Soledad Miranda as the Countess Nadine Carody in Vampyros Lesbos (1971) dir. Jesús Franco
Fascism is a patriarchal movement that seeks to reaffirm masculine supremacy in the face of feminist, gay and transgender struggle. Fascism incorrectly analyzes the rise in such movements as the result of some Jewish (or in other contexts, Western) influenced “degeneracy” meant to destabilize the population and cause a crash in white birth rates. In this way fascism is obsessed with the purity of the body, particularly the ability of the body to impregnate or give birth according to heteropatriarchal norms. This fear over declining birth rates is used to justify restrictions on women’s bodies, violent homophobia and transphobia. In order for the nation to be reproduced its subjects must be willing to adhere to “traditional” gender and sexual norms, have “normative” hormone levels and bodily configurations. Simply put, fascism demands the only expression permissible to be that of compulsive cisgender heterosexuality and that giving birth is a necessity of all women.
Fascism, like settler colonialism, is obsessed with the demographic question. The population ratio between settlers/“the master race” and the colonized/enemy races is heavily scrutinized and considered to be of the utmost importance. This can be seen with the “great replacement” and the related “white genocide” conspiracy, which concerns itself with the fact that nonwhite populations are expanding and then extrapolates that this must be an intentional act of genocide against the white race. The reason for the obsession with the demographic question is that settler colonialism requires an imbalance of power in order to function, so the demographic question is a practical one for the ruling class. The less of the colonized, the less effective resistance to colonialism they can offer. In this way perpetual genocide of the colonized serves the extractionism of capitalism as new lands can be developed.
The demographic question is a gendered issue in addition to being a racial or ethnic one. Settler colonial capitalism must always be expanding and this expansion requires a constantly replenishing labor pool. Migrant labor is one way that this question is resolved by capital but this fuels the conspiracies of the fascists and the ire of the nativists. This is why the obsession with white birth rates persists; an increase in white children is seen as necessary for the survival of the race, which is a metaphor for the survival of the capitalist world system. Women of the dominant racial and class order become broodmares for the race, literally reproducing the nation-state and producing new laborers. We can see this logic in the recent reversal of abortion rights in the United States where women are expected to give birth during this mass hysteria over declining (white) birth rates.
The demographic question is related to the Jewish question. The Nazis would target the Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfeld for his research on gay and transgender people as part of the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft. The Nazis would infamously destroy his research by burning it in public on May 6, 1933. Hitler would declare Hirschfeld “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” As Joni Alizah Cohen notes: “We can see that Nazism understands itself to be engaged in a culture war with Jews over gender roles and gender/sexual variance. But, just as we saw in the original National Socialist regime, Nazism also understands the fundamental terrain of this war to be on the level of biology. There is a deep anxiety expressed in Nazi and far-right thinking which is constantly concerned about the biological undermining of the white race yes, but also the white male, and his hormone balance, his testosterone level. Nazi political ontology understands the biological as one of, if not the most important terrains of political dispute. We know this in our understanding of Nazi race theory, but what has been neglected is the centrality of endocrinological purity and security to Nazi ideology. In this sense, endocrinological purity is the gender/sex corollary of the Nazi eugenic project of racial purity.”
