Transnational Anti-Gender Politics

Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the LSE Department of Gender Studies, UK. Her research is interested in transnational movements of knowledges and of people, and how these are produced by and productive of gendered and racialised (in)security. Her book monograph Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) examines what work the term gender comes to do in the context of international peacekeeping. Her published work appears in journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, European Journal of Politics and Gender, and International Peacekeeping.Billy Holzberg is Assistant Professor (lecturer) in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London, UK. His research focuses on the affective and sexual politics of intensified nationalisms and border regimes in Europe and has been published in journals like Body and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Media Studies and Sociology. His first monograph Affective Bordering: The Emotional Politics of Race, Migration and Deservingness published with Manchester University Press conceptualises national border making as an affective practice cementing racialised and gendered hierarchies.Tomás Ojeda is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (2022-2023), and Visiting Fellow at the LSE Department of Gender Studies, UK. His research interests lie in the intersection of queer theory, psychosocial studies, anti-gender politics and LGBTI+ mental health, with a special focus on depathologising practices, activist and academic responses to current attacks on gender affirming care. He is an editor of Engenderings, the LSE Gender blog.

• 1: Introduction: Thinking anti-gender politics transnationally.- 2:  Brazil: A catastrophic hotspot of anti-gender politics – Present realities, hovering specters, transnational connections.- 3:‘Pro-Family’ campaigning against comprehensive sexuality education in Eastern and Southern Africa.- 4: Thinking from Hanau to Christchurch and El Paso: Anti-gender ideology and the sexual politics of transnational right-wing terrorism.- 5: The battle to be ‘normal’: Anti-gender politics in Japan.- 6: Relational politics of anti-gender and anti-feminist ideology in India: Notes on fascism, feminist solidarity and liberatory politics.- 7: Child protection, sexuality and LGBT+ rights – Anti-gender politics in populist illiberal Hungary.- 8: The emergence and trajectory of the anti-gender movement in Turkey.- 9: The ‘gender ideology’ rhetoric and the de-secularization process: A reflection situated in Latin America.- 10: The Forbidden ‘F’? Do women still hold up half the sky in today’s China?- 11: Anti-gender campaigns and abortion: Feminist strategies against reactionary biopolitics in Chile.- 12: Strategies of Attack: How anti-gender politics devalues and depletes academic knowledge production.- 13: Gendered contestations in Spain: A call for conceptual diversity and embodied knowledges.- 14: Gender studies and anti-gender politics in the Gulf region.- 15: Roundtable with scholars and activist affected by anti-gender politics.

“Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attack edited by Aiko Holvikivi, Billy Holzberg and Tomás Ojeda is a welcome intervention into the discourse. ... The book is self-aware and cautious, often reflecting on the limitations of applying the anti-gender framework in countries where the terminology does not arise organically. It is a valuable resource in conceptualising anti-gender politics … .” (LSE Review of Books, blogs.lse.ac.uk, February 20, 2025)