Sawyer Seminar to explore role of gender, sex, reproduction in ethnonationalism

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Thanks to a $225,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a group of Penn State scholars led by Scott Burnett, assistant professor of African studies and of women’s, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS), will hold a prestigious Sawyer Seminar examining the roles gender, sex and reproduction have played in global fascist and ethnonationalist movements from the early 20th century through today. 

The two-year comparative study, “Birthing the Nation: Gender, Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries,” will feature a series of seminars, lectures, art installations and film screenings presented by experts from a range of disciplines. Ethnonationalist is a person who believes in a form of nationalism in which ethnicity defines a nation's character, while imaginaries refer to the social visions of dominant groups, along with the norms and ideas they promote, as intrinsic to an ideal society. 

The seminar will kick off on Jan. 23 with a guest lecture by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor in American University’s School of Public Affairs and School of Education and director of its Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL). She’s the author of the acclaimed book, "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right,” published by Princeton University Press in 2022, and is currently at work on a book focused on gendered imaginaries right-wing populists. 

The lecture, titled "A Woman’s Place: Gender and Misogyny on the Extreme Right," will take place from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Over four semesters, the seminar’s participants will present an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural analysis of ideologies that advance exclusion and hatred along racial, gender and sexual lines, specifically: contemporary U.S. masculinism; 20th century European fascism, antisemitism and Nazism; global “populist” ethnonationalisms of the 21st century; and the various online formations associated with the “manosphere," a term used to describe the vast number of websites devoted to promoting pro-masculinity, anti-feminist and misogynistic beliefs.

Burnett applied for the grant last spring, shortly after arriving at the University. He is the seminar’s principal organizer, with Aparna Parikh, assistant teaching professor of WGSS and Asian studies, and Nancy Tuana, DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and WGSS, serving as co-organizers.

Ten other Penn State faculty members representing a range of disciplines will make up the seminar’s working group, and two graduate assistants and a post-doctoral fellow will be funded by the grant. Meanwhile, the seminar is receiving additional funding and support from the WGSS Department, the African Studies Program, Penn State University Libraries, the Center for Global Studies, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, the Humanities Institute and the Rock Ethics Institute.

“The core group for the seminar has already started meeting online — everyone is bringing a lot of good ideas to the table,” Burnett said. “The other component is bringing prominent guest speakers to the campus — it’s quite prestigious to deliver a Sawyer lecture. For these public lectures, we’re encouraging our speakers to tailor their remarks to a broad audience so that we can promote a public understanding of the issues.”

Burnett grew up in South Africa during the latter stages of the apartheid era and the transition to democracy in the 1990s. A critical discourse analyst, he’s focused the bulk of his research on race, particularly as a white South African looking at the reproduction of racial states and racial capitalization in post-colonial, post-apartheid societies. His first book, “White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2022, examined the role whiteness has played in maintaining racial order there, arguing that protection of white entitlement to property acquired during colonialism and cultural connection to the land are closely interwoven.

About four years ago, Burnett and researcher John Richardson began collaborating on a research paper analyzing the role played by gender within Great Britain’s post-World War II fascist movement. While working on the project, Burnett conducted a literature review on gender and sexuality within broader fascism formations, reading widely on Italian fascism, German Nazism, Spanish Francoism and other extreme forms of historical ethnonationalism. Through that, he began to see patterns of thought on gender roles that mimicked what he was seeing from the contemporary far-right movements he was already researching.

“When I started reading all this stuff on historical fascism, I was surprised to see how clear the echoes were, not only across time but across contexts,” he said. “From Italy to Brazil to apartheid South Africa, to Nazism, to post-war Britain, there were so many clear parallels. A lot of scholarship has been done from a lot of different disciplinary perspectives on individual case studies, and occasional ones on historical periods, but there’s been very little work that compares these contexts and looks at how gender, sexuality, reproduction and far-right thinking have a character to them, a particular interconnected series of elements that you see repeated again and again across cultures and across time periods. I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone written a book about this?’

“One of things that consistently appears in these ethnonationalist imaginaries is the need to control women’s bodies, as they are constructed as the ‘wombs’ of the nation,” he continued. “It’s about controlling reproduction, discouraging women from having abortions, forcing them to give birth, but also discouraging miscegenation — essentially trying to make sure only the pure ethnic category is reproduced. It becomes the preoccupation of these imaginaries. This reproductive order further demands strict gender roles with a strong gender binary — masculine men and feminine women.”

When he came across the Mellon Foundation’s call for proposals for the Sawyer Seminar, Burnett said he realized its mission to bring together scholars from different disciplines on an issue relevant to humanistic or social science inquiry would be the perfect vehicle for his new research interest.

“I thought, ‘That’s what should be done here — we need to bring together all these different traditions, all these scholars working on specific contexts and specific time periods and sometimes specific media,’” he said. “I think there’s a powerful knowledge project we can implement through comparing these contexts, with a network of people interested in gender, sexuality, reproduction and the far right. By ‘ethnonationalist,’ I mean everything from historical Nazism through to the kinds of nationalisms that advocate for an ethnic purity. It’s not only the extreme right that believes this, but also various forms of nationalism that pervade the right wing.”

The Sawyer Seminar will run through the fall 2025 semester and conclude with an academic conference. From there, Burnett said he anticipates its participants will publish their research in a variety of high-profile journals. He plans to devote his next monograph to the subject.

“I hope this creates the foundation for a research program in this space, especially because the links between gender, sexuality and ethnonationalism are lying there for us to analyze, and doing this comparative work is going to significantly advance the possibilities of understanding why these ideologies take root again and again and again in these different contexts around the world,” Burnett said. “There’s a real demand for this kind of work. A lot of future research that people can take forward is going to come out of this.”