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

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. She works across feminist and queer studies exploring the political and epistemological impact of the stories we tell about these fields. Her books include Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018). Her current work is on affect and temporality in ‘anti-gender’ discourse and on family stories. 

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at the LSE and Faculty Associate at the LSE International Inequalities Institute. Her most recent book Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2021) was awarded the ‘Susan Strange Prize Best Book Prize’ and ‘The Sussex International Theory Prize, 2022’. She is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014). 

Senel Wanniarachchi is a Doctoral Researcher at the LSE Department of Gender Studies and is the Research Network Coordinator for 'Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions'. His research is interested in understanding how discourses on ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ are instrumentalised in frameworks that are anti-imperialist, but also nationalist, patriarchal, heteronormative and anti-human rights in the postcolony. In Sri Lanka, Senel co-founded an activist organisation called Hashtag Generation, which works in the intersections of Human Rights and Technology. 

Shakuntala Banaji is full Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change in the Department of Media and Communication at the LSE. An award-winning lecturer and scholar, she convenes the Master’s in Media, Communication and Development and teaches courses on politics, sexuality and film, gender, international media and the global south. Her research and writing covers topics from creativity and participation in mediated public spheres to youth and children’s agency, digital media and disinformation. Her latest book, Social Media and Hate (Routledge, 2022) with Ramnath Bhat examines the historical contexts of digitally mediated disinformation against minoritised communities, theorising digital hate as intimately linked to existing histories of oppression.   

Mary Evans has been an academic for some time and her work has increasingly come to focus on specific questions about the making and the implications of gender. Differences of gender have consistently been the location of fierce debates and discussions but the past decade has seen an increasing refusal of the legitimacy of the discussion of this subject. Much of Mary's writing and teaching (on feminist theory, women writers, the 'detection' of the social and political policies about and related to gender) has been on this question and in doing so I have worked across the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences and the humanities. Mary welcomes the opportunity to take part in the assertion of the centrality, across all academic disciplines and in all institutional contexts, of the question of gender. 

Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is co-editor, with Billy Holzberg (KCL) and Tomás Ojeda (LSE), of the volume Transnationalising Anti-Gender Politics (under contract with Palgrave’s ‘Thinking Gender in Transnational Times’ -series). This project also received a grant from the Open Society University Network’s Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice Program, in collaboration with Haley McEwen (Wits University) to facilitate dialogue around ‘Troubling Anti-Gender Attacks’ in May 2022. 

Niraja Gopal Jayal is the Avantha Chair and Professor of Politics at King’s India Institute, King’s College London. She is also Centennial Professor (2019-23) in the Department of Gender Studies at The London School of Economics. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Jayal is the author of Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2013) and Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black, 2021); editor of Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today (Penguin Random House, 2019) and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (2010). 

Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. From 2010 until September 2013 she was Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School, at New York University Law School and at the Australian National University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and was from 2014-2019 the Academy’s nominee on the Board of the British Museum. In 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice and Gender Politics; she holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oslo; and in 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern, for scholarship on the rule of law in modern societies. 

Anne Phillips is Professor Emerita at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She joined the LSE in 1999 as Professor of Gender Theory, and was Director of the Gender Institute until September 2004. She subsequently moved to a joint appointment between the Gender Institute and Government Department, and later to a sole appointment in Government. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. Her most influential work is The Politics of Presence: the Political Representation of Gender, Race, and Culture (1995). Her most recent book is Unconditional Equals, published by Princeton University Press (2021).

Coretta Phillips is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy, LSE. Coretta's research interests lie in the field of race, ethnicity, crime, justice and social policy. She is currently leading a multi-disciplinary project providing the first comprehensive account of the crime and justice experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in England since the 1960s. Her book, The Multicultural Prison (2012) jointly won the Criminology Book Prize (2013) and was shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed/British Sociological Association Award for Ethnography (2014). Coretta has consulted for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, (UK) Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Judicial Studies Board, Clinks, Howard League for Penal Reform, and the Metropolitan Black Police Association. 

Dr Ania Plomien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Her research focuses on gendered inequality processes in paid and unpaid work, social reproduction, and migration from a materialist feminist political economy perspective. She considers these themes at the institutional (policy), organisational (the workplace), interpersonal (the household) levels from a transnational perspective. Her substantive areas of research on gender and policy, employment, migration and care span national contexts of Poland, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom as well as the supra-national European Union level. Ania is also a member of the Policy Advisory Group of the UK’s Women’s Budget Group and has been a National Expert in the European Network of Experts on Gender Equality (2005-2015). 

SM Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Prior to this, they were based in New York, USA, as Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology in the Department of Sociology and Director of LGBTQ+ Studies at Hofstra University. SM's research shows a concern for sex, racialisation and punishment. They take an anti-carceral, Black and trans feminist approach to interrogate sex as a projection unto the body and as an activity, especially as related to criminal law and “correctional” practices. SM has navigated this line of questioning in global and transnational research, with particular attention to African Diasporic people and places.

Leticia Sabsay is Associate Professor of gender and contemporary culture in the Department of Gender Studies at the LSE. She is the author of The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom (2016), and, with Judith Butler and Zeynep Gambetti, she coedited Vulnerability in Resistance (2016). In Spanish, she authored the books Las normas del deseo: Imaginario sexual y comunicación (2009) and Fronteras sexuales: Espacio urbano, cuerpos y ciudadanía (2011) and coedited, with Patrícia Soley-Beltrán, Judith Butler en disputa: Lecturas sobre la performatividad (2012). She is joint editor of the book series Critical South (Polity) with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Natalia Brizuela; and, with Sadie Wearing and Sumi Madhok, she co-edits the book series Thinking Gender in Transnational Times (Palgrave).

Dr Hakan Seckinelgin is Associate Professor (Reader) at the Department of Social Policy, LSE. He is a political theorist who has developed a multidisciplinary research programme by combining theoretical work with empirical studies. His work focuses on both the epistemology and politics of international social policy by engaging with people’s lives in different contexts. Thematically, he works on HIV and AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa considering the development, implementation and implications of international AIDS policies; on knowledge and evidence used by global policy actors; on contextual determinants of policy relevant knowledge; on sexualities, LGBT activism; and theories and politics of civil society.

Wendy Sigle is Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and teaches courses on social policy and population studies. Wendy has worked on a variety of issues related to families and family policy in historical and contemporary societies. Applying theoretical contributions and insights from gender theory and feminist epistemology, Wendy’s research critiques how quantitative methods are applied and how quantitative evidence is used and interpreted in social research. A key concern is how taken for granted approaches shape policy logics and policy design. 

Sadie Wearing is Associate Professor in Gender Theory, Culture and Film in the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Her research and teaching interests are in the critical, gendered, analysis of film, literature and popular culture. Her work examines how cinema, literature and popular culture both reflects and contests wider cultural dynamics. 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.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and former Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They served as Founding Director of the Critical Theory Program as well as the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997). In 2023, they will publish a book on the anti-gender ideology movement.

Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at King’s College, London and has worked for many years on questions of gender, sexuality and power in international development. Her publications include Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure (Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall, Kate Hawkins eds., Zed Books, 2013), Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development (Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead eds., Zed Books 2009) and Development with a Body (Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Correa and Susie Jolly eds., Zed Books 2008)

Sonia Corrêa has been involved in research and advocacy activities related to gender equality, health and sexuality since the late 1970s. Between 1992 and 2009 she coordinated the sexual and reproductive health and rights research program at DAWN – Development Alternatives with Women for a new Era, a global South feminist network, of which she is a Board Member. Since 2002, she is a research associate at the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association for AIDS where with Richard Parker, she co-chairs the Sexuality Policy Watch program, a global forum comprising researchers and activists engaged in the analyses of global trends in sexuality politics.

Éric Fassin is a professor of sociology at Paris-8 University with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Gender Studies, and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is affiliated with the first research center in gender studies in France, created in 2015, LEGS, CNRS/Paris-8/Paris-Nanterre. His research focuses on contemporary sexual and racial politics with a comparative, transnational perspective. He co-founded a network in defense of gender studies (“The Gender International”). Public interventions related to his scholarly work have long been part of his political commitment as a “sociologue engagé”. 

Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) and a General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her next book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, will be published by Verso.

Marsha Henry is a Professor at the Mitchell Institute, Queen's University, Belfast and Visiting Professor at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Marsha’s research is concerned with the gendered and racialised politics of violence; militarisation; global south development; international aid and intervention; and conflict, peace and security. In addition, she has published on the challenges of decolonial, intersectional, and feminist qualitative approaches, methodologies and fieldwork. She is the author of several books, the latest of which is: The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race and the Martial Politics of Intervention (Penn Press). She is currently Associate Editor for Security Dialogue and has helped to develop a range of courses on gender, peace and security at the GEST Programme, University of Iceland; UNITAR, Switzerland; and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeper Training Centre, Ghana. 

Sally Hines is Professor at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. Sally is currently leading two ESRC grants. The first, 'Trans Pregnancy: an international exploration of trans masculine experiences and practices of reproduction’ is a collaboration with researchers in the UK, Italy, the US and Australia. The project explores the experiences of trans men who became pregnant after transition, and considers trans pregnancy through the lens of citizenship and recognition, human rights, healthcare advocacy and reproductive justice. The second ‘Living Gender in Diverse Times’ explores young people’s understandings and practices of gender in the contemporary UK. 

Ratna Kapur is Global Law Chair and Professor of International Law, Queen Mary University of London. Ratna has written and published extensively on post colonial and feminist legal theory, human rights and international law. Her latest book is Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl.

Tshepo Ricki Kgositau is passionate about research for social impact as well as legal and policy reform to advance socio-economic justice and accountability towards those on the margins of society. She won a constitutional court case seeking legal gender recognition in the High Court of Botswana in 2017. She has years of experience as a young feminist leader within the developmental sector having been the Executive Director of Accountability International and Gender Dynamix and is currently the CEO of her own social enterprise the Ricki Kgositau Foundation in Botswana. A 2016 alumnus of the Obama Administration’s YALI program under the flagship of the Mandela-Washington Fellowship, she gives of her time to other organisations such as the UNAIDS International Reference Group on HIV, Human Rights and Law, the Global Advocacy for Transgender Equality (GATE) and the Methodist Church of Southern Africa’s Connexional LGBTI Task Team. 

Niharika Pandit is Lecturer in Sociology at Queen Mary University of London. Niharika is a feminist theorist interested in questions of gender, racialisation, post/coloniality, everyday politics of living and epistemic and political potentialities of theorising from the Global South. Insistently interdisciplinary, her research, writing and teaching draw on transnational, anticolonial and liberatory feminist and queer thinking. Before joining SPIR in September 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science from where she received her PhD in September 2022. Niharika is an editorial collective member of Engenderings and Otherwise Magazine. She is also Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

zethu Matebeni is a sociologist, activist, writer, documentary film maker, Professor and South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. She has held positions at the University of the Western Cape and has been senior researcher at the Institute for Humanities in Africa at UCT. She has been a visiting Professor Yale University and has received a number of research fellowships including those from African Humanities Program, Ford Foundation, the Fogarty International Centre and the National Research Foundation. She is actively involved in queer activism in South Africa and Zethu’s films, poetry and essays have been published in numerous journals, books and blogs including blacklooks.org and AWID.org. 

Olga Plakhotnik is a Chair in Ukrainian Cultural Studies at the University of Greifswald and a PI of the team project "Un)Disciplined: Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies—Understanding the War in Ukraine" (funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research). Considering themselves a scholar-activist and educator, they works in the area of feminist/queer epistemologies, critical citizenship studies, and feminist/ queer pedagogies. Their publications appeared in Feral Feminisms (2022) and lambda nordica (forthcoming). Olga’s recent research project explores performative mechanisms of political subjectivities and queerness using the concept of “border” as both a locality and a method. They are also working on a book manuscript "Sexuality, Citizenship and War" for McGill-Quinn University Press. Olga is a co-founder and joint editor-in-chief of the refereed journal 'Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies'. 

Shirin M Rai is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests are in the fields of political economy of development, gender and political institutions and performance and politics. Her latest books include the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward) and Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP 2019). She is currently working on two books - Depletion: the human costs of caring and Doing Politics Sideways.

Tooba Syed is a feminist writer, researcher and organiser based in Pakistan. She has actively participated in various movements including the housing rights movement, the feminist movement and the climate justice movement in the last decade. She is the founding member of Women Democratic Front and part of its elected cabinet. Tooba is currently working on her first book on feminist visions and struggles in Pakistan. 

Sylvia Tamale is a leading African feminist and scholar. She recently retired from Makerere University’s School of Law where she served for 36 years and was the first female Dean of Law in the country. She has been a visiting Professor in several academic institutions globally and serves on several international human rights boards. She holds a Bachelor of Laws from Makerere, a Masters in Law from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. She has numerous publications to her name including the groundbreaking book, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (Daraja Press, 2020).   

Alyosxa Tudor is Reader (Associate Professor) in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London. Their main research interest lies in analysing (knowledge productions on) migrations, diasporas and borders in relation to critiques of Eurocentrism and to processes of gendering and racialisation. Alyosxa has published on these topics with Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Gender, Place and Culture etc. At the moment, they are working on their new monograph project The Endurance of the Mare on histories of resilience and (sexual and state) violence in the Eastern borderlands of gender and Europe.

Françoise Vergès is a Reunionnaise theorist, independent curator, and antiracist decolonial feminist, with a long life of activism and of holding different jobs. She has written on Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, colonial slavery, colonial psychiatry, anticolonialism, racial capitalocene, decolonial feminism, or the (impossible) decolonization of the museum. In 2015, she cofounded with five other women the non-profit Decolonize the Arts and the university Decolonizing the Arts (until 2021). She has written films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire (with whom she published Resolutely Black). Vergès works with artists and curates workshops and performances with artists and activists of color. Recent publications include: A Feminist Theory of Violence (2022), A Decolonial Feminism (2021), De la violence colonial dans l’espace public (2021), and The Wombs of Women; Race, Capital, Feminism (2020).

Irina Zherebkina, DSc in Philosophy is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine); Director of the Kharkiv Center for Gender Studies and Editor-in-Chief of the Gender Studies Journal. Her books include Passion. Women’s Sexuality in Russia in the Era of Modernism (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2001, 2018); Gender 90s, or the Phallus does not Exist (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2003); Judith Butler’s War and Peace (with Sergei Zherebkin) (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2019); Stalinist Antigone. Feminist Intervention in Stalinism (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2019); Contemporary Western Philosophy. Introduction (with Sergei Zherebkin) (St. Petersburg: Alethea 2022). Since the beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Zherebkina has positioned herself as a strong critic of Putin's militaristic politics in her numerous journalist publications and interviews.