IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2025-2026
Feminism, Democracy, and Academic Freedom
Anti-Gender Politics and Democratic Backsliding in Global Perspective
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From Turkey and Sri Lanka to the United States, anti-gender discourses are helping to undermine democracies and shore up authoritarian rule. In this panel, three scholars will discuss how anti-gender discourse travels globally and manifests in specific cultural and political contexts. Didem Unal (University of Helsinki) will focus on the Islam–gender nexus in Turkey as an example of the institutionalization of global anti-gender discourses in the Global South. She will argue that anti-gender politics reinforces domestic authoritarian consolidation and transnational contestation of liberal gender norms, and reflect on how these dynamics affect feminist resistance, academic freedom, and democracy. Senel Wanniarachchi (Oxford and LSE) will describe how, in Sri Lanka, organized anti-gender groups with transnational connections—such as the Mother’s Front, which is linked to a US-based evangelical church—have gained increased media prominence for advancing queerphobic and transphobic discourses. Wanniarachchi will place these developments within the broader global dynamics of anti-gender movements, emphasizing the roles of motherhood and anti-imperialism. Elizabeth Corredor (Bryn Mawr) will discuss the global circulation of the term “gender ideology,” tracing its development as a reaction to feminist and queer gains in academia, policy, and international institutions. She will argue that these attacks on gender scholarship are central, not peripheral, to contemporary democratic backsliding in the United States.
Didem Unal is an Academy Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. Her research examines gender and religion, anti-gender mobilizations, right-wing populism, authoritarianism, and feminist movements, with a particular focus on Turkey in comparative and transnational perspectives. Her work has appeared in journals including European Journal of Women’s Studies, Politics & Gender, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the author of The Crisis of Democracy, Anti-Gender Politics, and Feminist Resistance: Islam and Gender in the Age of Right-Wing Populism and Authoritarianism in Turkey (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2026).
Senel Wanniarachchi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his PhD. His research explores how discourses of “culture” and “heritage” appear in colonial archives and persist in contemporary contexts, including digital archives. He is interested in how these narratives are used in frameworks that are anti-imperialist yet simultaneously ethnonationalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative. In Sri Lanka, Senel co-founded Hashtag Generation, an advocacy organization working at the intersection of human rights and technology.
Elizabeth S. Corredor is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University (2021), holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago, and a certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. Her research focuses on gender, peace and security, populism, and Latin America. Her book manuscript, based on her award-winning dissertation, examines the 2010–2016 Colombian peace process to show how women’s and LGBTIQ+ agendas were advanced, constrained, and contested within formal negotiations and the final agreement. She also studies anti-gender and anti-trans mobilizations, tracing how populist and authoritarian discourses produce epistemological and ontological violence by contesting knowledge, erasing identities, and remaking insecurity within both state institutions and everyday politics. Her work has appeared in Signs, Latin American Politics and Society, and International Negotiation, and her dissertation received the 2022 APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Best Dissertation Award.