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Paper short abstract

This paper examines fathers' rights activism in Hungary, focusing on how claims about custody, care, and deservingness articulated online appear in family support institutions under an illiberal, anti-gender political regime.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines fathers' rights activism (FRA) in Hungary, where an illiberal, anti-gender political climate has enabled fathers' claims around custody and care to gain institutional traction. Drawing on digital ethnography of Hungarian-language online groups to complement sixteen months of fieldwork in family support services, I analyse how divorced fathers mobilise moralised claims to deservingness as caregivers while positioning themselves as victims of a feminised bureaucracy.

Family support services are municipal institutions traditionally serving low-income families, but middle-class, legally assertive fathers have increasingly approached them recently seeking support or intervention around parenting. Hungary’s pro-natalist regime has promoted traditional family roles while attacking "gender ideology" since 2010, creating conditions where FRA discourse resonates with state rhetoric. The 2021 introduction of alternating custody, a key FRA demand, demonstrates their potential influence on policy.

Rather than treating FRA as merely an anti-feminist backlash, this paper shows how it operates in online spaces and shapes institutional practice. Drawing on fathers' rights discourses, these men file complaints and invoke "parental alienation" to advance their claims. During my fieldwork, I observed social workers describing middle-class fathers as a challenging new client group while themselves referencing "parental alienation" uncritically. While often rooted in pro-feminist desires to support involved fatherhood, such uptake can obscure post-separation power dynamics and reinforce gendered harms.

By examining how FRA operates across digital spaces, policy reform, and street-level practice in an illiberal context, this paper shows how anti-gender movements gain legitimacy, reshaping the negotiation of care in welfare governance.