Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks

In recent years, attacks on the rise of ’gender ideology’ and ’genderism’ as a political force, on gender studies as an academic field, and on feminist, queer and trans individuals seen to be their embodied representatives, have grown in scope and intensity. This edited volume understands such attacks as a global force in need of urgent analytical and political attention. Drawing on contributions from and about a varied range of geographical locations including Argentina, Chile, China, Germany, the Persian Gulf, Hungary, India, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, the UK and the US, this 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. By transnationalising our inquiries into the epistemic, affective and political nature of the anti-gender phenomenon, this volume troubles the ’origin stories’ we tell about where anti-genderpolitics come from, and helps 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, to show how they also derive from more centrist, liberal, leftist and even presumably feminist positions. The book thus invites us to sharpen and rethink the conceptual vocabularies and strategies we use to understand and resist anti-gender attacks, opening up space for envisioning new political imaginaries and transnational feminist solidarities.

Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the LSE Department of Gender Studies, UK. Her research is interested in transnational movements of knowledges and of people, and how these are produced by and productive of gendered and racialised (in)security. Her book monograph Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) examines what work the term gender comes to do in the context of international peacekeeping. Her published work appears in journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, European Journal of Politics and Gender, and International Peacekeeping.

Billy Holzberg is Assistant Professor (lecturer) in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London, UK. His research focuses on the affective and sexual politics of intensified nationalisms and border regimes in Europe and has been published in journals like Body and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Media Studies and Sociology. His first monograph Affective Bordering: The Emotional Politics of Race, Migration and Deservingness published with Manchester University Press conceptualises national border making as an affective practice cementing racialised and gendered hierarchies.

Tomás Ojeda is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (2022-2023), and Visiting Fellow at the LSE Department of Gender Studies, UK. His research interests lie in the intersection of queer theory, psychosocial studies, anti-gender politics and LGBTI+ mental health, with a special focus on depathologising practices, activist and academic responses to current attacks on gender affirming care. He is an editor of Engenderings, the LSE Gender blog.