Join us for a talk: Tracing the Global Anti-Gender Movement: Feminism, Facism & the Future”. 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 half years, “Feminism, Fascism & the Future has produced more than twenty 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. Two, resistance to it is possible, but first 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, Essig will use episodes of the 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.

Laurie Essig is Professor and Chair of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. She is the author of several books including Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other and Love, Inc: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter. Essig has written for a variety of publications including the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. In 2023, she started producing a podcast on the global anti-gender movement. The podcast, "Feminism, Fascism & the Future”, now has more than 20 episodes and explores the global rise in anti-gender ideology movements and what we can do as feminist academics, activists, and artists to fight back.