Preliminary presentation of the Research Group on Sexualities (GPS) by its coordinators (Ana Cristina Santos, Madalena Duarte and Teresa Toldy) followed by a seminar.


About

The expression “anti-gender campaigns” has rapidly made its way to describe a new and specific wave of activist and policy initiatives against gender and sexual equalities (including reproductive rights) that started in the mid-2000s and blossomed in the 2010s. In this lecture, I will examine the current state of anti-gender campaigns in Europe and look back at the scholarship produced in the last decade. Following the historical unfolding of anti-gender campaigns in Europe, I will explore four scenes that are crucial to contemporary anti-gender politics: churches, social movements, political parties and states, and I will scrutinize the ways different actors seize these struggles to pursue aims that are not necessarily compatible. 

Through this, I want to show that anti-gender campaigns encompass today a wide diversity of political projects, mounted by different kinds of actors. This observation invites us to pay more attention to the actors who use them and the ways they do it. I also insist on the need to see this plurality as constitutive of the phenomenon of anti-gender campaigns itself and to consider anti-gender campaigns as a transnational kit that is highly adaptable to local circumstances. It is precisely what constitutes the appeal and the strength of anti-gender campaigns and it should therefore be further investigated and conceptualised. To do this, I use Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: not to claim that anti-gender politics are monstrous but to emphasise that, like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, they are not the result of ignorance but of coordinated intellectual efforts and, even more crucially, that, like in the novel, the creator is no longer in control of his creature who lives an emancipated and autonomous life.

Bio note

David Paternotte is Associate Professor in Sociology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where is the codirector of STRIGES - Structure de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur le Genre, l’Égalité et la Sexualité. He also chairs the board of the interdisciplinary master in gender studies that unites the 6 Belgian French-speaking universities. After research on same-sex marriage advocacy and LGBT activism, he studies anti-gender campaigns and attacks on academic freedom in Europe. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he has authored the book Revendiquer le “mariage gay”: Belgique, France, Espagne (Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2011). He has also edited numerous collected volumes, including The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State (Ashgate 2011, with Manon Tremblay and Carol Johnson), LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A Rainbow Europe? (Palgrave, 2014, with Phillip Ayoub), the Ashgate Research Companion to Lesbian and Gay Activism (Ashgate, 2015, with Manon Tremblay) and Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017, with Roman Kuhar). He is the co-director of the book series “Global Queer Politics” (Palgrave) and Genre(s) & Sexualité(s) (Editions de l\'Université de Bruxelles).

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