REGRETTABLY THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Join Jules Gill-Peterson in conversation with Ida Roland Birkvad and Alexander Stoffel for an event about how to study macrohistories of gender, race, and sexuality. 

In current debates about transgender rights, trans people appear as ‘brand new’ and without a history. This myth plays a powerful role in organising the international politics of gender by obscuring long durée histories of gender nonconformity. This also has larger consequences for the way we study history in international studies.

Bringing together perspectives from postcolonialism, gender studies, and Marxism, this event asks how we can study the construction of identity categories across historical periods and geopolitical contexts without erasing their particularities, and why they persist as hierarchies in international politics.

Meet our speakers and chair:

Jules Gill-Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Kinsey Institute, and was honoured with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020. Jules is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child.

Alexander Stoffel is a Lecturer in International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He was previously a Fellow in Qualitative Methodology at LSE. Alex is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, where he convenes the Sexuality and Political Economy Network.

Ida Roland Birkvad is a Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her research engages with questions related to international political theory, non-Western agency in International Relations, and histories of imperialism.

Chair:

Shikha Dilawri is a Fellow in International Relations Theory in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her research addresses histories and afterlives of empire, taking up critical questions regarding entanglements of migration, race, and capitalism.

More about this event

The Department of International Relations (@LSEIRDept) at LSE is now in its 96th year, and is one of the oldest as well as largest IR departments in the world, with a truly international reputation. The Department is ranked 2nd in the UK and 4th in the world in the QS World University Ranking by Subject 2023 tables for Politics and International Studies.

The Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions is 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, LSE. 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.