The Jackson School of Global Affairs will host the panel discussion, “Sex and Gender in Hard Times: Theory, Law, Policy,” featuring an interdisciplinary, international group of scholars and advocates invested in the questions of how rights attach to gender and sexuality and with regard for the fault lines and internal contestations which hover below the surface of contemporary rights advocacy.
 
Tensions over evolving rights claims around gender and sexuality—whether arising in the context of what is traditionally called women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay or queer mobilizations, children’s rights, or the rights of trans and non-binary people— are routinely exploited by political leaders, amplified, distorted, and pitted against each other by social media and even advocates themselves. These domains have taken on a symbolic register so great that it is now commonplace for questions of gender and sexuality to be rhetorically front and center in seemingly unrelated geopolitical conflicts. While these contestations are not new, they are currently deployed in the political realm with heightened intensity.

Speakers include Sonia Corrêa, activist and researcher; Serena Dankwa, lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel in Switzerland; Alice Miller, professor in the practice, Yale School Public Health; and Rachel Spronk, professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. The conversation will be moderated by Graeme Reid, Jackson School research scholar and UN Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.

The discussion is sponsored by the Jackson School, with the support of The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

This event is open to the general public.