Security unbound: spectres of feminism in Trump-time

Conceptus interruptus: Forestalling sureties about violence and feminism

“…But it is precisely the reliance on the comforting narrative that feminism (or more accurately, gender) is making it on the global stageas Zalewski would put it, with gender programmes and policies coming out of our earsthat the arrival of Trump-time has been met with such incredulity (at least among white Western progressives), the subject of our 'Security Unbound: Spectres of Feminism in Trump-time'. 51 In that we enlist the idea of the spectral, derived in part from Zalewski's close readings of Derrida, but employed increasingly within critical and feminist IR. Zalewski has worked with ghosts before in her 2005 'Gender Ghosts in McGarry and O'Leary and Representations of the Conflict in North Ireland' 52 as forgotten shadows that (re)emerge to disrupt coherent narratives of modernity.…”

Special issue introduction: Contemporary international anti-feminism

“…This research builds on a growing body of scholarship on women’s rights contestation, including work on transnational right-wing politics (Buss and Herman 2003; Butler 2006; Bob 2012); efforts to undermine women’s and SOGI rights in international organizations and law (Chappell 2006; Cupać and Ebetürk 2020; Ebetürk 2018; Goetz 2020; Kantola and Emanuela 2020; Sanders 2018; Sanders and Jenkins 2021; Sandler and Goetz 2020; Shameem 2017, 2021; Stoeckl and Medvedeva 2018; Voss 2018, 2019; Yamin, Datta and Andion 2017); the role of gender in regional and comparative contexts (Biroli and Caminotti 2020; Doğangün 2020; Lavizzari and Prearo 2019; Mos 2018; Payne and De Souza Santos 2020; Un 2019; Verloo and Paternotte 2018; Vida 2019; Zaremberg, Tabbush and Friedman 2021); and the dynamics of anti-feminist human rights backlash and democratic decline (Denkovski, Bernarding and Lunz 2021; Gilligan and Richards 2018; Graff, Kapur and Walters 2019; Korolczuk 2020; Krizsán and Roggeband 2018; Krizsán and Roggeband 2021; Roggeband 2018, 2019; Roggeband and Krizsán 2020; Vinjamuri 2017; Zalewski and Runyan 2020). From this literature, several prominent patterns emerge, which are taken up, elaborated and investigated by the authors in this special issue: the core significance of social hierarchy and biological essentialism to anti-feminist conservative thought; the polarizing demonization of feminists by religious conservatives and populist nationalists; the appropriation of rights discourses and advocacy tactics by anti-feminist campaigns; and the strategic importance of law and legal language as a terrain of rights contestation.…”