Liberalism as Fascism’s Prefiguration by Abeera Khan
‘What becomes of gender and sexuality amidst the collapse of the liberal world order?’ In this essay, Dr Abeera Khan from SOAS, University of London’s Department of Gender Studies examines our current moment as one after homonationalism, where ‘the sparse and vanishing wages of inclusion lie exposed.’
If one were to construct a montage of the role of gender and sexuality in the maintenance of modernity’s violence, which scenes would we draw on? To say we are spoilt for choice would be an understatement; and yet, there are ideological tableaux that come to my mind — conspicuous arrangements of gender and sexual rights to embolden systematic asymmetries in the organisation of labour, land, and life.
We could begin with Oprah’s infamous unveiling of an Afghani woman in a burqa on stage at a New York benefit gala in 2001 (Hulton Archive) — an image that so effectively evokes the ‘women's rights’ rhetoric that abetted the invasion of Afghanistan, it boggles the mind that it was captured exactly eight months before 9/11. Or, the grotesque photographs taken by US soldiers – both men and women – enacting violations psychic and bodily upon the captives of Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion of Iraq (Hersh). These scenes could then be interspersed with celebrations of global triumphs in marriage equality: South Africa in 2006, the US in 2015, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality – the repeal of Section 377 – in India in 2018. We could also pan to Laverne Cox’s statuesque image on the cover of Time Magazine’s 2014 ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ issue (Steinmetz) or overlay aerial drone shots of Tel Aviv Pride in occupied Palestine.
The content of the sequence may differ from person to person, but what remains constant is the incongruity of these scenes with the present political terrain. Some images evoke a bygone era of liberal optimism, a sharp contrast to the culture wars of today that rally against the dangers of ‘gender ideology’, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and ‘woke-ness’, no longer a hysteria of the fringes but a concern legitimated in and as ‘of’ the centre. Meanwhile other images – capturing the brutality of US empire at the turn of the millennium, its foot soldiers now men and women alike; synchronised with the promotion of women’s freedom as the pretext for the extension of this empire’s reach – foreshadow the violence to come.
During the 2000s and 2010s, critical queer and feminist scholars argued for the contemporaneity of both: that the liberal progresses on gender and sexuality, and the acceleration of deprivation and death-making, were not coincidental, but correlative (Duggan; Eng; Haritaworn et al.; Puar). These scholars connected the ideological and cultural turn that seemingly undergirded liberal wins like same-sex marriage with the increasing conservative and neo-conservative influence in economic and geopolitical policy. In other words, the achievement of civil rights occurred at the same time as the suspension of political and legal rights and the fortification of financialised capitalism. The entrenchment of free market economics in the 1990s, the austerity policies following the 2008 market crash, the erosion of social welfare programmes, and the expansion of structural adjustment programmes in the Global South under the neoliberal agenda, the War on Terror’s securitisation of everyday life, its fortification of borders, their violently racialised logics and impact — these material relations were, as scholars convincingly argued, essential to understanding the shifts in gender and sexual relations in the West.
This correlation – between the seeming progress in the social rights of women and queers in Euro-America, and the expansion of imperial, capitalist, and carceral infrastructures – reveals, I would suggest, a substantive relation between liberalism and fascism: that these political states were not at all oppositional, as the mythologies of liberal democracy will have us believe. Rather, what Ruthie Wilson Gilmore calls the ‘intertwined imperatives’ of organised abandonment and organised violence – ‘capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism’(306) – reveal liberalism as fascism’s incubator. One of capitalism’s redemptive gambits is the gradual inclusion of previously reviled subjects, such as queers, to stay criticisms of its novel and compounding tactics that degrade life and liveability. In other words, capitalism endures, in part, because it periodically dangles indemnity to new peoples. We endure capitalism because we hope against hope to work ourselves into its charmed circle — despite all evidence pointing to its contraction.
Of course, the veneer of inclusion did not emerge unchallenged. The reservoir of critical homo-concepts that zeroed in on the role of sexuality in this landscape – homonormativity (Duggan), homonationalism (Puar), homocapitalism (Rao) – differently articulate this enmeshment of capital, empire, gender, sexuality, and race in their relevant historical conjunctures. That they weren’t widely taken up as critical analyses of the shifts in the bearing of sexuality on capitalist social relations is a classic tale of capitalism’s capacity to inhibit critiques of both its order and crisis.
Homonationalism’s Time
Tempting though it may be for well-meaning critics of Zionism to hurl ‘Homonationalist!’ at a gay man mocking critics of Israel’s pinkwashing from a Tel Aviv bunker brimming with shirtless, muscled settlers, neither the vernacularism nor the carnivalesque scene quite capture scholar Jasbir Puar’s intended critique of the coined term (2008).
The extent of the concept’s uptake and misconstruction was widespread enough to warrant a corrective from Puar herself:
'Homonationalism, thus, is not simply a synonym for gay racism, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to conservative political imaginaries; it is not another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an accusation, and not a position' (2013, 337).
Instead, homonationalism marked a historically contingent shift in the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality, whereby the degree to which queers were embraced by a society or state became a new measure of civilisational progress. Indeed it became a new contingency to grant – or seize – national sovereignty. As such, the video in the bunker is not ‘homonationalist’. Rather, homonationalism makes the political claims underlying the scene – sexual rights as another means to both sanction and propagate liberal democracies’ organised violence – systematic and legible.
Common critical focus has been on the entry of queers into hegemonic social relations – gaining positions of institutional power, but also a pronounced ideological shift to centrist politics – but this is epiphenomenal. Homonationalism is the means, not end, of this entrance. The shift in the relation between liberal democracies, sexuality, and capitalism is what makes this opening possible in the first place. As more queers in liberal democracies gained purchasing power and actualised assimilatory bourgeois aspirations, they gained entry as homosexuals into dominant ideologies (the nuclear family, the free market, the national imaginary, and so on) and institutions (the military, the IMF, the border regime, the Home Office, the State Department, and so forth). Heterosexuality was no longer a necessary precondition for an ascendant position in capitalist social relations, so long as that non-heterosexuality still reproduced hegemony.
The fallacies of liberalism were key to this process. Imperialism in the 2000s and 2010s relied heavily on notions of freedom, emancipation, and rights as its extenuation. As various Western states entered another phase of imperial geopolitics, those reliable queer consumers were extended invitations to become citizens proper through a more explicit participation in nationalist projects. All the better that these (sexual) citizens were a new fount of recruits to maintain a distinction between the normative and the deviant: welfare recipients, sex workers, the homeless, the unemployed, the poor, the racialised, were villainised as ever before. In other words, non-heterosexuality was no longer an automatic symbol of perversion. Indeed, perversion was not just a sexual domain; it was also an illiberal one — occupied by those who opposed the fight against terror and the fight for freedom (Wintour). Pervert status was suspended for those reliable LGBT+ participants and proponents of the increasingly unregulated market, with austerity policies culling social welfare, and militarisation at home and abroad. Liberalism (economic) begets liberalism (political), or so it seemed.
Heterosexuality was no longer a necessary precondition for an ascendant position in capitalist social relations, so long as that non-heterosexuality still reproduced hegemony.
We, however, no longer live under homonationalism’s time. Its territorial capture, too, shrinks by the day. From Argentina and India to Indonesia and the US, decisively illiberal democracies are the state form du jour. Far-right populism marries market fundamentalism with essentialism (biological and cultural) to address the social ills borne off decades of austerity and an emboldened, expanding financial elite. The cumulative impact of decades of engineered precarity is, among other things, the erosion of social solidarities and the vulgarisation of the fascistic imaginary. The culture wars – increasingly globalised, but not without the specificities of national dynamics – are a response to the contradictions of capitalist social relations in our current conjuncture writ large. Moral panics about trans people, gender ideology, migrants, ‘wokeness’, critical race theory, radical left jihadism, and the like, are not, as some would have us believe, a disaffection borne off identity politics gone rampant. They are a response to the hollow, undelivered promises of free-market prosperity that compound existing gendered, racialised, and colonial antagonisms to explain away organised abandonment. In other words, liberalism’s contradictions are leading to its own – and our – unravelling.
Indeed, this is precisely what critics of queer and trans liberalism warned us about ten years ago (Raha). Far from ivory tower abstraction or activist sanctimony, these critiques were attuned to the contingency of progress (legislative rights and consumptive capacity) and progressivism (cultural and political representation). Considering our current moment as a ‘slide back’ from the supposed gains of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s assumes these gains were universally achieved. In the UK, the recent proposed cuts to Personal Independence Payments (Ryan), the Supreme Court decision to limit the definition of woman to a biological definition of sex (McConnell), and the proscription of direct-action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) fall within a longer legislative and policy trajectory. The Austerity Programme of the 2010s, the Hostile Environment policy, the Terrorism Act, and Section 28 set the precedent for an accelerated retreat of welfare systems, the expansion of policing and surveillance, and moral panics over gender and sexuality. Citizenship under racial capitalism necessitates a constitutive outside –– exclusionary in both form and function. The rights gained by citizenship are leveraged to legitimate the disenfranchisement and depravation of those who fall outside the ideal type of the citizen (that is, most of us). Why should sexual citizenship be any different?
... the genocide in Gaza is not an aberration within modernity, it is the logical conclusion of imperialism as it appears in the twenty-first century.
Few could have predicted the exact contours of the contemporary ‘mask off’ moment. But these critiques of liberalism were prescient insofar as their suspicions of legislative progressive and mainstream embrace as quid pro quos – rather than organic progressive shifts in ideological and material relations – have been validated. The ascendancy of the LGBTI+ subject occurred in tandem with emboldening markets, borders, and nationalism — and a concomitant erosion of welfare and social solidarities. In other words, what we are experiencing is not a regression of gender and sexual rights, but an accelerated expansion of the exclusions upon which these rights were gained. It follows, then, that in the current conjuncture contoured by the ‘mutant strains of neoliberalism’ (Slobodian) mainstreaming fascism across the globe, the relation between state, capitalism, and sexuality has once again transformed so that homonationalism is no longer the primary frame through which to understand it.
Fascism’s Prefiguration
This is not an indictment of the concept. As the Pinko Collective argues in the introduction to After Accountability, ‘concepts do not act on their own. They are the product of people thinking, criticizing, remembering, fighting, and passing down elements of their concrete situation in history and struggle’. If liberalism is out of fashion, then analyses of liberalism’s masking of social violence are no longer pertinent either. Trans and queer liberalism, homonationalism, gay imperialism, and their correlates are insufficient analytics for the current moment not because they are lacking – prophesying is not the measure of analytic rigour – but because the concrete situations they were assessing have changed. Conceptually, homonationalism is more useful today as an archive of liberalism’s striking failures: it is one of the structural relations that facilitated the slide into fascism.
The genocide in Gaza demonstrates how the current manifestation of imperial domination has foregone liberalism as its preferred mode of articulation and defence. Liberties for women and queers – Palestinian or not – are no longer a mainstay of Zionist propaganda. Zionist appeals to its own gender and sexual freedom have given way to what Palestinian feminist scholar Walaa AlQaisiya has called ‘occupation of gender by genocidal means’ (33), where gender and sexuality become another form of property usurped by the settler project. Neither gender nor sexuality offer protection from the totalising abjection of a settler colonial genocide. Individual genocidaires and their supporters may rely on ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ (Decolonize Palestine) and ‘gays thrown off rooftops’ (Reuters Fact Check) talking points, but pinkwashing is no longer a mainstay of hasbara tactics. Gender and sexuality continue to consolidate far right and imperial projects, but they appear less and less as appeals to democratic virtue and more as proud and unfettered colonial domination. Indeed, whilst there may still be gay supporters of imperialism and far-right populism, these political formations no longer wave the rainbow flag. Freedom is less likely to be espoused through the language of democratic, sexual, and women’s rights but through civilisational stakes of light against darkness (Levy). That liberalism itself has relied on similar civilisational logics and geographic demarcations in its deployment of race, gender, and sexuality is a reminder that it is not fascism’s rival. Liberalism is fascism’s prefiguration.
Indeed, fascism arrives through liberal policy and procedure. ‘The conviction regarding the absolute antithesis between fascist despotism and liberal democracy', argues Alberto Toscano in Late Fascism, is ignorant to, on the one hand, liberal democracy’s originary violence, and makes banal, on the other, the deprivation and disenfranchisement that occurs under its contemporary mandates, its ‘concrete and steel’ (32). Today, at every turn, we are confronted with corroboration of Toscano’s thesis. If we are to take this insight seriously, the genocide in Gaza is not an aberration within modernity, it is the logical conclusion of imperialism as it appears in the twenty-first century. Framing the Zionist entity’s assault on the region as a return to the brutality of ‘older’ colonialisms, and the attack on civil liberties in liberal democracies as a rollback of gained rights, is a tempting, but misguided, characterisation. It evades how the current iteration of imperial violence relies on distinctly modern technologies and social formations. Fascistic in aim and form, these tactics may no longer rely on freedom and rights for justification; instead, it is liberal institutions and ideologies that have set the stage for their arrival.
That liberalism itself has relied on similar civilisational logics and geographic demarcations in its deployment of race, gender, and sexuality is a reminder that it is not fascism’s rival. Liberalism is fascism’s prefiguration.
What becomes of gender and sexuality amidst the collapse of the liberal world order? We may only be able to answer this question retrospectively, having battled against the all-consuming temporality of liberalism. At the moment, we find ourselves in homonationalism’s ‘after’; here, the sparse and vanishing wages of inclusion lie exposed. Now, queers and feminists are as caught as ever in the battle of energies and ideas. In her poem, Death is Everywhere and Not Here, Victoria Adukwei Bulley offers an apt cue for our times: ‘there will always be more of you to kill or free’ (34). Fascism swells, but so do counter struggles. New scenes and arrangements of space, time, and people emerge – not only tyrannical, but also solidaristic, resistant, with roots in sharpened movements and analytics – at the counter-demonstration, at the anti-raids meeting, on the flotilla, in the transience of a de-arrest, in the underground formations that remain necessarily anonymous and unintelligible. One of the tasks at hand is to attend to the particularities of the contemporary conjuncture in the development of our tactics and critique. In his essay, The Great Moving Right Show, Stuart Hall warns us that the strength of what he calls the ‘radical right’ lies, in part, ‘in the radicalism of its commitment to break the mould, not simply to rework the elements of the prevailing “philosophies”’ (16). His observation is apposite to the current conjuncture; the success of contemporary fascism can be attributed to its ability to reissue itself as a rupture (rather than a continuity) and to reframe the failure of liberalism as unprecedented (rather than an inevitability). Amidst these fictions, reinvention cannot solely be the domain of our enemy.
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Image credit: Composition IV by Wassily Kandinsky
