Abstract This article analyzes the U. S. federal assault on gender research since 2025 as epistemic warfare: state administrative power deployed to dismantle feminist knowledge infrastructures. From a feminist institutionalist perspective, decades of feminist institutionalization paradoxically rendered gender research politically governable, while neoliberal restructuring created financial dependencies enabling ideological intervention through budgetary threats. The alignment of executive, legislative, and judicial power weaponized research governance, producing anticipatory compliance across universities. The article theorizes epistemic warfare and epistemic trauma to capture rapid infrastructural destruction and collective professional disorientation, revealing authoritarian threats to democratic knowledge production.
Kathrin Zippel (Fri,) studied this question.