Digital contestations of gender studies: sentiment and discourse analysis

Scientific knowledge has long been presented as neutral and objective, yet feminist epistemology reveals how this neutrality often masks systematic exclusions. The male body has frequently served as the universal standard in research, rendering women, trans, non-binary, racialized, and disabled individuals epistemically invisible. While European research policy now mandates sex and gender analysis (SGA)—through frameworks like Horizon Europe and the European Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025—implementation remains uneven, often reduced to tokenistic gestures. More critically, the institutional push toward gender inclusivity faces organized ideological resistance. Over the past decade, gender studies has become a primary target of systematic backlash, particularly in digital environments where it is framed as ideologically biased, scientifically illegitimate, or politically driven rather than as rigorous scholarship. This study examines how digital publics contest the epistemic legitimacy of gender studies through discourses that reverberate across academic, institutional, and political contexts. Analyzing 19,480 Reddit posts and comments across multiple subreddits using mixed methods—sentiment classification and qualitative thematic analysis—we identify systematic delegitimization patterns. Gender studies is framed as pseudoscientific, ideological propaganda, or economically irrelevant compared to STEM disciplines. These narratives deploy biological essentialism, cite selective evidence to naturalize inequality, and employ affective tactics including irony and ridicule. Universities are portrayed as ideologically captured institutions promoting activism rather than scholarship, with funding cuts advocated as corrective measures. Crucially, this epistemic resistance is stratified across communities: overtly hostile in anti-feminist spaces, technically framed through biological determinism in science-oriented forums, and emerging even within feminist-oriented discussions debating feminism's boundaries. Academic subreddits reveal how digital discourse shapes material practices, with researchers reporting career anxiety and modified research agendas due to stigmatization. These findings demonstrate that online delegitimization of gender knowledge extends beyond digital arenas to reconfigure epistemic hierarchies within research ecosystems, undermining decades of feminist scholarship and threatening the institutionalization of intersectional approaches. Understanding this resistance is essential for effective gender integration policy implementation and for designing counter-strategies that protect academic freedom while advancing inclusive, epistemically just science.