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Paper short abstract:

This contribution is based on an ethnographic study on the transphobic activism of a women’s collective. It shows how trans-exclusionary politics is driven both by the struggle for certainty about the meaning of womanhood and by affective responses to times of uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst the challenging of fixed ideas of gender is supported and facilitated by most feminist movements, the gender-critical movement, a self-proclaimed strand of radical feminism, advocates for the necessity to understand gender as biological, binary and determined at birth.

In this contribution, I will show how the gender-critical movement and its trans-exclusionary activism is both mobilising and mobilised through the affective constitution of gender certainties in times of uncertainty. Based on ethnographic research in a trans-exclusionary women’s collective in Manchester, UK, I will discuss how affective experiences underlie the conceptualisation of womanhood as existing only for cisgender women’s bodies. I will show how this definition of womanhood is created by a pursuit of certainty in light of changing understandings of gender, and how it creates affective boundaries around both the female subject and the feminist subject. Shared affective experiences of vulnerability, fear and anger, further feelings of belonging amongst members of the collective whilst propelling their trans-exclusionary activism and fostering the formation of political alliances with transphobic groups of the far right.

Ultimately, I will argue that the current surge of trans-exclusionary politics is driven by the struggle for certainty about the definition and meaning of womanhood, and that it is the affective response to times of uncertainty that make exclusionary politics so pervasive.