Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, February 19, at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Camille Robcis entitled “The War on Gender: The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Robcis is Professor of History and French at Columbia University, where she has been since 2018. She was previously appointed to Cornell University’s Department of History, where she taught for 10 years. She holds a PhD and an MA in Modern European History from Cornell and a BA from Brown in History and Modern Media & Culture.
Robcis specializes in modern European history (with a focus on 19th and 20th century France), gender and sexuality, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. In both her teaching and her research, she examines the relationship between texts and their various contexts (cultural, social, political, economic).
Robcis is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2012), winner of the 2013 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize.
Her second book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago, 2021) maps the intersections of politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in twentieth-century France. It was awarded the 2024 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
At RSF she has been working on her third book, which explores the arguments against so-called “gender ideology,” “gender theory,” or “gender agenda.” She is tracing how critics came to perceive, and fight, “gender ideology” as responsible for the push for sexual and reproductive rights, from the legalization of abortion and access to contraception, to same-sex marriage, sexual education in schools, non-discrimination bills, access to new reproductive technologies, trans rights, and more.