The International Seminar “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” is now accepting pre-registration. Places are limited and will be approved upon prior registration.

The seminar will be held from January 15 to 17, 2025, at the Pampulha campus of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte.

Based on the book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”, released in March 2024 by philosopher Judith Butler, the seminar aims to be a space for dialogue, focusing on collectively reflecting on anti-gender policies from transdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. According to Butler, the grotesque attack she was the target of in São Paulo in 2017 was what inspired her to write this new book. Seven years after this unfortunate episode, a strong symptom of the rise of the far right and its anti-gender agenda in Brazil and around the world, the seminar will explore how the elaborations of this new work converge with Brazilian debates on gender, sexuality and their many intersections.

According to the organizers of the initiative, IEAT’s resident professors Marcelo Cattoni, from the Law School at UFMG , and Marco Aurélio Prado, from the School of Philosophy and Human Sciences at UFMG, the seminar aims to examine the current state of anti-gender offensives on a transnational level and in Brazil, based on a few questions: What is the relationship between anti-gender policies and the de-democratization and neo-authoritarianism of today? What power struggles do they entail? Who are their targets and what are their effects?

Registration for the International Seminar “Who’s Afraid of Gender” can be done on the website of the LGBT Human Rights and Citizenship Center (NUH).

The event is sponsored by the Minas Gerais State Research Support Foundation (Fapemig), the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences at UFMG, and supported by the Sexuality and Politics Observatory (SPW) of the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA). The event is organized by the Center for Human Rights and LGBT Citizenship (NUH) and the Institute for Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies at UFMG.