Agnieszka Graff, Ph.D./ Elżbieta Korolczuk, Ph.D.

Agnieszka Graff, Ph.D.

Agnieszka Graff is a Polish feminist scholar, activist and media commentator.
As co-organizer and speaker of Congress of Polish Women, she writes for major journals and newspapers, including the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza. As an academic, she is based at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, where she teaches US culture, literature and film, African American studies and gender studies.
Her publications examine the intersection of gender, sexuality and national identity. She has authored four books of feminist essays: Świat bez kobiet (World without Women, 2001); Rykoszetem (Stray Bullets –Gender, Sexuality and Nation, 2008), Magma (The Quagmire Effect, 2010), Matka feministka (Mother and Feminist, 2014).
She is also the author of numerous articles on gender in Polish and American culture published in collected volumes and academic journals, including Public Culture and Feminist Studies.

Her current interest is in the transnational anti-gender movement. Her article on anti-genderism co-written with Elżbieta Korolczuk has been accepted for publication in Signs in 2018 and she is currently co-editing an upcoming issue of Signs on gender and the global right.

Elżbieta Korolczuk, Ph.D.

Elżbieta Korolczuk is a sociologist, commentator, women's and human rights activist. She works at Södertörn University in Stockholm and teaches at Gender Studies, Warsaw University; her research interests involve social movements, parenthood and gender, including anti-gender campaigns and movements.
Most recent publications include books: Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland co-edited with Kerstin Jacobsson (Berghahn Books, 2017) and Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia co-edited with Katalin Fábián (Indiana University Press, 2017).

For over a decade she was a member of Women’s 8 of March Alliance, currently she is engaged in the Association "For Our Children" fighting for the changes in the Polish child support system and serves as a board member of "Akcja Demokracja" Foundation.

Email: elzbieta.korolczuk[at]sh.se

“Ebola from Brussels”: anti-genderism, right-wing populism and the future of transnational feminism

Keynote - Saturday, 15.09. 11:30 - 12:30 ZHG 011

For the new wave of transnational populist right, “genderism” has become a flexible signifier for all that is wrong with the contemporary world: gender chaos, low fertility rates, social inequality and the arrogance of the liberal elites. The reactionary mobilization against gender, in progress since 2010, is a broad movement that operates on two levels: academic and sociopolitical. We will examine both, focusing on the cultural geography of anti-genderism and its links to right-wing populism. By selectively borrowing from liberal-left and feminist discourses, this movement strives to construct a new universalism, an illiberal one and to rewrite Western intellectual history. All this has serious implications for feminist theory and activism.

The East-West divide features prominently in the anti-gender discourse and politics: Russia is the source of inspiration, Poland appears as an unspoiled land of true men and real women, a key battlefield in the culture wars, whereas European Union is a source of imminent danger, with genderism imagined as an epidemic. What does this mean for feminist geographies of knowledge, prestige and activism that have long been shaped by an East-West divide?

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