Pascism or Fatriarchy?
We are fully in the throes of the 2024 Presidential Election. Kamala Harris says the present right-wing assault on our democracy must be stemmed. And Trump spits out authoritarian barbs and lies. A rising fascism is often named as our largest challenge. But ours is a particular kind of fascism that should be specified.
Fascism is a term that bespeaks the extremism of Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. And this, in the U.S., today, is not exactly that. It is our very own brand of fascism, even if it is being shared elsewhere by other macho thugs like Bolsonaro in Brazil; Modi in India; Putin in Russia, etc.
What is our fascism doing now? A patriarchal fascism that I’ll coin “pascism,” it is identified with Trump/Vance and tied to the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol alongside Trump’s refusal to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. So, what is particular about the assault today?
Women — trans, queer, non-binary, gender-free, cis — are a target of this particularly new PACISM, but not exclusively. LBGTQ people and disabled people are also demanding to be seen and recognized. This diversity, so to speak, is part of the newly constituted nation while women are everywhere today: in the home, in the workplace, in the boardroom. And they have been punished for this, through the reversal of Roe v. Wade, by losing the right to their reproductive freedom.
My use of the term women is inclusive of trans, gender-variant, queer, and nonbinary identities, across and through racial and class and national borders. And my usage also recognizes the political construct of woman that must be reckoned with as a part of the subversive fight against misogyny. And misogyny is the political system — structures, ideologies, and practices — that seek the control and exploitation of this formidable group/class. I wish to embrace the specificity and differences that clarify that we share this punishing system.
The opening of the gender binary is part of the larger challenge to (all) borders — the out-dating of nation states and their prerequisites by global capital is the instigator of this new form of fascism. Misogynist imaginary nationalisms will try and buoy the loss of old nation states while attacking gender fluidity.
Given these changes and assaults, my discussion of fascism highlights the role of patriarchy and misogynoir — Moya Bailey’s naming of the intricate web of racial and gender oppressions. I want a language that makes the gendered structure of fascism explicit and visible.
Naming is crucial to seeing. Names allow seeing something as present. They bring realities out of the shadows into the bold to be reckoned with. This is why naming our brand of fascism matters. It is a misogynist fascism that structures the absolutism and totalitarianism in unique sexualized and racialized and gendered forms.
Toxic masculinity and white supremacy connect in this historical moment different from before. The toxicity is directed at the fluidity of gender and its meanings and choices alongside the changing borders of family and work; public and private; nation and globe. And we need better theory for seeing how misogyny enables/instigates racism, now, within fascism. Better theory means better thinking and language to see with, connecting the dots rather than severing or ignoring them.
Rape and Fascism
I cannot get my head around how a rapist, who has been found guilty of such, can run for president unless rape is a normalized practice of sorts. E. Jean Carroll says it was a fight. He penetrated her with his penis. So, yes, this is a rape, and yet she was laughing — not believing, not wanting to believe, being devastated. And she says she did not come forward in 2016 because she knew it would make him look better, stronger, more manly with his followers: a man who can take anything he wants.
Fascism is a response to cracks and openings in patriarchal misogynist power. Pascism or Fatriarchy makes clear this is a new kind of macho absolutism responding to the multiplicity and complexity of sex/gender choices.
This absolutism demands the reconstruction of borders that global capitalism has undermined and destroyed. National borders no longer hold as laborers and products and capital travel. It has led to the crisis of the nation-state itself. It is an impediment to global flows, especially of laborers. It is why immigration is created as a crisis rather than a necessity.
But once borders loosen, misogyny itself is rattled from loosened gender differentiation and hierarchy — which is a series of borders emanating from the binary man/woman. Today the binary is being displaced by non-binary gender choices, gender-free, trans, etc. It is a new battlefield that initiates fascistic responses — authoritarian and totalitarian.
During a conversation onstage at a Moms for Liberty event recently, Donald Trump said: “The transgender thing is incredible,” he told the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”
It is important to make patriarchy and its misogyny visible as a politics when so much political talk evades its presence. Ignores it. Names it as something else.
Misogyny, on the state level, seems more and more exposed and visceral. It seems different so it becomes different. Maybe it is because I live in the U.S., where women have lost the right to abortion that we had for the past 50 years. But maybe it is also because of the visibility of Afghan women’s challenge to the Taliban’s excesses, and the “woman-led revolution” in Iran, and the courageous Ukrainian women snipers, and the women activists in Chile and Brazil. Women demanding their freedom/s are seen across the planet even if there are endless attempts to enforce our unfreedom.
Cis and trans women of every kind are leading the revolutions for freedom in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Argentina, and Chile, and in the United States. I want to further expose and make visible the power we have as we fight for our bodies, their right to be free from sexual violence, and their right to determine and choose their destiny. This mobilized human struggle is part of the political crisis of this moment for humanity and planet earth.
A New Gendered Fascism
Supposedly, politics is about the Publix. Politics is about the economy. Politics is about class. Politics is about power. Politics, as a narrative, evades sex or gender or the realm of the (once) private sphere.
Think of the women in Iran, and the women in Afghanistan, and the women in Ukraine. How they are fighting against the misogyny of their rulers and for their bodies and the humanity of all. The women in all the struggles at this very moment remind us of a humanity that includes all genders, and gender choices alongside the multiples of races, and their hues.
And as we embrace the freedom struggles of Palestinians of every gender, we must remind everyone in the U.S. — with no right to our/their bodies and no choice to live free of bombs and death — there cannot be justice or peace. When women live without the right to control our bodies — free of war or with access to abortion — we are not fully part of the world. These struggles connect women across this globe no matter how disconnected the struggles may seem. Focus only on Netanyahu and nationalisms and you will miss all the rest of this.
If we are not looking to understand and see how misogyny is present and changing, we will not see the newly forming fascism. If you are not looking for misogynoir it remains invisible.
It is crucial to see how a masculinized gender has become a key element in the global economy, with Modi, Duterte, Trump, Bolsonaro. All these male leaders utilize rapist embodied hateful language to express their contempt for the changing globe where women of color dominate in numbers — and unsurprisingly are most of the new displaced refugees and migrants. Poor women of color are closest to the pain — to the climate disaster — to the crisis of this moment.
For Trump, these women of color birth the very nation he hates and fears: a non-white one. He rails at the “squad” — and all women of color — as too radical, unhinged, un-patriotic. The policies they embrace support the very new world he runs from. And yet men such as Trump oversee systems of power that necessitate this oppressive and exploitative system. Their politics makes no sense for the world they wish to oversee and protect. And there is the truth: women of color are the heart of the new world with their many labors and loves that share everywhere.
Trump — or should I say the right-wing white supremacist nationalists led by Steven Miller — separated families at the border and put children in cages, destroying their lives. Most of these children will grow up as orphans — the newest generation to face the ravages of war in peacetime. He uses his racist rhetoric against all refugees of brown and black colors to keep out the women. Misogynoir is in full play here.
Trump practices misogyny in private life daily. He dishonors women all the time and rapes and sexually harasses and abuses. His more public practices focus on white nationalism. He activates each with the other. And yet, Kamala Harris is the presidential candidate, possibly unsettling or unmooring the patriarchal anti-abortion controls on women’s bodies. It remains an open question whether she will fully challenge the present misogyny and world order protecting Israel’s Zionism or remain too much a part of this state apparatus.
It is hard to think through all this because political rules were not set up to deal with misogyny and sexual practices, but rather capitalism and issues of economic equity. Trump’s anti-abortion stance is simply a contradictory practice. The very women — poor women of color that he hates and does not want reproducing — are left choiceless, without rights to abortion and contraception. But the right wing is too caught up with white nationalism. So, he is caught in their own mess. His racist misogyny is his silent cover for everything and nothing.
If you do not agree that the un-bordering of the globe by capital has also opened up a new plural/borderless democratized set of sex and gender choices that has instigated a fascist backlash, then think about what might explain the misogyny of fascism in this historical moment, because this is not fascism in the style of Mussolini or Hitler.
It is too fascinating that while we are suffering Trump’s misogynist fascism there is a woman of color running for President. And I think she will win. But it is unknown what this will really mean.
As one last thought, this was written before Israel’s detonation of pagers and other individualized electronic devices against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon. This is the newest stage of Netanyahu’s misogynist fascist Zionism which is borderless: there are no civilians, everyone is a target in this incomparable, inhumane, and insufferable heart-breaking genocide.
Zillah Eisenstein is a noted international feminist writer and activist and Professor Emerita, Political Theory, Ithaca College. She is the author of many books, including “The Female Body and the Law” (UC Press, 1988), which won the Victoria Schuck Book Prize for the best book on women and politics; “Hatreds” (Routledge., 1996), “Global Obscenities” (NYU Press, 1998), “Against Empire” (Zed Press, 2004), and most recently, “Abolitionist Socialist Feminism” (Monthly Review Press, 2019).