By Janice Fiamengo Hungary is bidding good riddance to the academic junk food of Gender Studies and Women’s Studies. Last week, the Hungarian government announced plans to withdraw funding from gender studies programs at state-funded universities “after determining the programs serve no identifiable purpose and are based on ‘ideology rather than science.’”
The decision will affect only a small number of students, according to the report, because such programs are not yet popular or widespread in Hungary. In many parts of the English-speaking world, in contrast, tens of thousands of students take courses and earn degrees in Gender Studies, which is sometimes called Women’s Studies, or Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies.
Defunding such programmes in more liberal parts of Europe and North America and Canada, would trigger off feminist paroxysms of apocalyptic proportions. But if Hungarian officials are correct that they serve no purpose and are based in ideology rather than science, should we not seriously consider abolishing them?
I have argued for years that the answer to this question is an emphatic and unqualified yes. Evidence drawn from the programs’ own websites suggests that, far from serving no purpose at all, they exist to create foot soldiers for feminist social change, mainly by transforming the role of women and greatly enlarging the reach of the feminist state.