Cornell University Lecture
Camille Robcis, “The War on Gender: The History of a Dangerous Idea”
Physical Sciences Building 401 of Cornell University
16 April, 2026 4:30 pm EDT
Sponsored by:
Cornell University Romance Studies, History, and German Studies; Jewish Studies; LGBTQ Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexual Studies
Institute for German Cultural Studies
The Mosse Foundation
The Mosse Lectures
Description: 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: 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.
