On April 3, 2022, the Hungarian general election takes place, and alongside the election, there is a national referendum on LGBTQ+ in education. The referendum asks citizens four questions, about “teaching of sexual orientation”, “promotion of sex reassignment”, “exposure to sexually explicit media content”, and “showing of sex-change media content” to minors. The wording of the questions, and the accompanying campaign (with the slogan “Protect our children!”, Source), clearly inform citizens what the appropriate answers in the referendum supposedly are.

Research by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) indicates that the long- and short-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic pose a threat to the progress of gender equality in the EU.

Normality is a made-up construct, and it is constantly changing and updating itself. People ditch stigmatized old terms and come up with new names all the time. In recent years, gender and sexuality are two of those concepts undergoing radical changes. Being an international researcher who has traveled to many countries, gender equality has always been a topic of importance for me because of its complicated relationship with people, culture, and time.

Some scholars argue that the norms of traditional masculinity are “dying out” as a result of the movements that advocate for gender equality and challenge traditional gender ideologies.

Societal and media discourse are linked and strongly influence each other. Hence, societal gender discourse can be observed within different media representations. This regards non-fictional media formats like journalism, self-representations on social media but also fictional productions like series or films.

Categorization is a process that helps people simplify their perception of the social and physical world. With categorization, a perceiver of the world groups many individual cases (called exemplars in Social Psychology) in one overarching category. For example, let’s think about a parrot called Mindy. We can imagine Mindy as a blue and yellow parrot, shy with strangers, and quite talkative when she hears the shower in the other room. 

Keynote lecture by Professor Mieke Verloo, Radboud University Nijmegen during the G-Versity Summer School in Berlin

Keynote lecture by Prof. Emer. Angela McRobbie