We are thrilled to announce that Rogers Brubaker, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Distinguished Guest of the IWM, will deliver this year's Lectures in Human Sciences entitled Gender Identity: The Career of a Category. He will explore gender identity from its obscure mid-20th-century beginnings to its current status as a concept enshrined in laws, bureaucratic regulations, court decisions, and organizational policies and routines. Today, gender identity is being challenged on multiple fronts. Why did the far-reaching institutionalization of the category meet with so little opposition until a decade ago? What changed thereafter, drawing gender identity into the vortex of culture war debates? And how might we discuss gender identity while avoiding the common pitfalls of current debates? These are the questions Rogers Brubaker will address in a three-part lecture series.
I. Rethinking Gender Identity
Brubaker’s first lecture analyzes the performative, productive, interactive, and regulative workings of the category. It treats gender identity not as a category of analysis but as an actionable category of practice, a category that people and organizations can use to do a widening range of things. Brubaker shows how the category brings into focus, and in a certain sense brings into being, new kinds of people.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar will moderate the first evening on Tuesday, 21 October 2025, 18:30 CEST.
II. A Quiet Revolution
The second lecture starts with the roots of the concept of gender identity in 19th-century European sexological speculations about cases in which “psychological sex” differed from the sex of the body. But the term “gender identity” itself—and the language of “gender” more generally—was coined only in the mid-20th century. It first gained an institutional foothold in the highly specialized and medicalized context of psychiatric assessment of intersexuality and transsexualism, and it was initially understood as relevant only in rare cases. Brubaker’s second lecture analyzes the category’s subsequent remarkable trajectory, tracing its institutionalization in medicine, law, bureaucracy, data-gathering, and education.
Ana Mijic from the University of Vienna's Department of Sociology will moderate the second evening on Thursday, 23 October 2025, 18:30 CEST.
III. A Decade of Contestation
Since the middle of the last decade, gender identity has emerged as a major focus of heated public debate. Many commentators, with good reason, have characterized the controversies over bathroom access, eligibility for women’s sports, pronoun policies, school curricula, self-identification, and gender medicine for youth as a moral panic. But why did the controversies emerge when they did after an extended period of noncontroversial institutional embedding? What changed? Brubaker’s third and final lecture addresses these questions.
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will moderate the third evening on Tuesday, 28 October 2025, 18:30 CET.
Rogers Brubaker is a professor of sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. Brubaker is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Grounds for Difference (Harvard University Press, 2015), Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton University Press, 2016), and Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (Polity, 2022).
The IWM Lectures in Human Sciences were launched in 2000 on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Hans Georg Gadamer, a supporter of the Institute since its inception. Previous speakers include distinguished scholars such as Paul Ricoeur, Zygmunt Bauman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Seyla Benhabib. Selected lectures have been published in English (Harvard University Press, Cambridge), German (Passagen Verlag, Wien; Mandelbaum Verlag, Wien; Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin), and Polish (Kurhaus Publishers, Warsaw).
An IWM lecture series in cooperation with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Sociology, and the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.
Funded by the City of Vienna – Department of Cultural Affairs
Photo: © Maurice Weiss
