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. The event will be followed by a reception provided by Queer@King’s. 

Meet our speakers and chair (full list of speakers to be announced soon)

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, which she joined in 2004, having previously studied and worked at in the Department of English at Queen Mary College, University of London, where she obtained her PhD and Masters degree, and the University of East Anglia in the department of Film and Television Studies, where she held a lecturer post. Her research and teaching interests are in the critical, gendered, analysis of film, literature and popular culture. Her work examines the ways in which cinema, literature and popular culture both reflects and contests wider cultural dynamics. Her research covers historical and contemporary contexts exploring the ways in which literary and cinematic narratives articulate contested cultural processes including questions of gender, sexuality, public and private memory, national identity, heritage and belongings, and aging. A key strand of her work has explored how aging is figured in contemporary culture and with what effects. Drawing on a range of genres she has explored how meanings are attached to dementia and how a range of aging subjectivities are managed and articulated. Her current research project is an AHRC funded collaboration (with Lizzie Thynne at University of Sussex and Yvonne Tasker at University of Leeds) centring on the work of the British feminist socialist film maker, Jill Craigie. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Post-war Britain, co-authored with Yvonne Tasker for University of Illinois Press.

Kalpana Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Science at Birkbeck, University of London.

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.