Join us for The New School’s Gender & Sexualities Studies Institute Annual Convening on April 23-25, 2026. This year, we bring together scholars, artists, writers, activists, and students to engage the theme of feminism and fascism.

VIEW SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM HERE →

At a moment of intensifying authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally, feminist theory is uniquely positioned to diagnose what Robyn Marasco has termed “the fascist in the family”: the continuities between violence in the intimate sphere and violence in political life. Feminist analyses have long traced how patriarchal authority, gender binarism, and heteronormativity are naturalized as forms of order: within the family, the nation, and the state. Yet the roots of fascism in everyday life, intimacy, and care often remain under-theorized. We invite you to ask: How might feminist theory reframe fascism? What does it mean to confront authoritarianism not only as a political regime, but as an affective, familial, and libidinal structure? And how must feminist organizing transform in response?

Keynote 1: Dagmar Herzog, Thursday, April 23, 6pm – In person only

Moderator: Natasha Lennard

The New Fascist Body

What new insights into fascisms’ libidinal appeal do we gain when we think sexual politics and disability politics together, and how are eugenic fantasies and deadly malice toward imperfection connected with the promise of transgressive pleasure? Herzog’s lecture considers the whiplashing ricochets between the pasts of the 1890s and 1930s and our postmodern present of the 2020s, with particular attention to the “sexy racism” and obsessive antidisability hostility animating the rise of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books 2025), the prizewinning The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton 2024), as well as Cold War Freud (Cambridge 2017), Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge 2011) and Sex after Fascism (Princeton 2005). She teaches courses on the histories of Nazism and the Holocaust, sexuality and gender, disability rights activism and care politics.

Keynote 2: Judith Butler, Friday, April 24, 6pm – Live streamed

Moderator: Robyn Marasco

NOTE: This lecture will be live streamed to Wollman Hall, and also available for viewing to audience members off campus. To register for this lecture only please follow this link. Registered attendees will receive the live stream link one week prior to the event.

Contemporary Fascist Passions

Fascist passions change historically. Yet some common features permit for them to be called fascist. The specific forms of sadistic exhilaration and revenge in operation now are passions undergone at psychic levels both involuntary and voluntary. They are also passionate reactions against social and legal movements and legal accomplishments that seek a restoration to forms of social hierarchy and exploitation (white supremacists, heteronormative, unrestrained capitalism). Considered as forms of furious nostalgia, these phantasmatic scenarios structure practice and policy ratifying limitless acquisition, imperial expansionism, and unconstrained revenge against feminist left social movements. The transnational reproduction of unbridled masculinism requires a transnational strategy and solidarity. For that purpose, an analysis that links forms of rights-stripping as a strategy of an authoritarianism fueled by fascist passions. To counter this, anti-fascist passions are necessary not only to arrest fascism but to build an anti-fascist understanding of shared life.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at The New School and  Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they also served as the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are the author of many books, including: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); Excitable Speech (1997); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012); What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022); and Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024). Their books have been translated into more than 27 languages. They received their PhD in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the Academic Council of Jewish Voices for Peace. They have been the recipient of numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships including  the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13), the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy; fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. In 2014, they were awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and subsequently reappointed as commandant. In 2025 they received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from The American Council of Learned Societies.