Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, Again: Gender Scholars As Targets In an Age of Autocratisation

As democratic guarantees erode and anti-gender, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQ+ politics gain force, academics working on gender and sexuality encounter escalating personal, professional, and institutional risks. This session asks how autocratising tendencies translate into direct pressure on researchers: through online harassment and doxxing, legal intimidation, loss of institutional support, closure or defunding of programmes, and voluntary exile.

These pressures are not experienced evenly but are shaped by gender, sexuality, race, class, career stage, geopolitical location, institutional precarity, and public visibility. Women and LGBTQ+ scholars are disproportionately subjected to these pressures, not only due to their research topics but also because their identities render them vulnerable to the same political backlash that their scholarship examines.

When researchers self-censor, withdraw from public debate, leave institutions, the consequences extend beyond individual careers, affect what can be studied, which knowledges are legitimised, and which critical scholarship is silenced.

Shifting from a focus on publishing infrastructure, this call invites papers that explore researchers' lived experiences under autocratisation, examining how it targets scholars, their response strategies, and the implications for knowledge production when researchers self-censor, relocate, or withdraw from their field.

We welcome contributions from scholars at all career stages and across regions, including testimonies, comparative studies, and accounts of solidarity and protection networks.

Possible topics:

Doxxing, networked harassment, online intimidation campaigns

Legal harassment: defamation suits, strategic lawsuits against public participation, disciplinary proceedings

Institutional (non-)responses

Intersectional patterns of risk

Visibility as vocation and vulnerability

Solidarity networks, and protection mechanisms

Autocratisation’s impact on institutions and funders

Autoethnographic research