We're delighted to announce that Professors Clare Hemmings & Sumi Madhok have been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council network grant for Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions.
The new research network will map 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.
Right-wing agendas have consistently identified feminism, gender equality and anti-racism as a problem, and have used ‘anti-gender’, anti-feminist, and anti-migrant feeling as a way of garnering support for nationalist, cultural, religious or political agendas. Currently 'anti-gender' attacks are on the rise globally, in the form of violence against feminists, LGBTQI communities and institutionalisation of feminist thought in universities, NGOs and governments.
The network will be made up of theorists, activists, and policy-makers already working on 'gender ideology'. It will start from a critique of sexed, sexual, racial and cultural 'authenticity' that lies at the core of 'anti-gender' rhetoric.
We will invite participants from the main sites of 'anti-gender' mobilisations: Brazil, India, Pakistan, Uganda, South Africa, Hungary, Germany, Poland, the UK, the US and Scandinavia to participate in four linked workshops, around themes of: politics; geographies; temporalities; and transnational imaginaries.
In foregrounding a focus on concepts and narrative, the network will develop a transnational methodology which can help us draw out how these ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations work, with the aim of generating more robust tools for resistance to the take up of anti-feminism for right-wing agendas.
The project will launch in September 2022.
For further details and project updates, please check back on this page.