Fascist Feminism: A Dialogue

Sophie Lewis: Hello Asa. I am delighted to get this opportunity to think about fascist feminisms and their erotics with you. To date, there has been a substantial amount of scholarly work on the nexus of fascism and male homoeroticism, but very little, as far as we know, on the libidinal economy of the equivalent formation in women's history. Likewise, we've seen a great deal of excellent archival work coming out lately on the anti-liberatory endeavors of women (eugenics, “mothers of massive resistance,” female slave-owning, etc.), but not so much on the sometimes specifically feminist character of these white supremacisms and how we might apprehend it. We both perceive a kind of Eros running through the archive of the far-right wing of women's rights: it appears palpable to us in the pleasures people take in exercising maternalist authoritarianism, in the euphoria of the womanhood-as-suffering worldview, in the wounded attachment undergirding same-sex cis separatism. You have commented—on the UK context specifically—that “the commitment to misery, to being a ‘bloody difficult woman,’ is one of the main affective drives of the stubborn British insistence on an anti-trans and anti-sex work position” (Seresin 2021). For me, this really pinpoints the self-satisfaction of the national feminism in question, which is, incidentally, conservative even when it is cultivated among Labour supporters, say. You helped bring into focus a brand of smugness that is, once named, pretty unmistakable to many of us with close ties to Britain: Unapologetic Englishwomanhood™, a populism so grandiose it verges on auto-eroticism. (I'm thinking of all the TERF hashtags that evoke a defiant brandishing of wombs, of vaginas, of breasts, of XX chromosomes in terms redolent, for me, of the romance of the Blitz.) I think I was feeling in this direction when I speculated about the “no-nonsense” fetish that centrally drives British TERFs (Lewis 2019), and I am grateful to you for filling out my mental picture.

Asa Seresin: Hi Sophie! I am likewise thrilled to be having this conversation with you.

SL: I anticipate pit-stops at everything from neopaganism to leatherdykes; from “civilizing” suffragists to antiporn lawyers; from Mrs. Pankhurst to Posie Parker; and from the women's KKK to “TAnon” (the analog of the more famous QAnon network, which focuses specifically on the “globalist” conspiracy to, er, transgenderize America's children).

In case of doubt, we are not talking about the long archive of reactionary action that happens to have been creatively undertaken and overseen by women (e.g., eugenics, pro-segregation, pro-lynching, settler-genocidal, pro-life). We are talking about the times when this action was lived and framed as feminism.

I will briefly give two examples of the discomfort that attaches immediately to instances when scholars take fascist declarations of feminism at their word. Kathleen Blee (1991), in her research on 1920s Klanswomen, found that feminism actually played a major role in their ideology. Reviewers of Blee, however, hastened to explain that this feminism was “insincere” or “false.” Similarly, in Hurrah for the Blackshirts!, Martin Pugh (2006: 144) discloses how Emmeline Pankhurst's personality cult, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), foreshadowed the interwar dictatorships, and he documents how the British Union of Fascists (BUF) (to which many suffragettes flocked) “couched much of its propaganda in distinctly feminist terms.” But he then backtracks by insisting, “All of this amounted to a feminine expression of fascism, rather than feminism” (144). We're not so sure. We think Pugh is too quick to purify and absolve “feminism” here.

AS: Right. We want to take a different approach. What if certain forms of feminism, historically, have not simply colluded with white-supremacist projects but have actually been fascist themselves? How might ceasing to deny that feminisms can be fascist actually strengthen antifascist organizing in this moment?

SL: OK, before we dive into this conversation, should we briefly indicate our working definitions of both feminism and fascism—these apparently antithetical terms? Are you happy to call “feminism” any project that seeks to enlarge the sphere of action for a human (individual or collective) female, feminine, or gender-oppressed subject? Are you okay with understanding fascism as a fundamentally colonial matrix of domination, whose cults seek to impose, among other things, right reproduction upon human populations via both positive and negative eugenics? If so, how should we go about broaching the subject of their overlap? I am keen, as well, to hear you describe the contours of your evolving commitment (or not) to this internally riven rubric, feminism, from your standpoint.

AS: When it comes to our definition of feminism, I think it's clear that we've already run into a problem: agitating on behalf of women and agitating on behalf of gender-oppressed subjects are two quite different projects—and this is before we even get into the problem of who is permitted entry to the category of womanhood. As you've mentioned, part of what we are trying to do here is resist a purifying impulse when it comes to feminism. It is politically and theoretically unhelpful to dismiss all white-supremacist, or transphobic, or otherwise oppressive feminisms as “not real feminism.” This is particularly true, given that the imposition of a normative gender regime from which nonwhite people are coded as deviating has been a part of so many colonial projects. Already, then, we have illuminated a closer connection between fascism and feminism than is usually acknowledged, based on Aimé Césaire's (2000: 36) understanding of fascism as the application “to Europe of colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘n——s’ of Africa.” I think it's useful to hold this definition of fascism alongside your 2019 New York Times opinion piece, “How British Feminism Became Anti-trans.” There, you write,

Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it's not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain's TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.) (Lewis 2019b)

Historians who work on the role of women in fascist movements often express surprise that women would be invested in a political ideology that is inherently anti-feminist and misogynistic. Yet female fascists themselves expressed a strong belief that fascism had something to offer women, and I don't think we should rush to dismiss this as false consciousness. Fascism did have much to offer certain subsets of white women who were invested in upholding white supremacy as well as conservative social norms surrounding the family, religious morality, and social purity. Martin Durham (1998: 11–12) notes that at its founding meeting, “the Italian fascist movement adopted a programme which included a call for women to have both the vote and the right to hold office. . . . By the end of 1921, some 2,000 women belonged to the movement and the Bologna party paper was already referring to ‘Fascist feminism’ in describing local militants.” Benito Mussolini doubled down on this promise to offer women the vote at the 1923 Rome Conference of International Alliance of Women—an organization founded by Millicent Fawcett and Susan B. Anthony, among others—where he was the opening speaker. Meanwhile, during the interrogation following his arrest in 1940, Oswald Mosley stated his belief in the “complete equality of men and women” (29). This rhetoric echoes earlier fascist literature, such as a 1934 article from Blackshirt magazine, which asserts that “fascism sees women as complementary and equal to man” (qtd. in Gottlieb 2021: 102).

It perhaps won't come as a surprise that fascist movements generally failed to deliver on their promises to offer social and political “equality” to women. Historically, to announce your intention to advocate for gender equality via an entrenchment of gender roles has been a way of signaling disingenuousness. But recently TERFs have picked up this trope in earnest. In his 1932 book The Greater Britain, Mosley argued, “We want men who are men, and women who are women” (qtd. in Durham 1998: 29; emphasis in the original). This statement sounds like an anticipatory refutation of the common assertion that “trans women are women.” In this sense, it foreshadows the rhetoric of the gender critical movement, whose most fervent desire is, in their terms, the state's acknowledgment of the “reality” of sexual difference and the impossibility of sex/gender transition.¹ TERFs love to fixate on the phrase “trans women are women”; Helen Joyce (2021: 10) writes, “What first intrigued me about gender-identity ideology was the circularity of its core mantra, ‘transwomen are women,’ which raises and leaves unanswered the question of what, then, the word ‘woman’ means. What led me to think further was the vilification of anyone who questioned it.” Here, Joyce projects the “circularity” and incoherence of transphobic thought onto trans people themselves. This is an important point of convergence between fascism and TERFism: an anti-intellectual celebration of intuitive perception and a celebration of epistemic incoherence as if it were a virtue.² (A related point of convergence—anti-Semitism—has flared up in relation to Joyce's book in particular, which claims that the trans “global agenda” is funded by a sketchy cabal of Jewish billionaires.)³ I have to admit I laughed out loud at the moment when Joyce (2021: 7) claims, “Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people's sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex.” Her rapturous celebration of evolutionary instinct (that word exquisite!) perfectly aligns with fascism's anti-intellectual intellectual tradition.

SL: As you know, your point here is in line with the published, then egregiously censored, argument Judith Butler made in an interview with Transgender Marxism editor Jules Gleeson on no less a platform than the Guardian, the venerable liberal newspaper with the notoriously trans-antagonistic UK office. (Members of the US office of the Guardian have even denounced their counterparts in London because of the latter's TERFism.) Butler (2021) was circumspect: they merely said that “the anti-gender movement is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.” So, we might pause here and spell out that, while all TERFs are gender criticals, not all gender criticals are TERFs. However much the two constituencies seem to blur in practice, the RF part of TERF—that is, the radical feminist argument for trans exclusion—marks TERFism as distinct from the wider, nonfeminist, and indeed often anti-feminist position that deems “gender ideology” to be detrimental to society or evil. However, we are adding, explicitly, that we cannot assume a priori that there are no feminists—even radical feminists—within the “anti-gender” strain of contemporary fascism.

It was a small minority of straight and lesbian radical feminists who, historically, promulgated and then doubled down on a trans-exclusionary account of sex-class's primacy (meaning: dyadic at-birth sexuation is a primary axis of human oppression relative to class, and also relative to racialization). Radical feminism is by no means represented by this minority. Nevertheless, the racial politics of that minority's feminism are worth taking seriously. As a number of scholars at this point have argued—María Lugones, Emi Koyama, and Marquis Bey are the names that, for me, immediately spring to mind—there is an unspoken whiteness to this dyadic, cissexualist account of the world. I would like to see even more work in this vein, focused, for instance, on putting TERFist ideological mechanisms into historical context, specifically in terms of their racial interests. We might recall how white women in Europe and America for centuries simultaneously analogized their cause to, and differentiated it from, antislavery and antiracism, popularizing the notion that “woman is the n——r of the world,” for example, and fighting tooth and nail against the idea (I'm looking at you, Elizabeth Cady Stanton) that it might be “the hour of the Negro.” For decades, as Alyosxa Tudor (2002) has argued, TERFS have timed their organizing in such a way as to distract (and detract) from the movement for Black lives. I certainly noticed many people on social media remarking upon something that had also struck me very forcefully at the time: the day J. K. Rowling (2020b) tweeted incendiarily, “‘People who menstruate.’ I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?,” was more or less the day the media finally realized that the worldwide insurrection sparked by the murder of George Floyd was no mere flash in the pan. It was as though Rowling wanted to pull attention away from anti-Blackness and foster worry, instead, about “female erasure.”

I'll add one final suggestion. In addition to paying greater attention to this potentially anti-anti-racist dynamic, left anti-capitalists might profit from remembering that the belief in the primacy of sex-class was one salient (though by no means sufficient, it goes without saying) ingredient of fascist identity. Klaus Theweleit (1987: 169) shows exhaustively in Male Fantasies that “one of the primary traits of fascists is assigning greater importance to the battle of the sexes than to the class struggle.” As your points about Mussolini and Mosley remind us, it is quite possible to be a white-supremacist advocate of gender equality.

AS: There is an interesting moment in Julie Gottlieb's (2021: 5) Feminine Fascism where she blames communist class reductionism for “stunting the development” of feminist antifascism. I think this does an injustice to the long tradition of feminist antifascism while simultaneously scapegoating communist movements for the fact that some women were drawn to fascism. Anyway, to return to your earlier question concerning my commitment to feminism, I'm glad we're writing this together because mine is not as durable as yours, I think. I grew up in the exact tradition of British feminism that we're critiquing—I went to the same suffragette-founded high school as Maya Forstater, the TERF fired for transphobia, whose case famously gained the support of Rowling. As a teenager I remember hearing a teacher making disparaging comments about another student for wearing a niqab because ours was a feminist institution. A year after I left, the student feminist club successfully lobbied the Tesco petrol station opposite the school to stop selling “lad's mags” (softcore pornography). The rage I feel as someone formerly interpellated by this form of feminism is something you share, I think. It's made me especially attentive to intellectual and political moves to innocence, whether that be the “memeification” of queer ethical superiority or casualized “men are trash” misandry (Seresin 2019). Sophie, could you tell me more about your relationship to feminism?

SL: Like most queer scholars, I've wrestled long with dis/identification with “feminism.” Neither Monique Wittig's suggestion that lesbians are not women, nor Lugones's lesbian-informed denunciation of the coloniality of woman-centered politics, struck me as particularly shocking when I first encountered them. At the same time, my father's anti-feminist taunting made me feel like a feminist at the most elemental level, ever since I can remember. You can tell I'm agonizing over this answer! Especially since it's you—my friend Asa—asking me whether I am a feminist in the pages of TSQ, my answer could run very long. I could first disclaim that opposing feminism (which sometimes takes the form of calling feminism “fascist”) is itself a fascistic move. I might then talk about my total opposition to femonationalism, maternalism, femocracy, misandry, sexual moralism, and liberal feminism. I could describe the alienation (at best) and aversion (at worst) I've experienced with regard to feminisms encountered in the wild, since adolescence. I could affirm my, nonetheless, gut-deep anti-anti-feminism. But you're right: in other contexts and moods, the matter is less equivocal for me than it is for you. I'm a “feminist against the family,” after all; a feminist against cisness (as Heaney has it);⁴ a partisan of Beth Richie's “abolition feminism.” I sniff misogyny a mile away. My whole white queer middle-class European girlhood was awash in red-hot antipatriarchal emotion! Lastly, I think I actually see “feministness” as partly outside individuals' choice and control, as a relation of social recognition. For example, my feministness has often been ascribed to me, for me, just from looking at me on the street. The ascription isn't wrong. I mean: I do “identify.” The raging, righteous pleasures of feministness are potent. The addictiveness of that righteous feeling prevented me for many years from becoming attuned to (and learning to fight) feminist femmephobia, feminist whorephobia, feminist anti-Blackness, ableism, cissexism, Orientalism, and so on. But, also, fat, bra-less, hairy-armpitted AFABs like me (and many TERFs . . . ) are widely “read” as feminists, in public, regardless of our speech.

AS: Earlier you brought up “wounded attachments.” I want us to zero in now on the question of erotics and why we're trying to illuminate the specifically erotic pull of fascist feminism. Given that fascism defines itself so vehemently against sexual freedom, queerness, and the erotic, it might surprise some people that we are choosing to think via the term erotics. What do you think this framing illuminates about the fascist impulse within feminism?

SL: I think naming the erotic frisson in fascist and fascisant feminisms is useful because it tells the truth about that “commitment to misery” these actors vaunt, right? There is an excited, sacrificial kind of doom that attends the condition of being so-called women-born women, in the eyes of participants in eugenic feminism. This doom (which they pretend to want to fend off but actually hungrily seek after, for instance in cis misogyny apocalypses like The Handmaid's Tale) is epically beautiful, to them. There are homo-, hetero-, and autoerotic pay-offs to be had here, in spades. Jules Joanne Gleeson (2021b) recently speculated about “an addiction to disgust reflex triggers” in the feminists swarming her Twitter account. This is well put. The promise of libidinal rewards following enlistment in TERFery is a bit of an open secret. Fun times are implied quite clearly in the popular idiom Prosecco Stormfront, for example (which refers to the British webforum and hotbed of TERF organizing Mumsnet). Tudor (2020), similarly, defines TERFism as “an activity you do for pleasure.” A piece of biopolitical property is being defended, indignantly—lustily. I will try to paraphrase: Mother's sacrosanct body is beset on every side by thieves and liars, only to be additionally caricatured by impostors, an imposture that governments then enshrine in law, making laws that honor this impostor, this travesty, in the way that Woman ought to be honored!! And only other bona fide wombyn can possibly understand the gruesomeness of this indignity. But men like Derrick Jensen and Graham Linehan can be fulsomely praised for sticking up for women . . .

As an extinction fantasy narrative, it is all quite gothic. Which reminds me: do you remember the internet meme circa 2016 (whose origins are unknown to me, honestly) whereby the quasi-murderous arch TERF Cathy Brennan was derided as a “fake goth”? I have a pet theory that fascist feminists, in their capacity as (fake) goths, fundamentally agree with Edgar Allan Poe (1846: 165) that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” I suppose what I am claiming is that the millenarian emergency of “female erasure”⁵ imagined by Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, and Janice Raymond is an imminent disaster the cisterhood loves, Cassandra-like, to hate.

Uncovering the presence of this apocalyptic intoxication or self-martyring titillation in some feminist discourses can be useful simply because it makes it easier to understand the draw these mythologies exert upon feminized (usually white, but not always) human beings. In the Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, I was gratified to find that Kyla Schuller (2021: 200) agrees with us: “TERF politics has an erotics.” Kyla parses the textual intercourse between Daly and Raymond as charged with yearning and eroticism. But it is a chastity-fetishizing eroticism, I think, and it is not unrelated to the feverish fits of collective maternal prudery organized by TAnon, with its fantasies of child trafficking and “rapid-onset” contagions of transgenderism among America's juveniles (Gill-Peterson 2021; Leveille 2021). The scope for falling in love with the romance of one's own stalwart moral courage, and that of one's feminist sisters, resonates for me with the romance of eugenic feminism more generally, which includes figures like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Sanger, Kathleen Mayo, Sarojini Naidu, and Indira Gandhi (Nadkarni 2014; Ziegler 2008). Eugenic feminism rests on a stirring story about woman's redemptive, all-important role as the author and guardian of the reborn and regenerated race: a story whose loudest proponents are sometimes, paradoxically, lesbians.

On which note: tell me more about the lesbian fascist suffragettes.

AS: Earlier I mentioned that for many women the draw of fascism lay in its promise to enshrine their identity as mothers, to protect the family, and to promote social purity. In early 2021 I became interested in a group of women who found fascism appealing for quite different reasons. I've called them lesbian fascists, but this is really something of a misnomer, not only because in this early twentieth-century moment “lesbian” was still an emergent category and not a term these people necessarily applied to themselves, but also because many of them might be closer to what we now think of as transmasculine (not that the two are always mutually exclusive). The British aristocrat and BUF member Rotha Lintorn-Orman, for example, would dress up as male figures (such as Father Christmas and “a grandfather”) at fascist social events; the French athlete and later Nazi Violette Morris got a double mastectomy so she could better fit inside her cyclecar (at least, this was her stated reason). Others, such as Mary Sophia Allen, who served as a police officer alongside her partner, Margaret Damer-Dawson, were masculine, butch women who publicly foregrounded their womanhood, even if their private lives were another story (Allen was called Robert and “Sir” by people she knew personally). Allen's fascist politics revolved around her belief that society was in drastic need of “women police”—she traveled to Germany to speak with Adolf Hitler himself about it—and she wrote a three-volume autobiography with woman and lady in every title (The Pioneering Policewoman, A Woman at the Crossroads, and Lady in Blue).

For Allen, women police were vital for the enforcement of social purity feminism in public. She believed that “women police, in patrolling parks and streets, could protect children” (Durham 1998: 44), a task for which men were presumed to be intrinsically unsuitable. There's such a strange convergence of desires at work here, which is typical of the archive of lesbian and feminist fascism. On the one hand, Allen's rabid eagerness to serve as a police officer (for years she did so voluntarily, to the point of actually being sanctioned by the state) does seem at least somewhat rooted in her queer masculine identity—I'm thinking of her desire to be called “Sir.” At the same time, she grounds her argument about the need for women police in family ideology, in protecting the innocence of the child. This is your area of expertise, so I'm going to turn it over to you now. Clearly, fascism is deeply invested in white reproductive futurity and in the unit of the white nuclear family. We are accustomed to pitting queerness in comfortable opposition to this kind of politics. What do you make of the women police movement, propelled by the mix of family ideology and queer (trans)masculinity? Do you see a relation to the way in which lesbian TERFs in the present are fixated on defining womanhood via reproductive capacity even where lesbianism itself often precludes women from conceiving children biologically?

SL: You raise an important point. The concept of homonationalism, with its white-supremacist freight of “family values,” is practically always illustrated with reference to gay male (white) married couples like Pete and Chasten Buttigeig. Why not Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, and her partner (police officer) Helen Ball? Speaking of whom: the women's police movement is far from dead. During the anti-police uprising of 2020, a slew of op-eds (from Ms. magazine to CNN) called for police departments to hire more women because policewomen, it is erroneously supposed, do not murder Black people. In particular, by virtue of their sex, they have children's best interests at heart. In October 2020 the National Fraternal Order of Police tweeted a photo of a white Philadelphia policewoman, her eyes half-closed in maternal pity, with her arms clasped around a tiny Black two-year-old. The caption read, “This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”⁶ This was blatantly fascist propaganda, made even more egregious by the fact, as it later emerged, that the Philadelphia police itself had ripped the child in question away from his mother earlier in the day (that woman, Rickia Young, has been awarded $2 million in damages). This circular tale is such a perfect encapsulation of the irreducible class antagonism between racialized and proletarianized caregivers and what could equally be called, in the carceral-eugenic tradition, the National Maternal Order of Police.

As you notice, there is so much apparent tension and contradiction in this female cop archive, notably between the policewomen's identifications with state masculinity and their vindications of the principle of feminine maternal authority over a populace. But perhaps motherhood (the institution) was always simply the other side of the coin of paternal fascism, the “good cop” to fatherhood's bad one. The genre certainly extends to today's transphobic military lesbians and white lesbian femonationalists: women like Miriam Ben-Shalom, a former staff sergeant in the US Army and contributor to the pagan anti-gender Female Erasure anthology, whose statements of loyalty to “apple pie, motherhood and the American flag” are a matter of record. While researching the historical roots of the explosion of Islamophobic governmental feminism in Germany—feminism that seized upon an incident of mass sexual assault that took place in Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015 in order to peddle anti-Muslim border policies—I discovered that Cologne was in fact where the Prussian Weibliche Kriminalpolizei (WPK) first began in 1923. The WPK was Germany's female criminal police department, whose officers were responsible for children and adolescents. It expanded hugely under Nazism. Learning about the WPK gave me an added perspective, shall we say, on the adulation that Germany's transphobic second-waver-in-chief, the lesbian feminist Alice Schwarzer, heaped on the Cologne Police Department in early 2016, for having defended the bodies of native German women and girls from the groping hands of what the new neo-Nazi feminists in Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicization of the Occident) were calling “Islamist rapefugees.”⁷

For avoidance of doubt, let us stress again that there are many vital and liberatory strains of lesbian politics. The majority of 1970s lesbian organizing seems to have been trans inclusive (Heaney 2016), and much of it was also family abolitionist, in the sense of commune-oriented, anti-state, anti-capitalist, polymaternalist, and children's liberationist (I'm thinking here of contributions by Kay Lindsey to Toni Cade Bambara's Black Woman anthology, published in 1970). I am, as you know, extremely fond of the Wages Due Lesbians, a mothering-against-motherhood moment in history.

And that is precisely why I am so repelled when certain radfems, today, deploy lesbianism (whether or not they are themselves lesbians) as a family-values, think-of-the-children type of conservatism. “Gender critical”–identified straight feminists who say they are fighting lesbophobia, in particular, seem to utter online the most gender-traditional appeals to the moral authority of motherhood one could ever imagine. They typically call for carceral state powers to back this authority. Meanwhile, Britain's massively popular message-board Mumsnet is a self-declared “army of mothers,” whose percentage of lesbian combatants is notoriously tiny, but where feminists nevertheless constantly air concerns about “lesbian erasure.” (One could witness this same dynamic in Rowling's (2020a) infamous anti-trans open letter, which worried about lesbians being “called bigots for not dating trans women with penises.”) I cannot say what proportion of contemporary TERFism is really waged by lesbians, as opposed to heterosexual women using lesbians as their flagship endangered species, but my distinct impression is that the proportion is tiny. Alas, it is not zero (viz. “Get the L Out”). I have myself witnessed avowed lesbian socialist feminists tie themselves in knots at Marxist events, mounting fundamentalist defenses of a definition of femaleness as “cyclical secretion of luteinizing hormone.” Kathleen Stock, the depressingly influential lesbian academic, is very invested in purifying the definition of lesbian sexuality to exclude kink, as well as cocks (be they flesh or silicone).

Amid all this awfulness, though, my question to you is: how do we avoid trivializing the analytic charge (so dear to Stock) of societal “lesbophobia,” while fighting neo-social-purity-feminism? Do you agree that lesbians have good reasons to be reticent to see themselves or their forebears as implicated in fascism? Could you reflect a little about the distinction we are drawing between an individual's or even a subculture's fascist drives, and the rather different matter of the fascism of a state or government apparatus? Secondly, could you unpack for us this concept of a homoerotics of sameness and what it helps us do here?

AS: As I mentioned earlier, I felt conflicted about the title I chose for the short essay I wrote about Lintorn-Orman, Allen, and others, which was “Lesbian Fascism on TERF Island.” I don't want to imply that I have uncovered some massive archive of lesbian fascism or to further stoke the impression of lesbians and trans people being at war with one another. At the same time, in choosing such a provocative title I did want to push back against the reflexive framing of lesbians as intrinsically progressive and innocent, an idea that has quite powerful currency right now. More and more, my work is oriented toward critically interrogating the work that “queer” is doing in contemporary culture as a totem of political purity. As Kadji Amin (2017) points out, this “idealizing impulse” exists within queer theory too, and I've been deeply inspired by the heuristic of de-idealization that he lays out in Disturbing Attachments. I'm really drawn to de-idealizing projects like Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller's (2019–present) Bad Gays (first a podcast, soon to be a book), which traces the histories of messy, cruel, and even straight-up evil queer people—including quite a few fascists. At the same time, it's telling that it took them until season 3—after twenty-six episodes!—before they featured a lesbian. Writing “Lesbian Fascism on TERF Island,” which I called Bad Gays fan fiction, was also a loving form of dissent from the idea that lesbians are intrinsically better people or that lesbianism and fascism are incompatible.

In a 1992 essay, “Of Catamites and Kings,” Gayle Rubin describes a subcultural tendency toward exclusionary and even fascistic practices within lesbian culture:

Despite theoretically embracing diversity, contemporary lesbian culture has a deep streak of xenophobia. When confronted with phenomena that do not neatly fit our categories, lesbians have been known to respond with hysteria, bigotry, and a desire to stamp out the offending messy realities. A “country club syndrome” sometimes prevails in which the lesbian community is treated as an exclusive enclave from which the riffraff must be systematically expunged. . . . Over the years, lesbian groups have gone through periodic attempts to purge male-to-female transsexuals, sadomasochists, butch-femme lesbians, bisexuals, and even lesbians who are not separatists. FTMs are another witch hunt waiting to happen. (249)

It is no accident that the terms Rubin uses here—xenophobia, bigotry, stamp out, expunge, and purge—evoke far-right inclinations. At the same time, you are totally right that there is an important distinction between a subcultural tendency and fascism outright. However exclusionary their communities might at times be, lesbians are not well positioned to marshal the resources of the state in their favor. (Indeed, they are more likely to be targets of state persecution.) Similarly, I think you are right to question “what proportion of contemporary TERFism is really waged by lesbians” and to point out the injustice of lesbians having to answer for the bioessentialist and queerphobic nonsense committed by transphobes in their name.⁸

With all that said, I hope it's clear that I'm not interested in going after lesbians because I think they are especially fascistic, but rather that I'm invested in dispelling the myth that there is something inherent within lesbian culture that insulates it from harboring fascism. As I mentioned above, the historical co-implication of fascism and white male homosociality/homoeroticism is quite widely acknowledged. One crucial trope of this co-implication is what we have been calling the homoerotics of sameness. In gay male culture, this takes the form of valorizing a kind of cookie-cutter, hypermuscular, white male form as the gay ideal. We can also recognize it in the phenomenon of twinning: when two men who look exactly the same date each other. Bobby Benedicto (2019: 283) has written about the morbid narcissism of gay twinning and the fact that, “by definition, twinning cannot accommodate racial difference; its narcissism necessarily colludes with another prohibition: the prohibition against interracial desire.”

Lesbian culture does not really have a comparable investment in twinning, but as a concluding thought I want to read the history of lesbian feminist bigotry against butch/femme as part of this tradition of the homoerotics of sameness. In quarantine I watched a 1992 documentary, Framing Lesbian Fashion, and was struck by what a couple of interviewees were saying about the 1970s frumpy lesbian feminist aesthetic, which several of them called a “uniform.”⁹ Of course, wearing a uniform in itself is not indicative of fascism. But the way that the wearing of this uniform was enforced—and dissenters, particularly butch/femme lesbians, condemned—is worth pausing over. In Pleasure and Danger, Joan Nestle (1984: 236) writes, “The message to fems throughout the 1970s was that we were the Uncle Toms of the movement. If I wore the acceptable movement clothes of sturdy shoes, dungarees, work shirt and back pack, then I was to be trusted.” I think the policing of those who deviated from the “uniform” of “acceptable movement clothes” betrays an investment in sameness, to the idea that one can and should broadcast their commitment to a social/political position via aesthetics. Perhaps more importantly, it betrays a narrowness of imagination around what lesbian identity would be. As many people have pointed out, there is an indelible connection between the femmephobia found within certain lesbian communities and the transmisogyny of straight cis women who code trans women as regressive traitors to the cause of feminism. You see this in writing like Elinor Burkett's (2015) New York Times op-ed about Caitlin Jenner, “What Makes a Woman?,” in which she disdainfully indicates that Jenner is wearing the wrong kind of uniform: “A new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair . . . offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner's idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular ‘girls’ nights' of banter about hair and makeup.”

Speaking of uniforms—I want to end on a less bleak note, by bringing up what I know, Sophie, is one of your favorite films. Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform) is a boarding school lesbian love story that, rather extraordinarily, was made in Germany in 1931.

SL: Leontine Sagan's (1931) film is a vision of queer Jewish antiauthoritarianism, sapphic solidarity, and children's liberation. It skillfully discusses the affective and aesthetic seductions of fascism, argues for the urgency (amid the crumbling Weimar Republic!) of an antiheroic politics, and culminates in a finale in which, symbolically speaking at least, the girls take off their uniforms and embody a politics of what Ewa Majeswka (2021: 151) in Feminist Antifascism calls “contingent universality,” mindful that love by itself is not, as it were, enough, because after all, “there is [also] love at the core of fascist mobilization.” I think this is perhaps as good a note as any upon which to end this dialogue: honoring the history of feminist and/or lesbian anti-fascism even as we—indeed because we—insist on being attentive to the non-synonymity of feminism and anti-fascism and the collective arts by which they are, always contingently, made synonymous. Thank you, again, Asa, for engaging in this mutual exploration with me.

AS: Thank you, Sophie!