Description:

"The End of Gender: Project 2025 and the Global Authoritarian Threat to Gender Justice"

Annie Wilkinson’s research ethnographically examines the transnational and affective politics of anti-gender movements in the Americas and their imbrication with rising authoritarianisms around the world. This talk explores the centrality of misogyny and anti-queer politics to authoritarian political projects through an in-depth examination of Project 2025, a plan designed by a broad coalition of right-wing organizations designed to consolidate American authoritarianism and Christian nationalism in United States, in ways that reflect global trends Through an analysis of what Project 2025 aims to achieve and how its proponents aim to accomplish this, Wilkinson analyzes both the centrality of gender hierarchies to authoritarian movements and their deployment of anti-gender rhetoric as a political strategy that threatens to obliterate the concept of “gender” itself. 

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.