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Round Tables

Title
From Gender as an Useful Category to Anti-Genderism
Session code
RT07
Date Time
Wednesday, August 24th / 14.00-17.30
Organizers
Colin Johnson
Place
Collegium Novum, C1
Abstract

We have entered the age of moral equivalence. White is black. The survivor is the oppressor. The perpetrator the victim. The 2010s was a decade during which populist sentiment crept into and arguably overran the marketplace of ideas. An important component of this trend towards rhetorical radicalization and political polarization has been “genderism.” Initially, pundits and self-proclaimed “experts” coined the term “gender ideology” to draw attention to the supposedly nefarious aims of those making justice claims along gendered and sexual lines. They blamed social and economic problems in the world, from plummeting birth rates to the rising cost of living and increasing competition for economic opportunities, on the influence of feminists and LGBTQ activists. This new form of exclusionary radicalism is born out of the specific context in which we live, but it obviously also builds upon an arsenal of older tropes. Our panel seeks to place this transnational phenomenon in multiple historical contexts. It also aims to consider how we might make sense of the development of anti-genderist movements and ideas by looking more specifically at the recent or even distant past in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Russia, or from a more broadly conceived transnational perspective.