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Paper short abstract

Queer-feminist academic activism in Czech universities confronts the entanglement of neoliberal governance and illiberal anti-gender backlash. Delegitimised and misframed as cancel culture, scholar and student activists' affective labour resist from below by imagining and doing academia otherwise.

Paper long abstract

Across Europe, organised anti-gender mobilisations increasingly target (gender) education as a key site of their affective polarisation. Post-socialist Central/Eastern European universities, often falsely depicted as politically neutral, have become arenas where struggles over gender and legitimate pedagogy unfold with particular intensity. This paper examines queer-feminist academic activism in Czech universities as a practice that provokes both anti-gender backlash and neoliberal governance by proposing a culture of care, solidarity, mutual aid and transformative justice.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews, digital ethnography, and multimodal analysis of student and scholar initiatives addressing gender-based violence, the paper conceptualises this activism as informal education beyond the classroom. Through testimony-sharing, peer support, artistic interventions, and public critique, students and scholar teach how to recognise gendered power, articulate consent beyond romantic or sexual relationships, and relate ethically within academic institutions. These practices break institutional silence around gender inequality, and transform frustration into hope.

The analysis also shows how anti-gender actors respond by framing queer-feminist academic activism as ideological indoctrination, “cancel culture,” or a threat to academic freedom or national values. These affective repertoirs function to delegitimise this activism, intersecting with neoliberal academic norms that privilege "masculinist culture of science" based on individual resilience, excellence, and competition, creating rather hostile environment for queer-feminist activism and pedagogy. These neoliberal-illiberal mobilisations in European universities target queer-feminist academic activism because it teaches to imagine and do academia "otherwise". To update the theory of "masculinist culture of science", this paper frames academic activism as queer-feminist culture of science and knowledge production.