How are Anti-Gender Movements Changing Gender Studies as a Profession?

‘Thank God for the Catholic Church!’, Fassin quotes an imagined gender studies expert, as the anti-gender movement is gaining momentum in France. My response reflects on an issue that remains unaddressed in this volume: what are the consequences of the increasing public exposure of gender studies as a profession due to the surge of anti-gender movements? Recently gender studies scholars can indeed not complain about the lack of wider social interest in their work – just the opposite is true. In Poland, ‘gender’ was chosen as the word of the year in 2013. The mailboxes of gender studies faculty members have been filled with emails with queries about their research and invitations to public debates in different media. Can the profession of academic feminism meet the expectations of what Fassin calls the ‘double exposure’, as anti-gender movements, demonstrations, and discourse brought not only national but also international recognition to gender studies scholars (Pető 2016)? And in what sense is this different from ‘mainstreaming’ gender, which has been the aim of gender studies professionals? While attacking gender studies as an academic discipline, the anti-gender movements are gaining much support all over in Europe (Kovács 2017: 175–189). Some representatives are connected to different churches, while some are strong non-believers who draw upon an anti-gender position to criticize neoliberalism (Grzebalska 2016). These movements are not only piggybacking upon anti-feminist sentiments that continue to be popular, they are also substantially different. The public exposure of gender as an analytical concept and gender studies as scholarship has made the profession even more political as it found itself in the midst of an open political struggle that lead to a ‘paradoxical recognition’, as Fassin put it. Gender studies always had a strong and dialogic relationship with social activism. This new situation, however, convinced those who, in recent years, hoped to see the future of gender studies in the comfortable academic ivory tower of publishing in peer reviewed journals, that their dream turned out to be a fragile illusion. Gender studies have been long criticized for reconstructing internal professional hierarchies with the cult of what Liz Stanley and Sue Wise called ‘theory stars’ (for more on this, see Pető 2001: 89–93). Paradoxically anti-gender movements are contributing to this process as they are promoting key figures of