Gendering Fascism: Imaginaries, Media, Technologies

Qui Parle, 2001

Page 1. FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE Ara H. Merjian In the wake of a post-World War II, leftist intellectual reckoning which needed to distance its politically suspect forebears, the no tion that fascist ideologues permitted - indeed encouraged - di ...

Third Text, 2019

Taking as its starting point Ingeborg Bachmann’s comments that the National Socialist ‘virus of crime’ was not surpassed, but merely retreated into the fabric of society’s moral codes, this article examines how non-synchronous notions of time (Bloch, 1935) are engaged with, in art in the aftermath of National Socialism in Austria. Austria, a context which was both first to embrace National Socialism in 1938, and first to be ‘freed’ from dealing with this history in 1943, saw protest and political action most often led by artists and artistic forms. The most incisive political and social critique appeared in the realm of art and literature. By looking to the work of artist and filmmaker VALIE EXPORT and novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, this article asks how film and literature – specifically, works that address gender relations critically – follow in Bachmann’s footsteps and engage with a notion of para-history. Moreover, I argue that such works help us to understand residual tendencies and continuities in relation to both media and gender, in resurgent fascism today. By looking to the film, theatre-texts and essays by EXPORT and Jelinek I situate them in their historical context, and reread them as a history of feminist resistance to, and urgent critique of contradictory forces which make fascism appealing, both in the decades following World War II and again today.

Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture. Ed. by Robyn Pickering Iazzi. University of Minnesota Press, 1995

During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of theories were developed in Fascist Italy regarding the essence, function, and place of woman. These theories constituted veritable "technologies of gender": discur-sive practices that contributed to the cultural construction of sexual difference in Fascist Italy. Teresa De Lauretis, who adapted to the study of gender Foucault's notion of the "technology" of sex (those mechanisms, tactics, and devices—other than simply prohibition and the law — through which power has access to and controls sexuality), has remarked that gender in any given period is a cultural construction rather than a simple derivative of biological or physiological difference. It is, furthermore, a construction that is constantly in process, shaped and reshaped through discourses — such as the cinema or philosophical theories produced in the academy—that have a more or less direct, institutional power to influence the field of social meaning and therefore to generate, promote, or reinforce specific notions and representations of gender. The cultural construction of gender is never one-way, of course. Although in any given period certain technologies of gender become so entrenched as to acquire the dominance of a hegemonic model, there are also countertech-nologies at work on the margins or between the lines of the dominant discourse. These countertechnologies, although less easily visible and detectable, influence the construction of gender—and its repre-sentation— either by deconstructing or destabilizing hegemonic models and discursive practices or by positing new and more or less radi-cally different alternatives. I consider two theoretical texts that are—in different ways—representative of the hegemonic discourse of Fascism on woman: Giovanni Gentile's 1934 "La donna nella coscienza moderna" (Woman in modern consciousness) and Ferdinando Loffredo's 1938 Politica delta famiglia (Politics of the family). I then turn briefly to three literary texts by women that, in my view, constitute forms of counterdis-course, "resisting" the Fascist construction of woman. These are the experimental novels Le forze umane (The human strengths)(1924) and Viaggio di Gararà (Garara's journey) (1931), both by the futurist novelist and artist who called herself Benedetta, and the 1939 novel Nascita e morte delta massaia (Birth and death of the housewife) by Paola Masino, which is also an experimental text.

Qui Parle, 2001

Teksty Drugie, Special Issue, 2017

This article discusses the sexiness of fascism as a phenomenon exemplifying the relationship between sex and power. Rawski’s approach to fascism, inspired by Susan Sontag’s well-known essay Fascinating Fascism, spans not only the fields of literary and cultural studies, but also psychology, history and anthropology. By analysing selected cultural texts (novels and films) alongside historical sources that feature the image of the “beautiful Nazi,” Rawski confirms Michel Foucault’s theses about beauty and the relationship between power and sexuality. In the context of the Nazi criminals who were – and still are – perceived as unequivocally erotic objects, beauty appears as a sublimated tool of power over another person.

60 Years Fascism Seminar Revisited, 2025

In 1963, historian George L. Mosse was invited by his colleague Gordon Craig to give an extended seminar on the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism at Stanford University. The purpose of the seminar was to critique draft chapters of The Crisis of German Ideology, the groundbreaking book Mosse was writing at the time. Participants included distinguished historians, philosophers, sociologists, literary studies specialists, economists, and political scientists from Germany, Spain, Iran, Great Britain, the United States, and beyond. Over the course of a semester—and only eighteen years following the end of World War II—these scholars defined and debated the parameters of European fascism. They asked: What are the intellectual origins of right-wing populist political movements? To what degree was fascism a European revolution? Were individual charismatic leaders the driving forces behind Italian and Spanish fascism and Nazism? What was the relationship of the churches and other institutions to fascist movements? In short, they strove to better understand the development of fascism in the twentieth century by debating the origins and trajectory of rightist, anti-democratic European political movements. Their discussions were often contentious. Mosse pushed the assembled professors to think of fascism as a comprehensive worldview that provided answers to its adherents in uncertain cultural and political moments. In a particularly heated exchange, Mosse, to the chagrin of many, declared, “I must object very sharply your saying these things are an ideological ragtag of ideas. That is a value judgment. I mean, we don’t like them, but it’s no more an ideological ragtag than any ideology.” In spite—or, perhaps, because—of these disagreements, however, the Stanford Seminar proved incredibly influential to the historiography of European fascism. Gordon Craig cited it in helping him develop the Sonderweg argument that modern Germany deviated from the rest of Western Europe by not adopting liberal democracy and the values of the Enlightenment after national unification in 1871. Meanwhile, Mosse himself went on to publish not only The Crisis of German Ideology (1964, 2021), but also such volumes as Nazi Culture (1966) and The Nationalization of the Masses (1974, 2023), which drew upon themes and ideas he first raised in Stanford in 1963. The original seminar was, nevertheless, limited. Little attention was given to lived experiences, including those of women, colonial subjects, soldiers, and the victims of fascist movements. Though some of the attendees would later make major contributions to the history of gender and sexuality, the discussion did not address fascist views of the body or stereotypes. Reflecting its time, few women participated in the seminar. The Stanford discussion also did not consider the varied utopias and empires that fascists hoped to create, nor did they weigh the importance of those who actively resisted Nazism, Italian Fascism, and other European anti-democratic movements. And though Mosse advocated for the importance of understanding fascism in the context of popular culture, many of his peers continued to frame their analyses within the less-fertile realms of diplomatic and political history. In the past half-century, these limitations have only grown more apparent. New studies have stressed the entangled relations, ties, and mutual transnational influences between right-wing radical movements, parties, and regimes, complicating the consensus view of fascism that the Stanford Seminar helped to pioneer. Meanwhile, other studies on fascist empires, colonialism, the disparate nature of European far-right worldviews, and the lived experiences of the victims of fascism have changed the terms of scholarly debate concerning the nature, characteristics, goals, and agenda of fascism. And yet the concept of “fascism” has nevertheless re-emerged with particular force as Europe and North America once again encounter new politics, radical and destabilizing rhetoric, and unprecedented events like 6 January 2021 in the United States, German coup conspiracies, and rightist coalitions. Indeed, the word itself is often used as a sort of passe-partout to describe deeply different political and temporal phenomena, encouraging many public-facing scholars to write and opine about an eternal and universal “fascism.” For these reasons, and in the spirit of the original Stanford Seminar, the George L. Mosse Program in History proposes to once again examine fascism in light of contemporary populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian movements and ideologies. Participants will represent the geographic diversity of current proto-fascist and fascist movements, including Eastern and Western Europe. They will also include experts from three generations of scholars who have worked on the history of fascism. They will be asked some of the same questions Mosse and others posed in 1963: What is meant by fascism? How does fascism co-opt institutions? How do historians deploy the term as compared to public commentators? However, the speakers will also be asked to consider new, pressing questions, which reflect how the debate over the meaning and definition of fascism have shifted in our current political constellation. For instance, the 2025 conference will also ask: Can historians make comparisons between different national contexts? What constitutes a “fascist empire”? How did European far-right movements seek to reshape the bodies of their populace? And is it meaningful to use the terms “fascism” and “fascist” to describe contemporary political movements? There is no question that it is high-time for such a reexamination. For example, the American Historical Association recently featured an Oxford-Style Debate, “Resolved: Fascism Is Back,” where scholars discussed the utility of the term “fascism” in examining contemporary global political crises. And since 2016, the common features of fascism are increasingly visible in Europe and the United States, including longing for a mythic past, for autocracy, for racial hierarchy, for political violence. Taken together, these features reveal if not an outright return of fascism, then the resurrection of many of its key elements. We need look no further than the 2017 spectacle of antisemitism and white supremacy on display at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and the current wave of violence against LBGTQ+ communities to see that concerns about resurgent fascism are not without merit. The explosion of online racist conspiracy theories, the detention of immigrants, widespread suspicion about the validity of elections, and the claim that executive branches should not be subject to constitutional constraints all indicate the continued vulnerability of liberal and representative governments to tyranny and anti-democratic politics. Against this backdrop, our conference endeavors to redefine fascism for our own time, sixty years after the classic debates from 1963.

GENDER. Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, 2021

Anti-feminism in Turkey: a critical political economy perspective Between femonationalism and anti-genderism. Right-wing populist gender politics in Germany History's gender-History as an anti-feminist resource in the discourses of the New Right Anti-genderistic conditions: völkisch gendering, conspiracy beliefs and anti-Semitism "Without white men, people like you would still be living in caves"-the marking of the unmarked Hostile interpellations. Using a parliamentary instrument to discredit gender studies (Anti-)feminist litigation-contesting abortion law in Germany and the USA From Verona, with love: "anti-gender" mobilizations and transfeminist (re)actions

palgrave, 2003

This book examines the everyday operations of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. The Gestapo were able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines, especially 'crimes' pertaining to the private spheres of social, family, and sexual life. One of the key factors in the enforcement of Nazi policies was the willingness of German citizens to provide the authorities with information about suspected 'criminality'. This book examines women denouncers in Nazi Germany through close examination of the Gestapo files. The author seeks to answer questions about how women in particular used denunciation and why so many ordinary women denounced 'deviants and dissenters' to the Gestapo.

Following the fruits of the second wave of feminism fiom the 60s into the 80s, the backlash has set in (cf. Susan Faludi), with texts such as Camille Pagha's Sexual Personae intensqing the reaction. Beyond the women's movemenf we are witnesses to a growing sense of intolerante, made manifest in xenophobic attitudes and racist attacks. In The Nature of Fascism, published in 1991, Roger Grifñn spends his fúst chapter dwelling on the "conundrum" of fascism, so temed because of the lack of consensus as to how fascism might be defined. We do not propose to consider the complexities involved here but will rnake use of Griíñn's working definition: "Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythc core in its various permutations is a pahgenetic fom of populist ultranationalism." (Grif6n 1991,26). For our particular purpose, we wish to focus on the concept of palingenesis (fkom palinagain, anew; and genesiscreation, biríh). Fascism promulgated the idea of rebiríh: the movement would bring about "a new national community", one which would draw on, "where posible,