Friday, February 27, 2026 at 4:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls present
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestreamvia the Hallwalls website.
Gender politics are central to understanding the rise of illiberal and authoritarian political movements and the current crisis of liberal democracy. To gain support, far-right parties and leaders specifically target feminist advances in bodily autonomy, freedom from violence, and equal political participation for women and sexual minorities. Drawing on over 100 interviews conducted over 20 years of field research, I argue that the rise of powerful feminist movements and their political victories shifted the political strategies far right leaders and parties. By analyzing Chile’s recent politics, I show how right-wing populists seek to capitalize on gender backlash politics to drive illiberal political projects and threaten democratic governance.
Gwynn Thomas studies the ways women political leaders and activists contest their political exclusion and work to promote inclusive and equal societies in Latin America. She is currently researching the role of feminist movements in strengthening democratic societies in the face of rise of far-right populist parties and political leaders. She is the author of Contesting Legitimacy in Chile: Familial Ideals, Citizenship, and Political Struggle, 1970-1990. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). Her work has also appeared in the Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Journal of Feminist Politics, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Politics & Gender, as well as in a number of edited volumes, most recently, in Seeking Rights from the Left (Duke, 2019) and Women, Representation, and Politics in Latin America. (Oxford University Press, 2017).