Epistemic Warfare and the Dismantling of Gender Research in the United States

This paper examines the 2025 U.S. federal assault on gender research as a critical case for understanding contemporary strategies of anti-gender knowledge politics. Drawing on feminist institutionalism and the CCINDLE framework, it identifies epistemic warfare—the administrative and financial annihilation of feminist knowledge infrastructures—as a new mode of de-legitimation. Executive orders, defunding, and data erasure targeted programs such as the NSF ADVANCE initiative and NIH-funded gender and diversity research, reframing them as “ideological” rather than scientific. The attacks reveal how bureaucratic instruments—funding rules, classification systems, and evaluation criteria—can be weaponized to suppress academic freedom and redefine scientific merit as political loyalty. Universities’ anticipatory compliance, including program closures and renaming, demonstrates how fear and dependency reshape institutional behavior. For gender and intersectionality research, these developments have produced both material destruction and affective disorientation—what I term epistemic PTSD—as scholars lose data, positions, and legitimacy. The U.S. case illustrates how rapidly feminist knowledge infrastructures can collapse once state power turns against them. It serves as a warning for other countries: protecting gender studies and critical scholarship requires proactive, decentralized strategies of epistemic resilience to safeguard democratic knowledge production.