#3: On Gender Panic and Fascist Barbarism
More notes from this uneven present.
Another day, another moral panic in which queer and racialised bodies have been placed in the cross-hairs of the global Great Moving Further Right Show. This time, the tide of reaction finds itself upon the Paris Olympics, where the mediatised spectacle of international sporting provides a stage for the rehearsal-by-proxy of various scenes of reactionary sadism from the Christofascism of Texas’ drag bans to the particular obsessions of British transphobic ‘feminism’.
First, there was the initial stream of confected outrage over a Drag Race performance at the Opening Ceremony, a reminder that the days of full-throated denunciations of queer art in the public sphere as ‘satanic’, ‘demonic’ and ‘deviant’ have never been too distant. This, of course, turned out to be a minor storm, soon overshadowed by the sight of a mediocre children’s author unleashing the TERFs upon two women’s boxing champions (now gold medalists), the Algerian Imane Khelif and the Taiwanese Lu Ying Ting, for failing to meet transphobic liberalism’s phrenological metrics of ‘femininity’.
As with the 'sex testing’ scandal surrounding intersex runner Caster Semanya over a decade earlier, this policing of an athlete’s chromosomes - by a police officer, a fitting representation of Meloni’s Italy if ever there was one - is simultaneously infused with ‘race’, trading on fantasies of an injured white femininity within a toxic cocktail of biological essentialism, colonial fantasy and transmisogyny. As Niharika Pandit writes in the Contrapuntal, the abuse of Khelif rehearses a colonial script of racialised gendering that takes the form of “ungendering, misgendering, or regendering” non-white bodies “as less-than-human, alien, strange, not-up-to-the-mark”, including in the excision of racialised women from 'womanhood’ itself. Positioned along these multiple gradations of infrahumanity, the eliminationist interpellations of transphobic ‘feminism’ and anti-feminism now potentially extend to all women - cis, trans and intersex - who find themselves outside the normative standards of binary white femininity.
Above all, what this episode has illuminated is the constitutive incoherence of transphobic sex essentialism, in case this was ever in doubt. The same grifters who have been campaigning to deny puberty blockers and other gender-affirming healthcare to transgender teenagers around claims that physical anatomy constitutes the foundation of ‘sex’ have now conceded that even what is termed biological ‘sex’ is malleable and subject to multiple other influences, hormonal or otherwise. Whether transphobes primarily seek to surveil a person’s genitalia, or whether they speak instead of ‘hormone levels’, both operate within the transphobic imaginary - somewhat like epidermal markers of ‘race’ - as arbitrary signifiers of difference defined solely in terms of their exclusions. And despite TERFs’ putatively ‘critical’ posture towards gender, such exclusions derive their intelligibility from the binary social norms of gender - or what Judith Butler terms, in Bodies That Matter, the ‘heterosexual matrix’.
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Fascist mobs on the rampage across England and in Belfast. Mosques attacked. Black and South Asian men assaulted. Hijabs ripped off Muslim women. A pogrom born out of twenty years of racism and Islamophobia normalised by politicians, the press and the police, with echoes of previous ‘whiteness riots’ in 1919, 1948, 1958 and 2001. Like its historical precedents, this latest wave of racist violence follows what Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley identify as a familiar pattern of:
…police partisanship, local and national media fomentation, moral panics about crime and ‘race-mixing’, followed by calls for new criminal and immigration legislation. They have also operated as significant flash points for constituting the public interest as white.
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Perhaps an indication of how far the new transphobia has permeated common sense ideology is the extent to which both the attacks upon and defences of Khelif have been contested on a terrain of cisnormativity. Instead of unreservedly defending the right of trans athletes to compete in elite sporting, solidarity with Khelif has most often been confined to defensive re-assertions of her status as a cisgendered woman. In a global context of escalating transphobic violence in which the very term ‘transgender’ has become a pejorative slur, a disavowel of this abjected interpellation may simply - without a direct challenge to transphobia - run through a reiteration of the gender binary itself.
The comparatively tepid solidarity for trans people in recent days stands in contrast to the widespread circulation of the signifier ‘biological woman’, including by those otherwise well-versed in Simone de Beauvoir. But we should not lose sight of who is under attack in this conjuncture. As Rikvah Brown writes in Novara, it is transgender teenagers, “not 25-year-old boxers with bloody noses, we should be worried about – because it’s they who will be burned by the fire that Khelif, simply by existing, has ignited.”
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Amidst flames of reaction, racialised communities organising for their self-defence. Fascists outnumbered by anti-racists in Liverpool and Manchester, chased away by punks in Blackpool, prevented from breaking into migrant housing in Bristol by a cordon of anti-fascists. In Brighton, fascists reduced to a pathetic rump of three sad men hiding behind police. Significant anti-racist demonstrations of several thousands across Britain have, for now, pushed the forces of racist street violence back.
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The entrepreneurs of white racial grievance will be out in force reframing these pogroms as an expression of the 'legitimate concerns' of a ‘left behind’ 'white working class' subject. Writing of this ‘legitimate concerns’ brigade, Richard Seymour reminds us that, contra the economistic reductions of some on the left who misread racist riots as a displacement of underlying ‘bread and butter’ concerns, these supposed ‘legitimate concerns’ amount to nothing more than the psychosocial ‘wages of whiteness’:
No doubt we need more bread and butter, but that is strictly orthogonal to what is taking place. Racism sometimes works as a form of displaced or distorted class politics, but not always. The ‘legitimate concerns’ of these rioters pertain to the idea of lost ethnic status. Where the ‘white working class’ is misleadingly invoked, ‘white’ is the operative term: the idea is that workers, far from being exploited, have been denied the appropriate moral recognition as white members of the nation by ‘elites’ too overzealous about extending recognition to minorities.
Whether offered as an alibi for Trumpism, Hansonism or Tommy Robinson’s thugs, the ‘left behind’ narrative is primarily a claim for cultural authenticity that operates as a move to innocence for racist violence in both its structural and street-based variants. If the British Labour MP Zarah Sultana once responded to this trope by pointing out that “the enemy of the working class travels by private jet and not migrant dinghy”, Alberto Toscano notes that those who invoke the language of “legitimate concerns” today obscure the extent of cultural and political work required for defining the problem of post-Brexit Britain in terms of “dinghies” rather than “private jets”.
One of the most astute critics of left nationalism in the current conjuncture is Sivamohan Valluvan, who in The Clamour of Nationalism, deconstructs this conceit of a ‘white working class’ as a whitening of the working-class. Drawing upon Robbie Shilliam’s Race and the Undeserving Poor, Valluvan historically situates the ‘left behind’ trope within colonial distinctions between a ‘deserving’ white poor and a racialised ‘undeserving’ poor during the emergence of the welfare state. In Britain’s postcolonial present, the imagery of ‘white working class’ decline primarily remains, as Valluvan argues, a cipher for ‘race’. In establishing a false dichotomy between the ‘working class’ and so-called ‘cosmopolitan elites’, and assigning migrants and racialised people into the latter category, this culturalisation of class implicitly equates ‘the working class’ with whiteness itself. At the same time, this nationalist equation of ‘cosmopolitan’ with ‘elite’ disavows the lived reality of vernacular, everyday forms of cosmopolitanism in the multiracial working class as it exists, erasing migrants and racialised Others from ‘the working class’ in the process.
It is this same everyday lived multiculture that may provide, as Valluvan argues, the resources for the emergence of a plebian anti-nationalist politics that refuses any search for a fixed or ‘authentic’ working-class subject. As against melancholic nationalisms that conflate nativist cultural nostalgia with class politics, a line of flight from nationalism could proceed from the actuality of the multi-ethnic working-class in all its inauthenticity and cultural mongrelism. Such an anti-nationalist cultural politics, whether in the form of Rock Against Racism in Britain or the multiracial Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, may emerge out of urban geographies in which migration and difference is lived as a mundane, ordinary feature of the texture of everyday life. Without necessarily suggesting that such patterns of multiculture exist in the same form in all cities, it is in these spaces of urban cohabitation that the cultural closures of nationalism, and not migration, appear as anomalous to working-class realities.
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These two recent mobilisations of reactionary passions share, in different ways, the features of moral panics identified by Stuart Hall. Writing of the rise of Thatcherism, Hall understood the ‘authoritarian populism’ of 1980s Britain to be a cultural-political project sustained by recurrent ‘law and order' campaigns directed at ‘enemies within’. Moral panics, were, for Hall, characterised by the discursive production of specific events - for example, “mugging” - capable of constructing a popular consensus for authoritarian policing and neoliberal statecraft. The question remains, as Ali Meghji suggests in the aftermath of the most recent racist violence, not whether the racist disinformation circulated by pogromists contains any ‘truth’ (a question to which racists are indifferent), but why ‘race’ remains an always-weaponisable ‘floating signifier’ for the mobilisation of reactionary resentments.
Much as Hall’s analysis remains of relevance for historicising the racist violence of the last week in England, the anti-trans moral panic around the Olympics can similarly be understood in conjunctural terms as an authoritarian contestation of hegemony. In constructing the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘nation’ in defensive and identitarian terms as perpetually besieged by various constitutive outsides, both transphobic and racist moral panics - and their accompanying fantasies of revenge - converge around an authoritarian yearning for the nation-state, fixed identity and social order. What both share in common in other words is, as Seymour argues, an anxiety about “borders and boundaries eroding, of people being where they have no business being.”
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Transphobia increasingly forms the lowest common denominator between the milquetoast centrism of Starmerism in Britain, the MAGA authoritarianism of Trump and Vance in the United States, and the new-old forces of European neofascism. It is a thread that runs through and binds together together such disparate formations as ‘gender-critical’ ‘feminism’, Christian anti-feminism, new currents of eco-fascism, palingenetic white ultranationalism, and Great Replacement narratives. It is potent precisely, as Judith Butler argues in her latest work, Who’s Afraid of Gender, in its incoherence and emptiness of signification, its capacity to “collect and mobilise” multiple resentments.
Anti-trans discourse is, in this sense, a quilting point for a broader reactionary ideological formation variously termed “late fascism” by Toscano, “inchoate fascism” by Seymour, and simply ‘fascism’ by Butler. In this new transnational configuration of reactionary desire, the phantasmatic enjoyment of fossil ‘freedom,’ of the nuclear family and the ‘nation’ converge within the same constellation of ressentiment and narcissistic jouissance.
If the constitutive outsides of this fascist, or fascistizing, imaginary are multiple and varied, this articulation of once-disparate reactionary demands on the Right may be understood as what Laclau and Mouffe termed a ‘chain of equivalence’. The new global far-right have shown themselves, in this cannibalising of undead populist desires, more than capable of investing empty signifiers such as ‘the people’, ‘freedom’ and ‘woke’ with the negativity of friend/enemy distinctions.
For those who cling onto the notion that a better world is possible, transphobia needs to be challenged - in the workplace and elsewhere - because its appearance is a reminder of just how extensive our collective defeat could be.
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The pogromists have just set alight
a migrant hotel.
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If the interminable present is, more often than not, a scene of abject horror, then horror, and its capacity to render contingent and estrange us from that which is taken as natural, may be a fitting lens for apprehending this present.
I have just finished reading Jon Greenaway’s Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination which revisits the discussion around capitalism’s relationship to the figure of the monster. The monster is, as Greenway writes, that which “so many of us are made into”, but also “the sign that both warns us away from and simultaneously points us towards something new.” It may also contain possibilities of escape:
What ways out of and through these violent systems might there be? Is it possible to think about this process, this enforced category of being made monstrous, as a ground for a kind of utopian thinking?
Incidentally, the phenomenon of monsters and the monstrous also forms the theme of a newly published collection of essays by the transgender historian Susan Stryker, When Monsters Speak. Perhaps there is solidarity in becoming-monster?