The Trouble with Gender

2026-07-22

Fifty years after the term ‘gender’ entered the vocabulary of social scientists, intense contestation about its meaning has broken out, spilling out of the academy into noisy, heated and wounding spats on social media. As the ‘gender wars’ rage, splintering the consensus that once held together feminist engagement in international policy arenas and international development on 'gender equality', TROUBGEN asks: what’s happened, why now and what can be done? TROUBGEN will draw on the PI’s extensive international networks formed over thirty years of scholarship and engagement and on an international team of advisors and collaborators to establish node points from which to begin a snowballing enquiry into the trouble with gender. It will explore the genealogies of different understandings, situating key thinkers, actors and networks of influence of the concept of 'gender' in international development - including Judith Butler, whose 1990 book Gender Trouble (from which this project takes its title) had such a catalytic effect. It will map the fault-lines of current disputes, examining their genesis, trajectories and encroachments in international development. It will analyse online/offline debates, untangling threads of meaning. It will create Dialogue on Gender spaces to convene and mediate deliberations that enquire into the differences that have now become so toxic and explosive, including devising a poly-vocal Verbatim theatre piece that uses the liminal space of the theatre to bring different perspectives into dialogue, and a Landscapes of Gender exhibition using the creative arts to visualise different strands, threads and meanings. It will evaluate the use of these dialogic and creative methodologies for bridge-work that might make visible and amplify common ground and build greater empathy and understanding amongst those for whom this has become a source of irresolvable ontological difference, threat and injury.

United Kingdom (UK)

2025-10-01