Description:

Annie Wilkinson will present her research in the talk, "Gender as Conspiracy: Mistrust & Misinformation in Anti-Gender Organizing in Mexico."

Annie Wilkinson’s research ethnographically examines the sociopolitical and affective politics of anti-gender movements, anti-feminist organizing, and anti-LGBTQ violence in the Americas. This talk explores the role of mistrust and misinformation in anti-gender movements through a reading of anti-gender conspiracy theories in Mexico. By connecting the dots between the conditions in which they emerge and circulate –including intense political upheaval, economic uncertainty, and social insecurity– and the stories they tell of people and places both far and near, Wilkinson analyzes what contemporary anti-gender conspiracy theories tell us about the sociopolitical dynamics of anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ politics in Mexico and beyond.

Wilkinson’s ethnographic work on transatlantic anti-gender movements, ex-gay movements and “conversion therapy” in Latin America, and transnational right-wing organizing has appeared in the International Journal of Feminist Politics, Feminist Anthropology, Social Anthropology, and North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Commission and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the US-Mexican Studies Center at the University of California San Diego. This talk draws on Wilkinson’s book manuscript, Illiberal Insecurities: Distrust and Post-Truth Populism in Anti-Gender Activism in Mexico, which examines how transnational anti-gender activism taps popular in/securities conditioned by late neoliberalism and how these movements are challenging prospects for equality and democratic conditions in Mexico and around the world.

Lunch will be served at 12:15, and the talk will start at 12:30 pm.  A Q & A will follow the presentation.  This is a hybrid event, with online attendance facilitated by Zoom Webinar.