In this episode we talk about some new, important research, namely the book Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attack featuring an interview with the authors, Tomás Ojeda, Billy Holzberg, and Aiko Holvikivi.
Links from the show:
Episode Interviews
Dr Tomás Ojeda is a queer researcher and trained psychotherapist. He held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (2022-2023), and Visiting Fellow position at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His research interests lie in the intersections of queer theory, psychosocial studies, anti-gender politics and LGBTIQ+ mental health, with a particular focus on activist and academic responses to current attacks on gender-affirming care. He is the co-editor of the volume Transnational Anti-gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan), and is a member of the Engenderings editorial collective.
Billy Holzberg is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Social Justice. His research, teaching and public engagement draw on transnational, liberatory, and collaborative queer feminist approaches.
Prior to joining King’s College London, he was a Fellow in Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, where he also completed his PhD in the Department of Gender Studies.
Billy is broadly interested in the sexual and affective life of power. His research grapples with the role that sexual desire and emotional attachments play in fuelling social inequalities, nationalisms, and neo-fascist politics today and how such dynamics might be counteracted. In exploring these questions, he draws on and contributes to work in queer studies, transnational feminism, affect theory, postcolonial critique, and critical migration and border studies. His work is informed by cultural, visual, and media analysis and he is interested in bridging innovative methodologies and reading practices between the humanities and the social sciences.
His first monograph Affective Bordering: The Emotional Politics of Race, Migration, and Deservingness(Manchester University Press) explores the interplay between affect and migration control, revealing how emotions work to reinforce racial and national hierarchies. Taking the construction of migration as crisis in Germany as its case study, the book brings together queer feminist theories of affect with postcolonial border studies offering an incisive perspective on the reproduction and contestation of borders in today’s world.
Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies and an Associate Academic at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, LSE.
My 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. My first monograph, Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Peacekeeper Training (Oxford University Press 2024), interrogates these themes through an examination of the practice of ‘gender training’. This research traces the ways in which training produces knowledge about gender; the processes of circulation, translation, resistance and negotiation that are involved; and the epistemic and political effects of such training. The book draws on fieldwork with military and police peacekeepers in East Africa, the Nordic region, West Africa, the Western Balkans, and Western Europe.
A second project through which I have investigated these themes relates to transnational anti-gender politics, how they work, and how activists and scholars are resisting them. I am co-editor, with Billy Holzberg and Tomás Ojeda, of the book Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (Palgrave 2024).
Further questions on which I have recently worked include: forced displacement in the WPS agenda; gender experts and expertise; feminist research methods; and sexual exploitation and abuse in international deployments.
I have extensive experience with policy engagement and stakeholder outreach. Before re-entering academia, I worked on questions related to gender and security at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Home Affairs. In these roles I built up experience managing projects on policy research and technical advice and capacity-building in the field of gender and security sector governance, and worked with UN Women; the Albanian State Police and Ministry for Defence; the South African National Defence Forces Peace Mission Training Centre; the Sierra Leone Police; and the UK Stabilisation Unit. As an academic, I have guest lectured at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and the UK Defence Academy, and serve in an advisory capacity to the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations (Measuring Opportunities for Women in Peacekeeping) and the Security Sector Reform Advisory Network to the United Nations.
