This talk explores how the term “gender” first became controversial.  Today, many on the Right blame what they call “gender ideology” for a broad range of sexual and reproductive rights, from access to abortion and contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual education in schools, non-discrimination bills, new reproductive technologies, trans rights, and much more.  I trace the origins of this “anti-genderism” to various UN conferences during in the 1990s and examine how Vatican delegates first came up with this idea of a “gender ideology” that would destroy the family and the social order more broadly. 
 
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University and the current chair of the History Department.  She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history.  She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013), Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago, 2021), and The War on Gender: The History of a Dangerous Idea (forthcoming with Princeton UP).  She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, the Princeton Law and Public Affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
 
This Cornell Annual Mosse Lecture is cosponsored by the departments of Romance Studies, History, and German Studies, by the Programs of Jewish Studies, LGBTQ Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexual Studies, and by the Institute for German Cultural Studies in collaboration with the Mosse Foundation. The lecture will be followed by a reception.