Camille Robcis, “The War on Gender: The History of a Dangerous Idea”
Cornell University Mosse Lecture
Cornell University
Physical Sciences Building
Room 401
245 Feeney Way
Ithaca, NY 14853
16 April, 2026, 16:30 EDT
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Lectures
Cornell University Romance Studies
Cornell University History
Cornell University German Studies
Cornell University Jewish Studies
Cornell University LGBTQ Studies
Cornell University Feminist, Gender, and Sexual Studies
Institute for German Cultural Studies
Lecture 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 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.
Enzo Traverso is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth century. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for twenty years at the University of Piccardy, France. He has been a visiting professor in several European and Latin American universities. His authored several books, which are translated into more than fifteen languages, including The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (1994; 2018) The Jews and Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the Memory of Auschwitz (1995); The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003); The End of Jewish Modernity (2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (2016); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945 (2016); Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021); and Singular Pasts: The ‘I’ in Historiography (2022).
