Anti-Gender Moral Panics: From Psychosocial Accounts to the Critique of Political Economy

• In Event: Fighting Anti-Trans Attacks

Abstract

In recent years, moral panics about the decline of the traditional family have become a battleground for a wide range of social conflicts. Across the United States, conservative forces have achieved a far-reaching agenda in the name of restoring the traditional American family. This agenda, often labelled an 'anti-gender movement,' covers such varied goals as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the extension of parental oversight of public school education, and the classification of gender-affirming healthcare as ‘child abuse’. Political commentators identify a decline in marriage and the rise in LGBT+ identification as the chief cause of rising rates of substance abuse and incarceration. This is a transnational phenomenon. Ascendant authoritarian movements the world over have successfully coalesced various reactionary discourses around the defense of the so-called ‘natural’ family, from moral panics about ‘gender ideology’ and the feminization of society to white nationalist conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement.

This paper addresses these recent developments, asking why this moral panic around gender and the family has emerged in our current moment of waning US imperial power. Existing accounts of this moral panic tend to treat gender as a 'phantasm' that displaces people's 'real' fears onto something fictitious called 'gender.' Trans people and other gender deviants are, in this view, figured as scapegoats for a host of other, more serious issues like precarity or climate catastrophe. These predominantly psychosocial explanations tend to fallback to a defense of forms of gender and sexuality diversity on the basis of individual rights and privacy. This paper argues that this tendency obfuscates the historical specificity of gender and sexuality as internally related to the family and wider social relations.

Taking a more materialist approach rooted in the critique of political economy, this paper argues that contemporary moral panics about gender and the family must be understood as a terrain of struggle over social reproduction. The transition from an industrial to a service economy in many post-industrial states reshaped gender and sexual relations in profound ways. Through the imposition of more flexible forms of labor onto working populations and the commodification of numerous household tasks, this transition opened up possibilities for new, non-normative organizations of gender and sexual life. As this dominant regime of capital accumulation has come into crisis, however, accelerating the self-undemrining tendencies of capitalism and delivering low productivity and anemic growth, its dominant forms of social reproduction have taken the appearance of a crisis in the social order as a whole. This paper expands on this frame to elaborate a materialist explanation of and challenge to contemporary moral panics.

Biographical Information

Dr. Alexander Stoffel is a Lecturer in International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He was previously a Fellow in Qualitative Methodology at the London School of Economics and holds degrees from the University of Oxford (BA History and Politics, 2014-17), the London School of Economics (MSc International Relations Theory, 2017-18), and Queen Mary University of London (PhD Political Science, 2019-23). His research takes up critical questions regarding the intersections of sexuality, race, and desire within capitalist expansion. He has published in, among other journals, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, and Salvage and is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism, where he convenes the Sexuality and Political Economy Network.

His first monograph, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stanford University Press) reconsiders US-based struggles for sexual freedom since the 1960s, centering their transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures, and derives from this history new perspectives on contemporary debates about queerness, capital accumulation, and empire.

Author

• Alexander Stoffel, Queen Mary University of London