Anti-Gender Politics and the Threat to Democracy
Please join the Institute for Research on Women (IRW) for “Anti-Gender Politics and the Threat to Democracy,” the third event in its 2025-2026 IRW Distinguished Lecture Series on Feminism, Academic Freedom, and Democracy. This hybrid event will feature Professor Camille Robcis (Columbia University) and Professor Agnieszka Graff (University of Warsaw). The event will be held on Thursday, December 4, in the Humanities Seminar Room, Academic Building 6051, College Avenue Campus from 11 am - 12.30 pm. The event will be followed by lunch for those who register.
Register here: https://forms.gle/LME7ybgwGGicdLQZ7
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. “Anti-Gender Politics and the Threat to Democracy” will offer an intellectual history of anti-genderism, which can be traced to various UN conferences in the 1990s, and map the global circulation of the term “gender ideology.” It will also address the ways in which anti-gender politics constitute a threat to democracy through phenomena ranging from radicalization to electoral strategies.
Agnieszka Graff is an associate professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She is a cultural studies scholar with research interests in gender studies, feminist history as well as the history of anti-feminism. She is the author of four books of feminist essays in Polish, including World without Women (2001, 2021) and Mother and Feminist (2014). She co-edited the Spring 2019 issue of Signs on Gender and the Rise of the Global Right as well as the Journal of Gender Studies 2025 theme issue on the global anti-gender movement. Her most recent book publication, co-authored with Elżbieta Korolczuk, is Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment (Routledge 2021, open access) – a monograph on the global anti-gender movement and its links with right-wing populism.
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University and the current chair of the History Department. 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 project tentatively titled The War on Gender (forthcoming with Princeton University Press).