Fascist Feminism
No TL;DR found
Abstract
Repudiations of trans-exclusionary radical feminism often take the form of a call to strip from TERFs the name feminist. TERFism, it is often argued, is not "real feminism," and in this same vein it is sometimes argued that lesbian exponents of transmisogyny are not a "real" part of queer history. Asa Seresin and Sophie Lewis—both of us transplants from "TERF Island," living in the United States—here advance a different approach. In this critical dialogue, we suggest that, if some feminisms are patriarchal, and some lesbianisms are invested in whiteness, then queer feminists must become comfortable positioning some feminists—even queer ones—as their enemies. With reference to minoritarian sections of the archive of early twentieth-century British lesbian suffragism and, equally, of 1970s US lesbian separatism (both of whose contemporary heirs we locate in the "gender critical" movement), the discussion attends to fascisant themes within Anglophone feminism past and present, such as the sacralization of cis female fertility and the homoerotics of sameness. What if certain feminisms, historically, have not simply colluded with white-supremacist projects but actually amounted to fascisms themselves? How might ceasing to deny that feminisms can be fascist actually strengthen antifascist transfeminist organizing in this moment?