On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
“Bratich’s razor-sharp analysis provides invaluable answers, and in so doing, offers a crucial tool for antifascist praxis.”—Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
“On Microfascism unpacks the deeply disturbing gender narratives that underskirt our societies and create an insurgent cruelty that corrodes our human relationships. This is an incredible intervention in the crisis we are living through and calls for us to collectively look deeper when responding to the growth of misogynist, white supremacist movements.”—Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
“Jack Bratich has written a compelling and original discourse on how microfascism presents itself nowadays and how this is imbued with misogyny, the cult of death, and violence in many forms—war included. A must-read for all scholars and activists.”—Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital