Read: Betting on anti-feminism as a winning political strategy

As far-right politicians become entrenched in Europe, both at the European Parliament and within national parliaments across the Continent, they are taking aim at experts and intellectuals they present as members of an out-of-touch, corrosive elite. Several academic disciplines are subject to scrutiny and attack, but gender studies has become a particularly vilified target.

For the far right, propping up male authority and promoting a nuclear family that sticks to the gender binary are central tenets of the broader nationalist project. By contrast, gender studies promotes a more fluid understanding of self and society, in particular by recognizing gender as something shaped and interpreted by a given social order, as opposed to an immutable biological fact. In questioning traditional concepts of identity, sexuality, and kinship, gender studies therefore destabilizes the far right’s simple narrative of a native “us” versus an alien “them.” At the same time, the field disrupts the male authoritarianism integral to much of the far right’s self-image, from Orbán’s strongman swagger in Hungary to the paternal rhetoric of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister and the leader of the League. And yet, the far-right assault on gender studies is as much about electoral expediency as it is about a conflict of ideas. While gender theorists are hardly a significant cohort at the ballot box, they can be used as a convenient proxy to criticize the European Union, decry the West, and galvanize religious-conservative sentiment.

“Gender studies has become a battleground,” says Massimo Prearo, a political-studies researcher at the University of Verona. “In the last five years, it has developed from a peripheral concern to a central topic for those who purport to defend European Christian civilization.”

Integral to almost all the attacks is the implication that gender studies itself is not an academic discipline, but something larger and more mendacious. In a brisk rhetorical flip, far-right leaders and their supporters frame gender studies as an “ideology,” its researchers as “agents,” and they discredit the field’s research as raw political agenda rather than legitimate scholarship. Gender studies “has no business in universities,” Hungary’s deputy prime minister, Zsolt Semjen, said when the discipline’s ban was announced. “It is an ideology, not a science.”

Although opposition to gender studies has seen a spike throughout Europe, it has distinct local variants. In countries with Stalinist scars, the accusation of ideology is readily associated with pedagogic brainwashing. In Germany, the new word genderismus—conjuring up the idea that gender is an ideology—wilfully echoes the sozialismus, or socialism, of East German memory. In Estonia, where the far-right Conservative People’s Party joined the coalition government in March, the far-right website Objektiiv regularly publishes articles comparing “gender ideology” to Marxism and Leninism.