Troubling anti-gender attacks: transnational activist and academic perspectives

This chapter is based on an online roundtable that took place in March 2022 with scholars and activists who have experienced and are engaged in resisting intensifying anti-gender attacks in various contexts from Argentina and Pakistan to Uganda and the US. It highlights the value of sustained transnational conversations in which feminist epistemologies and politics not only work as a reaction to growing attacks but also work as the fuel for renewed world-making practices that acknowledge our mutual interdependence. The authors discuss some of the main features of the politics of the anti-gender phenomenon, sketching its historical trajectories within the current crisis of racial capitalism. They trace the neocolonial exporting of global tropes around gender, sexuality, and feminism while calling out the appropriation of anti-colonial frames for anti-feminist and anti-queer nationalist projects. The chapter calls to reclaim queer feminist imaginations to envision better futures for all and to build solidarities across borders and actors including scholars, activists, artists, policy-makers, NGOs, and state actors.