Feminist Responses to Right-Wing Governance in Hungary: The Emergence of Anti-Gender Feminism

This dissertation employs ethnographic data about Hungary’s feminist activist and academic circles to explore the impacts of right-wing anti-gender politics on feminist activists and scholars in Hungary. The right-wing anti-gender context presented multiple challenges to the feminist actors, such as increased visibility of their work in a hostile climate and decreased political and financial support. Feminist actors coped with the restrictive political context by either openly opposing the right-wing politics, self-censoring, deploying strategic language and activities, or leaving the country. The right-wing Anti-gender climate also contributed to the intensification of the debates among various feminist groups. The debates focused on finding feminist strategies for surviving within the hostile, right-wing anti-gender context. I argue that the tensions brought to the Hungarian feminist movement by the right-wing, anti-gender climate contributed to the emergence and discursive dominance of what I call anti-gender feminism. Anti-gender feminist discourse is articulated as a “new” and “progressive” feminist strategy for overcoming the critiques of gender-related work by right-wing anti-gender actors. Anti-gender feminism is grounded in a particular articulation of leftist perspectives and claims that the feminist movement must center on the needs of the majority of women and appeal to the sensibilities of “everyday people”. According to this discourse, a leftist perspective allows for overcoming the failings of liberal feminist approaches, for example, West-imposed identitarian struggles. According to anti-gender feminist arguments, such approaches dismiss the structural reasons for inequalities affecting the wider public and result in hostility towards feminist initiatives. In its desire to appeal to the wider masses, and operate without interference from the right-wing government, anti-gender feminist discourse distances itself from other marginalized struggles such as trans and sex-workers’ rights and racial justice. It also brings feminist arguments dangerously close to the white-supremacist, nationalist-populist rhetoric of the Hungarian state.