In recent years, attacks on the rise of ‘gender ideology’, on gender studies as an academic field, and on feminist, queer and trans* individuals, have grown in scope and intensity.   

The editors of this volume understand such attacks as a global force in need of urgent analytical and political attention. Drawing on contributions from varied range of geographical locations, the book explores how anti-gender mobilisations work as a transnational formation shaped by the legacies of colonialism, racial capitalism, and resurgent nationalisms, and how these can be resisted. The contributors trouble the ‘origin stories’ we tell about anti-gender politics, and help to better locate the various sources, actors, and networks behind these attacks, contesting the notion that anti-gender politics derive solely from right-wing nationalist or conservative religious actors. The book thus invites us to sharpen and rethink the conceptual vocabularies and strategies we use to understand and resist anti-gender attacks, opening space for envisioning new political imaginaries and transnational feminist solidarities.  

Dr Holvikivi and Dr Holzberg will provide introductory comments on the book, and panellists will offer their reflections on the topic, with the opportunity to participate in a Q&A afterwards.

Please note that a ticket does not guarantee entry. All LSE events are over-ticketed.

This event is hybrid. Join via Zoom using this link. 

Meeting ID: 829 1774 9020
Passcode: 271124

Meet our speakers and chair

Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at King’s College, London.

Sadie Wearing is Associate Professor in Gender Theory, Culture and Film in the Department of Gender Studies. Her newest book Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Post-war Britain, co-authored with Yvonne Tasker, is forthcoming with University of Illinois Press.

Kalpana Wilson is Senior Lecturer in International Development at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research explores questions of race and gender in development, labour movements, neoliberalism, imperialism, fascism and reproductive rights and justice, with a focus on South Asia and its diasporas. She is the author of Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice (Zed Books, 2012) and co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (Palgrave, 2013). Her current research includes an exploration of Hindu supremacist development politics and practice, with a particular focus on gender.

Billy Holzberg is Lecturer in Social Justice at King’s College London. His work explores the sexual and affective dynamics that shape contemporary nationalisms and right-wing authoritarianism and blends queer theory, transnational feminism, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. He is co-editor of Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks and his first monograph Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control has just been published by Manchester University Press.

Dr. Xine Yao is Associate Professor in American Literature to 1900 and co-director of the queer studies network qUCL at University College London. Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke) won the Robert K Martin Book Award from the Canadian Association of American Studies among other accolades. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Xine was once cited in a viral TikTok that got covered by Pink News.