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In recent years, gender mainstreaming has increasingly been positioned as a central policy imperative in many countries. At the same time, gender as a focus of academic study has come under attack in the USA and Europe, and some suggest there to be a crisis in feminist teaching. This renders it vital to explore in the context of contemporary higher education where gender and feminist content and approaches are present and absent. This research set out to develop insight through a cross-disciplinary, qualitative case study including documentary analysis alongside staff and student interviews. Findings highlighted contradictions, including that people often claim to champion gender and diversity generally whilst simultaneously rejecting responsibility for the same issues in their own teaching. These insights identify challenges, including attribution of responsibility for inequalities around the representation of gender as belonging elsewhere, with others, in terms of both teaching spaces and temporality.

In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this "may prove more harmful than helpful." This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women's bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the "colonization of the everyday." This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women's bodies and women's status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as "more harmful than helpful?" Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of "witches," the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare's "Taming," to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education practitioners concerned with addressing gender on the curriculum inevitably come up against a complex range of institutional barriers. Research presented here, drawing on in-depth staff interviews, sheds light on such 'gender work' and the challenges and its complexities in the current moment in the UK context. Through an institutional case study, we identify multiple ongoing and contemporary challenges arising for those engaged in this work. A constellation of intersecting obstacles are elucidated, wherein gender, far from being 'mainstreamed', is continually side-lined and deprioritized due to being positioned as peripheral, optional and of questionable value in the neoliberal episteme. Yet with urgent challenges inherent in gender equity and social justice education in the contemporary socio-political context, we contend that addressing such barriers and moving the gender mainstreaming agenda forwards is crucial. Renewed emphases on curricula may yet offer an opportunity to re-open discussions, reimagine and reinvigorate gender mainstreaming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]