Gender diversity and academic solidarities in response to authoritarianism and crisis

The conceptualisation of gender is a key battleground for populist ideology, with a quasi-return to ‘traditional’ gender roles and responsibilities central to the populist reimaginings of the state. Authoritarianism thrives in binary discourses and the construction of threat through challenges to perceived stability: stability which is frequently epitomised by the heterosexual nuclear family. The image of the stable family reinforces a clear division of reproductive labour and the expectation for national identity to be consolidated and reinforced through child-rearing. These discourses are also frequently racialised in response to constructed threats from beyond (or within) national borders. Deviation from, in terms of personal gender identity and expression, and challenges to, in terms of academic theorisation, these hegemonic binaries are therefore perceived as threats to the imagined nation or failures to uphold ‘patriotic’ duty. The threat of gender diversity therefore brings higher education institutions into this key battleground in which the academic study of gender, sexuality and feminism, which overtly contest, problematise and expose these narrow discourses, is pitted against conservative political stand-points often within as well as outside those same institutions. This paper explores examples of these tensions affecting higher education in the contexts of Hungary, the UK and Turkey, building on research conducted through the collaborative project Universities and Crisis. Through exploring these examples I propose that these conflicts may be generative sites for the creation and consolidation of new solidarities across academic, activist and civil society spheres which offer a response to questions of the public role of the university.