Anna Carastathis (Athens) ‘Anti-gender’ politics as “reality enforcement” and cisgender performativity

The Leibniz ScienceCampus, the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, and Prof. Dr. Ger Duijzings are pleased to invite all colleagues and students to an open discussion and exchange with: Dr Anna Carastathis - a political theorist and co-director of the Athens-based Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research and senior researcher on the RESIST project: Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics. She is the author of Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and co-author of Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020). She is also co supervisor of the LSC doctoral researcher Vita Zelenska.

Join us in Room 017 at IOS / Graduate school on Tuesday 27 January at 09:30 for a discussion with Anna Carastathis on ‘anti-gender’ politics as a project of “reality enforcement” that seeks to eliminate gender and sexual self-determination by reasserting ‘sex’ as a fixed, natural order. We will explore how opposition to ‘gender ideology’ and ‘wokeness’ crosses the political spectrum; it is not restricted to the far right and is institutionalised in laws that naturalise the binary gender system, the assignment of gender at birth, and coerced reproduction.

Full Abstract | Download the abstract with references | Drawing on research on ‘anti-gender’ politics conducted in the context of the RESIST project (‘Fostering Intersectional Queer Feminist Resistances to Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Politics), I conceptualise ‘anti-gender’ politics as an umbrella of practices of “reality enforcement” and cisgender performativity, seeking to eliminate gender and sexual self-determination. “Reality enforcement” is drawn from Talia Bettcher’s analysis of transphobia (2014), theorising how trans people’s genders are erased through cisnormative, compulsory assignments and gendered violence. Key to this conceptualisation is self-determination: what Talia Bettcher elsewhere calls “first-person authority over gender” (2009). Self-determination — including living free of violence — is what anti-gender actors, across ideological alignments, oppose: they view it as a threat to the political orders they seek to materialise, which they proclaim ‘natural orders’. Self-determination links together resistances to ‘anti-gender’ politics: queer, feminist, trans struggles (Butler, 2024); struggles for freedom of movement; anti-colonial and antiracist struggles.

The opposition to ‘gender ideology’ and ‘wokeness’ crosses the political spectrum; it is not restricted to the far right and is institutionalised in laws that naturalise the binary gender system, the assignment of gender at birth, and coerced reproduction. Such reactionary views of gender — the refusal of gender as such and the reassertion of the category of ‘sex’ — circulate between, and bring into alignment seemingly contradictory politics on the right, centre, and left. They also suture to fascist discourses, which empower self-proclaimed gender critical feminist conceptions that seek to enforce the ostensibly fixed biological ‘reality’ of sex (Amery, 2024). On these views, to be ‘critical’ of gender, entails the reassertion of ‘sex’ as an indisputable ontological reality. Notions of ‘sex-based rights’, ‘adult human females’, ‘native women’, ‘women-born-women’ etc. evince not only epistemic injustice with respect to gender identifications; through the reimposition of ‘sex’ as a sociolegal category ‘anti-gender’ politics seek to materialise and enforce their ‘reality.’ Transfeminist conceptualisations of gendered and sexualised violence are also derealised in this gesture, with the inversion of actors and targets of violence being a key strategy in representing trans-exclusionary cisgender women in the act of exclusion as the (potential) victims as opposed to the (actual) agents of violence.