Women’s and Gender Studies Under Attack

As I recently approached the final days of my 16th year as a women’s, gender, and sexuality studies professor in a department that just last year commemorated 50 years of dynamic, interdisciplinary inquiry, I felt the weight of the unrelenting attacks on the field of gender studies. I can’t help but worry about the future of my interdiscipline as universities rush to comply with executive orders, state legislatures, weaponized austerity, and a raucous insistence of anti-intellectualism. I remain reasonably terrified, yet carefully undaunted.

The Department of Education, under Trump’s bombastic guidance, has prioritized “Ending Gender Extremism and Cutting Underused Programs.” This prioritization on one hand highlights the powerful impact of women’s and gender studies on reshaping knowledge on topics such as gender identity, multiple oppression, and patriarchy, while emphasizing on the other hand these programs’ “futility” and “low enrollments.” On the DOE’s website, the administration celebrates the closing of women’s and gender studies departments and programs. They frame the elimination of our programs and departments as “victories” and as integral to “changing the culture of higher education.” Trump’s explicitly racist, misogynistic, antitrans, ableist, xenophobic, Christian nationalist, Islamophobic, and imperialist agenda positions gender studies as inimical to his delusional and exclusionary vision of U.S. greatness and exceptionalism. In short, he is threatened by an intellectual enterprise that carefully and skillfully provides college students with tools of resistance.

Any field of study that offers students an opportunity to rigorously interrogate, critically think, and creatively imagine a more just world is an easy target in Trump’s war on higher education. Women’s studies, for example, emerges out of the women’s liberation movement, the student movement, and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While the field has expanded beyond the foundational question of “where are the women” in history, literature, art, and other areas of human experience and endeavor, its origins as an interdiscipline born out of struggles to reshape the world are what make it so contemptible for an authoritarian regime.

Trump’s fervent contempt for those who study, research, and publish about multiplicative oppression, patriarchy, settler colonialism, gender expansiveness, and/or white supremacy renders my colleagues and me uniquely vulnerable in our current political moment. We contend with institutional cowardice and legislative malfeasance. Whether it’s the passing of SB1 in Ohio, which aims to “weed out indoctrination” in the classroom (something interdisciplines such as women’s studies are often accused of perpetuating) or a Texas state legislator proposing to prohibit “public institutions of higher education from offering programs or courses in LGBTQ or DEI studies,” state legislators across the country are escalating their attacks on academic freedom and research and teaching focused on understanding systems of power, oppression, and privilege. Additionally, many of our institutions are failing to protect our programs in fear of becoming Trump’s latest target in his war against higher education.

The swift capitulation of numerous institutions to Trump’s demand for defunding and dismantling higher educational units that literally provide tools and skills for contesting authoritarianism, fascism, and a sex/gender binary has been equally deflating. Trump’s threat to cut off funding from “elite” universities such as Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia because of his belief that these schools are “bastions of ideological indoctrination” spooked numerous schools into making deals with the Trump administration. Schools rushed to quietly find ways to appease Trump and his allies and to end federal investigations of their institutions. Women’s and gender studies programs were among the easiest units to put on the chopping block given Trump’s framing of them as hotbeds of the “indoctrination” he sought to eradicate.

More than a dozen well-established and storied programs and departments have shuttered their doors since Trump’s inauguration, with many of them publicly using the justifications of low student demand for courses, low numbers of majors and minors, and/or budgetary challenges. Universities are becoming increasingly corporatized — which, according to the American Association of University Professors, entails the transformation of “the university from an educational community with shared governance into a top-down bureaucracy that is increasingly managed and operated like a traditional profit-seeking corporation.” Within this corporate mindset, a women’s studies major or minor is seen as less valuable because it provides tools and skills to question and upend this very mindset.

There’s a perniciousness to the frequency with which interdisciplinary units anchored in examining social problems and inequalities are dismissed as frivolous, undesirable, useless, and wasteful. Gender studies emerges as a punch line in a culture war being waged by folks railing against gender-affirming care, women’s voting rights, books and media featuring queer individuals and families, and drag queen story hours. There’s a growing contempt for those trained to examine power, privilege, and injustice — and it is precisely in a historical moment such as we are in now that women’s and gender studies is desperately needed.

Despite this scholastic massacre unfolding, gender studies in the academy has a long history of contending with damaging myths, derisive characterizations, and divestment. Birthed in a cauldron of freedom struggles, women’s and gender studies has resistance at its core. The academic interdiscipline emerged from protests and a determination to recognize the importance of thoughtfully exploring gender and sexual oppression and equipping students with a set of world-making skills. Although we have recently lost some significant battles, gender studies can remain a warrior on the front lines of the war against routinized inhumanity.

What does this look like? It’s the National Women’s Studies Association collaborating with the National Women’s Law Center for an event focused on traversing legislative attacks on women’s and gender studies and to "to equip those in the field to protect their programs and departments and to work in coalitions to preserve their important work.” It is also the American Association of University Professors publishing a statement entitled, “The Assault on Gender and Gender Studies,” which called out the attacks on women's studies as part of a broader assault on civil rights and women's freedom, and pledged solidarity with colleagues across disciplines to show how integral gender studies is to a well-rounded college education. As a women’s, gender, and sexuality studies professor, it was heartening to see a statement from the AAUP expressing solidarity with us and letting us know who our allies are in this uphill battle.

Striking back also includes students, staff, and faculty launching protests on college campuses and at statehouses against cuts, eliminations, and flippant reorganizations of interdisciplinary units. These protests unite people and shape public awareness about what’s happening on college campuses. Pioneering feminist outlets such as Ms. magazine plead for university leadership to defend gender studies and other fields rooted in historical and contemporary injustices. From media to legal battles to grassroots mobilizing and organizing, those who know the value of gender studies are using all means necessary to contend with what the Trump administration and its supporters desire: our annihilation.

These days, I am overwhelmed by political exhaustion and emotional fatigue. Many of our gender studies foreparents knew to move on lower and sometimes widely illegible frequencies when those opposing your existence expend this kind energy legislating your demise. Our fear about our departments and programs surviving this historical moment is real, but so is our willful rage. My department just hired a new feminist science studies scholar, and we were not the only women’s and gender studies department who hired this academic year. The work continues because at the core of women’s studies is an ethos of refusal — a refusal to be devalued, unacknowledged, or erased.