Seite - 177 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

The academics criticizing gender studies were identified by an analysis of internet platforms, journals, and scientific publications. Then, through an impact analysis using the software “publish and perish” ten scientists were selected who had the highest potential power of interpretation for an in-depth discourse analysis of their texts. Those critics of Gender Studies are or have been active inside the scientific community, many of them are university professors. The selected scientists can because of their academic titles and their impact be assumed to have a high amount of symbolic capital.1 They come from various fields, not only sciences, but also economics and humanities. So, as we will see, the reason for the critique of gender studies is not merely a misunderstanding stemming from different science cultures. Argumentation figures and rhetoric strategies The overall objective of the texts of the mentioned academics is to defame gender studies. For this goal, a variety of argumentation figures are used. First of all, most of the critics frame gender studies as being not scientific. This assessment is often based on faulty representations of gender studies. For example, Ulrich Kutschera, professor of evolutionary biology, states that the main thesis of gender studies is that “people are supposedly born as sex-neutral mammals and then are shaped by society either feminine or masculine”2, (Kutschera 2016: 55). This leitmotiv of criticism directed against radical deconstructivism can be found in the texts of all of the critics. Gender studies according to them assume that only through socialization and cultural influences, sex and/or gender emerge. As references, often Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler are cited – and misunderstood, for example when Kutschera interprets Butler´s notion of the performativity and normativity of the appeal of a baby as “boy” or “girl” as evidence that Butler assumes babies are sex-neutral (Kutschera 2016: 238). In general, the critics state that gender studies ignore the body and biology. They base of their argumentations on the two-sex- concept. Bodies which transcend this dichotomic scheme are seen as exceptions and as abnormal; Kutschera (2016: 187) names them design errors. Also, some critics, like economics professor Günther Buchholz, suggest that gender studies reject academic standards such as evaluation and only serve as lobbying strategy for feminists (Buchholz 2014). In addition, the critics argue that gender studies are useless because from their perspective, gender equality already has been acquired. For example, Heike Diefenbach states that there is no patriarchy (Diefenbach 2012). Sometimes this argument of redundancy of gender studies is connected with men´s rights discourse: The retired professor for sociology Gerhard Amendt accuses gender studies of promoting the notion of men as aggressive and violent and women as victims and that gender studies serve to supress men (Amendt 2016). This leads to the next argumentation figure: gender studies as dangerous for society, an assertion made by most of the critics (Amendt 2016, Buchholz 2014, Gerl-Falkovitz 2011, Kutschera 2016, Seubert 2014, Spreng 2015a, 2015b). First of all, some trace the constructivist 1 Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has described symbolical capital as a form of prestige which is the outcome of a combination of the other forms of capital: economic, cultural and social capital. For the context of this paper, especially the implications of symbolical capital for power of interpretation are relevant: Bourdieu´s notion that “symbolic power is the power to make things with words” (Bourdieu 1989: 23). 2 All citations are taken from German texts and translated by the author. 177