Lobna Darwish, Contributor
Lobna Darwish is a feminist and a gender and human rights officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a leading human rights nongovernmental organization not only in Egypt, but also in the Global South. She works on gender and sexuality, with a focus on criminalization.
Kate Korycki, Contributor
Kate Korycki is an assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and women's studies at the Western University Canada. She is a founding member of Memory Studies Association—Canada Section and a scholar of collective memory, critical whiteness and nation-making.
Naira Antoun, Fellow
Naira Antoun is a fellow at Century International and director of the Transnational Trends in Citizenship initiative. She is also a contributing editor at Mada Masr, where she has worked since its establishment in 2013.
Order from Ashes Podcast: Who’s Afraid of Gender?
From Poland to the studios of Fox News, reactionaries have recast progressive ideas about gender as a militant “gender ideology” that threatens society and its values. These politicians and pundits stoke this and other “moral panics”—mass frenzies of fear about practices, ideas, or identities that supposedly threaten a country’s innocence or moral character.
Moral panics are an increasingly prominent feature of the political landscape around the world, and they increasingly focus on gender. This episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—draws on examples from Egypt, Poland, and elsewhere to show how leaders, media, and other actors cultivate, promote, and even invent these moral panics. These actors exploit moral panics to rapidly construct social coalitions that might not otherwise coalesce. And in case after case, moral panics are shown to be about power—more policing of the marginalized; stifling social and economic change that would cost the elite; fighting democratic reforms; and redirecting grievances toward scapegoats.
This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Participants include:
Tags: gender, moral panic