Author: Laurie Essig

We Talk to Really Smart People: Clare Hemmings

Laurie Essig

We Talk to Really Smart People: Clare Hemmings – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode we talk to Prof. Clare Hemmings of the London School of Economics. Prof. Hemmings helped to start an international research group on the anti-gender movement. Prof. Hemmings puts a lot of what’s going on into historical perspective for us by linking white supremacy, transphobia and the colonial imagination together.

Episode Interviews

Clare Hemmings

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory. She has been working at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics since 1999.

She has two main areas of research focus – feminist and queer studies – and is particularly interested in thinking through the relationship between these, as well as the ways in which both fields have been institutionalized at national and international levels. This interest has led her to think about how participants in these fields tell stories about their history as well as current form, and to explore how such stories resonate with (rather than against) more conservative agendas. To find out more, go here.

Episode 2: How the Anti-Gender Movement Got Political

Laurie Essig

2. How the Anti-Gender Movement Got Political – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode we talk to a variety of experts on the anti-gender ideology movement. They explain its history in the Catholic Church and how it slipped into far-right political movements starting in Russia, but spreading through Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Find out why Vladimir Putin and Ron DeSantis have the same policies and why feminists, LGBTQ activists, and others are fighting back to save democracy itself.

Episode 2 Interviews

Agnieszka Graff

Agnieszka Graff is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She is a feminist activist and public intellectual. Her articles on gender in Polish and U.S. culture have appeared in Public Culture, Signs, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Studies and East European Politics and Societies. She has authored five books of feminist essays in Polish, among them Świat bez kobiet (World without Women, 2001, anniversary edition 2021) and Matka feministka (Mother and Feminist, 2014, Spanish edition 2021). She coedited the Spring 2019 theme issue of Signs “Gender and the rise of the global right.”

Readings by Graff:

Alexander Kondakov

Alexander Sasha Kondakov is Assistant Professor at the UCD School of Sociology, Ireland. His international experience includes positions at the University of Helsinki in Finland, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States and the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. Alexander’s career started in Russia, at the European University in St. Petersburg, where he pioneered LGBT and Queer Studies. He has extensively published in journals such as Sexualities, Social & Legal Studies and European Journal of Criminology.

Readings by Kondakov:

Episode 1: Introduction

Laurie Essig

1. Introduction – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode, we introduce what’s coming for us. It’s fascism, pure and simple and it’s spreading across the globe. But this time fascism is against “gender ideology” as well as the usual suspects (like Jews or migrants). This new fascism blames feminism, LGBTQ activism, and gender studies for everything that’s wrong and wants to make a world without women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. If you aren’t scared of the anti-gender movement yet, you will be after listening to this.