Vanishing Intersectionality in the Illiberal Political Context of Hungary Between 2010 and 2023: Violence Against Romani Women Represented by Online Media

The illiberal transformation in Hungary has been extensively analyzed by scholars and commentators, yet the role of gendered racialization in this shift has received insufficient attention. This paper explores how right-wing actors exploit gendered racialization to delegitimize feminist discourse, suppress intersectional critiques, and reinforce the marginalization of Romani women. Focusing on representations of gender-based violence against Romani women in Hungarian independent and pro-government media between 2010 and 2023, this study examines how illiberal regimes manipulate gender issues while erasing Roma experiences through paternalistic strategies. It addresses the following key questions: How are Romani women portrayed in media discourses on gender-based violence? How do paternalistic ethnic and gender ideologies shape these portrayals? Through discourse analysis of media texts, the paper demonstrates that the regime’s anti-gender ideology and strategic invisibilization of ethnicity severely constrain the development of intersectional critiques. The study found that violence against Roma women is significantly underrepresented or invisibilized in both the independent and pro-government media. Four types of discourse were identified when the Roma ethnic background of victims or perpetrators was mentioned, with these discourses often intertwining. The color-blind PC discourse, the intersectional-external discourse, and the intersectional-internal discourse appear primarily in the independent media, while the illiberal-essentializing discourse is present in pro-government media, reflecting the polarized nature of the Hungarian media landscape. The independent media provides a more pluralistic approach to the issue, whereas the pro-government media addresses it more homogeneously. The study highlights how these approaches shape the public discourse about gender-based violence against Roma women. The color-blind PC discourse avoids addressing ethnicity due to concerns about reinforcing racial stereotypes and marginalizing the issue of domestic violence. This reluctance reflects a broader historical trend of rejecting racial analysis, which has led to the concept of “racelessness” and “Eastern European exceptionalism.” The intersectional-external discourse advocates for the explicit acknowledgment of ethnicity and the recognition of intersecting inequalities of race, gender, and class. The intersectional-internal discourse, voiced by Romani women, frames gender-based violence as a cultural issue within their community. In contrast, the illiberal-essentializing discourse, found in pro-government media, frames Roma culture as inherently backward, obscuring structural causes and placing responsibility on Roma communities and NGOs. The study concludes that the illiberal invisibilization of ethnicity and the anti-gender ideology of the regime makes it almost impossible to articulate robust intersectional discourses. In other words, even in the independent media, voices addressing gender- and race-based structural inequalities are underrepresented. These findings reveal how structural inequalities are entrenched and obscured through the interlocking mechanisms of gender and racial oppression in illiberal contexts.