Life After Death: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on the Global Now

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• 1. Illiberal Biopolitics? Family, Gender, Social Reproduction, and the New Radical Right

  Convened by: Katharina Hajek

  The family and policies of social reproduction are central to the emerging New Right. Across national contexts, right-wing movements have politicised motherhood, fatherhood, abortion, migration, and welfare as tools for enforcing “natural” hierarchies and authoritarian notions of society. Yet the erosion of the material foundations of the traditional family complicates this narrative. This panel examines contemporary right-wing reproductive and biopolitics—from social policy to techno-utopian eugenics—and asks how we might conceptualise these transformations: as intensified neoliberalism, selective welfare restructuring, or a “fascistisation of social reproduction.”
  
  
• 2. The Demise of Feminist Promises? Queer/Feminist Entanglements with neoliberalism and nationalism

  Convened by: Lucie Naudé

  Feminism’s entanglement with neoliberal logics has long been debated. Once co-opted into empowerment discourses compatible with market individualism, feminist and LGBTQ+ politics now coexist uneasily with nationalist, authoritarian, and anti-gender mobilisations. Some right-wing actors even claim feminism for exclusionary ends. This panel explores feminism's entanglements, complicity, and contradictions at the crossroads between the reconfiguration of neoliberalism and the consolidation of authoritarian-nationalism. 
• 3. Life After Liberalism? Feminism, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Abandonment

  Convened by: Dorit Geva

  Liberalism has long been a contested terrain for feminist and queer projects—a framework that offered partial rights while sustaining capitalist, racialised, and patriarchal orders. As neoliberalism hollowed out liberalism’s egalitarian promise, the right has further hollowed out liberalism’s core. This panel explores the gendered consequences of liberalism’s crisis: what happens to feminist and queer politics when both right and left abandon the liberal project? Can equality, freedom, and pluralism be reimagined within liberalism, or must we leave liberalism behind? 
• 4. From Caring to Careless Democracy? Approaching Care through the Lens of Democracy—and Democracy through the Lens of Care

  Convened by: Ayse Dursun

  Amid a deepening global care crisis and democratic decay, this panel investigates the conceptual and structural entanglements between care and democracy. What forms of “carelessness” mark contemporary democracies, and how might a “caring democracy” look? Through feminist political economy, intersectional, and democratic theory perspectives, we examine how care—its organisation, denial, and potential—reveals the moral and political fault lines of the present.
• 5. Feminist Futurities and Futures of Feminisms

  Convened by: Firoozeh Farvardin

  When the far right offers seductive visions of order and belonging, what futures can feminists imagine instead? This panel reclaims feminist and queer futurity against both neoliberal exhaustion and fascist dreams. Building on movements from Ni Una Menos to Kurdish women’s resistance, from anticolonial and communitarian imaginaries to trans-Marxist feminisms, we ask: what is the potencia of feminisms today? How can feminist politics articulate and prefigure new forms of life amid planetary crises?