Petronella Lee, Anti-Fascism Against Machismo: Gender, Politics, and the Struggle Against Fascism (Tower InPrint, 2019), 54pp.[1]

By Devin Zane Shaw, January 5, 2019

Combatting the rise of far-right and fascist social mobilization is an urgent task for militant antifascists. Whereas liberal antifascists place a naive and unfounded faith in civil society and law enforcement to apply normative and legal force to permanently marginalize far-right movements, militant antifascists fight these movements through direct action and the diversity of tactics; for the latter, it is a question of meeting organizing with organizing. Militant antifascists engage in information campaigns to place pressure on liberal institutions to deny platforms to fascists; they dox anonymous or pseudonymous far-right organizers to out them to the communities where they live and work; and when the far-right mobilizes in the streets, to harass and intimidate our communities, militant antifascists meet them with the diversity of tactics.

Given that over the past four years, far-right street-level mobilizations have organized around publicly explicit white nationalism, racism, and xenophobia, antifascists have often focused on antiracist organizing—in militant forms of street mobilization and forms of community outreach, self-defense, and coalition building. But the far-right isn’t only white supremacist and racist. In general, in the context of the United States and Canada, we could functionally define the far-right and fascism as forms of populist social mobilization which demand the re-entrenchment of the economic and social hierarchies that have enabled furthered the project of white settler-colonialism: including, but not exclusively, class stratification, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and white supremacist racisms (plural here, given how differing types of racism—-anti-blackness, anti-Indigeneity, antisemitism, Islamophobia—play different roles in far-right ideology).

While there are debates concerning the exact class composition of far-right movements, it is generally acknowledged that the bourgeoisie and fascist movements typically ally against socialist or communist social forces. (Here my own view aligns with theorists typically associated with the concept of the “three-way fight”). And while it is generally acknowledged that racism plays a formative role in the ultra-nationalist populism of the far-right, some aspects of racism remain undertheorized (for example, the relationship between American and Canadian far-right notions of a white homeland and the apparatuses of the broader the settler-colonial project). (On this point, Rowland “Ena͞emaehkiw” Keshena Robinson’s “Fascism and Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective” remains indispensable).[2]

Petronella Lee’s Anti-Fascism Against Machismo, then, is a timely and important contribution toward understanding, to paraphrase the subtitle, gender and politics in the struggle against fascism. The essay, itself a brief but engaging forty-two pages, is divided into three parts. In Part One, Lee examines the gender politics of fascism and the ways that liberal feminism has failed to interrogate the white supremacist underpinnings of its call for state protections of (white) women and (some parts of) LGBTQ+ communities. In Part Two, she sketches a short, episodic history of women’s antifascist activity, focusing on movements in Ethiopia (during Italian colonization), the Spanish Civil War, and partisan resistance against Nazi occupation in Yugoslavia. In Part Three, Lee draws on these histories to outline seven insights for an explicitly feminism antifascism. She concludes by calling for a militant antifascism critical of machismo.

In Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (2018), Matthew N. Lyons categorizes gender and sexuality as “neglected themes” in analysis and criticism of the far right, though Lee’s meticulous citation apparatus shows how extensively its sexism, misogyny, and transphobia has been documented by researchers and journalists. In other words, for example, the far right’s adherence to masculinist gender hierarchies has been documented but it is not always clear how these groups coalesce, or splinter, around the role of women within the movement. Lyons, for his part, identifies four ideological themes present in the far right: “patriarchal traditionalism,” which promotes rigid gender roles typically based on a patriarchal family structure; “demographic nationalism,” which maintains that the woman’s main duty is to have children for the nation or race; “male bonding through warfare,” which emphasizes warfare, combat, and martial values as a bonding mechanism between men (and which implicitly or explicitly celebrates homoeroticism and male homosexuality); and “quasi-feminism,” which advocates specific rights for women (typically) of the privileged nation or race, but maintains nonetheless that male dominance is natural and immutable.[3] After drawing these distinctions, he catalogues how these themes are manifested, sometimes coexisting in tenuous and contradictory ways, in various movements in the United States. There’s a risk, though, that despite the attention to empirical detail, that the reader comes away from Insurgent Supremacists without a clear account of how these far-right positions on gender hierarchy cohere, converge, and where they opportunistically seek to normalize their views.

On this point, Lee’s analysis is incisive. Despite their disagreements, far-right movements share three common assumptions: first, that gender is a biologically determined fact; second, that gender is binary and each gender carries “innate traits and predetermined characteristics” that “inescapably dictat[e] one’s place in the world”; and third, that there is a gender hierarchy where men are fundamentally superior to women; in sum, “gender is determined by nature, gender differences are immutable, and a clear gender hierarchy where men dominate and rule exists (and is desirable)” (10–11). Furthermore, while there are competing ideological trends, Lee contends that these split, practically speaking, into two groups around the role that women ought to play within the far right social movements: what she calls patriarchal fascism and misogynistic fascism. Both tendencies consider women to be inferior to men, but the former assigns positive but restricted roles to women’s activities. By contrast, “many contemporary groups influenced by the Alt-Right promote an intensely misogynistic ideology that straight-up hates women” (13). According to misogynistic fascism, women have no positive role to play within far-right movements.

These categories are important for identifying the trajectories of convergence and divergence within the far right. While examples of misogyny abound in the Alt-Right and associated groups, Lee documents how it underpins the far more extreme Daily Stormer website (which bans women from contributing to the site) and the armed Atomwaffen Division, whose members promote rape as a terroristic tool (14). We might consider then, that misogynistic fascism functions as a path for violent radicalization within the movement; at the same time, it appears to be one ideological and organizational fault-line between older and newer white supremacist movements—as Lee notes, for example, The Daily Stormer’s position has brought it into conflict with women associated with Stormfront.

It is also important to note, despite their differences, how the common assumptions about gender shared by the far-right translate into “agreement on opposing the notion of gender as non-binary, and thus, agreement on opposing (and frequently enacting violence against) genderqueer and trans people). In general, the far-right shares revulsion for trans people, and a particular hostility for trans women who ‘are seen as men who reject their natural roles and privileges and “voluntarily” become the hated other’” (10–11). I believe that there is a missed opportunity on this point, for Lee could have returned to this point in her later discussion of how liberal feminism calls for safety re-entrench or expand the apparatuses of the “racialized penal state” (a discussion found in the section “White Supremacy, Complicity, and the Legacy of Saviour Politics”). There Lee contends that liberal calls for safety and security for women typically draw on or leave unexamined racist tropes (the racialized other who poses a threat to white women) and sanction expanded police powers. She notes how racist and xenophobic groups have disingenuously feigned support for feminist groups and LGBTQ+ groups as a path to normalizing their far-right views. But Lee does not address how the far-right could pursue a path for recruitment and normalization through trans-exclusionary reactionary (sic) feminism. Both movements share essentializing and binaristic assumptions about gender, and both opportunistically exploit the safety/security discourse to present non-binary and transgender women as threats to (white) ciswomen and children (and in terms obviously indebted to homophobic discourses from the 1990s). I would suggest that where explicit racism fails to to provide a path to normalization, we could expect far-right movements to regroup—as opportunistic proponents for so-called free speech—around public presentations of transmisogyny.[4]

Lee concludes by outlining a path toward a militant feminist antifascism between, on the one hand, a liberal feminism, reliant on the state for security and beholden to “a dead end of permitted marches, electoral campaigns, and ‘pussy hat’” political symbolism, and on the other, currents of antifascist organizing which tend toward “bravado and dogmatic combativity” (40). Militant antifascism is, of course, distinguished from liberal antifascism by a willingness to use direct action and the diversity of tactics to combat far-right mobilization. Lee observes, however, that antifascist groups are continually at risk of replacing a commitment to the diversity of tactics with a “political position that prioritizes confrontation while it more or less ignores (or at least downplays) other aspects of struggle” (41). At the same time, this antifascist machismo “reproduces some of the worst characteristics of hegemonic masculinity with a self-righteous zeal, and considers discussion of things like sexism to be needlessly divisive and a distraction from the ‘important things’” (41).

Here Lee identifies two major organizational problems which are often treated as ideological problems. The first problem involves treating the diversity of tactics as a hierarchy of tactics, in which physical combat takes priority over other forms of activity; it is compounded when groups default to placing men in prominent organizational and leadership roles based on their willingness to physically confront fascists. Physical confrontation is typically a small part of antifascist work, and most effective when integrated within a political strategy that aims to undermine and fragment far-right organizing. Therefore, as Lee notes, antifascist work also requires public education, labor and community organizing and outreach, information gathering, building movement infrastructure, and creating a broader antifascist political culture (35). Done effectively, each of these forms of organizing places a substantial social cost on participation in far-right movements.

The second problem occurs when critiques of sexism and machismo are relegated to secondary, largely ideological concerns. By contrast, Lee maintains that “gender liberation [is] a non-negotiable component of anti-fascism. This means entering gender considerations, taking trans politics and queer struggle seriously, and not treating these things as peripheral concerns” (36). Lee makes the case that sexism is a fundamentally organizational concern, which can affect internal decision-making dynamics and community outreach. She notes that, for example, in building an antifascist political culture, “we cannot focus almost exclusively on physical activities and/or traditional male-dominated spaces;” instead we must also cultivate reading groups, social clubs, collective kitchens, daycare centres, and workplace organizations (36). These activities and organizations must be attentive to ability and age, as Lee writes, “a vibrant movement would have a place for [a] two year old child up to their eighty-two year old grandparent” (41).

Furthermore, we must be cognizant of gender stereotyping in internal organizing initiatives. In a movement committed to diversity of tactics, one must criticize machismo but also stereotypical assumptions that identify violence with masculinity: “against the tendency to associate women with passivity and non-violence, it is crucial to recognize that combative politics is not exclusively the domain of men” (36). Lee’s point is especially salient for organizations involved in community self-defense initiatives. Self-defense involves both practical training and political education. From the latter angle, antifascists must articulate a critical perspective that attacks the white, masculine, settler-colonial imaginary which underlies the default North American concept of an individual’s right to self-defense.[5] (And here an education in the history of Black armed community self-defense during the Civil Rights Era is instructive).[6] This political education must be met in practice by self-defense awareness training for street mobilizations, where it involves collective defence against both fascists and police, but also for the community at large, where skills in conflict de-escalation and resolution are more useful and necessary than physical violence. Antifascists who participate in these types of self-defense initiatives ought to be trained in a diversity of tactics while being vigilant against lapsing into divisions of labor anchored in gender stereotypes.

It is readily recognized, within all true currents of militant antifascism, that fascism cannot be defeated until the conditions that make it possible are overthrown. For this reason, antifascists are anti-capitalist and antiracist. There is a growing awareness that in North America, there is no meaningful way that fascism will be defeated without decolonization. Petronella Lee demonstrates not only that gender oppression is one of the fundamental pillars of fascism but also that gender liberation must be a non-negotiable component of antifascism.

[1] Also available online at https://north-shore.info/2019/10/03/anti-fascism-beyond-machismo/

[2] See Rowland “Ena͞emaehkiw” Keshena Robinson, “Fascism and Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective.” Maehkōn Ahpēhtesewen. February 11, 2017 [Edited 2019]. https://onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/fascism-anti-fascism-a-decolonial-perspective/

[3] Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire. (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2018), 94–95.

[4] Indeed, we might also expect that “free speech” would constitute a point of convergence that carries “plausible deniability” for TERFs who build coalitions with, but for optics do not publicly or explicitly endorse, far-right groups.

[5] This critique is central to the contributions collected in Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community and Armed Self-Defense. Ed. scott crow. (Oakland: PM Press, 2018).

[6] Charles E., Cobb Jr.’s 2016. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) is a good, recent introduction to this history.