Webinar “Gender, Self-Determination and Authoritarianism: Conversations Across the RUTA Regions and Latin America”

Please join our next webinar “Gender, Self-Determination and Authoritarianism: Conversations Across the RUTA Regions and Latin America”.

As authoritarian politics tighten their grip across continents, women’s bodies and queer lives have become central battlegrounds — from anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Central Asia to reproductive rights rollbacks in Latin America to the entrenchment of rigid gender politics across Eastern Europe. This webinar brings together scholars and activists from the “RUTA regions” — this time, from Europe’s East, the Baltic and Central Asia — and Latin America, to ask what these struggles share, where they diverge, and what solidarity across them might look like.

The second installment in RUTA’s ongoing dialogue series on challenges and solidarities between these two regions, this conversation turns to a question both urgent and intimate: how authoritarianism is built, contested, and resisted through the politics of gender and the body.

Joining the conversation:

Tereza Hendl (moderator) — philosopher working on issues of global health justice, European East-West health inequalities — also considering the impacts of German and Russian-Soviet imperialism on directly affected populations — and persistent hierarchies of knowledge, founding member of the Central and Eastern European Feminist Research Network and the RUTA Association.

Zhanar Sekerbayeva — LGBTQ rights activist, poet, and journalist from Kazakhstan; founder of Feminita, an organization for queer women, whose work has brought her both international recognition and state harassment and legal persecution.

Gabriela Arguedas — bioethicist and professor at the University of Costa Rica; activist and educator focused on women’s health, reproductive rights, and obstetric violence.

Gražina Bielousova — sociologist of race, religion, and gender; assistant professor at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania; RUTA board member and public commentator.

Together, they will explore how authoritarian regimes instrumentalize gender and bodily autonomy as sites of control — and how feminist and queer movements across vastly different political contexts are building strategies of resistance and solidarity.

This webinar is happening with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. It’s content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Renaissance Foundation.