On this episode of FFF, we travel to see how the anti-gender movement has played out in post-Roe Texas and, of course, how people are resisting! After all, we might all be Texas now…
Check out the East Lubbock Art House website: https://eastlubbockarthouse.org
By now we’ve all heard (cried, screamed, etc.) about the election. So now we ask… what tf is going on??? To some, this was a shock. How could so many people, people who are neighbors, peers. and family, vote for what is clearly a fascist trajectory? To us, however, it’s no surprise. Politicians like Trump are part of a larger global anti-gender movement – and that is precisely what this podcast is focused on. Listen to this bonus episode for a short reaction to the election.
Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and now.. we CONTINUE to organize !!!
By now you’ve heard that Trump and Vance are weird. But are they really? Are they weird or are they just part of the anti-gender movement? Listen to this short and sweet bonus episode to hear our take on it.
Grab your passport and an oat milk latte and join us at the Transnational Anti-Gender Movements and Resistance Conference! This past February, Laurie and Harper travelled to the London School of Economics to engage with other thinkers, activists, academics, and feminists fighting the anti-gender movement across the globe. What a time we had! Hear all about it and maybe learn a thing or two in our first mini episode!
The conference was part of a series of workshops through the research group and network, Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions. It was co-organized by the London School of Economics (LSE) Department of Gender Studies and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Centre for Gender Studies.
The research group: “This new global research network maps 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… The research project and network is led by Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Sumi Madhok, Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies of the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.”
Clare Hemmings: “I have two main areas of research focus – feminist and queer studies – and am 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 me 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. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which ideas travel (or do not) across geographical and temporal borders, and shift when considered from a black feminist or lesbian critical perspective.
Sumi Madhok: “Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Quite unusually, she is a feminist political theorist with an ethnographic sensibility. Her work combines theoretical, conceptual and philosophical investigations with detailed ethnographies of the lived experiences, political subjectivation, and political struggles for rights and justice, specifically, in South Asia.”
Tooba Syed (@Tooba_Sd) is the secretary of the socialist-feminist women collective and organisation, Women Democratic Front. Syed has regional expertise in Pakistan and South Asia and eight years of experience working as a feminist researcher, trainer, campaigner, writer and teacher in the areas of gender studies, gender-based violence, feminist education and climate change adaptation.
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and former Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They were the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Program and International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley. Butler is active in gender and sexual politics, human rights, anti-war politics, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Click here to listen to the full keynote panel on YouTube.
In this episode we travel to Mexico City, exploring the anti-gender ideology movement on a local level. We encounter a lot hope and feminist joy along the way. Join us in exploring anti-gender politics and feminist resistance in Mexico City.
Students in this year’s Feminist Theory class at Middlebury College worked together to create an episode for the podcast! They researched, conducted interviews, and did some deep dives into the anti-gender ideology movement in Vermont, Florida, Mexico, and Germany.
Students: El Fahey, Christian Lopez, Aziz, Akbarali, Alex DeFeo, Adriana
Santiago-Lucena, Meron Tesfa, Jannis Kastner, Maria Soto, Nancy Rivera Almanza, Christina Ritter, Ani Hamm
To see the complete reading list mentioned in the episode, check out our resources page!
We have to talk about sex if we are going to talk about the anti-gender movement. You see, the anti-gender movement is rooted in the belief that sex is simple- boys and girls, penises and vaginas. But actually, sex has never been that simple and rather than assuming we know what sex and gender are because they’re “obvious” we talk to one of the world’s foremost authorities on just how messy sex and gender are. In this episode, feminist writer and journalist Judith Levine talks with Rebecca Jordan Young, author of Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography. We also talk with Julianna Neuhauser about how this right wing belief that sex is easy to understand overlaps with trans-exclusionary feminists’ “gender critical” stance. And how sometimes, the politics of believing sex is a binary can make for really strange bedfellows.
Rebecca Jordan-Young: “I am an interdisciplinary feminist scientist and science studies scholar whose work explores the reciprocal relations between science and the social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race. My recent book, Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, coauthored with Katrina Karkazis (Harvard 2019) upends a lot of entrenched thinking that props up hormone folklore as if it is established fact. So familiar that it can go by a single initial, T is at once a mercurial cultural figure and a specific molecule. We take aim at received wisdom about T in six domains: female reproduction, aggression, risk-taking, power, sports, and parenting. Along the way, we show how “science-y” stories about T are used to recycle stereotypes—not just about gender differences, but also class and racial distinctions. There are also quite a few good stores about how preconceived ideas about this so-called “sex hormone” can sometimes make it hard for scientists to see evidence that’s right under their noses. Testosterone won the Gold Medal in Science from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Brocher Foundation, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship.
My first book, Brain Storm: The flaws in the science of sex differences (Harvard 2010), was the first systematic analysis of the idea that early hormone exposures “hardwire” sex differences into the human brain. Tracing definitions and measures across hundreds of studies, I found that the research overall doesn’t support the idea that human brains are “organized” for gender and sexuality by early hormone exposures. Brain Storm was awarded a Distinguished Book Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (2011) and has been translated into French (Belin Press, 2016). My essay “Homunculus in the Hormones” summarizes the argument and main findings. You can download it here.
I’m on the Board of the international Neurogenderings Network, and enjoy collaborating with colleagues in fields that range from cognitive and developmental neuroscience, developmental biology, and physical chemistry to cultural anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. I’ve published in a wide range of scholarly journals, such as Feminist Formations, Nature, Science, Neuroethics, BMJ, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and the American Journal of Public Health, as well as popular outlets like the New York Times, The Guardian, and Discover Magazine.”
Julianna Neuhouser is a transfeminine translator and writer. Her texts have been published by Revista Común, Gatopardo, Malvestida and Zona Docs. She was the coordinator of the book Polarization and transphobia: Critical looks at the advance of anti-trans and anti-gender movements in Mexico
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.
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.”
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.
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.
