How are gender studies scholars resisting anti-gender politics in the United Kingdom?

How are gender studies scholars resisting anti-gender politics in the United Kingdom? Clare Hemmings (bio) and Sumi Madhok (bio) Editors of Pandemonium spoke with Clare Hemmings and Sumi Madhok on August 3, 2023. Clare Hemmings: Sumi and I were recently supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant in Britain to build a network called Transnational "Anti-gender" Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions. Sumi Madhok: This network is something that was perhaps one of the first projects of its kind, particularly in the U.K. academy, to get funded, and frankly we were quite surprised given the political climate in the U.K. To End Page 117 see the research councils in the U.K. academy support this feminist transnational network of scholars who are researching these questions in different parts of the globe, has been very heartening. Clare Hemmings: Our aim has been to bring scholars together to consider threats to gender and queer studies as fields as well as to feminism, LGBT communities—especially trans communities—migrants, refugees, and Black communities. These communities and the threats against them are all quite connected, of course. In the U.K. right now, the kinds of work that we do within these communities has become increasingly difficult—increasingly subjected to challenges and aggression. Even just being able to use the term "gender" as a critical intervention has been subject to attack, let alone when articulated as a racialized, classed, or sexual category related to social meanings. Hostility to universities from the U.K. government has been increasing generally—particularly towards the interdisciplinary humanities—and attacks on gender studies are underwritten by these "culture wars" that are anti-feminist and racist. And our department has been directly attacked for its work, precisely because we are visibly resisting these developments. But this is not just about the U.K., of course. We very much wanted to put together a network that was transnational in scope to link that to other experiences of anti-feminist, anti-trans, anti-migrant politics in different locations, let's say in India or Pakistan, in South Africa or Uganda, in Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and so on, as well as within the U.K. and across Europe generally. We wanted to open up a space where we could have frank conversations that are increasingly difficult to have in hostile environments. Sumi Madhok: Yes, and of course there has also been a sort of "split within" that we wanted to address too—splits within women's rights or what sometimes is termed "gender equality" advocates. A split has opened up between intersectional feminists and groups that self-identify as "feminist"—sometimes—who are mobilizing against trans rights and disavow gender studies, which has a very particular kind of intellectual framework that's being challenged on both transnational and gender essentialist grounds. I would say these attacks are not only a matter of the world outside being against gender studies or against universities; actually, there is also a challenge being mounted within universities and among feminists in the U.K. There are some feminists who take an anti-trans position, although we don't End Page 118 see that present as much within gender studies at the university. We don't see a split within the field certainly, but what we do see is a kind of passivity or silence on the question of trans or nonbinary rights, a default position maybe where … if you're not speaking up to make it very clear that the work you're doing is trans-inclusive, but you continue to use terms like men and women without further qualification or in ways that are inclusive of trans and nonbinary and other queer folk … well, that says something too, doesn't it? Clare Hemmings: Yes, it says a lot in a context where we have powerful organizations and individuals who are pushing very similar kinds of campaigns as we see in France, claiming that, in education, particularly primary and secondary education but also in higher education, the question of binary sex needs to be retained and that anything other than that is, you know, meaningless or mindless or perverse or absurd. There...