Gender wars and cancel culture in academia: Umut Özkırımlı in conversation with Laura Favaro.

Abstract

The Oxford English Dictionary defines cancel culture as «the action or practice of publicly boycotting, ostracizing, or withdrawing support from a person, institution, etc., thought to be promoting culturally unacceptable ideas». Though accurate, this definition is incomplete since cancel culture goes way beyond boycotting or ostracizing. It includes a wide spectrum of sanctions, spanning from public naming and shaming, censorship and job loss to intimidation and outright attacks in the form of verbal and physical abuse. This article discusses the mechanisms and negative impacts of cancel culture in academia by focusing on the case of Laura Favaro, who was ‘cancelled’ after publishing an article on the findings of her research on academia’s ‘gender wars’. The concerted attempts to silence certain — particularly feminist — perspectives on sex and gender have severe and wide-ranging implications for researchers and the scholarly endeavour as a whole, contributing to the toxic atmosphere created by the neoliberalisation of universities.