To mark the launch of SPW’s new website, we invited some long-term partners to explore our archive and select a piece of content (a publication, an article, a newsletter issue, etc.) to highlight as a relevant contribution to our field of research and action and to write a few lines explaining why this “something” is important.
Below, we share Susana Fried’s generous words about The Politics of Gender. Susana Fried is an accomplished feminist advocate with a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Gender and Development. She has extensive expertise in human rights, gender justice, sexual rights, and public health advocacy. She is the co-founder of Just Futures Collaborative, a feminist initiative cultivating global cross-movement strategies for challenging criminalization, promoting human rights, and protecting democracy (www.justfuturescollaborative.com). Susana has collaborated with us on the project SexPolitics: Trends & Tensions in the 21st century.
The recommended content is available at this link.
_________________________________________________________
By Susana Fried
We projected a future in which a strong consensus could be built in the Global South around an intersectional agenda of social justice, gender justice, and erotic justice.
We were wrong. The successes in shaping a transnational gender politics in the 1990s can be measured by the fury with which gender is now attacked north and south of the equator. As a result, la lucha continua.
(Correa, The “Politics of Gender”)
It’s been less than a week since the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and the 69th UN Commission on the Status of Women – an ideal time to reread Sonia Correa’s piece, The “Politics of Gender”: a Genealogical Commentary, published by Sexuality Policy Watch on September 16, 2024. The article’s publication coincided with a submission made by my organization, Just Futures Collaborative, along with 22 other groups, to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, criticizing how the request for submissions frames the topic of her June report: Forms of “sex-based” violence. In this context, the article’s genealogy provides a recounting and analysis to situate the current growing visibility of “gender-critical” feminists, who are, in many respects, the successors to the anti-gender mobilization that Correa describes. And indeed, the furious attacks have grown.
At the same time, as Correa demonstrates, the war over “gender” is embedded in larger geopolitical, economic, and social contestations. At the 69th CSW, this featured the rise in power of increasingly authoritarian, anti-feminist, and anti-trans regimes in Argentina and the United States, alongside Russia, Turkey, and Hungary, among others. Whereas, as Correa shows, the conflict was originally primarily positioned in reference to sexual orientation and abortion (or sexual and gender diversity and bodily autonomy), the goal of anti-gender, anti-democracy actors was always much more ambitious, as the piece illustrates.
The SPW website’s ease of use and new design come at a critical time, when articles like The “Politics of Gender” provide critical historical and theoretical grounding for our current struggles to overturn the ongoing campaign to erase an embrace of non-binary gender, non-heteronormative sexuality, heterodox economics, diverse communities, families, and cultures, ecologically sustainable practices, and a safe and peaceful planet.
Congratulations on the relaunch!