Reflections on the Gender War: East and South project
Gender Wars: East and South was an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that ran for two years to September 2024. The project was an interdisciplinary network of scholars and artists of gender and sexuality across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America with the aim of providing a more nuanced understanding of the intersections of history, religion, sexuality, and gender have contributed to a backlash against women’s and LGBTQ+ rights across the globe. We spoke to Professor Nicolette Makovicky to find out more about the project.
The project came about when Professor Makovicky’s colleague, Professor Agnieszka Kościańska, was at OSGA for a Leverhulme visiting professorship. Unfortunately, her year in Oxford happened during the Covid lockdowns, but a lot of productive work was done online as a consequence. Professor Kościańska taught a special option on gender and sexuality in Eastern Europe, prompting many discussions, including with Professor Flávia Biroli, a specialist in gender studies who visited Oxford at the time. It became clear that there were many similarities regarding anti-gender, anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ rights movements in Latin America and in Central and Eastern Europe. Many conservative religious movements in these regions share financial and organisational links that had never been explored substantively. In addition, both post-authoritarian Latin America and post-communist Central and Eastern Europe are seeing rising illiberalism. There were so many similarities and differences to discuss that the group decided to apply for a networking grant to bring together different researchers and hold a series of workshop discussions.
The network that resulted included members from the Federal University of Bahia and University of Brasilia, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Warsaw and the Central European University, as well as Oxford. They also invited the contemporary artist, Karol Radziszewski, to join the group. His work explores the buried histories of gender and LGBTQ histories in both Latin America and Central Europe and so was a perfect fit for the network.
'It was a really wonderful experience to work with someone who experiences and thinks deeply about some of the same questions we do as academics, but deals with them in a very different way through visual material and other creative means.' Professor Makovicky
Among the highlights of the project for Professor Makovicky was the fact that the network events were so easy to run. The members of the group were spread around the world but the hybrid events they held brought everyone together regularly and effectively, meaning everyone had a chance to take responsibility for one or two events. The workshops were very well attended by people from across the globe. Another high point was Karol Radziszewski’s exhibition, which was held at St Antony’s College at the end of the project and included videos, visual art and archival material. As Professor Makovicky recollects, ‘It was a really wonderful experience to work with someone who experiences and thinks deeply about some of the same questions we do as academics, but deals with them in a very different way through visual material and other creative means.’ The project members were able to see this work when they came together for their final conference at St Antony’s in September 2024, the first time they had all been in a room together.
Project members now plan to turn the research into a book of essays, written by network members and others who joined the final conference or have been working in this field for some time. This book would provide a forum to compare what is going on between the two regions and also to look at historical and cultural links that have existed for a long time, for example, links between people who are involved in pro-life movements or share religious connections. Professor Makovicky reflects that, ‘One of our key discoveries has been that these links have been there for many decades and that people have worked together and known about each other's work and activism for many decades. We're only just catching up with how this has been functioning. We're only opening our eyes to it now.’ The aim is for the collection of essays to take a wide view, looking at different themes and dynamics in both regions for a general audience.
Professor Makovicky hopes that the legacy of the network will be further collaboration, whether through research or publishing, for the members of the network who have made strong connections. She also hopes that the experience of working with Karol Radziszewski opens the door to more collaboration with artists or other non-academic colleagues in future. ‘We can start to think about how to make projects broader than the classic way of doing research and publishing it. Maybe now we can think about how we can make an impact in different ways.’
