Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Politics and Resistance

Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions is a project led by Professors Clare Hemmings and Sumi Madhok of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact. This 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. 

In foregrounding a focus on concepts and narrative, the network aims to develop a transnational methodology which can help us draw out how these ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations work, with the aim of generating more robust tools for resistance to the take up of anti-feminism for right-wing agendas. You can follow us on Twitter (X) @ahrc_gender and use the hashtag #ahrcgender when tweeting about the conference.

This 2-Day Conference is the final event for the network, and is organised by Clare Hemmings, Sumi Madhok, Alyosxa Tudor and Senel Wanniarchchi. For more information about previous workshops, network members, and aims of the project, please visit the dedicated webpage here.

Keynote Panel: Transnational “Anti-Gender” Politics & Resistance (SOAS)

Friday 2nd February (5.30 – 7.30 PM) followed by a reception - location details released to attendees closer to the event

This panel asks our keynote speakers to reflect on the rise of anti-gender politics in the geo-political contexts that they work within, and the queer, transfeminist and decolonial politics of resistance that accompany them. This keynote panel ends day 2 of the AHRC-funded 2-day conference of the same name, taking place at LSE and SOAS.

• Zethu Matebeni (UFH) with discussant Alyosxa Tudor (SOAS)
• Chair: Sumi Madhok (LSE)

* Jules Gill-Peterson (Johns Hopkins) was unable to make it to the conference due to illness.

zethu Matebeni is the South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. zethu has published various key essays, articles, poetry, films and volumes on African sexualities and gender diversity including: Reclaiming African: queer perspectives on sexual and gender identities (2014); Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship and Activism (with Surya Munro and Vasu Reddy, 2018), and Beyond the Mountain; Queer life in 'Africa's gay capital'. zethu has been Visiting Professor at the Marie Jahoda Centre for International Gender Studies at Ruhr University Bochum, and at the Women’s Gender and Sexualities Studies (WGSS) Department at Yale University. Trained in Sociology, zethu has been instrumental in the development of African queer theory and queering decolonisation efforts in higher education.

Alyosxa Tudor is Reader in Gender Studies and the Chair of the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London. Their work connects trans and queer feminist approaches with transnational feminism and postcolonial studies. They have published widely on their work and given international keynotes (Turku/Finland, University of Uppsala/Sweden, NYU/USA) and numerous national and international papers and SOAS hosted two conferences under their lead. For their article ‘Im/Possibilities of Refusing and Choosing Gender’, they won the 2019 Feminist Theory Essay Prize. Alyosxa’s next monograph project builds on archival research in Holocaust/Porajmos (Romani genocide) archives in Heidelberg, Berlin and Brandenburg/Germany.

Chair: Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. 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. She is most recently the author of Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021), which won both the Susan Strange Book Prize and Sussex International Theory Prize in 2022. Professor Madhok is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).