Modern Europe Colloquium | The War on Gender: A History

The Modern Europe Colloquium presents Camille Robcis, Professor of History and French at Columbia University, on "The War on Gender: A History" My talk tries to make sense of various arguments that have emerged in recent years against a so-called “theory of gender,” “gender ideology,” or “gender agenda.” According to its critics, this “gender ideology” has driven the push for a broad range of sexual and reproductive rights, from the legalization of abortion, access to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual education in schools, non-discrimination bills, access to new reproductive technologies, trans rights, and much more. I trace the discursive origins of this “anti-genderism” to various UN conferences in the 1990s and map the global circulation of the term, first through the Vatican and its different think tanks, and later through other religious, right-wing, and populist groups. Bio: Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University and the current chair of the History Department. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell UP, 2013), Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago UP, 2021), and The War on Gender: A History (forthcoming with Princeton UP). She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in History and Modern Culture & Media and obtained her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University. The Modern Europe Colloquium is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; and the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center