Moms for Liberty and Right-Wing Anti-Futurity

• In Event: 50451 - Right-Wing Misappropriations of Feminism

Abstract

With over 32 bills authored by the organization’s state legislative committees having been signed into law across the country in 2024 alone, Moms for Liberty has recently risen to national prominence as a ‘kingmaker’ on the American right, setting the tone for much of the conservative legislative agenda in the contemporary political milieu. Of particular note is the deployment of rhetorics of regret surrounding gender-affirming care for transmasculine youth. This discursive tactic emphasizes the importance of traditional desires such as childbearing and breastfeeding that are understood as inevitably arriving in the future for all persons assigned female at birth. At the same time, trans desires are rejected as regressive returns to bygone-days of gender discrimination that allow for current projects for equality to be relegated to sites of fear and destruction. This paper argues that Moms for Liberty is engaged in a politics of anti-futurity that seeks to use gender-inclusive language to annihilate the emergence of trans desires in children. Following the work of Lee Edelman and José Estaban Muñoz, I show how the politics of anti-futurity details an effort to reject trans possibilities for the world in order to maintain a cisnormative present and stabilize right-wing projects of gender inequality. The process of maintaining this presentist regime highlights how the stabilization of the cisgender subject is bound up in the management of vectors of contamination—children and women—in order to resolve the fear and anxiety inspired by the encounter with the trans other. The cisgender self is here construed as a sovereign subject that needs to be walled off from potential contagions that could lead to disruptions. This paper concludes by proposing transgender worldmaking as an antidote to the politics of anti-futurity through acts of community resilience that imagine an otherwise world despite right-wing attempts at foreclosure.

Author

• Piper Thomson, University of Virginia