Gendered Authoritarianisms: Exploring potential solidarities in the battle for gender studies

By Dr. Elizabeth Maber

Contestations over the understandings, and even the use, of the term ‘gender’ have become a familiar trigger for mobilising anti-liberal popular discourse. Gender has always been political and gender norms strongly aligned to the expectations of the state from its gendered citizenry, with authoritarian states strongly reinforcing the hierarchisation associated with heteronormative gender binaries, expected gender roles and commitments to the family and child-rearing (Segato 2018; Peto & Grzebalska 2016). Authoritarianism and populism thrive in simplistic binaries and reductive classifications as emotive and easily mobilised discourses reinforcing group identity (citizen/other, insider/outsider, security/threat etc). Education offers a key platform through which the transmission of gendered learning can be directed by state authorities, and another key emotional battleground for the deployment of nationalistic narratives.

However, as Eszter Kováts has recently highlighted, the process of dichotomisation can also be seen reproduced in left-leaning academic discourses which risk similar homogenisation and simplification (Kováts 2022). Consequently, discourses around gender create an appealing theatre for the enactment of constructed tropes, bringing together familiar narratives of ‘tradition’ and institutionalised religion with reductive performances of ‘progressive elites’, with players variously positioned as hero, anti-hero or menacing villain.

The construction of gender in society, then, is reinforced through political and public discourse as well as through implicit and explicit teaching and learning in education institutions. With the rise in authoritarian and anti-liberal politics in many parts of the world, issues in education such as challenges to sex and relationships education, choice of curriculum texts, the use of communal spaces such as toilets and changing rooms, and inclusive teaching around gender diversity have become flash-points for ideological conflicts. However, as we know well, education is also a space of transformation and never a singular site of uniform transmission. Teachers, students, school or institutional leadership, changing resources, everyday dialogues, all interact to form unpredictable learning spaces which can undermine and subvert received narratives, both knowingly and unintentionally. For our project in exploring the role of higher education in conflict and crisis, our interest lies in the interaction between these different elements and the possibilities for new understandings to emerge through these interactions.

Discourses of threat are effective precisely because they are powerfully emotive in weaponizing fear. However, a distinction should be made between this affective impact which ultimately works to consolidate a feeling of belonging to the approved norm, and the emotional and physical toll taken by contesting narratives and policies that seek your eradication. Non-binary, non-conforming and queer bodies have borne the assaults of policy-making, political and public discourse which frequently denies their legitimacy and rights to exist. We have seen queer bodies highly visible in protests and counter-movements: on the frontline of resistance in the face of assaults by security forces, such as the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey in 2013 (Uǧur 2019; Gambetti 2016) and the first wave of anti-coup protests in Myanmar in 2021 (Maber & Nwe 2021). What one LGBTQ protestor in Gezi park described as “‘all that colour and flurry’” (quoted by Gambetti 2016) has drawn the attention of media, campaigners and other protestors sharing images online to global audiences portraying the vitality, diversity and inclusivity of resistance movements.

Gender diversity then is positioned as emblematic of the opposition to authoritarian regimes. Yet questions emerge as to how we are to understand the representation of queer bodies as frontline in the assault (direct and indirect) on democracy: as a reflection of the range of popular support for liberal democratic movements? Of the strength of LGBTQ community organising? Or as reproducing the consumption and disposability of queer bodies as targets of attack from the state, facing the ‘pedagogy of cruelty’ (Segato 2018) of the security forces? Or, again, as a reflection of the emergence of new, if momentary, solidarities as Gambetti (2016) has illustrated in the case of the Gezi park protests, whereby disparate social groups share a stage of resistance, which might offer glimpses of the possibilities of social change? Perhaps in reality, elements of all of these and more.

Likewise, questions emerge as to the inclusivity and representation of anti-authoritarian or progressive movements and scholarship. Such movements have been participated in, commented on, theorised and lectured about by feminist academics (myself included), which leads to further questions about the relationship between academia and activism, and the role of academics in resisting authoritarianism or populism even while the university is positioned as an instrument of its reach. What role then can we understand for higher education within authoritarian or populist movements?

The liminality of gender diverse activism in the face of oppressive state responses is echoed in the precarious position experienced by academics in resisting instrumentalization. Speaking at the Faculty of Education recently about the experiences of Turkish academics, Seçkin Sertdemir Özdemir reminded us that the targeting of academics as threatening to the state is not new, but rather there has been a long history of surveillance, reporting, sacking, imprisonment, exile and disappearance of academics who resist the reproduction of state ideology, with this reach extending to both public and private institutions. Paradoxically, as universities have become increasingly distanced from their public service under neoliberal marketisation the expectation for academics, positioned as “worker-citizens” rather than civil servants, to reproduce state ideology has deepened (Özdemir 2022).

Our work in Hungary provides a relevant compliment to the experiences of academics in Turkey, especially in the targeting of gender studies as oppositional to state narratives. Although not alone in current conservative political responses to notions of gender, the context of Hungarian higher education provides a distinctive example of the speed through which public discourses can be redirected and the transformation of public and private education spaces. Likewise, it also exposes fault-lines in academic discourse, responses to public debate, and ideological positionings.

Since the election of the Fidesz-KDNP alliance in 2010, Viktor Orbán has overseen the consolidation of an anti-liberal gender regime which has actively promoted gender inequality through entrenched heteronormativity, denying gender diversity, sentimentalising unpaid caring expectations and unequal labour market opportunities (Fodor 2022). The new Hungarian Constitution of 2012, for example, eroded gender rights including banning same-sex marriage, further restricting abortion and removing sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited grounds for discrimination (Vida 2019). Accompanying the dismantling of once-progressive legislation protecting LGBTQ+ identities (Kuhar et al 2017), education spaces and media discourses have been particularly targeted as mechanisms of knowledge sharing. The National Core Curriculum was changed to reduce inclusion of gender identity and sexuality and to instead promote binary gender roles and heteronormative family life (Vida 2019); while more recently further restrictions within education and media have included prohibiting material in schools, on television and in films that were deemed to ‘display or promote’ gender and sexual diversity beyond heterosexuality.

Particularly attracting attention within higher education debates, in 2018 the Fidesz government rapidly forced the closure of gender studies programmes at both the public Hungarian Eotvos Lorand University and the private, international Central European University (the only two available Masters degree programmes in the field) (Pető 2018). These courses were directed to be replaced by an “Economics of Family Policy and Public Poclicies for Human Development” programme (Vida 2019), further underlining the substitution of gender and sexual diversity with an unwavering focus on the heterosexual nuclear family. This practice of substitution and replacement with state-aligned agendas has been well tested. Since 2015 a pattern has been observed in the gradual replacement of gender-focused civil society organisations with pro-government NGOs to which state funding is then directed creating a ‘parallel civil society’ which effectively cuts off funding to the original more progressive rights-based organisations (Pető & Grzebalska 2016). Avenues for contestation and resistance are therefore increasingly eroded and marginalised from public debate.

In relation to the work of this project, these observations give rise to a number of further questions: To what extent does the academic field of gender studies continue to be, or is desired to be, a transgressive site for (re)conceptualising gender?

This also raises the question of course as to what extent the university has ever really been a generative space for new learning and collaborations around gender and sexuality, identities and expressions. Certainly individual academics have made enormous contributions to public understandings of gender, and become the targets of protest and attack as a result (Ergas 2022). But gender studies have frequently been in a precarious position within universities, often accommodated within other departments or faculties without strong financial or institutional recognition from the wider university (Grzebalska et al. 2017). Conversely, however, the targeting of gender studies departments has drawn attention to their work, providing an opportunity to galvanise anti-authoritarian work, but potentially at the risk of the diversity of theorising and stand-points that accompanies a divergent field of experience and positions.

If the university is not/no longer a site of comprehensive gender study, analysis and advocacy, what alternative spaces persist and/or emerge to counter ‘gender ideology’?

Given the increasing restrictions faced by civil society organisations and popular support for countering ‘gender ideology’, opportunities for resistance are constrained. Nonetheless, activist spaces and solidarities, including those operating across borders, do continue to persist, to shift focus and to build alliances, as we have witnessed across varied contexts (Maber & Han 2018; Aksoy 2018; Zaremberg et al. 2021). Likewise, universities remain formational sites for the expression of identities and the forging of solidarities, despite increasing constraint, and can continue to be sites of resistance to authoritarianism and spaces where collaboration and alliances emerge, not least amongst the student population. This leads us to our final guiding question: What solidarities emerge through resistance to anti-gender discourses and what role might there be for academia in building alliances?

Anti-liberal authoritarian platforms have garnered popular success by uniting several conservative, although not always naturally compatible, positions, including religious conservativism, far-right nationalism, and a rejection of perceived political and academic ‘elites’. The attacks on ‘gender ideology’ serve as a narrative that has wide appeal across these disparate groups, providing a unifying agenda which Grzebalska, Kováts & Pető have termed a ‘symbolic glue’ for anti-liberal, populist movements (2017). The question for us becomes what potential new solidarities might emerge in contesting this anti-gender standpoint and what new role we might see emerge for the university within this. In particular, what risks in homogenising narratives might be emerging, and how can scholarship retain diverse representation in its engagement and mobilisation in countering anti-liberalism?

References:

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Fodor, E. (2022). The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85312-9

Gambetti, Z. (2016) Risking Oneself and One’s Identity: Agonism Revisited. In Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., & Sabsay, L. (Eds.). Vulnerability in Resistance (28-51). Duke University Press.

Grzebalska, W., Kováts, E., & Pető, A. (2017, January 13). Gender as symbolic glue: How ‘gender’ became an umbrella term for the rejection of the (neo)liberal order. Political Critique. http://politicalcritique.org/long-read/2017/gender-as-symbolic-glue-how-gender-became-an-umbrella-term-for-the-rejection-of-the-neoliberal-order/

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