Donna M. Hughes

Donna M. Hughes, Ph.D., a professor holding the Eleanor M. and Oscar M. Carlson Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island who researches the trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, discusses the fallout to her article on 4W, “Fantasy Worlds on the Political Right and Left: QAnon and Trans-Sex Beliefs.” As a result of having published her piece, Hughes was mobbed through defamatory comments and other misrepresentations of her person made by both her colleagues and activists, some of whom have pressured her to resign from the university. Framing these attacks as emanating from a totalitarian body of neoliberal identitarians, Hughes outlines how the underlying ideology to a movement that takes aim primarily at women detailing the attacks over her research on sexual violence by colleagues who frame trafficking as “sex work.”