Gender Studies Scholars Claim Their Field is Under Attack
“People saying it’s ideological, it’s not scientific.”
Now that Hungary has given gender studies the boot, others are starting to question the field’s legitimacy.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Global Attack on Gender Studies
The decision by the Hungarian government earlier this fall to withdraw accreditation from gender studies programs — a full-frontal governmental assault on an academic discipline — sent shock waves through the field.
Gender studies “has no business [being taught] in universities,” because it is “an ideology not a science,” a deputy to Hungary’s prime minister, Zsolt Semjen, told the international news agency Agence France-Presse.
Semjen also said labor market demand for the field was “close to zero.”
“No one wants to employ a gender-ologist,” Semjen said.
Yet even if the scale of the assault on gender studies in Hungary was shocking, the rhetoric was not. Gender studies scholars say what happened in Hungary is the most extreme manifestation of what seem to be growing attacks on the discipline as right-wing populist parties gain power or influence in many countries around the globe.
The attacks take many different forms, including blacklists and harassment of individual scholars, the proposal of legislative measures to police classroom speech, and attempts to censor academic events. In Brazil the pioneering gender studies scholar Judith Butler was burned in effigy and accosted by protestors at the airport last year after far-right Christian groups objected to her visit to the country for a conference she’d helped to organize.
As Butler told Inside Higher Ed in an interview at the time, her sense was that the protesters “who engaged this frenzy of effigy burning, stalking and harassment want to defend ‘Brazil’ as a place where LGBTQ people are not welcome, where the family remains heterosexual (so no gay marriage), where abortion is illegal and reproductive freedom does not exist. They want boys to be boys, and girls to be girls, and for there to be no complexity in questions such as these.”
David Paternotte, an associate professor in sociology at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) and co-editor of the book Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), said less extreme attacks on gender studies often take the form of press articles criticizing the discipline. “People saying it’s ideological, it’s not scientific. This is what we hear the most — that it’s a waste of public money, it shouldn’t be a part of what is taught at universities.”
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“People saying it’s ideological, it’s not scientific.”
Analysis: True.
. . . the protesters “defend ‘Brazil’ as a place where LGBTQ people are not welcome, where the family remains heterosexual . . . They want boys to be boys, and girls to be girls, and for there to be no complexity in questions such as these.”
That’s Brazil, all right.
If the gender dystopians are looking for fertile ground to spread their bizarre concepts of reality, I would think that Brazil would be somewhere close to the very bottom of their list.
Labor market demand for the field was “close to zero.”
Sounds like most Liberal Arts degrees.
Their “field” is a joke that as less value than a degree in Russian Literature or Underwater Crafts.
how about a degree in PUPPETRY
The program offers a BFA degree in puppet arts and is the only institution in the country offering masters degrees (both MA and MFA) in the puppetry.
https://www.puppeteers.org/discover-puppetry/professional-development/
Actually I thing that has more value, there are actually uses for Puppetry in the entertainment industry, education, and therapy. The only use for a Gender Studies degree is to promote outrage, anger, unrest, and to a large degree marxism.
I agree that puppetry has many uses – elementary school kids often like it. But, I do not think it warrants an MA or an MBA. I agree with all that you said about “gender studies” – it is all about FEELINGS, PC feelings
Russian literature study is at least defensible as a subset of literature study.
Whereas gender studies if anything is a subset of psychology.
But it’s adherents won’t claim or admit to that, because until recently it would have been classed under aberrant physchology studies….
See, they’re not so stupid after all. They know a hawk from a handsaw.
Indeed they are. I wonder why.
A degree in gender studies makes about as much sense as a degree in astrology.
Gender studies is a philosophical attempt to mainstream the belief that homosexuality (and other sexual deviances) is normal. As a gay conservative let me give my take on this philosophy. It’s a pile of unscientific crap. There is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is anything other than a lifestyle or a mental illness.