Speakers
Yasmine Ergas (Columbia University)
Zeynep Gülru Göker (Sabancı University)
Zehra Kabasakal Arat (University of Connecticut)
Barbara Sutton (SUNY-Albany)
Convener: Türküler Işıksel (Columbia University)
Mobilization against women’s rights, LGBTI+ rights, and gender equality (denoted "anti-gender politics") has become a near-universal feature of populist, authoritarian and religious-conservative movements around the world. As they erode constitutional democratic safeguards of all kinds, these movements take aim at the civil, political, and socio-economic rights of women and LGBTI+ and seek to overturn the achievements of decades of local and transnational rights-based activism. Alongside seeking traditional legislative, administrative, and constitutional means of advancing their political agenda, they construct and disseminate alternative, essentialist narratives of gender and sexuality in a variety of contexts, including universities, civil society, and the media. Paying attention to the global ramifications as well as local specificities of anti-gender mobilization, this panel will examine "anti-gender" mobilization as both a symptom and an accelerant of democratic backsliding, and discuss their implications on gender and sexuality activism, policy-making, and the academy.
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Panel discussion: 4:10-5:30 PM
Reception to follow
International Affairs Building 707, (Lindsay Rogers Room)
This event is in-person only. Please register here: https://bit.ly/GenderPoliticsSSC
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.