Overview

Lives that can only be grasped through detours—fragments of life that stretch across Europe—traces that lead to nowhere. The contributions of many women who wrote around 1800 are now, for the most part, difficult to reconstruct. Anthologies, textbooks, and historical accounts even suggest that these women never existed.

How does the far-right make use of the language of gender equality to forward their own politics, and how can we resist and respond to these formulations? How does gendered state power operate, historically and today, to regulate and target gender and sexual nonconformity, and what forms of resistance emerge in response? And, what can feminist histories, perspectives, and practices across different contexts tell us about confronting authoritarianism?
Moving between Argentina, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, this panel brings together three feminist voices working across research, journalism, and activism to consider the entanglement of gender politics in contemporary fascist developments and the forms of resistance emerging in response.
Drawing different contexts and research perspectives into conversation, we collectively reflect on what it means to conduct feminist research in these times.The event is organized by the Chair in Sociology of Culture and Migration, held by Prof. Dr. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Cornelia Goethe Center for Gender Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt.
The event is part of the 2nd campaign week of the initiative "Science Against Fascism", taking place from 16 to 20 November 2026. You can learn more about the campaign week and the event that are part of it on their website.

On November 26, 2026, the collaborative event “Frauen. Erinnern. Geschichte. Literatur im Spiegel der Erinnerungskultur.” will take place at the Dondorf printing house.

In an age of polycrisis, the invocation to embody “hope,” in spite of it all, might seem like a ridiculous proposal. Imperatives to be “hopeful” about the future often signal or produce complicity with the status quo and its structuring violence, speaking as though social progress is an inevitable and natural part of history. For those of us whose futures have never been guaranteed, it is tempting to reject hope and embrace its seeming opposite: cynicism, hopelessness, or despair. Yet these refusals, too, have their problems; namely, they risk foreclosing forms of political dissidence and experimentation through complacency and resignation about the seemingly-inevitable. This talk analyzes both of these orientations toward and against the future, and suggests that each falls short because of a shared presupposition that hope and refusal must be mutually-exclusive and oppositional political affects.

This lecture explores moments in which negative emotions are transformed into a capacity for resistance and political action. How, and under what circumstances, can pain, anger, or despair become catalysts for change? Feminist practices—in political, activist, as well as artistic and literary contexts—often explicitly highlight their fragile genealogy. Drawing on various examples from activism and art (such as Audre Lorde, Jelena Jureša, and the Wages for Housework campaign), the lecture will explore what this genealogy reveals about the respective processes of politicization and about the capacity for political action.