Feminism and the Culture Wars.
The 2025-2026 Annual Theme for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University.
Often taking the form of moral panic, culture wars are characterized by reactionary rhetoric that targets the most marginalized groups, casting them as threats to the social order. More than metaphor, culture “wars” are proxies for political hegemony, eliciting questions about state power, criminalization, disinformation, and the limits of academic freedom.
Grappling both with feminism’s real and/or perceived role in sparking moral panic, and with its moral imperative to resist and contextualize that panic, we explore what liberation, solidarity, and critical inquiry can look like during moments of intensified cultural conflict. Thinking across disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, we consider the culture wars in a transnational context, examining attacks on gender, sexuality, race, and more, as well as liberatory modes of resistance like decolonization, demilitarization, abolition, and transformative justice.
Our seminar will engage scholarship, art, and media surrounding the attack on trans life and anti-LGBTQ legislation; reproductive justice and abortion bans; imperialism, colonial expansion, and genocide; borders, deportations, and the refugee and migrant crises; the ongoing wars on drugs and terror; #MeToo and cancel culture; deviant sexualities, purity culture, and sex work; scientific racism; anti-intellectualism; and the state of higher education.
In addition to examining the particularities of various individual culture wars, we search for the synergies and parallels that exist across generations and transnational contexts, studying how yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s moral battlegrounds have much less to do with morality than with the struggle for power.
Ultimately, we gather not only to understand feminism’s historical and contemporary entanglements with moral panic, but to enact forms of feminist praxis and feminist criticism attuned towards a refusal of carcerality, authoritarianism, and white supremacy.
Often taking the form of moral panic, culture wars are characterized by reactionary rhetoric that targets the most marginalized groups, casting them as threats to the social order. More than metaphor, culture “wars” are proxies for political hegemony, eliciting questions about state power, criminalization, disinformation, and the limits of academic freedom.
Grappling both with feminism’s real and/or perceived role in sparking moral panic, and with its moral imperative to resist and contextualize that panic, we explore what liberation, solidarity, and critical inquiry can look like during moments of intensified cultural conflict. Thinking across disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, we consider the culture wars in a transnational context, examining attacks on gender, sexuality, race, and more, as well as liberatory modes of resistance like decolonization, demilitarization, abolition, and transformative justice.
Our seminar will engage scholarship, art, and media surrounding the attack on trans life and anti-LGBTQ legislation; reproductive justice and abortion bans; imperialism, colonial expansion, and genocide; borders, deportations, and the refugee and migrant crises; the ongoing wars on drugs and terror; #MeToo and cancel culture; deviant sexualities, purity culture, and sex work; scientific racism; anti-intellectualism; and the state of higher education.
In addition to examining the particularities of various individual culture wars, we search for the synergies and parallels that exist across generations and transnational contexts, studying how yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s moral battlegrounds have much less to do with morality than with the struggle for power.
Ultimately, we gather not only to understand feminism’s historical and contemporary entanglements with moral panic, but to enact forms of feminist praxis and feminist criticism attuned towards a refusal of carcerality, authoritarianism, and white supremacy.
Minor Aesthetics: queer, Asian, diasporic
A Working Group funded + sponsored by The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, co-led with Yun Emily Wang (Assistant Professor of Music, Duke University).
Featuring the work of two artists-in-residence —Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Jae Quisol— the Minor Aesthetics Working Group creates a space of provocation. We begin with the premise that artistic interventions via the sonic, visual, and tactile hold potential for deeper attention to the unseen, inaudible, disavowed registers of racialized queer life. We seek to forge an intellectual hub for invited artists and scholars from the humanities and interpretive social sciences working at the nexus between aesthetic inquiry, queer studies, and the Asian diaspora. We gather in multiple venues— seminars, performances, a roundtable, an online exhibition—to experiment with how the aesthetic helps us to sense and reconfigure the dialectical tensions joining minoritarian life to historical and ontological violence. Thinking with the affordances of different methodologies, the conveners call forth an aesthetics-as-ethics, a praxis of liberation from the vantage point of art. Insofar as Minor Aesthetics highlights innovations in style and poetics, we are ultimately invested in, on the one hand, sketching the corporeal ways of registering empire’s circumscription of minoritarian life, and on the other, illuminating performance’s potential to bust open precisely that imperial dislocation while heralding in More Life.
More info here.
Featuring the work of two artists-in-residence —Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Jae Quisol— the Minor Aesthetics Working Group creates a space of provocation. We begin with the premise that artistic interventions via the sonic, visual, and tactile hold potential for deeper attention to the unseen, inaudible, disavowed registers of racialized queer life. We seek to forge an intellectual hub for invited artists and scholars from the humanities and interpretive social sciences working at the nexus between aesthetic inquiry, queer studies, and the Asian diaspora. We gather in multiple venues— seminars, performances, a roundtable, an online exhibition—to experiment with how the aesthetic helps us to sense and reconfigure the dialectical tensions joining minoritarian life to historical and ontological violence. Thinking with the affordances of different methodologies, the conveners call forth an aesthetics-as-ethics, a praxis of liberation from the vantage point of art. Insofar as Minor Aesthetics highlights innovations in style and poetics, we are ultimately invested in, on the one hand, sketching the corporeal ways of registering empire’s circumscription of minoritarian life, and on the other, illuminating performance’s potential to bust open precisely that imperial dislocation while heralding in More Life.
More info here.