Gender Justice Under Soft Authoritarianism – mit Eva Fodor

Gender Justice Under Soft Authoritarianism

mit Eva Fodor | Wien

Im Rahmen der „Worlds of Contradiction“ (WOC) Festival 

An important feature of the rising tide of authoritarian politics across the world today is their emphasis on crafting  ‘gender regimes’ that reassert the role of women in patriarchal terms. In the context of the anti-liberal and soft-authoritarian transformation of Hungarian democracy since 2010, this talk will outline the key challenges to gender justice arising out of the pro-natalist agenda of the Orban government. It will focus especially on how the Orbanist regime shaped a set of policies that ties social citizenship rights to having children, thereby engendering a new variety of gender regime that I call “carefare”. Coupled with the authoritarian crackdown on what is often dubbed “gender ideology” in universities and other spaces in the civil society, this reformulation of the ‘problem of care’ into one of reasserting the gender roles of women poses a powerful challenge to gender justice. While this talk will draw on the distinct trajectory of gender regimes within the specific history of state socialism and post-socialist society in Eastern Europe, it hopes to open a wider dialogue on the ramifications of the rise of soft-authoritarian politics in different parts of the world for the question of gender justice.

Eva Fodor is Professor of Gender Studies and is currently a member of CEU’s Senior Leadership Team as Pro-Rector for Teaching and Learning.  She has a Ph.D. in Sociology  from the University of California in Los Angeles and works in the field of comparative social inequalities.  Specifically, she is interested in how and why gender differences in the labor market and elsewhere are shaped, reshaped, renegotiated and reproduced in different types of societies and in different social contexts. Her recent book, „The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary“ describes the introduction of what she calls a „carefare“ regime in Hungary after 2010 (open access with Palgrave Pivot, 2022).  Her ongoing research projects puruse this agenda further and seek to create a gendered political economy of illiberalism.