Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact

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We are delighted to announce the formal launch of ‘Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions’. 

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) network grant and LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact, this is a critically important global research network of scholars, policy makers and activists. The research project and network is led by Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Sumi Madhok, Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies of the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

This new global research network maps the narrative building blocks – the political grammars, conceptual vocabularies, rhetoric, figures, and temporalities – of both ‘anti-gender ideology’ interventions and the political struggles and solidarities engendered in resistance.

Right-wing agendas have consistently identified feminism, gender equality and anti-racism as a problem, and have used ‘anti-gender’, anti-feminist, and anti-migrant feeling as a way of garnering support for nationalist, cultural, religious or political agendas. Currently 'anti-gender' attacks are on the rise globally, in the form of violence against feminists, LGBTQI communities and institutionalisation of feminist thought in universities, NGOs and governments. The network will start from a critique of sexed, sexual, racial and cultural 'authenticity' that lies at the core of 'anti-gender' rhetoric, with the aim of generating more robust tools for resistance to the take up of anti-feminism for right-wing agendas.

From September 2022 - January 2024, the network will invite theorists, activists, and policymakers already working on 'gender ideology' to explore intellectual resources for new frameworks for politics and theory and also participate in four transnational workshops around themes of: politics; geographies; temporalities; and transnational imaginaries. Crucially, these four research workshops will facilitate the exchange of ideas for a critical praxis across disciplinary and activist sites for countering 'anti-gender' politics in different parts of the globe.

Supported by a dynamic Advisory Board comprising UK-based and international representatives within academia and progressive civil society actors and organisations, the network will develop a transnational methodology which can help us draw out how these ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations work.  

For more details, visit the project website. To join the network mailing list, and for media queries and interviews, please email us at: gender.ahrc@lse.ac.uk. You can also follow project updates on Twitter @ahrc_gender.