Journal of Gender Studies

Moral Panics and Gender Studies

In recent years, political shifts in the agendas of several Western and non-Western countries have increasingly mobilized anxieties around gender, sexuality, and identity, and, more in general, issues pertaining to Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies. We have witnessed the resurgence of extremist and nationalist discourses that draw heavily on anxieties surrounding gender and other EDI themes. These anxieties are frequently mediated and amplified through traditional and digital media, thus contributing to construct threats to social order and fueling waves of moral panic. In these moral panics, specific groups or individual or behaviors can be perceived as a menace to societal values or national identity.

From public debates over feminism and LGBTQ+ rights to the contested narratives of masculinity or family, gender issues and policies have become a key terrain of dispute upon which wider political battles over culture, nation, and morality are fought.

Such dynamics highlight the need to revisit and expand the concept of moral panic as a means of understanding how the representations of these critical dimensions are related to social anxieties, fear, control, and moral regulation in contemporary societies. Consider for instance how framing gender issues or gender education as a threat or as a crisis of moral values – whether in political rhetoric, popular culture, or online spaces – highlights how moral boundaries are constructed and contested in social and media arenas. By examining these dynamics, scholars can discuss how moral panic discourses operate not only to regulate gendered and sexual identities and behaviors but also to shape public debate, social and political agendas, and state interventions.

This special issue invites contributions that critically discuss the conceptual interplay between moral panic and gender-related debates and policies, including intersections of gender with other categories – such as sexuality, race, social class, ability, age, religion, culture, location, politics –, and draw on theoretical innovation and empirical research to explore how these specific moral panics emerge, circulate, transform and disappear within the local or global social and media landscapes, within and across global and local contexts, and the actors that characterize them.

Background

Since its introduction by Stanley Cohen in the 1970s, the concept of moral panic has provided a widely used framework for analyzing collective anxieties, social control, and the construction of social problems in the public arena. Cohen (1972: 9) defines a moral panic as follows: 

"A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes visible."

Over the decades, the concept has evolved through critical engagement with different sociological and criminological theories and concepts such as risk (Critcher, 2008), moral regulation (Hunt, 2011), fear (Furedi, 2011), social problems construction (Best, 2012), social anxieties (Hier, 2011), and discourse (e.g., Critcher 2003). These and other original contributions have expanded the scope of moral panic research, making it a convincing lens for understanding processes of tension and transformation in our contemporary societies around social problems. At the same time, the moral panic concept has attracted criticism, and it cannot be considered as an unproblematic analytical tool. Scholars have questioned some of the model’s assumptions on different grounds. Criticism has concerned mainly 1) theoretical aspects of the concept itself and of its reformulations, 2) an increasing loose application of the concept in analytical and empirical terms that reduces its explanatory value, 3) the trivialization of the concept due to its popularity that impacts on its (academic) reputation. The first group includes, for instance, criticisms towards Cohen’s original model including ambiguous terminology, limitations in explaining the role of the public as media audiences or a body of opinion, biased assumptions about the model’s dynamics, and limited attention towards media effects (Critcher 2008); Best’s (2013) observations about the conceptual weakness and ideologization of the model – that bring to suggest that moral panic can be considered as a specific type of social problem; Ungar’s (2001) remarks about the inappropriateness of the model to grasp contemporary anxieties that are specific to risk societies; Hier’s (2024) considerations about the problem of disproportion; Hunt’s (2011) reflections about a certain ideological propensity of the model to judge claims-making in a negative way; but also McRobbie and Thornton’s (1995) emphasis on the need to update the model not yet ready to interpret the complexity of the effects of social media and new media. The second group includes criticism from Jewkes (2004), who, among several other flaws, mentions the looseness of the terminology. The third group hosts remarks from Garland (2008) about the trivialization of the concept that has lost its analytical subtlety and precision. Similarly, Falkof (2020) acknowledges that the term’s widespread adoption – including in everyday discourse – risks reducing its explanatory value.

Besides these three main groups of criticisms, we are aware of the challenges that the relationship between moral panics, ideology, and structural political change brings. As Hall et al. (1978) demonstrated in their classic account of authoritarian populism in Policing the Crisis, isolated episodes of moral panic can be symptoms of deeper hegemonic crises rather than discrete, episodic phenomena. This distinction matters in the current conjuncture: the sustained rise of authoritarian and neo-populist right-wing movements across Europe and beyond over the past decade or more raises the question of whether superficial analyses of situated moral panics are sufficient to capture what may be a long-term structural transformation of political culture (Walsh, 2020; Hier, 2019). At the same time, a problematization of the definition of “good” and “bad” moral panics is necessary: some consider the concept as ideologized because it tends to consider as moral panics only the reactions from certain conservative and traditionalist groups (Waiton 2008).

While we are aware of these criticisms, we reject extreme positions that suggest ditching the entire conceptual model and its terminology (Horsley 2017), and instead we acknowledge the theoretical vitality and empirical versatility of the research on moral panics.

Despite this exuberance, research on moral panics has paid limited attention to gender as a structuring dimension of social anxieties, fear, and moral outrage. However, in recent years, several current debates about gender issues – for instance the controversies around “gender ideology”, contemporary masculinities, sexuality, and identity – have fueled visible moral panics which reveal moral discourses and labelling processes, and reproduce inequalities and exclusions, while proposing or implementing changes in policies and law enforcement. These contemporary gender-related moral panics do not unfold in an institutional vacuum: they are intertwined with transnational moral crusades against gender studies as a field of knowledge. A substantial body of scholarship has documented the rise of anti-gender movements that explicitly target feminist and gender scholarship within universities and across public institutions (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Bracke and Paternotte, 2016; Graff and Korolczuk, 2021). Judith Butler, whose foundational work on gender performativity and the social construction of sex has been a recurring target of such campaigns, has argued that the contemporary movement against “gender ideology” is best understood as an attack on democracy’s freedoms, which concerns not only trans rights and reproductive autonomy but feminist scholarship and sex education more broadly (Butler, 2024). Butler situates these campaigns within a global authoritarian political context and explains how right-wing movements, religious institutions, and state actors have deployed “gender ideology” as a device for political mobilization. As recently discussed in this journal, scholars working in gender studies programmes across multiple national contexts have increasingly faced not only discursive delegitimization but concrete institutional attacks, e.g., the closure or defunding of gender studies departments (Ergas et al., 2022; Pető, 2020). This special issue aims to engage directly with this literature and treats attacks on gender studies as an object of critical analysis and as a key dimension of the contemporary moral panics surrounding gender.

Aim and Scope

This special issue seeks to explore how categories related to gender – and intersections of them – operates within, through, and across moral panics in contemporary societies. We invite contributions that investigate how gender-related moral panics are produced, circulated, represented, and tackled in mass media and new media, and in public arenas. We particularly welcome contributions that advance theoretical dialogues between gender studies, moral panic studies, feminist theory, behavioral studies, media and cultural studies, and critical sociology and critical criminology. At the same time, we invite contributions that use the moral panic framework reflexively, critically interrogating both its analytical purchase and its limitations when applied to contemporary gender issues and politics.

We aim to address the following topics, but also to accept other topics suggested by the authors:

• Rethinking moral panic theory through gender studies;
• Feminist, queer, and intersectional studies applying or critically contributing to the moral panic models;
• Gendered moral panics in traditional and digital media;
• Media and political discourses and moral panics surrounding “gender ideology,” trans rights, and sexual citizenship;
• Moral panics and moral regulation of sexuality, reproduction, and family life;
• Moral panics related to forms of masculinity and misogyny;
• Online and digital moral panics: social media outrage, trolling, and gender-related disinformation;
• The role of institutions (e.g., law, education, religion) in (re)producing, circulating, or countering gender-related moral panics;
• Moral entrepreneurs, claim-makers and gender-related moral panics;
• Comparative and historical analyses of gender-related moral panics;
• Emotional dimensions of gender-related moral panics;
• Rethinking moral panic theory through gender, emotions, and intersectionality.

We seek contributions that combine theoretical innovation with empirical depth, and that reflect the interdisciplinary approach of the Journal of Gender Studies. By stressing the critical dimensions of moral panics, this special issue welcomes interdisciplinary dialogues among scholars working in sociology, criminology, gender studies, feminist, queer and transgender studies, behavioral studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies, and related fields. We invite contributions that interrogate how gender issues and moral discourses shape public debates, behaviors, social control, and moral panics in contemporary societies. These papers will deepen understanding of the complex relations between gender issues and moral panics happening in a rapidly changing world.