“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”. Interview with Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism – 15 June 2026

From Public Books

Durba Mitra, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026), 352 pp.

Durba Mitra is a feminist historian and theorist whose work explores how gender and sexuality has shaped the intimate relationship between modern disciplinary knowledge and emancipatory politics. Her new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026), opens by reflecting on the powerful yearnings of global women who worked to build a different world through research on women and gender. Mitra argues that Third World feminism reinvented Third Worldism as a project of antiauthoritarianism. The Future That Was explores key genres that have defined the trajectory of feminist internationalism in the twentieth century, from the rise of women’s conferences and policy reports on women’s status to the expansion of transnational protests for women’s rights. As Mitra shows, feminist intellectuals refused the pessimism and disillusionment that resulted the fracturing of movements for civil rights and decolonization in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, they defiantly revitalized a collective liberatory politics centered in the ideas and visions of women.

The book engages key debates that shape the critical yet endangered work of gender and sexuality studies today, including a commitment to imagining a “feminism against cisness” based in the ideas of feminist literary scholar, feminist materialist, and trans studies theorist Emma Heaney. Mitra demonstrates how global research on women had a vexed dependence on NGO funding, foreign aid, private foundations, and international governance that enshrined the quantification of sexual difference in the foundations of international rights. The book reflects shared commitments by Mitra and Heaney to a feminist future freed from the dangerous policing and violent enforcement of binary gender. The Future That Was teaches us about the aspirations of minoritized knowledge like women’s and gender studies following the United Nations International Women’s Year in 1975, and how fragile these fields are now, fifty years later, with the institutionalization of Project 2025, the annihilation of US aid, and attacks on gender and “DEI” across colleges and universities. Seemingly resilient infrastructures for global research on women, gender, and sexual rights have been and continue to be destroyed by authoritarian states, reactionary think tanks, and universities scared of funding threats.

Emma Heaney spoke with Durba Mitra on Zoom in February 2026 about this vital history of Third World feminism and the place of feminist visions for the future in our world now.

[READ THE INTERVIEW]

“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”. Interview with Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism – 15 June 2026

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