Articulation, Hegemony, and the Anti-Gender Campaigns in the Americas

Lecture in the Public Lecture Series at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies, University of Bern (Switzerland).

Since 2016—when a new iteration of the attacks on gender took the global public sphere by storm—, lay and scholarly analyses of the phenomenon have multiplied. A great majority of these have read them as symptomatic of a series of ‘moral panics’ (from and within conservative constituencies) that emerge as a ‘backlash’. While these two angles (the moral panic and the backlash) have now lost currency, the baseline political, conceptual, and empirical frameworks from which the phenomenon is usually addressed remain stable.

In this lecture, I aim at shifting the approach by focusing on matters of rhetoric to claim that rhetoric matters. As the art of persuasion, rhetoric operates in the realm of language and representation, and has effects on people’s minds and hearts. It impacts both conceptualisation—i.e., it contributes to shape the ways in which people conceptualise how the world works— and ‘structures of feeling’—i.e., it aims at setting social moral and ethical conventions as well as individual emotional attachments in regards to how the world should work.

Taking the Americas as my empirical terrain and deploying the conceptual and methodological apparatus of British critical cultural studies, I argue that if our goal as feminists is to produce knowledge that matters both within and without academia, we must: first, re-politicise the realm of culture, understood broadly. Second, refine our terminological toolbox to address the issues at stake, so that instead of reinforcing our antagonists’ rhetorical work, we aim at fracturing the ‘articulations’ and ‘chains of equivalence’ they have—somewhat successfully—built in their struggle for ‘hegemony’.