Gender as a hidden radical plan

In the past few years some Western and Eastern European countries – and recently countries in Latin America – have been faced with a fierce opposition to what used to look like a steady progress in ensuring sexual rights and gender equality. Mass protests against marriage equality, reproductive rights, gender mainstreaming, transgender rights and sexual education have centralized around the so called “gender theory” or “gender ideology”. The vocal actors of these anti-gender movements claim that the very notion of “gender” is in fact a hidden plan of “radical” feminists and LGBTIQ activists. They see it as a new type of Marxism, aiming at nothing less than a cultural revolution: a post-binary gender world, where there is no place for “natural families”, masculinity, femininity etc. “Gender theory” has become an empty signifier, an all-inclusive mobilizing tool, used by various (religious) groups, political parties and even state establishments to prevent equality policies from being adopted and implemented.The key note speech will map out and explore the emergence, the content and the effects of the “gender ideology” (or “gender theory”) discourse. It will examine how an academic concept of gender became a mobilizing tool for neo-conservative social movements and massive street demonstrations and how the concept of human rights, which has been used until recently by the proponents of gender and LGBTIQ equality, is now being (ab)used by neo-conservative actors.

Roman Kuhar is a professor of sociology at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), where he has been a director of the Department of Sociology and is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He has collaborated with the Slovenian Peace Institute as well as the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. He is an author of many articles, studies, and monographies, among which he has co-authored with Alenka Švab The Unbearable Comfort of Privacy (2005); co-edited with Judith Takács the books Beyond The Pink Curtain: Everyday life of LGBT people in Eastern Europe (2007) and Doing Families: Gay and Lesbian Family Practices (2011); and, quite recently, he co-edited together with David Paternotte Anti-gender campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against equality (2017).

The seminar is part of the Private, Civil, and Public SEXUALITIES: XI. International Academic Conference. http://sexuality.soc.cas.cz/

The visit of prof. Kuhar was made possible by a Progres Q20 project of the Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities.

Seminar will be held in English. No registration is needed.