Abstract
Attacks against “gender ideology” launched by the Vatican since the mid-1990s only gained political traction in the 2010s. But a few years later, in the era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, this conservative reaction against sexual democracy morphed into a neofascist intersectional offensive against race as well as gender, against both social movements and academia. Denunciations of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” or “Islamo-leftism” are the weapons of a state anti-intellectualism that rages from the United States to Russia, as well as in Hungary, Turkey, India, and Argentina – not to forget France. However, since October 7, 2023, there has been a new twist in this assault on academia: accusations of campus anti-Semitism. I will argue that this latest polemic is best understood as a new episode of a political anti-intellectualism that ends up whitewashing the far right while demonizing the left, before concluding that the concept of gender is a useful tool to apprehend this “actualité.”
Bio:
Éric Fassin is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Paris 8 University, affiliated with the research center Sophiapol (Paris Nanterre), and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He works on gender, sexuality, race, and immigration as democratic issues. In 2021, he co-edited (with Salima Amari) Femmes en rupture de ban, unpublished interviews with two Algerian women in France by Abdelmalek Sayad (Raisons d’Agir), and (with Caroline Ibos) a collective eBook entitled Défense et illustration des libertés académiques (Mediapart).
In 2024, he has published: State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender & Race. Illiberal France and Beyond, CEU Press, Budapest. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, la artista que dio cuerpo a la vanguardia (with Joana Masó), Arcadia, Barcelona. Misère de l’anti-intellectualisme. Du procès en wokisme au chantage à l’antisémitisme, Textuel, Paris.
The Christina Research Seminar is an open advanced seminar focused on interdisciplinary gender studies. The seminar is organized as part of the Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture and Society (SKY), University of Helsinki. The seminar is open to everyone wishing to attend.
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