"Anti-gender" Mobilizations, Affect, and Temporality

"But I thought we'd already won that argument!": "Anti-gender" Mobilizations, Affect, and Temporality

Introduction: The Terrain of Gender Studies

I work in a context rife with what are called "anti-gender" attacks: these are attacks on feminism and LGBT movements that are on the rise globally, frequently articulated in conjunction with anti-migrant or racist views, and which writers such as Sonia Corrêa, David Patternote, and Roman Kuhar have linked to right-wing ascendancy. I speak from the context of life and work in the United Kingdom, a place with deeply divided feminist accounts of gender and sex, and extremely high levels of aggression against trans people's right to self-determination. The overlapping sites of higher education, media, and politics are suffused with what are called "culture wars," although we might more accurately rename them: campaigns to paint minority rights as either irrelevant within or responsible for growing economic and social instability. I grant you that this doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Not since the nineteen eighties have we seen a Conservative Party leadership center questions of sex, gender, sexuality, and race so cynically, dismissing Black and trans rights as pointless identity politics, or part of a left-wing or European conspiracy, playing into and producing populist scapegoating in the face of increased austerity and state collapse. And as I finalize this article for publication, Rishi Sunak's Conservative government is threatening to intervene to impede the extension of the Scottish Parliament's recognition of trans people's gender identity. In these arguments, it is minorities who are positioned as aggressors rather than targets of violence, and feminist "anti-gender" activists targeting trans people trade in a similar rhetoric, as Alyosxa Tudor has made plain.

In addition, center-left and right-wing UK newspapers privilege feminists' feelings of being silenced by trans and non-binary claims to recognition, such that alliances between them are exceptionalized. If you put up a public statement of support for colleagues challenging the lack of consultation at the Open University before establishing the Gender Critical Research Network, as we did at the department of gender studies at the London School of Economics in the summer of twenty twenty-one, you can expect to receive incensed promises of libel action from feminist lawyers and groups campaigning for sex-based rights. and capitulation from an institution whose interest in protecting free speech appears to only ever work one way. And if you launch an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network exploring the narratives and politics of "anti-gender" movements transnationally, as myself and my colleague Professor Sumi Madhok, did in September twenty twenty-two, you can expect complaints against its remit and online harassment of its Advisory Board. In each case, accusations are accompanied by an insistence on misogyny: ours, not theirs. We are accused both of harming women and of failing to comprehend the violence women face.

It is bewildering, infuriating, and disorienting to be so accused. As a queer feminist theorist of some decades, I am used to being targeted as a pariah, an aggressive man-, family-, or nation-hater. And I have experienced homophobic and sexist aggression within and outside higher education throughout my life. I am also used to being positioned as a betrayer of real (materialist) feminist commitments or dismissed as a member of an obscure elite, safe in a corner of an ivory tower. I am used to being accused-as someone who takes a pro-union stance on sex work and pornography-of actual violence too, on occasion. And as a bisexual woman, I am used to having my sexual subjectivity called into question. Perhaps my bewilderment has something to do with the privileges I inhabit as a white, middle-class professor who was able to forget for a moment that, when the shit hits the proverbial fan, institutions have no real interest in protecting queer feminists. Or, following Sara Ahmed's reflections in "An Affinity of Hammers," I have been able to forget the relentlessness of anti-trans misogyny and anti-sex work fervor for straightforward reasons: because I am not a sex worker and I am not trans. Even so, for this set of reflections on the anniversary of Feminist Studies, I want to start with those feelings of disorientation and discomfort. I want to start from that intensity of aggression that Elsa Dorlin describes as "a will to obliteration,"

because anti-gender activism is a deeply feeling economy, and because this might offer some clues to working through some apparent stalemates.

I am not the first to point to affect as central to the experience of anti-gender attacks: Andrea Pető, Sonia Corrêa, and Stella Nyanzi all describe encounters with anti-gender rhetoric as terrifying in its insistent irrationality. They rightly point to the framing of gender studies, and feminism more broadly, as forms of aggression in themselves: to the family, to heterosexual complementarity, to the nation and its integrity. Elżbieta Korolczuk talks movingly of the blistering speed of these right-wing attacks as well as the difficulty of challenging the anti-gender discourse that frames gender as itself a form of elite violence. For Joni Cohen, that anti-gender trick of deflection is one that draws on long-standing anti-Semitic tactics, representing feminism as an elite global conspiracy committed to the eradication of local and national values. That this is a form of populism that threatens to challenge sexual and gender as well as anti-racist and immigration rights is hardly news: Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States; deportations to Rwanda have been confirmed as justifiable for people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom; anti-feminist violence has escalated in Pakistan, Brazil, Hungary, Poland; and closures of gender studies programs and attacks (legal and physical) on their members are increasingly routine. As Rodrigo Borba argues in relation to Bolsonaro's Brazil, homophobic, anti-migrant, and anti-gender feelings are effective because they so skillfully harness moral panic ("ordinary families" and the nation itself are framed as being attacked by outside forces). Anti-gender advocates are thus able to frame those challenging racism, homophobia, or transphobia as the aggressors, because gender itself is already understood as an aggressive concept designed to deny the reality of binary sex and the natural order of sexual difference. That's why, for Ahmed, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-sexist interventions can be understood as the origin of violence rather than as a response to preceding violence. The affective economy of anti-gender movements is thus also temporal, since it justifies feelings of who is to blame in the sequence of political loss and gain. Whether the feeling is of abandonment by global capitalism or anger at the imposition of the rights of trans, feminist, or migrant subjects, fantasies of minority status are often all the more powerful for not being rooted in empirical truth.

Affect also serves a temporal function in anti-gender rhetoric with respect to equality and women's rights. Anti-gender proponents often position themselves not as anti-equality, but as the real defenders of women's rights. In a neat trick, the argument goes: yes, sure, there were some problems with inequality for women, but these have largely been addressed. Anyone continuing to challenge the heterosexual family and nation is simply going too far, and instead common sense about both the nature of sex difference and the importance of complementarity should prevail. It is "la theorie de genre" that is dangerous for children in France, not anti-feminism; it is homosexuality that is perverse in Poland and Hungary, not masculinist sexual violence; it is trans subjects who are agents of patriarchy transnationally, not, well, patriarchs. The affective mode here is reassuring: anti-gender arguments are reasonable, understandable, self-explanatory even; while queer, feminist, and migrant claims for recognition and political change are beyond reason, laughable, violent. It is this affective temporality, too, that links gender theorists with migrants (and particularly Muslims) since it is "other cultures" that are thought to threaten the reasonable family, since what is characterized as Muslim hyperbolic patriarchy is conceived of as a relic of the Western, or modern, nation-state's past. On the one hand, there are abhorrent queer, feminist, trans abject hysterics who don't know when to stop; on the other, abhorrent migrant patriarchs from contexts that haven't yet begun to include women in the modern social and political moment. As Katarina Nygren, Lena Martinsson, and Diana Mulinari note, this affective teleology is underwritten by the separation of feminism and women's rights in the global field, so that feminism itself can be positioned as running counter to women's interests. And so too these oppositions function to represent queer and trans subjects as de facto white and global North subjects, unhelpfully counterposed to racialised and migratized women as Global South subjects in need of gender critical feminist protection.

If we add to this picture a further dimension of anti-gender rhetoric that claims that the anti-colonial position should be to resist the imposition of gender given its thoroughly Western history of imposition, then the affective temporality that annexes gender studies as both elite and dominant is complete. It matters little that anti-gender advocates have minimal interest in challenging sexism, racism, or colonialism, or that the white men that the anti-gender narrative paints as marginalized remain the most powerful, healthiest, and best paid globally. It matters little that it is transnational feminists who have been pointing to the problems of epistemic, economic, and military imposition of Western gender equality arguments and emphasizing the importance of Global South feminist networks and theories,

for many decades. But it does help to explain why being in gender studies right now feels a bit like being in a bad episode of The X-Files-the terrain is familiar but its pieces are constantly being rearranged into strange, new configurations.

Storytelling

In two thousand eleven, I published Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, which identified three dominant narratives that keep feminism's accounts of its own past intact and linked to one another, but with different affects and inflections. These are progress, loss, and return narratives that identify the same core transitions across decades but understand them as variously positive, negative, or about to change. As I was writing Why Stories Matter, my focus was on the progress narrative's investment in a move away from essentialism to sexual identity and critical race politics and into queer deconstruction as a heroic one that leaves adherence to narrow understandings of biology and fixed identity categories behind. The fights were fought and, in a progress narrative, won through the sex wars, Black feminist critique of the universalist claims of socialist and radical feminism, and the separation of feminist and queer objects of inquiry. Frequently, progress narratives bring with them a self-congratulatory tone-their prevailing subjects are dismissive or smug in relation to what has been transcended. In a loss narrative, the same markers and shifts are framed as a move away from real politics into abstraction via a divisive identity politics that shatters the unified category of "woman." The tone of the loss narrative is one of lament, both for a time of better feminist thinking and for the presence of clearer and more politically adroit subjects of feminist thinking and action. The loss narrative's affect is of marginality, and the relentless repetition of that marginality is central to its logic. The return narrative is closely related to the loss narrative insofar as it anticipates and proposes changes in feminist thinking that center the perspectives and subjects of the loss narrative. What each narrative advocates should come next may differ-typically materialism, embodiment, radicalism, real politics-but what needs to be displaced is the same (abstraction, fragmentation, a turn to language). My argument was, and still is, that each narrative gloss produces a teleology that does not hold up to closer scrutiny, characterizes decades as discrete and uniform, and- crucially-in doing so, limits the history and context of both Black feminism and sexual politics.

Over a decade ago, I understood these narratives as locating the subject in a particular history through their affective register, and here, as part of the anniversary celebration issue of Feminist Studies, I want to explore their continued value for a contemporary feminist context. What I characterize above as my own disorientation at the resurgence of anti-trans thinking, for example, positions me as firmly within a progress narrative that imagines the work of critiquing anti-porn, anti-sex work, and anti-BDSM, as well as anti-trans or queer arguments, as triumphant. That's perhaps where the shock comes from: the disorientation and the feelings of bewilderment arise from both a feeling of deep misrecognition, but also a sense of déjà vu. Each year I teach Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser's nineteen ninety-seven argument about whether the need for sexual minority rights should be thought of as "merely cultural": I am always surprised that my sense that Butler wins the argument by clearly demonstrating that sexuality is a concept with an economic as well as cultural life is not necessarily shared, and I always put it down to my students not having a full grasp of the history of feminist thinking (by which I really mean my history). My conviction about the progressive nature of feminist debates is shared by trans-inclusive feminists Patricia Elliot and Lawrence Lyons who ask in a similar vein: "why are we called upon to revisit this debate over the value of trans lives again and again?" "Didn't we challenge sex essentialism?" I lament, even as I spent over a decade critiquing the certainty that we had moved to a more sophisticated queer feminist time and place. Why won't essentialism concede defeat so I don't have to have the same fight over and over again?

Taking another look at the loss narrative, the story that feminism has abandoned sexed embodiment and radical politics has of course always been anti-trans, not to mention anti-sex work, anti-porn, and anti-queer. The affective dimensions of that story have nevertheless been intensified by increased trans recognition in politics and the rapid circulation of ideas possible on social media. Trans claims to womanhood are written into a loss narrative as illegitimate, the story goes, because they substitute gender for sex, thus removing misogyny from the spotlight and replacing it with (false) identity. Trans claims of inhabiting womanhood or manhood are themselves characterized as a violence against women because of the ways oppression on the basis of sex is based in a hierarchical sexual dualism: men have power over women and cannot voluntarily remove themselves from that dynamic with individualist identity tricks. The affective motor of this loss narrative is hyperbolic, extraordinarily aggressive, characterizing transwomen as rapists and transmen as not only betraying the sisterhood but also suffering from internalized homophobia. In a loss narrative, a feminist anti-trans position is radical and unpopular, silenced and unspeakable. Its genre is one of its advocates as heroes willing to say the unsayable to overcome those standing in the way of feminist freedom. The insistent fervor cannot be over-stated here: trans rights are framed as illegitimate because of women's rights, with the two understood as being ever distinct. The blame for this purported erasure of women from the center of feminism is placed firmly on queer and trans-inclusive actors and institutions, and common cause is made through these overlaps with right wing anti-feminists, as Tudor has trenchantly pointed out. It is an extraordinary risk for feminists to invest so heavily in sexual essence, since that commitment is so central to the right-wing anti-gender articulations that argue so strongly against feminism. And indeed this is a risk unlikely to pay off, as Korolczuk argues, since nothing will delight the right wing more than being able to take up a simultaneously anti-trans and anti-reproductive rights position under the guise of protecting women, as has been borne out in Poland and the United States. The Far Right is, to put it bluntly, as likely to celebrate the burning in effigy of Sheila Jeffreys as it is Judith Butler.

We can perhaps make a different sense of this grotesque figure of "trans threat"

central to the contemporary loss narrative by having another look at the progress narrative. Like the loss narrative, the progress narrative is suffused with affect and had a triumphalist tone at the time of the publication of Why Stories Matter, satisfied in its identification of the ills of earlier sex essentialisms and later identity politics. This critical tone expressed a rather smug pleasure, a repeated discovery of the unacceptable essentialism in particular schools of feminism, and in particular the racism in both radical and socialist feminism from that time now thankfully past. The moral high ground of finding racist sex essentialism again and again somewhere and sometime else in any and all feminist universalist claims has always been enormously appealing, particularly for white feminists, and again speaks to my surprise that sex essentialists did not just disappear or rehabilitate themselves appropriately following accusations of racism. Apparently, I forgot my own lesson that the progress narrative is also a dangerous fantasy, one that simplifies and excludes and crows from the rooftops about its virtuous distance from these racist, heteronormative ills. While that critique of essentialism was and is important, what I want to argue here is that it necessarily under-explored the triumphalism and aggression that went hand in hand with progress narratives' casting of radical feminism as the bearer of racist sex essentialism, making it carry that particular burden for feminism as a whole.

As a result, progress narratives were and are rather ill-prepared for what Elliot and Lyons call the symptomatic nature of radical (or lesbian) feminist transphobia. In their important psychoanalytic reading of anti-trans aggression, Elliot and Lyons explore the trans-exclusionary feminist externalizing of shame as a response to the (unacknowledged) realization that a unified community of radical lesbian feminism has always been a fantasy. Developing Elliot and Lyons's work in terms of progress and loss narratives here, we might speculate on anti-trans aggression as a combative attempt to overcome the shame of being accused of racist essentialism as the ground of that fantasy of unity. That externalization most certainly cannot target Black feminists-given that the aggression is intended to refute accusations of racism-but trans subjects constitute an appropriate stand-in. In other words, I want to suggest that the transphobia that is central to the current feminist loss narrative emerges at least partly as an attempt to deflect that accusation of racism. We could further analyze this anger and say that responding to this shame with aggression redirects the vitriol resulting from the politically unspeakable desire to obliterate that critique (and its originators) displacing that aggression onto a white-coded trans subject. This is not to say that a Black trans subject somehow fares better in an anti-trans loss narrative, but that the relentless refusal to engage the Black feminist critiques of sex essentialism implicitly whitens the alternative object of this ire. In this reading, the splitting of "gender" from "sex", and the whitewashing of "gender" as the violent critique of "sex" allows for queer and trans challenges alone to be recast as the enemy (while Black feminist critics of sex are excised from feminist history, but indirectly). In return, trans-inclusive feminists can remake radical feminists into a reassuringly singular and familiar target of vitriol: as with the earlier progress narrative, this deflection of their own enables queer feminist thinkers to continue to ignore their own inattention to race and racism.

And what of the return narratives in my analysis? In this anti-trans narrative the fantasy loss is repaired by a fantasy return to a binary opposition of "real sex" as we have seen. That return of course also comes with the need to ignore the links between sex essentialism and the resurgence of anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, and anti-reproductive rights agendas that have always been at the heart of right-wing anti-gender practice. It is the same ignorance that enables feminist anti-pornography advocates to separate themselves from a right-wing censorship agenda. But there is another strand to that return narrative that departs from the right-wing insistence on the integrity of binary sex in purely essentialist terms. This strand identifies and relies on sex as binary, certainly, but as determined as the site of violence and oppression rather than as a site of natural difference or complementarity. "Gender" for this strand is ludicrous not because it challenges the natural status of women and men, but because it is a smoke screen that obscures "sex" as the primary locus of women's oppression. For materialist feminists such as Christine Delphy, say, sex matters because it reflects, or is even an outcome of, ongoing positions of structural inequality rather than of essence. Materialist feminists' claim that sex is central is bound up with their insistence on politicizing sex in order to challenge its naturalization, and for Delphy at least, that materialist analysis is consistent with an anti-racist position. Delphy sees religious domination as overlapping with sex domination such that banning the headscarf in France is a sexist red herring deflecting from materialist accounts of intersecting state or institutional violence. Nevertheless, as Ilana Eloit has argued, Delphy's materialist account could not accommodate a radical departure from understandings of "woman," as her disagreement with Monique Wittig's insistence that "lesbians are not women" makes plain.

There are other compelling accounts of sex as central to an analysis of women's oppression that should also not be shoehorned into an essentialist box that doesn't really fit. The work of Catharine A. MacKinnon, for example, has been much maligned within progress narratives for its essentializing of sex as the primary site of women's oppression. Yet this is a mistake, because sex for radical feminist MacKinnon is a naturalized rather than natural category, much as it is for materialist feminists. The difference is that for MacKinnon, it is sexual violence that is the structural framework of oppression that produces "woman" as a violable category. For MacKinnon, sex oppression in the sex industry affects trans women (who have few economic options) in misogynist ways, just as it affects women assigned female at birth. Similarly, Andrea Dworkin, whose anti-pornography position was dismissed as essentialist in progress narratives, was in truth a determinist who had no truck with the "truth of sex," but included trans women in her understanding of the radical victimhood underpinning the sex industry. Neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin need sex to be an essential category in order to be abolitionists.

I am not a fan of either MacKinnon or Dworkin's privileging of 'sex' as foundational of women's oppression, but my point here is to highlight ways in which progress narratives have mischaracterized both materialist and radical feminist approaches to sex as more singular than they are in order to mark out their own distance from essentialism. And this is of course what progress narratives do: they are ever confident that the problem has been identified and overcome-identifying a secret essentialism here or an exclusionary identity there-always ensuring that the culprit remains the same: a myopic feminism invested in "women" or rights, more easily and predictably subsumed by the overarching neoliberal enemy than other forms. And as both Jennifer C. Nash and Robyn Wiegman have trenchantly observed, the answer-intersectionality-becomes increasingly empty of content or method, fetishized as the lone Black feminist approach to social justice. The tone of celebratory critique so associated with progress narratives, though, has transmogrified into a more brittle (perhaps even masochistic) certainty that all the rights agendas that were at the heart of radical or liberal feminism, as well as those emerging from LGBT and trans rights agendas, are variously hetero- or homonormative, trans- or homonationalist, racist, or colonial, and (of course) subsumed within the logic of capital. The certainty-it's global neoliberalism what done it !- is suffused with a rather pleasing affect of its own too: that if only "they" had listened to the critiques, feminism would presumably be less co-opted and neoliberal now. But I am also struck by the tone of relentlessly pleased disappointment that this endless debunking produces as we discover (once again) that any site of possible transformation has already had its well poisoned. These shifts in the tone of progress narratives mean that they are morphing into loss narratives, in fact, where what is lost are the radical underpinnings this time of queer feminist critique, the playful, hopeful openness of poststructuralist or posthuman intervention. Both loss narratives and progress narratives continue to pinpoint identity politics as the problem that needs to be escaped from, in other words. In materialist or radical accounts, it is the turn to queer abstraction that is an inevitable outcome of substituting gender (identity) for sex (essence or oppression). In the affective or posthuman turn of progress narratives, it is increasingly queer theory and liberal feminism that have a reductionist understanding of power or a fetish for the individual that can be easily co-opted.

Jenny Gunnarson Payne and Sophie Tornhill, brilliant critics of anti-gender discourse, quite reasonably suggest a return to Marxist or socialist feminist accounts that can reclaim anti-woman violence without falling into those doomed individualist identity politics as one way out of the current impasse between progress and loss or return narrative in feminism. For Payne and Tornhill, a feminist return must jump back over queer feminist politics to rescue a feminism less amenable to a right-wing anti-gender take up. It is a seductive argument, but its resonance across a range of progress and loss narratives might alert us to one of its central dangers-it tells the history of these transitions as though identity did in fact displace real politics, as though a unified feminism had been present only to be fragmented, and as though queer feminism was indeed primarily concerned with textual unsettling rather than anti-heteronormative justice. And yet, these are precisely the teleological fictions that pit culture against materiality as a zero-sum game. It is that opposition that is so pleasing to anti-gender arguments (including feminist ones), since it already does the work of associating gender with culture (and thus "unreality") and sex with materiality (and thus the baseline of common sense) that is so crucial to the Right. This fantasy of being able to go back - to a time of pre-identity investments, to a more real politics - plays directly into anti-gender proponents' hands. It continues to position queerness in ways that make it both the scapegoat and pivot for the histories that understand transformative politics as displaced by identity (reducing trans claims to dignity as individualist ones in the process). As Éric Fassin has also argued, it fails to get at the fact that the ongoing pitting of culture against politics is precisely why trashing queers, trans people, and feminists of all kinds works for the Right as part of garnering support for populism in the first place.