WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Editors of Pandemonium spoke with Andrea Pető on June 12, 2023.

What is unique in the Hungarian situation is that, in 2017, when the attack started on gender studies, it was not clear how this would end. But there's a fantastic Russian saying: when you think you are at the bottom, somebody's already knocking from below.

Things can always get worse.

What is unique in the Hungarian context is that our two-year MA program had just been accredited by the Central European University in 2004—and that was the first acknowledgment, really, of gender studies as a real discipline. For over ten years it was taught in English at a private American university where the students were getting fellowships. The next real game changer came in 2017 when, after several years, one of the public universities in Hungary submitted a request to initiate a teaching program in gender studies, to be conducted in Hungarian, in the public university [End Page 37] system, asking for recognition that the faculty and the resources exist to teach it as part of a consortium of faculties in Hungary. This use of taxpayers' money and the blackmailing potential that comes with it, especially by a state captured by illiberals, was when the whole calamity started. A year later, without any explanation or any kind of dialogue, the whole program was canceled, and we were back to zero, deleted from the accredited study list. This is an important story because it shows how a field of study can be so easily delegitimized.

Probably you have seen that, more recently, in Romania there was also an attempt to delete gender studies, but the Parliament decided not to ratify that proposed legislation. So, in a sense, the Hungarian case is symptomatic because you have got the whole spectrum, the whole spectrum of attacks on gender studies.

It starts with attacking individuals who are more visible and active in public life, those who are publishing and giving interviews. Among others, I was one of those who had been attacked and put on the cover of the national newspapers as an enemy of the nation.

After this public attack, there was a kind of legal counterrevolution, which I don't need to explain to you in the U.S. They were using all possible legal methods to eliminate gender studies, and then came the moment when gender studies headed back to the point where it was before its institutionalization. So, turning time back, like, twenty years.

But the situation is much better than twenty years ago because these twenty years haven't been lost. Those twenty years earned certain achievements, and not only that, but several colleagues also now have degrees in our field. Luckily, none of the colleagues who have been teaching in those gender studies programs have been imprisoned, killed, or fired, as they have been in Russia, Turkey, and other places. So these colleagues are teaching, often, the same courses as they were teaching in the program that was accredited, only now they are doing so without the accreditation, even if now these courses count towards different degrees. Of course, university administrators are extremely conscientious about deleting possible references from gender studies from the visible descriptions of these courses.

Probably you have read the article "Disputing 'Gender' in Academia" in Politics and Governance I published with Yasmine Ergas, Jazgul Kochkorova, and Natalia Trujillo (2022). We identified four strategies of the ways illiberal governments have attacked gender studies in recent years. One is breaking. [End Page 38] That's what you see in Hungary. There is also a ban, which is using existing strategies. For example, you know, it accidentally turns out that you don't get funding or whatever resources you need, but it's not done outside the existing legal framework. And then there is the forging of laws—this is when they are creating new legal frameworks to make sure that gender studies is not able to function. And the last one is the most interesting. In Hungary, you don't find gender studies anymore, right? But...