Ann Wilkinson

ANN K. WILKINSON, then a graduate student at University of California, Irvine, California, was awarded funding in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Securing the Family: Gender, Sexuality, and the Transnational Pro-Family Movement in Mexico,’ supervised by Dr. Kristin Peterson. Decrying ‘gender ideology,’ anti-gender backlash movements that reject social constructivist theories of gender and related right claims have emerged as a key feature of rising right-wing populisms across Europe and Latin America, including in Mexico. This project draws on one year of ethnographic research with Mexican anti-gender activists working to ‘secure the family’ to ask: how has ‘gender ideology’ come to be represent the greatest threat to the Mexican family and nation, and how does the spectacular emergence of Mexico’s profamily/anti-gender movement since 2016’in the midst of twin crises of democracy and security’relate to emergent forms of right-wing populism globally? Following three interrelated lines of inquiry into security, gender, and scale, the project ethnographically examines how anti-gender activists securitize the family to do political work; what ‘doing gender’ (as theorized by three decades of feminist scholarship) does in the world; and how right-wing movements articulate across national and transnational scales. Through ethnography’s pairing of social analysis and deep listening, this study compels understanding of the role played by ‘gender’ in cohering an emergent ‘transnational Right’ that connects daily lives on a global scale.