State Anti-Intellectualism
Political Campaigns against Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, and Campus Antisemitism
- Date
- 20 September 2024
- Time
- 15:30 -17:00
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A1.02
About this lecture
Attacks against “gender ideology” launched by the Vatican since the mid-1990s only gained political traction in the 2010s. But a few years later, in the era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, this conservative reaction against sexual democracy morphed into a neofascist intersectional offensive against race as well as gender, against both social movements and academia. Denunciations of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” or “Islamo-leftism” are the weapons of a state anti-intellectualism that rages from the United States to Russia, as well as in Hungary, Turkey, India, and Argentina – not to forget France. However, since October 7, 2023, there has been a new twist in this assault on academia: accusations of campus anti-Semitism. I will argue that this latest polemic is best understood as a new episode of a political anti-intellectualism that ends up whitewashing the far right while demonizing the left, before concluding that the concept of gender is a useful tool to apprehend this “actualité.”
About the speaker
Éric Fassin is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Paris 8 University, affiliated with the research center Sophiapol (Paris Nanterre), and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He works on gender, sexuality, race, and immigration as democratic issues. In 2021, he co-edited (with Salima Amari) Femmes en rupture de ban, unpublished interviews with two Algerian women in France by Abdelmalek Sayad (Raisons d’Agir), and (with Caroline Ibos) a collective eBook entitled Défense et illustration des libertés académiques (Mediapart).
