Zombies No Longer Willing to Make Do, Or, How to Save Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Neoliberal and Illiberal Apocalypse

Abstract: This article reports on our 2022–2023 survey of US women's, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) practitioners. The objective of the study was to take stock of the field at a moment of accelerating neoliberal pressures experienced in US higher education related to the COVID-19 pandemic and rising right-wing politics targeting our field. Our findings include two apparent contradictions. First, while institutional metrics as reported by respondents demonstrate surprising strength and even growth in key indicators of programmatic health, WGSS practitioners self-report experiencing unprecedented levels of what we call emotional precarity—negative feelings centered around anger and worry for their programs and pessimism about their own willingness or ability to sustain their careers as WGSS academicians. Second, despite long-standing critiques of the field as unsustainable due supposedly to waning student interest in the field and in liberal arts generally, many survey participants note a surge in student enthusiasm leading to robust enrollments in WGSS courses. To understand the results and their implications for the field's future, we place our study within the larger, transnational context of challenges currently and recently facing WGSS academicians globally. Drawing on interviews we conducted with twenty-five leading feminist academics in 2022 and 2023 in countries where the field has come under particularly severe statist attacks, we conclude our report with a discussion of how illiberal targeting of our field may, potentially and paradoxically, reconnect our field to its activist roots in ways that replenish and renew WGSS practitioners' commitment and ability to carry the field forward.