Center for InterAmerican Studies

The CIAS is cordialy inviting to the second talk of this semester's colloquium series. On Tuesday, 18th of November (6 pm c.t., Room X E0-226), Julia Roth (Universität Bielefeld) will be leading a lecture on the topic: Revitalizando el estado masculinista: El género como campo de batalla en el discurso autoritario del gobierno de Trump y sus aliados latinoamericanos.

The lecture examines how issues surrounding gender rights, gender, and the demonization of so-called “gender ideology” are being exploited in the discourse of the authoritarian right, and how ‘gender’ has become a central battleground in the current “conjuncture” (Hall). As an affective bridge and symbolic glue, the demonization of the “phantom” of gender (Butler) mobilizes and channels fears, distracts from structural inequalities and crises, and revitalizes the ‘retrotopic’ (Bauman) desire for supposedly simple answers, strong leaders, and a “masculinist state” (Sauer).

Dr. Julia Roth is currently teaching American Studies at Bielefeld University, where she was also director of the Center for Interamerican Studies (CIAS) and PI at the DFG Graduate School “Experiencing Gender”. Previously, she was Professor of American Studies with a focus on Gender Studies and Inter-American Studies in Bielefeld and postdoctoral fellow in the research project "The Americas as Space of Entanglements" in Bielefeld and in the interdisciplinary network "desiguALdades.net - Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America" at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on postcolonial, decolonial and gender approaches, intersectionality and global inequalities, anti-racist feminist knowledge from the Caribbean and the Americas, Hip Hop and social transformation, gender and genre, law and literature and legal imaginaries, gender and citizenship, and right-wing populism and gender.