Co-sponsored by the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Populism and Political Economy and the Department of History.
This talk examines various of the arguments that have emerged in recent years against a so-called “gender ideology” or “gender agenda.” According to its critics, “gender ideology” has driven the push for a broad range of sexual and reproductive rights, from the legalization of abortion, access to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual education in schools, non-discrimination bills, access to new reproductive technologies, trans rights, and much more. Robcis’ talk traces the discursive origins of this “anti-genderism” to various UN conferences in the 1990s and it maps the global circulation of the term, first through the Vatican and its different think tanks, and later through other religious, right-wing, and populist groups.
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013) and of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago, 2021). She is currently working on a new project tentatively titled The War on Gender. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.