Gender Studies Seminar - David Paternotte: Victor Frankenstein and its monster: the many lives of “gender ideology”

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 their historical unfolding 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 these campaigns as a transnational kit that is highly adaptable to local circumstances. To conceptualise 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.
 

Learn more about David Paternotte.