Gender Studies as “Gender Ideology” in right-wing populist political discourse in Hungary

In my paper I look at the discourse strategies of the current official Hungarian political discourse in which the rights of women, sexual minorities and people with non-conforming gender identities as well as feminist academics are sacrificed in the wake of a right-wing populism where hate speech has become the daily routine of communication. The stigmatization of “gender” as ideology has become a central element of political discourse in Hungary since 2010 - resulting in the ban of the MA in Gender Studies in the Official Gazette on October 12, 2018. For a critical reading, I situate the strategic attack in relation to three junctures of meaning-making of “feminism” and “gender” since the system change in 1989 that have eventually crystalized into the commonsense discourses of “gender ideology” and “gender-craze” of right-wing populism. I develop a social semiotic model of situated polyvocal meaning that goes beyond the post-structuralist understanding that all meanings should be ideological - a position that is counter-effective for feminist knowledge and movement alike as the current crisis over the status of gender studies shows. I argue that without a positioned epistemology there is no ground left for reclaiming “gender” as the key critical category of analysis for exposing unequal relations of power.