The Rise of the Global Right: Feminist/Queer Critiques

Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Masha Gessen, journalist
Svati Shah, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Neferti Tadiar, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
From a forthcoming issue of the feminist journal Signs dedicated to “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right,” to a recent panel at the Pratt Institute on the same topic, feminist and queer scholars and activists are urgently calling our attention to how the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes is predicated on an investment in toxic masculinity and its attendant homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. This panel brings together feminist/queer scholars and activists to discuss the convergences, and important distinctions, between the gender and sexual politics that undergird the consolidation of power of Trump in the U.S., Putin in Russia, Modi in India, and Duterte in the Philippines.
5 Washington Place, room 101
PLEASE BRING PHOTO ID
This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Studies.
Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She is author most recently of Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy.  Her new book Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed is forthcoming in the new e-book series she is co-editing at University of California Press, American Studies Now. She was president of the American Studies Association during 2014-2015.
Masha Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017. Gessen is the author of nine books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017; and “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about aids, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, Gessen was dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes. Gessen is a visiting professor at Amherst College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Svati P. Shah is an Associate Professor Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where they also hold an adjunct appointment in Anthropology. Additionally, Dr. Shah is a research associate in the University of Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration and Society, and has taught at NYU, Wellesley College, and Duke University. Currently, Dr. Shah also maintains research and teaching collaborations with the University of Pune and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and with the University of Oslo. Dr. Shah’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University’s joint doctoral program in Anthropology and Public Health. Their first monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, was published in 2014 by Duke University Press and Orient Blackswan in India. Within the auspices of a 2013-2014 Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, as well as other ongoing research support, Dr. Shah has been conducting a long-term ethnographic study of LGBTQ politics and the ‘near history’ of social movements in India. Dr. Shah’s work has appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including Gender and History, Cultural Dynamics, and New South Asian Feminisms (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and co-Editor of the New York-based Collective and international journal of interdisciplinary cultural studies, Social Text. She is the author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her current book project, Remaindered Life, is a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire.