On March 5, 1933, Hitler was elected Reich Chancellor in Berlin. In light of the rise of fascism in Europe in 1938, Virginia Woolf analyzes the connection between anti-Semitism, fascism, and the bourgeois patriarchal gender order and its ideas of masculinity and femininity in her essay “Three Guineas”.
In my lecture, I will first present some of Woolf's central insights into the close connection between anti-Semitism, fascism, and bourgeois hegemonic masculinity and femininity. In a second step, I will highlight some central aspects of the current processes of fascistization, which are evident, among other things, in Trump's “War on Woke.” With this fight against woke culture, Trump justifies, among other things, the radical dismantling of social support and measures against discrimination. The text “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” in which Trump step by step rejects so-called gender ideology, is also related to the latter.
Prof. Dr. Andrea Maihofer (Emerita) studied philosophy, German language and literature, and education in Mainz, Tübingen, and Frankfurt/Main. She earned her doctorate in philosophy and her habilitation in sociology. From 2001 to 2020, she was professor of gender studies and director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel. From 2002 to 2020, she also headed the Basel Gender Graduate College. In addition, she was head of the SUK cooperation project Gender Studies Switzerland from 2004 to 2007 and president of the Swiss Society for Gender Studies (SGGF) from 2010 to 2018; from 2018 to 2020, she headed the Swissuniversities ThinkTank “Gender and Diversity.” Her research focuses on critical social and gender theory, change and persistence of gender and gender relations (especially in relation to family, masculinity*, socialization), moral, legal, and constitutional theory, as well as right-wing populism and masculinity. She is currently working on a book about Virginia Woolf: “A Political Intellectual.”
The CGC strives to make its events as accessible as possible. If you require assistance to participate in our event, please let us know your support needs by October 30, 2025, by emailing cgcentrum@soz.uni-frankfurt.de. We will then endeavor to reduce any barriers within the scope of our possibilities.
The room is accessible via elevators. There are two accessible toilets on the 1st floor (1.G40s and 1.G40h).
There is an all-gender toilet (1.G40n) with standing and sitting toilets on this floor. There is also a FLINTA* toilet (2.G40q) on the 2nd floor of the CGC.
