The Public Eye, Winter/Spring 2025

The theme of this double issue—Gender & Authoritarianism—is a growing program area at PRA, and our first article introduces a critical framework for analyzing the centrality of gender to authoritarian politics. As senior research analyst Annie Wilkinson writes, when “The idea that gender is not a fixed or natural order threatens to upend the logical underpinnings of authoritarian power,” authoritarians deploy the normative family ideal and patriarchal discipline to assert and justify their rule.

In our first feature, Mary Reynolds and Carol Mason examine how the Heritage Foundation wields “parents’ rights” and anti-gender campaigns to advance their decades-long project to dismantle public education. Elsewhere, PRA research analyst Chancie Calliham analyzes how a far-right strategy backed by dark money is reshaping Texas through court capture.

Our next two features focus on reproductive politics. Journalist Gaby Del Valle investigates the growing movement of right-wing pronatalism. While divided into “trad” and “tech” wings, as Del Valle writes, the movement is (for now) united by an ideological commitment to birthing more babies that reproduces hierarchy and inequality. The flipside of encouraging rich White people to have more children is reproductive injustice and the criminalization of people of color and the poor and working classes under increasingly authoritarian conditions, the subject of our roundtable with movement leaders and advocates.

As federal agencies carry out Trump’s executive orders seeking to erase transgender and nonbinary people from public life, several of this issue’s articles dissect the Right’s anti-trans politics. Hannah Silver examines the Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition of right-wing women and anti-trans feminists mobilizing to exclude trans people from sports. Sophie Lewis, author of the new book Enemy Feminisms, makes the case for reckoning with the 200-year history of right-wing and fascist feminisms. And scholars Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl outline how transnational moral conservative networks have built broad opposition to LGBTQ rights.

As the Right weaponizes notions of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” gone amok in its attacks on racial, gender, and reproductive justice, how can we build a broader human rights movement? In our Q&A, Chancie Calliham speaks with Loretta Ross about her new book, Calling In.

Our cover features a collage by genderqueer South African feminist artist Boniswa Khumalo, whose work is part of Beyond Molotovs: A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies. The Art of Activism highlights the handbook’s mix of thoughtful and creative strategies for defeating authoritarianism.