Feminism, Fascism & the Future: Tracing the Global Anti-Gender Movement

At first glance, the global anti-gender movement can seem like a singular ideological force, but the truth is, the anti-gender movement is far from coherent. Depending on context, the anti-gender movement focuses on attacking trans women, abortion rights, gender studies, or even women who don’t reproduce. Yet despite its unpredictable and chaotic nature, the anti-gender movement does have clear and recognizable themes. Around the world, anti-gender movements insist on a stable and binary sex and use the sex binary to create racialized and nationalist hierarchies of value. Anti-gender movements transform the anxieties of economic and climate precarity into an easily defeated enemy whether transwomen in sport or the “overly” fertile migrant family. And finally, anti-gender movements thrive when most of the population is unaware of their existence and thus not prepared to resist them.

What can we learn and, more importantly, what can we do by exploring the global anti-gender movement through a podcast? For the past two and a half years, "Feminism, Fascism & the Future" has produced more than 25 episodes tracing the contours of the anti-gender movement and making it available to a larger listening public. The podcast has taught us some valuable lessons. First, the anti-gender movement is flexible and able to reshape itself to fit the local context and the current moment. Second, resistance to it is possible, but we must recognize the anti-gender movement for what it is: a patriarchal restoration project (Butler, 2024) that relies on the retrotopian (Bauman, 2017) logics of fascism. And finally, we need to learn from those who have been resisting racial fascism and/or the logics of settler colonialism for decades. In this talk, I will use episodes of our podcast to lay out some of what we know about the global anti-gender movement and some of what we must still learn as we struggle to keep critical thinking and the complicated truths about sex/gender alive.

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Host or Publisher University College Dublin and University of Helsinki