Conservative backlash? Anti-gender politics in Orbán’s Hungary

A defining feature of Orbán’s right-wing regime, in place since 2010 in Hungary, is the use of ongoing (publicly funded) fear-mongering and hate campaigns, targeting alleged enemies (migrants, liberals, George Soros or the so-called ‘gender ideologists’) who are presented as committed to destroy the nation. The main fields of contestation, where ‘gender’ is vilified, are the Istanbul Convention, issues of trans and genderqueer political claims in the West, and the de-accreditation of the MA program Gender Studies on the basis of the claim that it is not science (October 2018). Since 2020 even policy changes followed with reference to the presumably threatening “gender ideology”: prohibition of legal sex change for trans-identifying people, restricting the adoption rights for same sex couples, and restricting LGBT related sexual education in schools. The 2022 April Parliamentary elections will be combined with a referendum on “child protection”, about questions against “gender ideology”. Many scholars describe the anti-gender and anti-LGBT politics as a “conservative backlash” against attained levels of women’s and LGBT equality. In my theoretical paper I will argue – using empirical materials from my PhD dissertation on the Orbán regime’s anti-gender politics too – that this conceptualization misses very important features of the phenomenon. As I will argue, it even contributes, in the field of critical social sciences, to the dichotomic, culturalist and structure-blind understandings that underpins the right-wing discourse too. Instead of such simplifying notions we need conceptual tools that are both capable of describing the nature of the right-wing anti-gender politics as well as self-reflectively shed light on developments in the progressive agendas of the past decades in Europe.