Feminism and the Culture Wars
Chitra Ganesh, Eyes of Time, 2014-2015.
In 2025-2026, we will contend with the relationship between feminist theory, feminist activism, and the culture wars. Often taking the form of moral panic, culture wars are characterized by reactionary rhetoric that targets the most marginalized groups, casting them as threats to the social order. More than metaphor, culture “wars” are proxies for political hegemony, eliciting questions about state power, criminalization, disinformation, and the limits of academic freedom.
Grappling both with feminism’s real and/or perceived role in sparking moral panic, and with its moral imperative to resist and contextualize that panic, we explore what liberation, solidarity, and critical inquiry can look like during moments of intensified cultural conflict. Thinking across disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, we consider the culture wars in a transnational context, examining attacks on gender, sexuality, race, and more, as well as liberatory modes of resistance like decolonization, demilitarization, abolition, and transformative justice.
Our seminar will engage scholarship, art, and media surrounding the attack on trans life and anti-LGBTQ legislation; reproductive justice and abortion bans; imperialism, colonial expansion, and genocide; borders, deportations, and the refugee and migrant crises; the ongoing wars on drugs and terror; #MeToo and cancel culture; deviant sexualities, purity culture, and sex work; scientific racism; anti-intellectualism; and the state of higher education.
In addition to examining the particularities of various individual culture wars, we search for the synergies and parallels that exist across generations and transnational contexts, studying how yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s moral battlegrounds have much less to do with morality than with the struggle for power.
Ultimately, we gather not only to understand feminism’s historical and contemporary entanglements with moral panic, but to enact forms of feminist praxis and feminist criticism attuned towards a refusal of carcerality, authoritarianism, and white supremacy.