Academic Freedom Under Pressure: Attacks on Gender Studies and the Gendered Dimension of Deplatforming and Self-Censorship in Germany

This paper examines the increasing politicization and repression of gender studies as a discipline and the gendered dimension of deplatforming and self-censorship in Germany within the broader context of shrinking academic freedom in liberal democracies. First, I show how gender studies have increasingly become a target of far-right and conservative actors who frame feminist and queer scholarship as ideological extremism. These attacks manifest as increased political pressure (e.g. through parliamentary questions and defamatory campaigns) against individual scholars, university leadership, and decision makers in science policy, as well as through defunding threats, and public delegitimization of entire fields of study and scientific approaches. Notably, the AfD has called for the removal of gender studies from research and teaching from German public universities and proposed a federal review board to assess the ‘ideological neutrality’ of academic publications coming out of German research institutions. Such measures reflect a growing trend of epistemic policing and political interventions in research funding allocation, where critical scholarship is reframed as a threat to national identity, security or scientific standards and integrity. In a second part the paper also explores the gendered dynamics of self-censorship among scholars working on politically sensitive topics. Based on a recent survey of Middle East scholars in Germany and additional qualitative interviews amongst this population, it highlights how women, racialized, and precariously employed researchers are disproportionately affected by fears of reputational damage, threats, and funding loss, leading to them being disproportionally affected by self-censorship in public discourse, teaching and their academic work. These findings underscore how epistemic insecurity is not evenly distributed, but intersects with gender, race, and employment status. By situating the German case within transnational attacks on gender studies and academic freedom, this paper argues that attacks on gender studies are attacks on independent knowledge production and therefore constitute a symptom and a driver for the erosion of academic freedom. It calls for renewed institutional and political commitment to diversity and plurality in scientific approaches and disciplines in teaching and research, and for solidarity across disciplines to resist the normalization of epistemic repression.