Resumo

The current rise of Right Wing Populism in Europe, in the US and other parts of the Americas has reached center stage of political debates. Its ongoing success on the ballot box is generally viewed as a menace for representative democracy, civil society and transnational problems such as climate change, migration and peace-keeping.

Notably, the gender relations and the heterosexual design of the nuclear family play an important role in populist parties’ self-conception all the more as a wave of anti-genderism is lately connected to these movements. In contrast to the traditional agenda, populist ‘sexual nationalisms’ highlights the sexual freedom of the enlightened ‘native’ population thereby feeding on anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim resentment via the alleged ‘backwardness’ of immigrants and refugees. Another paradox combines the persistent gender-gap in voting with a coexisting tendency to support female leadership. However, it is surprising how little academic attention has so far been directed to populist gender and sexual politics. Only quite recently, relevant researchers asserted: that "(c)onceptually populism has no specific relationship to gender" (Mudde/Kaltwasser 2015).

The seminar introduces concepts of (right-wing) populism and combines them in relation with recent critical gender perspectives (Sauer 2017, Dietze 2017, 2018). I will critically discuss the ambivalences of right-wing actors seeming appropriations of gender and feminist agendas for racist aims and the simultaneous degradation of what they term "genderist" ideology. Moreover, I will think about possible counter-strategies as expressed in increasing intersectional feminist movements worldwide.

Bibliography

«Constructing ‘the people’ | An intersectional analysis of right-wing concepts of democracy and citizenship in Austria» - Edma Ajanovic, Stefanie Mayer and Birgit Sauer. Danube University Krems / FH Campus Wien (University of Applied Sciences) / University of Vienna

«Bolsonaro, 'gender ideology' Bolsonaro, 'gender ideology' and hegemonic masculinity in Brazil» by Mariana Prandini Assis & Ana Carolina Ogando | Aljazeera

 

Nota biográfica

Julia Roth (Prof. Dr.) is professor for American Studies with a focus on Gender Studies and InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. She earned her M.A. in American Studies from Humboldt University Berlin and her PhD from Potsdam University. As a doctoral student, she was member of the DFG Graduate program „Gender as a Category of Knowledge“ and the Potsdam Graduate School „Cultures in/of Mobility“. She was postdoctoral fellow at the BMBF research project“The Americas as Space of Entanglements” and at the interdisciplinary network “desiguALdades.net- Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America” at Freie Universität Berlin as well as postdoctoral researcher at the BMBF project „The Americas as Space of Entanglements“ at Bielefeld University. Julia Roth was lecturer at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Potsdam and the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on postcolonial and gender approaches, intersectionality and global inequalities and has led her among others to the USA, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the US, Nigeria, and Peru. Her work currently focuses on African American and Caribbean literature and culture, anti-racist feminist knowledge from the Caribbean, Hip Hop, intersectionality theorizing, and rightwing populism and gender. Her major publications include a monograph on Gender, Genre and Coloniality as expressed in the representation of Latin American women (Occidental Readings, Decolonial Practices, WVT 2014) and an co-editedvolume on cultures of resistance in the Caribbean (Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean: Narratives, Aesthetics and Politics, Routledge 2018). Her articles and book chapters deal with intersectionality theorizing, Gender and Citizenship, feminist knowledge production in the Americas (focus on the Caribbean), and, recently, Right-wing Populism and Gender. Julia Roth is member of the Society for Caribbean Research (SoCaRe) and the International Association for InterAmerican Studies (IAIAS).

Evento no âmbito dos programas de Doutoramento em Estudos Feministas (FLUC/CES) e Doutoramento em Línguas Modernas (FLUC).