Fascism, gender and sexuality [FASCISM AND POLITICAL THEORY BOOK] DANIEL WOODLEY
It has been suggested that to
understand fascism we first need to explain its relationship to the commodity
form as a structured social practice which conditions the ways in which reality
is understood. As a social form, the commodity is independent of its material
content, implying that ‘value’ – as a social mediation – is contingent on the specificity
of historical-social relations in different commodity-determined societies. In
this final chapter, we will be concerned with the kinds of body fascism
produces by analysing the social production of gender and sexuality in fascist
societies. Building on the argument in Chapter 8, the aim is to highlight not
simply the aestheticization of gender and sexuality in fascism, but the
connection between the triumphant fascist body and its cultural and economic
coordinates. Here it is important to link our discussion of gender with
Foucault’s (1977) conceptualization of productive power as control over the
homeostatic social body, focusing on the techniques adopted by fascists to
cultivate the internal equilibrium of the race-nation by adjusting its physiological
reproduction. The organization of the social body in fascism exceeds the
constraints of bourgeois law, medicine, demography and criminology to acquire a
totalizing force: the fascist body becomes a ‘corporeal text’, the site of
breeding practices and disciplinary projects which exceed the established
framework of liberal governmental regimes.
In what follows, we will be
concerned with three themes. First, it is essential to locate the fascist
representation of gender and sexuality in bourgeois culture and society. Mosse
(1985, 1996) argues that modern definitions of masculinity and heterosexuality
are closely tied to bourgeois nationalist discourse in the nineteenth century,
and locates fascism in this tradition. Although it is no longer viable to view
this discourse on gender in purely negative terms – as De Groot notes ‘women’s
history has extended beyond exclusive concern with female subordination to
explore the many and diverse forms of subversion, accommodation, and resistance
which developed in order to deal with their situation’ (1989: 89) – it is
impossible to explain the stratification and commodification of gender in
fascism without reference to the historical relation between capital, gender
and asymmetric power relations between men and women. To make sense of this
relation, we need to understand the differentiation of forms of value between a
relative masculine sphere of production, material exchange and control and an
equivalent feminine sphere of reproduction, emotional exchange and subordination
(Holter 2003). As noted in Chapter 2, fascism connects a mythical past with an
idealized future through a revalorization of archaic themes, fixing and
preserving an artificial value for ideological commodities through state
intervention. This phenomenon is revealed unambiguously in the fascistization
of gender and sexuality, which reinforces a type of gender asymmetry indicative
of reactionary modernity.
Second, we need to explain the construction of
masculinity and femininity in relation to the corporeal aesthetics of fascism.
Here we can link the discussion of gender with our earlier discussion of
nationalism and racism, highlighting the links between gender, race and nation
in the cultivation of the fascist social body. In bourgeois culture, alternative
gendered and racial identities are things to be represented – to be contrasted
against a rational ideal type of white, male heterosexuality, and so
distantiated spatiotemporally from European modernity.1 The fascist discourse
on gender offers an exaggerated defence of white masculine identity in a period
of crisis: the mythic construction of masculinity and femininity in fascism is
contingent not simply on the separation of gender roles or the
legitimation/proscription of bodily practices, but on the ideologization of
virility and fertility as political imperatives (Korotin 1992; Spackman 1996).
Yet, while defence of white masculinity remains a consistent and defining
feature of right-wing discourse, the cultural reinforcement of what Kaufman
(2007) terms a mysterious yet repellent male identity remains vulnerable to the
levelling force and abstraction of modernity in which feminine moral psychology
competes with yet also completes a ‘surplus-repressive’ masculinism predicated
on the fantasy of power. Fascist man, argues Theweleit (1987), actualizes the
repellent masculinity which bourgeois man is prohibited from expressing in
order to perpetuate a sex/gender system based on structured inequalities of
power.
Third, we must explain the ambivalent connection between fascism and
homosexuality. The received view of fascism as a homophobic ideology conceals a
more complex set of determinations. On the one hand, fascism is directed
against all manifestations of effeminacy and sexual deviance, and the persecution
of gay men and lesbians in Nazi Germany testifies to the extreme cruelty of
fascist regimes. On the other hand, the performative enactment of
hypermasculinity in fascist political culture militates against the
stabilization of bourgeois gender roles through a suppression of feminine
identities and a highly charged sentimentalization of male camaraderie outside
the context of heterosexual domesticity. Although the normative idealization of
heterosexuality in fascism is omnipresent and oppressive, the misogynist
violence of fascism highlights the tension between a prescribed homosocial
fantasy of ‘male autarky’ (where men are invulnerable to and independent of
women) and a proscribed homosexual culture (where men dispense with the
necessary mediation of capitalist patriarchal relations in the possession and
exchange of women) (cf. Spackman 1996: 59–60). As a largely ‘male event’,
fascism cultivates a homoerotic charge between men yet promotes a ‘cognitive
and ideological apartheid around homosexuality’ (Sedgwick 1994: 51). [DOWNLOAD BOOK]
