Moderator: Natasha Lennard ︳Wollman Hall (Eugene Lang Building, room B500, 65 West 11th Street)

What new insights into fascisms’ libidinal appeal do we gain when we think sexual politics and disability politics together, and how are eugenic fantasies and deadly malice toward imperfection connected with the promise of transgressive pleasure? Herzog’s lecture considers the whiplashing ricochets between the pasts of the 1890s and 1930s and our postmodern present of the 2020s, with particular attention to the “sexy racism” and obsessive antidisability hostility animating the rise of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

Bio: Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books 2025), the prizewinning The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton 2024), as well as Cold War Freud (Cambridge 2017), Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge 2011) and Sex after Fascism (Princeton 2005). She teaches courses on the histories of Nazism and the Holocaust, sexuality and gender, disability rights activism and care politics.

Traditional discussions of political resistance raise images of masculinized forms in the cultural imagination, while feminized efforts are obscured or overlooked. In their novel Cantoras, Caro De Robertis crafts the tenacious world of five queer women who find refuge from the violently enforced silence of Uruguay’s civic-military dictatorship through acts of feminine care and community building. How can femme care collectives heal the pain imposed by neoliberal ideologies and authoritarian oppression? The novel’s radically communal femininity coexists with Uruguay’s material reality as a nation founded on colonial invasion. As these women resist through care by escaping to a secret beachside community, they too are implicated in a long history of violence against and erasure of indigenous lives and cultures. Addressing this tension between healing and harm through oceanic metaphor recognizes the significance in continuing to understand that liberation for any must be liberation for all.

Bio: Noelle Candler is a first-year PhD student in English at Vanderbilt University. Her prospective research is a transnational feminist comparative project that seeks to imagine alternatives to colonial structures. Drawing on queer theory, post-colonial theory, and oceanic metaphor, she analyzes 20th- and 21st-century literature of the Americas as a site of political possibility. Noelle received her BS in English and Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The purpose of this talk is to provide a framework for how to resist social injustice and push back in small but significant ways in an era of rising global authoritarianism. I will use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory as a jumping off point and will also delve into disability justice theory. Using “economies of discomfort,” a phrase I coined to help me analyze how people share, or do not share, public space, I will explore who is welcome in public spaces. I’ll also use this method to examine divisions of labor. Attendees can expect to gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to become an effective advocate, agitator and ally.

Bio: Azure D. Osborne-Lee (he/they) is a PhD Candidate in Archiving for Disability Dance & Access Aesthetics (2029) at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He holds a Certificate in Screenwriting (2025) from The New School, an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice (2011) from RCSSD, as well as an MA in Women’s & Gender Studies (2008) and a BA in English & Spanish (2005) from The University of Texas at Austin.

Contemporary feminist critiques of authoritarianism often foreground spectacular state repression and overt anti-gender movements. Yet, as Robyn Marasco suggests, authoritarianism also takes shape through everyday affective relations, intimate hierarchies, and normative gender expectations that organize social life before they harden into political regimes. Drawing on ethnographic research with migrants navigating deskilling and precarious employment in Canada, this paper examines how authoritarian logics are reproduced and contested within the intimate and affective domains of work, family, and gendered responsibility (Bauder, 2006).

I show how women’s “resilience” and adaptability can function as moral and affective governance aligned with neoliberal ideals of flexibility, self-management, and endurance (Rose, 1999; Ong, 2006). At the same time, men’s refusals to accept degraded labor—often read as personal failure or cultural rigidity—can be understood as affective responses to the reconfiguration of patriarchal authority and breadwinner masculinity under racialized deskilling (Connell, 1995; Butler, 2015).

Read together, resilience and refusal illuminate how power circulates not only through coercion, but through attachments to gendered order, moral worth, and familial obligation (Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1982). Engaging poststructural feminist theory, critiques of empowerment, and scholarship on neoliberal responsibilization, I argue that integration regimes can mirror authoritarian logics: obedience through adaptability, moralization of endurance, and the disciplining of refusal (Weedon, 1999; Brown, 2015). This reframes fascism as an affective, relational structure and clarifies what feminist organizing must resist when endurance becomes virtue (Haraway, 1988).

Bio: Fatima Delia is a doctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University (Canada) whose interdisciplinary work draws on poststructural feminist theory and narrative ethnography to examine how power relations shape gender roles, identity, and agency. Coming from ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds, her scholarship is informed by attention to how everyday relations of work, family, and belonging are structured by unequal regimes of power. In both her scholarly work and university teaching, Fatima is committed to social inclusion, equity, and feminist praxis.

The climate emergency is just one component of a polycrisis of heightening inequalities, rising fundamentalisms, ongoing exploitation of human and more-than human beings, and more. This global scenario profoundly impacts our very understandings of life and death, as well as our hopes and fears for the future – not just regarding our own survival, but that of our very world(s). In this context, Global North political-economic elites are enacting an “end times fascism” (Klein and Taylor): provoking, profiting from, and planning for “doomsday” scenarios. This apocalyptic nihilism fuels bunker-building, artificial intelligence-accelerating, space-exploring obsessions that increase inequalities and fast-track harm for people and planet.

Simultaneously, alternative, subaltern paradigms regarding the ends and beginnings of worlds are being continuously created, remembered, imagined, refashioned and built by communities and social movements. These alternative futurities include approaches that blend past, present and future, and non-hegemonic understandings of time that contest the “end of the world” as a linear, simplistic progression towards either ultimate demise or (White, cis male) human triumph over nature. Breaking out of linear time is part of more broadly imagining -and acting- beyond the boundaries of what is deemed possible within current structures of power and oppression. Based on interviews with Global South queer climate justice activists, I explore decolonial queer understandings of end-times fascism, highlighting dissident perspectives on apocalypse and alternative futures. In the context of polycrisis and nihilist paradigms, what do Global South queer climate activists envision for the future(s)? And how do we liberate our imaginations, and time itself?

Bio: Majandra Rodriguez Acha is a climate justice and feminist advocate from Peru, and current student in the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management MS at Parsons. She is a Public Engagement Fellow and Aronson Fellow at The New School. She has recently worked with the Youth Climate Justice Fund, the Funders Learning and Action Co-Laboratory on Gender and the Environment, and FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund. She is committed to dismantling false climate solutions and to co-creating community-based alternatives rooted in decolonial, anti-racist and queer ecological paradigm shifts.

Last year, we presented an initial discourse analysis of the 2025 Gender Executive Order issued by the current U.S. administration, along with our students from our graduate “Psychology of Gender” course and The SexTech Lab. This year, we return with an expanded “one year on” analysis that traces not only how the Order constructs gender, but how its language travels into institutional practice, public rhetoric, and the conditions under which scholars, clinicians, educators, and advocates now work. Drawing on a critical feminist approach, we map the Order’s narrative architecture and the recurring themes that organize its regulatory structure: intensified reliance on (and conflation of) the sex/gender binary; depictions of gender fluidity as social threat; and the reassertion of compulsory heterosexuality. We show how these themes are advanced through discursive maneuvers (biological essentializing, moral-panic construction, safety-based justifications, institutional encoding, and scientific cloaking) that work together to naturalize particular “truths” about sex and gender while legitimizing expanded governance of gender and sexual variance. Building on last year’s findings, we extend the analysis by clarifying the Order’s underlying ideological commitments (biological essentialism, cisnormativity, ethnonationalism, and claims to moral/scientific authority) and reflecting on the Order’s broader social and political impacts, including consequences for research, pedagogy, health care, and LGBTQ+ advocacy under conditions of heightened scrutiny.

Researchers: Sedef Ozoguz, Pani Farvid, Dove Denisco, Oishiki Ganguly, Lynniya Charleus, Maria Sobrino, Anne Farnsworth, Sam Conner Self, Sylvie Shrum

Bios: Oishiki Ganguly is a Master’s student in Psychology at The New School and an Assistant Lab Manager at the SexTech Lab. Her work focuses on sexuality, embodiment, and mental health, drawing on transnational feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives. She is currently involved in research on sexual decision-making, heteropessimism, GLP-1 and healthism using mixed methods approaches. Her broader interests lie in how culture and sexuality shape psychiatric diagnoses, particularly borderline personality disorder in India. She hopes to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology and continue work that bridges research, theory, and clinical practice.

Sedef Ozoguz PhD is an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts in Psychology at The New School. She completed her PhD in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She currently serves as the co-director of SexTech Lab, which examines evolving social issues at the intersection of sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, culture, technology, and intimacy. Her work focuses on conducting transnational, transdisciplinary and transmodal research on gender and sexuality.

Maria Sobrino is a third-year PhD student in CUNY’s Basic and Applied Social Psychology Program. Maria’s work is grounded and contextualized in strengths-based and community-based participatory methodology and is broadly aimed at examining how young LGBTQ+ negotiate wellness, exploring the social and structural context of substance use and STI transmission, and scaling up harm reduction efforts.

This paper examines how authoritarian logics take hold not only through sovereign power but through the mundane infrastructures that organize movement, dependence, and care. Drawing on qualitative interviews and go-along research with people with disabilities navigating walking and rolling environments, public transit, and paratransit in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, I argue that mobility governance operates as an affective regime that distributes dignity unevenly across bodies and space.

Mobility is often framed as a technical service problem. Yet movement through the city is structured by layered administrative practices, including eligibility criteria, scheduling systems, assistive protocols, and jurisdictional boundaries that determine who can travel and at what cost. These mobility borders are spatial, bureaucratic, and temporal, requiring riders to anticipate breakdown and manage uncertainty. Participants describe long waiting times, inaccessible reporting systems, and the need for constant advance planning, transforming everyday travel into a site of vigilance and strain.

Rather than treating fascism solely as centralized authority, this paper reframes authoritarianism as an affective structure reproduced through fragmented governance. Infrastructural failure is displaced onto individuals and families, recasting vulnerability as deficiency while privatizing care. Situating mobility within feminist analyses of authoritarian affect, I argue that everyday infrastructures normalize waiting and self-discipline, revealing how fascistic logics persist in the organization of movement.

Bio: Yeon-Joo Kang is a doctoral student in Public and Urban Policy at The New School. Trained in urban and regional planning in Seoul and at Cornell University, her research examines how mobility systems shape dependence, care, and dignity in everyday urban life, with a focus on paratransit and disability access. Before her PhD, she worked in nonprofit community development in New York City, supporting immigrant-owned small businesses navigating public programs and structural barriers.

This paper plays with a double entendre, taking inspiration from Robyn Marasco’s “There’s a Fascist in the Family: Critical Theory and Antiauthoritarianism,” to analyze the onto-epistemological structure of the house, the category of race, and its constitutive role in fascism, literally and symbolically. The double entendre we present is thus: there is a fascist in the White House. The first sense of this entendre understands the White House as a symbol of American liberal democracy and empire, currently occupied by a president and fascist, Donald Trump. It is no coincidence that this same house was built by enslaved Africans who were denied the agency to make their own houses and families. This is reflected in the second sense of the double entendre: there is a fascist in the white house. Taking both meanings—the material reality of the first entendre, and the symbolic logic of the second—we examine the reproduction of the house as a symbol of nuclear white American family-making. We argue that this symbol is dependent on the categorical hetero-racialized Other and the concept of Blackness; that the axiological schema of the white house necessitates the construction, and continual reproduction, of the White House. By relying on theories of queer Black feminist mothering and revolutionizing, like those of Joy James, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Sylvia Wynter, we explore ways that families and communities can be built that constitute a rupture from the symbolic logic of the white house itself.

Bios: Lizzy Elkins and Skyler Moore are roommates, best friends, and long-term colleagues. They both received their BA in philosophy from the University of Oregon. Skyler is a Master’s student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, focusing on the intersection of feminism, queer theory, and decolonial studies. Lizzy is a New School for Social Research alum and a current Master’s student in the New York University department of bioethics. Her research interests include environmental ethics, totalitarianism, and decolonial studies.

At a moment when authoritarian politics increasingly operate through reassurance rather than force, this paper examines how fascism takes shape not only as a political regime but as an affective and aesthetic structure of care. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, affect theory, and cultural criminology, I argue that contemporary regimes of preservation—museums, heritage law, and urban order—function as forms of “friendly fascism,” governing through protection, smoothness, and moralized appeals to continuity. Under these conditions, care becomes disciplinary: an affective technology that demands obedience, legibility, and the maintenance of surfaces in the name of safety, civility, and value.

Against this backdrop, the paper reframes acts of destruction commonly labeled as vandalism, disorder, or erasure as feminist anti-fascist practices. Through case studies of auto-destructive art, institutional rupture, and monument removal, I show how destruction can operate as ethical attention rather than nihilistic violence. Feminist thinkers such as Joan Tronto, Carol Gilligan, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant provide a framework for understanding care not as preservation at all costs, but as relational, disruptive, and attuned to harm produced by enforced order. Destruction, in this account, becomes a refusal of coercive care—a way of interrupting authoritarian aesthetics that promise protection while reproducing exclusion.

By reading aesthetic rupture as a form of feminist devotion to justice, this paper contributes to feminist analyses of fascism as an intimate and affective formation. It suggests that confronting authoritarianism requires not only resisting overt domination, but also unsettling the comforting infrastructures of care through which power secures consent.

Bio: Juniper Todd (she/they) is an MA student in Sociology at Carleton University. Their research sits at the intersection of cultural criminology, feminist theory, and contemporary art, examining destruction and aesthetic rupture as ethical practices within regimes of care, preservation, and governance. Drawing on feminist ethics of care and affect theory, they explore how authoritarian power operates through intimacy and reassurance. Beyond academia, she is an artist and writer interested in ruin, devotion, and aesthetic transgression.

This paper examines how patriarchal structures not only persisted but, in some cases, flourished within alternative communities and living arrangements from the 1960s to the present. While countercultural communes positioned themselves as experimental sites of liberation—rejecting the nuclear family, private property, and state authority—their spatial and social formations often reproduced heteronormative and gendered hierarchies. Strikingly, the “long tail” of left-wing alternative culture now appears entangled with ascendant right-wing and even fascist agendas, particularly through wellness movements, radical isolationism, and a deep distrust of government. How did these seemingly opposed histories become aligned?

Focusing on the architectures of “hippie” communes, the paper analyzes space as a technology for organizing sexuality, gender, and the futurity of reproductive labor. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, it argues that architecture orients intimacy, presuming specific sleeping arrangements, privatized childcare, and the sanctification of the master bedroom. Many intentional communities sought to disrupt this model through communalized spaces that decentered the couple-form. Yet these experiments did not automatically undo heteropatriarchy. Through archival research and auto-ethnographic reflection on growing up in such communities, I show how romanticized invocations of “nature” and gender essentialism often reattached women’s bodies to reproductive labor and care, reinscribing the very norms these communities sought to escape. Tracing the architectural and ideological continuities between countercultural communalism and contemporary reactionary movements, the paper reconsiders the political afterlives of alternative space.

Bio: Macushla Robinson is an interdisciplinary person. She writes, curates, runs a small press, and is Director of the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at CUNY’s John Jay campus. With a background in museums, she received her doctorate in Politics from The New School for Social Research in 2023. She is the founder of Interstitial Press, and has published books, contributions to exhibition catalogues, book chapters and journal articles.

It is said that the Soviet family consisted of the husband, the wife, and the State. This structure marked a departure from the deeply patriarchal and communal family structure that characterized Tsarist Russia. In the 1920s, the USSR undertook deliberate efforts to reframe the family as a purposeful and vital supporter of the Soviet State, with the nationalization of child-rearing, childcare, and education. These efforts were specifically designed to support the Soviet state-building project and integrate the State into family management practices. However, Putin’s authoritarian ascension represents another break in the familial organization of Russian culture, with the regime utilizing substantial State resources and cultural leaders, such as the Russian Orthodox Church, to uphold “traditional family values.” This is exemplified by legal reforms around domestic violence, pronatalist family management policies, and hostile State action against queer Russians. However, due to Russia’s complex historical familial structure, the “traditional family” is a contested and ever-changing target. Using a comparative analysis of Soviet and Russian child-rearing manuals and sex education materials located at Yale University’s Cushing Medical Library and the Kroch Library at Cornell University, this paper argues that modern-day Russia has utilized the ghost of the Soviet infrastructure to support Putin’s pronatalistic, patriarchal, and fascistic regime- and explores what Russian feminists are doing about it. Russia’s authoritarian project is older and more entrenched than some other far-right movements, and there is much to learn from opposition movements from the region as they continue their meaningful work despite extreme violence, censorship, and war.

Bio: Kamryn McDonald holds a BA in International Relations and Gender Theory from UNC-Chapel Hill and studied International Relations and Philosophy at Oxford University. Kamryn has conducted extensive research on improving gender equity in global public health research publishing with the British Medical Journal and the WHO. Currently, she is a research assistant at Yale Law School and works with the UN independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity. Kamryn’s research focuses on biopolitics and how health systems are leveraged to expand state power in authoritarian and fascist contexts.

This paper is an inquiry into dating advice aimed at persuading cis, heterosexual women and men why they should not “go 50/50,” that is, equally split bills or finances. This position is disseminated online by speakers who perform a conservative, or “trad” stance as well as by speakers taking on a pro-sex work, pro-reproductive freedom, “progressive” stance. How is that speakers who see women as natural caregivers made for a life of housewifery and speakers who decry systemic failure to provide reproductive technology and equal pay end up prescribing the same advice? Using the framework of illiberalism (Muir 2022), this paper explains how the saturation of critique has created a mode of pragmatism shared across the political spectrum. Recognizing that working mothers are likely to perform most of the domestic duties, both conservative and progressive speakers find the solution in preemptively picking a male mate who can support a single-income household. The difference in messaging lies in the framing of the lack of male participation: conservative speakers gloss it as natural, progressive speakers see it as a systemic failure to provide socialized childcare and healthcare. As one progressive speaker put it: “do you and everyone else have access to free, legal abortions whenever you want, for whatever reason? If not, then don’t go 50/50.” The anti-50/50 trend exemplifies the linguistic consequences of illiberalism: it is put to the task of defining difference under conditions in which disparate groups are leaning on survivalist, pragmatic politics.

Bio: Shanti Escalante De Mattei is a PhD candidate in the anthropology department at NYU. Her research focuses on cryptocurrency use in Buenos Aires, and anarcho-libertarian politics and gender ideology. Escalante founded the feminist teach-in series at the NYU Anthropology. She is also a journalist and art critic. Her column LinkRot, on art, technology, and the internet, is published every other Monday on ARTnews.

This paper argues that the annihilation of Gerwani (the Indonesian Women’s Movement with 3,000,000 members, destroyed during the 1965-1966 genocide) must be understood as an anti-gender project: a state-making operation that converted female political autonomy into sexual disorder and national threat, and that established an affective infrastructure for authoritarian governance that persists into the present. Drawing on survivor testimony, movement archives, and the theoretical frameworks of Judith Butler’s analysis of anti-gender ideology, Robyn Marasco’s revisitation of Frankfurt School fascist familialism, and Julia Suryakusuma’s concept of State Ibuism, the paper reconstructs three interconnected dimensions of this project. First, it recovers the political content of Gerwani before its destruction, making visible what had to be erased for the New Order gender regime to appear natural. Second, it analyzes the Lubang Buaya myth, which falsely attributed naked dancing, sexual torture, and eye-gouging to Gerwani women on the night of the generals’ murders, as an anti-gender phantasm. Third, it traces the myth’s institutionalization through the New Order’s State Ibuism, compulsory film screenings, and school curricula, and its contemporary recycling in the anti-LGBT moral panics. This shows that the affective syntax deployed against Gerwani operates as a reusable template for authoritarian restoration projects that convert sexual and gender variance into threats to the patriarchal family-nation. The paper concludes by theorizing counter-archiving and feminist pedagogy as practices capable of displacing the phantasm through factual refutation and the reconstruction of an alternative imaginary in which women’s autonomous political life appears as legitimate heritage rather than historical threat.

Bio: Nathanael Pribady is a master’s student at Columbia University, whose research examines gendered violence and genocides in Indonesia, with a focus on the 1965–66 anti-communist purge, East Timor, and ongoing violence in West Papua. He founded a nonprofit initiative that challenges dominant historical narratives through archival work, public scholarship, and nonviolent civic organizing. This year, he launched a public teach-in series on the New Order that has drawn more than 7,000 participants following the election of a president accused of human-rights abuses in East Timor and West Papua.

In early 2026 a series of AI generated, short form videos were uploaded to Instagram, where bodily waste, food, or inanimate objects chastise the viewer for their daily habits. A subset of these videos show single sperm cells begging with their “father”—hailing a young, male subject who is assumed to be masturbating—not to cut their lives short through non-reproductive sex. The videos thus engage a rhetorical mode usually reserved for the antiabortionist protection of fetuses, skewed to include the assertion that life begins before conception. While perhaps frivolous at first glance, these anthropomorphic sperm videos index an ongoing far-right fascination with sperm. The sperm retention movement is reminiscent of the steely fascist man of the 1930s, who asserts his masculinity through precise control of his body. During the 2024 presidential campaign, supporters brandished cups of fake JD Vance sperm to celebrate his fertility, pitched against Tim Walz’s use of ARTs. After October 7th 2023, international attention was drawn to Israel’s longtime use of posthumous sperm retrieval for killed IOF soldiers. Feminists have, rightfully, paid critical attention to the authoritarian erosion of abortion rights. But it seems that sperm also deserves our attention in the feminist opposition to fascism. Via texts like Barbara Johnson on apostrophe and abortion and Emily Martin on the gendering of gametes, this paper employs critical tools developed by feminist theorists to assess and denounce the enduring fascist emphasis on male vitality.

Bio: Rose Rowson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College, where she is affiliated with the department of Sexuality, Women and Gender Studies. She received her doctorate in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2024. At Brown, she wrote the dissertation “My Baby is a Computer: Personal Devices, Reproductive Technologies, Historical Critique,” which she is currently developing into her first book. Rose’s writing has been featured in publications including Journal of Medical Humanities, Feminist Media Histories, and World Records.

This presentation examines the manosphere – a transnational ecosystem of male-supremacist online communities—as a critical site where fascism is cultivated not only as political ideology but as an affective, intimate, and relational structure. Drawing on investigative research from the Stop the Pushback against Women’s Rights initiative, we analyze how “ideological entrepreneurs” (Pick-Up Artists, Incels, Men’s Rights Activists) weaponize digital platforms to recruit boys and young men into authoritarian worldviews through the seductive language of self-help, vulnerability, and masculine restoration.

Building on Robyn Marasco’s framing of “the fascist in the family,” we argue that the manosphere functions as a training ground for fascist intimacy: it teaches young men to read relationality as domination, care as weakness, and women’s autonomy as theft. These digital pedagogies of misogyny do not remain online—they materialize in schools, bedrooms, and political violence. The January 2026 report of the French Haut Conseil à l’Égalité confirms this trajectory, identifying masculinist radicalization as a threat to both gender equality and public security.

Engaging Judith Butler’s work on authoritarian affect, I explore how the manosphere mobilizes the politics of resentment, melancholic attachments to lost patriarchal privilege, and false promises of power as the affective fuel for anti-gender politics. We conclude by asking: If fascism is forged in the intimate training grounds of digital misogyny, what must feminist organizing become? How do we interrupt the pipeline from Incel forums to political violence, and what new forms of counter-intimacy, care, and collective resistance might disrupt this recruitment into authoritarianism?

Authors: Rafaela De Negri, Nicoletta Dentico, Manolo Farci, Veronica Forin, Sarah Kaddoura, Simona Lanzoni, and Mara Matta.

Bio: Nicoletta Dentico is a public health expert and international activist, with a long history of feminist engagement. She was one of the founders of the If Not Now, When movement in Italy in 2010, and more recently she has played a pivotal role in the creation of the Stop the Pushback on Women’s Rights initiative (www.stopthepushback.org), launched in Geneva in January 2025. Her engagement is primarily focused at the level of international UN mechanisms, including WHO, Human Rights Council and the UPR. She also co-leads a group on “Masculinity and Christianity” in Italy. She has written extensively on women’s rights and the right to health and development.

Nicoletta currently leads the global health justice program at Society for International Development (SID) and co-chairs the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2). She teaches Global Health at La Sapienza University in Rome.

This academic paper examines the contemporary “male loneliness epidemic” as a key site for understanding how fascist affect circulates through intimate life, digital culture, and constructions of masculinity. As women’s rising educational and professional attainment has destabilized traditional breadwinner models of masculinity, many men confront a perceived loss of social authority and identity. In response, online spaces associated with the “manosphere” have reframed this dislocation as gender grievance, often redirecting personal alienation into misogynistic and nationalist resentment. Figures in the manosphere do not merely traffic in inflammatory rhetoric but cultivate an affective economy structured around humiliation, entitlement, and fantasies of restored male dominance. This paper argues that fascism should be understood not only as a political regime but as an intimate structure that weaponizes disillusionment and transforms it into an attachment to hierarchy. The male loneliness epidemic becomes politically consequential when it is narrativized as evidence of female superficiality and cultural decline. In this framing, women’s autonomy is cast as both personal betrayal and national crisis, rendering the subordination of women a solution to male dispossession. Feminist theory offers a critical lens through which to analyze how authoritarian movements mobilize injured masculinity and legitimize exclusionary violence against perceived “out-groups.” By situating modern misogynistic digital subcultures within broader histories of patriarchal authority, this paper reframes fascism as the link between intimate grievance and political domination, demonstrating how the family and the nation become mutually reinforcing sites of authoritarian oppression.

Bio: Sarah Ahmed is a New York–based writer and journalist whose work explores how perceptions of social life are shaped by digital culture. Currently pursuing a BA in English, she approaches literature as a discipline that provides valuable insights into the different ways people perceive the world and cultivate mutual understanding. As Managing Editor of The Banner and an Op-Ed writer for The Macaulay Messenger, she analyzes how shifting gender expectations and social anxieties surface in contemporary discourse. When she’s not writing, Sarah spends time crossing off movies from Letterboxd’s Top 250 Narrative Feature Films.

The constant attack to the female and femme body in the form of forced sterilizations, femicide, coarctation of rights among other direct violences, in the US and other countries in the Global North and the Global South, have found a justification for eugenics, discourses against the commons, overpopulation, and other environmental concerns rooted in fascist like ideas.

I rely on the notion that bodies are “living and historical territories that allude to a political interpretation, where wounds, memories, knowledge, desires, individual and common dreams live” (Cruz Hernandez 2021) The body is a living territory, where its removal, disappearance and constant attack provide a “removal of potentiality” The racialized, disabled, and poor body is a constant threat to the notion of purity and belonging for the imperial and settler state project.

For this reason, I argue that to study body entanglements in relation to affect (Ahmed 2004) might create a possibility for solidarity across multiple oppressions. While facing multiple crises, affect has been deemed as a weak link, and as a false emotion rooted in fragility. This discourse emphasizes a forced heterosexuality and hyper masculine attributes, where the embodiments of affect are seen as part of the erosion of a strong and well founded society. On the other hand, I propose a discussion around feminist and queer analysis of affect as well as land-body-entanglements (Cruz 2021, Cabnal 2012), from an Indigenous feminist approach to create a critical dialogue of how to analyze our marginal emotions and create spaces of solidarity, resistance and community.

Bio: Dr. Abigail Perez Aguilera is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management at The New School. Her most recent work is titled “Affective Multi-Species Resistance as Radical Imaginations” to be published in an edited volume by Bloomsbury in 2023. As part of her research she will published the article “The End of Nature and the Human: A Global South Ecofeminist Approach to the Anthropocene” in the edited volume titled “Critical Environmental Reflections in the Anthropocene: Making Sense of Nature” 2024.

This paper examines how K-Ming Chang’s 2020 novel Bestiary registers an erotics of diasporic Asian indigeneity that unsettles prevailing frames of China-Taiwan-U.S. geopolitical conflict and Cold War grammars of authoritarianism. Interweaving multiple narrative perspectives, timelines, and literary forms, Bestiary renders a non-linear story of queer inheritance, multispecies kinship, and fabulist transspecies becomings across three generations of mixed Tayal and Han Taiwanese women spanning Taiwan, China, and the U.S. I explore how the novel represents a politics of nonknowing settler colonial gendered and sexual violence and liberal authoritarianism across the Taiwan strait through epistolary and prose forms that unearth submerged experiences of imperial invasions, colonial heteropatriarchy, settler homonationalism, and transnational capitalist exploitation. The stories, desires, affects, and embodiments of diasporic Tayal women featured across the novel illuminate transcolonial imaginaries of settler authoritarianism and invoke regional decolonial relations that challenge the statist, binary, and masculinist logics of Cold War geopolitics. This paper considers how profane depictions of erotic entanglements between displaced bodies and degraded lands put pressure on liberal concepts of sovereignty, identity, and freedom. The erotics of diasporic Asian Indigeneity elucidates a different itinerary of cross-strait decolonization attentive to the complicated relations between migrants and Indigenous peoples across convoluted transits of colonialisms, imperialisms, and displacements. Such perverse political forms criss-cross colonial borders and categories to imagine alternative modes of embodiment and affiliation beyond the enclosures of identity, sovereignty, and nation.

Bio: Rui Liu is a PhD student in American Studies at New York University. Their research examines the complexities of Asian and Indigenous relationality in the context of Chinese/American transcolonialism, with particular attention to how diasporic Asian literary and cultural productions can index minor forms of anti-imperialism and alternative cartographies of transnational feminist and queer affiliation beyond Cold War geopolitical binaries. Her writing appears in Amerasia and TOPIA.

Las Niñas Perdidas explores the persistent continuum of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) shaping the lives of Latin American women before, during, and after migrating to the United States. Rooted in a personal history of witnessing Mexico’s “scarred” reality and participating in feminist activism against femicide, this research investigates how violence is not left behind at the border, but is instead reconfigured through the unique, precarious conditions of the immigrant experience in the United States.

Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality, the study examines how the structural wounds of Latin America, such as femicide, domestic or sexual abuse, and systemic impunity, force women to flee, only to encounter a U.S. immigration system that utilizes asylum deterrence to further marginalize survivors. This research highlights the paradox of displacement: while women migrate to escape violence, the journey and the destination often heighten their vulnerability through language barriers, fear of deportation, and the effect of aggressive enforcement that, now more than ever, is silencing their legal and personal agency.

The method of this work is lived human experience. It is with the details of every testimony that research can inform advocacy. Through interviews with immigrant women in NYC and human rights experts like Ana Lorena Delgadillo, this project documents how the violence intrinsic to migrant journeys is gendered. This capstone argues for the necessity of witnessing these shared threads of struggle. It opens a space for agency, and the voices of Latin American women in a country that continues to demand their silence.

Bio: Gabriela Meschoulam Levy is a human rights researcher and advocate specializing in gender and migration. A Global Studies major and Gender Studies minor, she is a senior at The New School. Gabriela served as a Research and Session Assistant for the UN CEDAW Committee, collaborating with international experts on gender-based violence. Her commitment to justice includes strategic roles at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and founding humanitarian initiatives for the Ukrainian border and Mexican women’s rights. A Freedom Scholar and Lang Fellow, she combines academic analysis, narrative and advocacy.

Gender has long been leveraged as a tool of fascism, but the left has also presented gender norms, and their manipulation, as a means of subversion and protection—the radiant mother, the innocent child, the violent man. But Operation Metro Surge has demonstrated the limits of gender optics as a means of manipulating public opinion: depending on who you ask, ICE agents are either valiant heroes or “unemployable incels”—men with nowhere else to direct their violent fantasies; the resisters are either “blue-haired liberal agitators” or “brave, true Americans”; Renée Good, murdered by an ICE agent, was either a peaceful poet-mother or a “lesbian bitch” domestic terrorist. The left’s reliance on gender norms as protective belies the reality and scope of fascist violence—in a military occupation, no one is truly safe. During my time reporting out of Minneapolis covering the resistance, I saw a complex latticework of gender relations playing out in real-time: ICE has begun deploying woman agents dressed in plainclothes to lure targets, resisters include everyone from “moms and trans people with whistles” to army vets and stay-at-home dads, Marxist bros, male schoolteachers on their off time. It’s clear that the Trump administration has effectively maneuvered gender to serve its fascist ends—Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi represent some of the cruelest policy initiatives in full beats and blowouts, woman resisters are being painted as shrewish and unstable. A lesson of the Minneapolis resistance is that there is a role for everyone—and the old rules, even rules as entrenched as gender binarism, no longer apply.

Bio: Becca Young is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn. Her work focuses on labor and love under technocapitalism, and has been published in The Baffler, Defector, and Blood Knife, among other publications. She received her MA in American Studies from Columbia University and is now pursuing an MFA in Creative Non-fiction Writing at The New School. You can find more at her website, bbyland.com.

Love is often seen as the answer to the question of how we might combat an ever-increasingly hateful world. But could love as a historical institution be a contributing factor to systematic oppression and the rise of conservatism? The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone unpacks the complexities of love and romance as institutions of patriarchal dominance, and despite the 56 years separating us today from this book’s publication, many of the critiques on love and romance still hold true. How can we combat hate when we cannot even trust love? Love and romance, as instruments rather than affects, are undoubtedly useful tools of patriarchy and fascism. They create in us specific images or desires for what our lives must look like, and in doing so reinforce oppressive systems such as heteronormativity. However, there are perhaps non-destructive forms of love that Firestone eclipsed due to the overt heteronormativity of her time such as queer love, pansexual love, and platonic love. These valuable and nuanced forms of love often become shrouded by the same heteronormative institutions of Firestone’s day, including the nuclear family, eroticism, and unrealistic beauty standards. Using Firestone’s text, alongside modern experiences and theories on both destructive and non-destructive love, this paper addresses the concerns of Firestone’s text, how it connects to our current socio-political climate, and potential solutions to combating the institution of love and romance. If it means we might resist oppression, are we able to desire differently?

Bio: Madeline Crosby is a recent alumna of The New School of Social Research where she graduated from the Liberal Studies Master’s program. Her research focused on feminist metaphysics, reimagining the fluidity of bodies, and creative non-fiction. She began this research in her undergraduate at Buffalo State University where she earned a dual degree in English Literature and Women & Gender Studies with a minor in Philosophy.

How is political domination (re)produced in the MAGA movement in the United States? Political actors on the radical right cast domination over racialized and gendered “Others” as a legitimate right, a form of civic participation, and as freedom. The “right” to dominate is a salve to a perceived weakening of – and even perceived attack on – what Du Bois called the “wages of whiteness.” Mobilizing the language of self-defense, preservation, and restoration, it responds to a constructed narrative of economic, social, and political dispossession of white men. Building on the works of Wendy Brown, Elizabeth Anker, Cristina Beltran, and Robyn Marasco, I theorize how this process recursively fuses three forces in American political culture: patriarchal authority through the strengthening of heteronormative family; settler freedom developed through settler colonialism and racial capitalism; and notions of neoliberal devolution. These forces come together to legitimize, broaden, and delegate the exercise of power over others, ranging from the “unapologetic” transgression of norms to the possibility of exercising physical violence. Understanding the processes by which domination becomes legitimized can help explain a key mechanism behind the fascicization of political orders and how those orders gain political support.

Bio: Vasiliki Malouchou Kanellopoulou is a PhD candidate in Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her research is at the intersection of critical whiteness studies, right-wing studies, and political economy. Her dissertation explores how the racial politics of the Right shape democratic meaning-making.

The problem of gender inevitably raises an epistemological question: how do we know what we know about gender? Scholars such as Judith Butler draw on speech act theory to argue that gender is performative rather than constative—something enacted and continually produced rather than simply described. In contrast, psychoanalytic thinkers including Catherine Malabou, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Lee Edelman emphasize the symbolic construction of gender, arguing that every categorical system depends upon necessary exclusions—often borne by the figure of “woman.” For Butler, gender is always in the process of becoming; for psychoanalytic critics, this fantasy of becoming is structured through exclusion and lack.

Bringing these approaches together, my essay examines the short film Juice by Neeraj Ghaywan to explore gender as a form of body language shaped by both performance and discourse. The film reveals that bodily performance exceeds the gendered language meant to contain it. At the same time, its cinematic language positions viewers as scopic subjects who are themselves performative—continually becoming “man” or “woman” through the act of watching.

Ultimately, the essay argues that if fascism entails the domination of one epistemology over another, then contemporary gender theory risks reproducing this logic when performance and psychoanalysis are treated as mutually exclusive. Neither framework fully captures gender’s complexity. A critique of fascism, therefore, requires confronting the limits of our own knowledge and relearning through the tensions between these perspectives.

Bio: Rohit Rajak is a first year PhD student of English at Tufts University. His academic interest lies in questions of literary theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and critical caste studies. Formerly, he was a creative associate at the literary magazine Proseterity, and a Teaching Fellow in the English department at Ashoka University.

There is a specter haunting feminism! With the recent release of Sophie Lewis’ much-lauded Enemy Feminisms, the so-called TERF wars have entered their next heated phase, and the specter of the second wave continues to loom over all potential inheritors of feminism’s legacy. While Dworkin, MacKinnon, Rich, hooks, and others find their work revived in the classrooms, Gloria Steinem cameos on And Just Like That… Reparative readings seem to rule the critical feminist landscape. This paper examines the question of Second Wave biological essentialism in relation to the thought and legacy of three iconic feminists: Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, and Andrea Dworkin. It also utilizes the theoretical work of Gayle Rubin and Lise Vogel in attempting to provide a contemporary answer to the question of biological essentialism. This is all in service of a ‘hauntology’ of the Second Wave: whose feminism is against fascism anyway?

Bio: Lily Pando recently received an MA in liberal studies from the New School for Social Research. Her thesis was about the ways visual cultures produce and interpret ‘sexed images.’ Her work sits at the intersection of cultural studies, trans feminist thought, and critical political economy. Outside of all of this, she’s a writer and filmmaker in the Brooklyn trans scene. You can find more of her work at lilypando.com.

In 2025, the fascist thinktank the Heritage Foundation introduced a new term to label trans* people as threats to American society: Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremists (TIVE). Although this designation is a continuation and escalation of existing anti-trans* legal structures, the far right’s newfound willingness to lean into specific discourses of terror and national security merits analysis. So, too, does the role of hyper-contemporary technologies such as predictive and generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automatic gender recognition (AGR) in supporting paranoid anti-terrorist approaches to trans* bodies and speech.

This paper examines the treatment of transness, particularly the trans* body, as a threat to be controlled, connecting trans* biopolitics to recent developments in facial recognition and related surveillance technologies. I argue that explorations of the role of visual technologies like facial recognition/AGR in trans* life must engage with materialist politics and the insights of queer, brown, and feminist surveillance studies to effectively disrupt the war on trans* people. Thus, by exploring the use of AI and AGR as racialized and sexed tools deployed by a fascist state to tame or destroy trans, brown, and queer bodies, this paper exposes the urgency of interrupting such technologies’ weaponization. I propose one method that transfeminist and antifascist activists can use to do so: techno-passing, or the use of glitch, muddled data, productive deception, and radical anonymity to disrupt the collection and collation of data that render everyone, but particularly trans people, vulnerable to hypervisibility and state control.

Bio: Charlotte Hanrahan is a PhD student and instructor of composition and LGBTQ+ studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Her research interests include queer desire, digital surveillance, and representations of transfemininity in media. Her recent work has explored the role of transfemininity in The Wizard of Oz, discourses of nostalgia in the emo subculture, and the use of historiographical discourses within the online hate campaign known as Christory. Outside of academia, she is a metalhead, a hyperpop connoisseur, and the proud companion of two rambunctious cats named Mitzi and Lolly.

In this paper, we examine how regret has been strategically weaponized as a tool of social control over gender-affirming care and abortion access, particularly under the current U.S. administration policies targeting gender justice. Drawing on theories of critical feminist psychology, as well as relational and humanistic psychoanalysis, we analyze how regret functions as a politically mobilized force used to legitimize surveillance and governance, restrict bodily autonomy, and enforce normative gender ideals. Despite empirical evidence showing extremely low rates of actual regret following these procedures, anticipatory regret is manufactured and instrumentalized to deny healthcare access.

We trace how this weaponization operates through the co-optation of scientific discourse, paternalistic claims of protection (e.g., “for their own good”) to preemptively restrict medical choice, and structural barriers that manufacture the very regret they claim to prevent. Our analysis reveals how regret is selectively emphasized only for medical decisions that transgress (cis)gender-normative biopolitical expectations while remaining absent from discussions of parenthood or intersex surgeries.

Moving beyond critique, we propose reframing regret by distinguishing between freedom from and freedom to regret (Fromm, 1941). Rather than viewing regret as an emotional state to be avoided at all costs, we argue for understanding regret as an inevitable and unpredictable consequence of human autonomy and decision-making. Such a reconceptualization demands infrastructures of support that allow individuals to process complex emotions without surveillance or punishment, while resisting state interventions that weaponize regret to restrict reproductive and gender autonomy.

Bios: Cleo A. Alonso Cintrón, MA is a first year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at The New School. Her research focuses on exploring the relationship that transfeminine people construct with hegemonic notions of femininity and motherhood from a critical discursive psychology framework. She currently serves as a lab manager for The New School’s Gender and Health Lab, as well as forming part of the SexTech Lab.

Lillien Nathan, MA is a third year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at The New School. Her research focuses on reproductive justice and reproductive identity.

Sedef Ozoguz, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts in Psychology at The New School. She completed her PhD in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She currently serves as the co-director of SexTech Lab, which examines evolving social issues at the intersection of sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, culture, technology, and intimacy. Her work focuses on conducting transnational, transdisciplinary and transmodal research on gender and sexuality.

Lisa R. Rubin, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at The New School. Her research focuses on the intersection of objectification and medicalization in healthcare, including an emphasis on “stratified biomedicalization”, or the uneven distribution of technoscientific interventions, and a concern for under-researched groups, focusing on intersections of privilege and oppression across race, gender, disability, and sexuality in medicine.

Have left internationalisms met their match in an emergent “far-right international”? This paper explores how far-right nationalists seek to arrest the momentum and seize the strategies of recent transfeminist, anti-racist, and environmentalist struggles. Moving between Argentina and the United States – with pit stops in Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain, and elsewhere – we examine the dynamics of international far-right networks and highlight their use of “Gramscian” as well as “Schmittian” strategies that exceed the institutional sphere. If Javier Milei, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump serve as figureheads for “top-down” radicalization, we demonstrate the importance of understanding and combatting broader logics of fascization in “anti-gender” politics, financialized speculation, spectacles of cruelty, and celebratory violence.

Bio: William Callison is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, CUNY. He is coauthor (with the Zetkin Collective) of The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis, and the Rise of Fossil Fascism (Verso Books, forthcoming) and coeditor of Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture (Fordham UP, 2020).

This paper examines how language sustains authoritarian order and how it can cultivate alternative modes of belonging. ​​By reading independent media as a form of feminist counter-intimacy, I argue that anti-fascist resistance unfolds in the reorganization of language, care, and relational life. I synthesize academic theory and empirical research to analyze the coverage of LGBTQ+ issues in Russian independent media under intensifying anti-gender politics. Drawing on discourse analysis, it traces how language and narrative strategies evolved in response to anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment promoted by state-controlled channels and codified through the so-called “gay propaganda” laws.

Russian official discourse frames homophobia as the defense of “traditional values,” positioning the heterosexual family, reproductive futurity, and child protection as pillars of national survival. Within this moral vocabulary, queerness is constructed as threat, contamination, or foreign intrusion. These dynamics resonate with the contemporary rise of authoritarian and fascistic rhetoric in the United States, where queer and trans lives are increasingly mobilized as symbols of social decay and danger to children. Gender and sexuality function as central sites through which political anxiety is organized and circulated.

The findings demonstrate that shifts in linguistic choices and storytelling techniques in independent media both register these pressures and intervene in them. Drawing on feminist discourse, these outlets center lived experience and expand the vocabulary through which queer life is articulated. Independent journalism thus operates as a form of feminist intimacy, redirecting public language toward care and recognition within a political climate structured by hostility.

Bio: Nastya (Anastasia) Dzutstsati is a writer and social researcher based in New York City. Their work examines autocracy, media, anti-gender politics, and LGBTQ+ rights in Russia and the United States. Nastya holds an MA in Human Rights and the Arts from Bard College and a BA in Journalism from the University of Kent. A former journalist at Current Time (RFE/RL), they left Russia after escalating threats related to their reporting. They have guest lectured at Columbia University, Cooper Union, Bard College, Stony Brook University, and NYU. They were the TEDxBard College keynote speaker (2023).

This paper is a diasporic anti-caste feminist meditation written amid converging fascisms in India and the United States. I argue that fascism does not endure only through spectacular violence or exceptional state repression, but through its enfolding into the ordinary. Drawing on Jack Bratich’s formulation of microfascism, I approach the “micro” as an ecology of domination circulating through everyday practices of differentiation, moral evaluation, and the production of self and other. In contemporary India, Brahmanism, the graded order of caste hierarchy, operates in precisely this register, moving through kinship and intimacy to render Hindu nationalist fascism sensible and sustainable.

Against this microfascist ecology, I center maitri, an anti-caste feminist ethic of being-with that requires the ongoing undoing of hierarchy as the condition of collective life. I trace four registers of maitri: Periyar’s The World to Come imagines futures beyond domination; the oral history of trans anti-caste activist Disha Pinky Sheikh elaborates solidarities across trans communities, sex workers, and radical organizing; the speculative narrative Switch reworks relationality through enforced empathy between a Dalit and a Brahmin student; and Gurram Jashuva’s Gabbilam calls for anti-caste justice by refunctioning classical epic form to expose caste violence. In such an account, maitri appears as relational practice — a reorganization of attachment, solidarity, reimagining futures, and justice, that interrupts the everyday reproduction of hierarchy. As an anti-caste feminist ethic, maitri offers a transnational feminist resource to unsettle microfascism and think of the liberatory possibilities of being with each other offered by anti-caste feminisms.

Bio: Chand Sepuri is a Bahujan queer/trans third-year PhD student in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their research engages trans studies, anti-caste philosophy, social movements, utopian thought, political economy, and the anthropology of development. A published poet and writer, they previously worked in the development sector and currently serve on the editorial board of After the Storm, a utopian magazine based in Washington, D.C.

This paper analyzes the gendered politics of consumption during Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983). It shows how the state-led consumer education campaign explicitly targeted the family, positioning women—specifically amas de casa (homemakers)—as key to combating inflation. While this has been largely overlooked by scholarly research, I argue that it reveals how intimate, gendered practices were woven into the Junta’s macroeconomic program. By tying inflation to household management, the regime moralized price instability, framing it as a matter of family—and more specifically, women’s—responsibility. As inflation persisted, however, women organized as amas de casa to mobilize against the regime, most notably through the “empty shopping bag” protests, contributing to the broader erosion of authoritarian rule. Drawing on a range of archival sources—including government documents, women’s magazines, and images of the “empty shopping bag” marches preserved in the archive of the newsroom of Diario Crónica—I argue that in late-1970s and early-1980s Argentina, consumption functioned simultaneously as a pillar of an emerging neoliberal form of citizenship and as a platform for asserting more democratic claims to social and economic rights. Ultimately, this study shows that economic crises are inherently cultural and political, contributing to broader debates on the gendered politics of political economy.

Bio: Julia Ballester is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research. She completed her Master’s degree in Sociology at the New School and, prior to coming to the U.S., earned an undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research has been funded, among others, by Fulbright, the DAAD, the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, and the Janey Program in Latin American Studies.

Moderator: Robyn Marasco ︳Live-streamed to Wollman Hall (Eugene Lang Building, room B500, 65 West 11th Street)

NOTE: This lecture will be live streamed to Wollman Hall, and also available for viewing to audience members off campus. To register for this lecture only please follow this link. Registered attendees will receive the live stream link one week prior to the event.

Fascist passions change historically. Yet some common features permit for them to be called fascist. The specific forms of sadistic exhilaration and revenge in operation now are passions undergone at psychic levels both involuntary and voluntary. They are also passionate reactions against social and legal movements and legal accomplishments that seek a restoration to forms of social hierarchy and exploitation (white supremacists, heteronormative, unrestrained capitalism). Considered as forms of furious nostalgia, these phantasmatic scenarios structure practice and policy ratifying limitless acquisition, imperial expansionism, and unconstrained revenge against feminist left social movements. The transnational reproduction of unbridled masculinism requires a transnational strategy and solidarity. For that purpose, an analysis that links forms of rights-stripping as a strategy of an authoritarianism fueled by fascist passions. To counter this, anti-fascist passions are necessary not only to arrest fascism but to build an anti-fascist understanding of shared life.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at The New School and  Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they also served as the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are the author of many books, including: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); Excitable Speech (1997); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012); What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022); and Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024). Their books have been translated into more than 27 languages. They received their PhD in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the Academic Council of Jewish Voices for Peace. They have been the recipient of numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships including  the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13), the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy; fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. In 2014, they were awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and subsequently reappointed as commandant. In 2025 they received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from The American Council of Learned Societies.

This is a 5-minute video montage that portrays the apocalyptic nihilism of white, cis male elites through their obsession with bunkers, doomsday prepping and space travel, and the end-of-the-world anxieties that permeate Hollywood and mainstream media. Through archival image and sound, the video montage seeks to highlight the patriarchal, white supremacist, anthropocentric foundations of “end-times fascism” (Klein and Taylor), as political and economic elites provoke and profit from social and environmental devastation while planning for their own salvation. The video montage culminates with a glimpse of alternative futurities, grounded in Indigenous futurisms, Afrofuturisms and Earth-centric dreams and visions for the liberation and the thriving of all beings, uplifting alternative paradigms rooted in nature, freedom and justice.

Bio: Majandra Rodriguez Acha is a climate justice and feminist advocate from Peru, and current student in the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management MS at Parsons. She is a Public Engagement Fellow and Aronson Fellow at The New School. She has recently worked with the Youth Climate Justice Fund, the Funders Learning and Action Co-Laboratory on Gender and the Environment, and FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund. She is committed to dismantling false climate solutions and to co-creating community-based alternatives rooted in decolonial, anti-racist and queer ecological paradigm shifts.

My creative work has consistently examined how power operates within the intimate sphere of sexual relationship and domestic life. In this presentation, I use Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day as my central text to explore how fiction reveals the mechanisms of political complicity that operate through personal delusion. I then discuss my forthcoming novel Heirloom, which extends this inquiry into how a contemporary housewife’s narratives about marriage, duty, and love enable her consent to systems of domination.

James Baldwin observed that Americans prefer “fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience” to avoid confronting the emptiness of their lives. Stevens, Ishiguro’s protagonist, embodies this perfectly: he narrates his sacrifice of love as professional duty, his complicity in fascism as loyalty, his entire life as inevitable. These stories allow him to remain complicit in structures—institutional, familial, political—that benefit the few while leaving others to fend for themselves.

But if fiction is the problem, it is also the solution. By examining how Stevens gradually recognizes his own narrative as constructed rather than inevitable, Ishiguro suggests that becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves about love, duty, and consent is the first step toward refusing them. This is not about individual happiness, but about the ethical work of truthful narration: seeing clearly what is, rather than what we need to believe.

This paper contributes to feminist theory’s project of diagnosing authoritarianism in intimate spaces by asking: How might art and storytelling—especially the deliberate practice of truthful narration—become tools for resisting the delusions that bind us to systems of governance, both intimate and political?

Bio: My stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, as an Audible Original, and in Blackbird, Electric Literature, Grist, Passages North, River River, and Willow Springs. I earned my MFA at the University of Kentucky and am represented by Rebecca Gradinger and Sarah Fuentes at United Talent Artists.

In this hybrid critical and creative project titled “A Hijab Manifesto // HRT: Hijab Reproduction Theory,” I will navigate how cisness operates as a narrative in a medical setting in order to pose an argument that is in opposition to cisness as an ideology and lead up to my claim of being assigned hijab at birth, or AHAB. In order to ground and navigate my argument through existing queer theoretical frameworks, I will begin with C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Gender, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era in order to discuss the origins of the category of sex and gender and how it is rooted in hegemonic and white institutional power, as well as how the medical industry enforces and regulates ideas of sex and gender as a technological biofascist project.

My project is heavily invested in A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway and will cover how hijab emerges as my sex, gender, and sexuality. The creative component of this project will discuss my journey with premature menopause, the process of undergoing hormone replacement therapy, and why creative writing, or poetry, is my reproductive future, a space of self invention or construction, and how it functions as a reclamation of the narrative of the body.

Bio: Hijab Ahmed is a poet and writer from metro Detroit and now lives in New York City. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry at The New School where she is the Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal, The Inquisitive Eater. Hijab is invested in interdisciplinary and experimental works and her projects often investigate the precarity of sex, gender, and sexuality and reproductive futures.

This paper theorizes a poetic interlude from my short film Pura Sangre as a feminist archive of affect—lived experience and the transmission of feeling—which exposes what Robyn Marasco names “the fascist in the family”: the links between intimate governance and authoritarian political life. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on performativity, vulnerability, and authoritarian affect (here, emotional drives that support or resist oppression), I argue that queer becoming—through trauma, desire, and relational ambiguity—acts as a counter-pedagogy (an alternative mode of teaching and learning) to the naturalization of heteronormativity, gender binarism, and transactional intimacy. The poetic text shows a struggle between legibility (being understood and labeled by others) and excess (experiences that defy categorization), between labels and becoming. It reveals how shame and normativity act as micro-technologies of governance within the self and within communities.

Building on this theoretical foundation, and through close reading and auto-ethnographic analysis, the paper situates moments of yearning, celibacy, manifestation, and relational refusal within broader structures of racial capitalism and white supremacy that constrain liberatory sociality. In this context, the interlude’s insistence on “always becoming” is read as an anti-fascist affective practice—one that resists closure, certainty, and the authoritarian demand for fixed identities. By framing intimacy and friendship as political sites rather than private domains, the paper rethinks feminist organizing as an ethics of care, patience, and non-possessive attachment.

Ultimately, the paper proposes “archiving feeling” as a method for feminist theory and practice: a way to document how authoritarian logics are lived, contested, and reimagined in everyday encounters. In doing so, it offers a model for how creative practice can function as theory—foregrounding the roles of affect (emotional experience), memory, and relationality in confronting fascism not only as a regime but as a structure of feeling, i.e., the underlying emotional patterns and sensibilities that sustain political formations.

Bio: Myra Kathiria Rosa is an award-winning Afro-Indigenous Puerto Rican writer, sensory ethnographer, and transdisciplinary cultural producer from the South Bronx. Her practice is rooted in writing as method—using poetry, lyric ethnography, photography, and film to explore memory, diaspora, and the multiplicity of identity within Afro-Latinx and Indigenous societies. Myra is currently producing a cycle of films examining affect, land, and relationality across Indigenous communities. Her films have screened at festivals throughout North America, South America, Eurasia, Australia, and Africa. She divides her time between New York City and the U.S. South.

What happens when fascism infiltrates the family form? Opposition is suppressed, abuse looms large, but there is never a banner preceding these mechanisms of control. In her creative autofiction novel THROUGH ME FIRST, author Brittany Borghi explores the intersectionality between economic class control in post-industrial western Pennsylvania and the oppression of women and girls in the traditional family system. The novel traces the experiences of its protagonist, Brittany, as she struggles against an endless onslaught of unwanted male attention. When she decides to enact revenge by entertaining the advances of her married coworker, Brittany’s mother, Terry, reveals to her a slew of family secrets, crimes, and abuses that demonstrate that Brittany is simply repeating intergenerational patterns. The novel ends with the two women finding a loophole “behind” the image of the woman/mother/wife in the fascistic family system as they step into an image of their own making.

The presentation will consider the politics of place. Western Pennsylvania was a sight of industrial anti-union violence through the 19th and 20th centuries, and this anti-worker environment encouraged the development of the master-slave dialectic in the home, where overworked fathers abused beleaguered wives and mothers into a kind of submission that can be traced from generation to generation. I am proposing a reading of selections from the text that would inspire discussion on the creation of a feminist space external to the fascist family structure that enables a momentum of resistance and creativity that serve to undo fascism in the family.

Bio: Brittany Borghi is a 2018 graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the recipient of a 2022-23 Fulbright research grant to Italy. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review, The Hopkins Review, Guesthouse, Entropy, The Pittsburgh City Paper, and by the UNESCO Cities of Literature. Her essay “A Delicate Strength” was featured as notable in The Best American Essays 2020 and her work has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award and a Pushcart Prize.

This presentation explores the emerging role of gender doulaing as a vital form of community care through The New School’s Gender Doula Project. While the doula model is traditionally associated with birth and death, “gender doulaing” expands this framework to support individuals navigating the complex continuum of gender exploration and transition.

In an era of increasing systemic hostility and medical barriers for transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) populations, this project posits that doulaing serves as a radical act of community-based care. The Gender Doula Project operates outside clinical hierarchies to provide non-medical emotional, social, and practical support. By facilitating peer-to-peer mentorship and advocacy, the project addresses the isolation often felt by those transitioning and provides support in navigating complex personal, social and cultural landscapes.

Bio: The Gender Doula Project, founded by Miller Oberman, Tamara Oyola‑Santiago, and Tracy Robin, supports transgender and gender‑expansive students at The New School amid rising attacks on DEI and trans communities. Addressing a vital gap in care, the project offers affirming, accessible guidance. Student members Samuel Conner Self, Paige Griffith, Samara Lopez, and Liam Glass‑Hussain help strengthen its mission to ensure gender diverse students receive the support they need.

Sex Workers are one of the canaries in the fascist coal mine. They are a group of people that we are taught to view as disposable, criminal, and below the common citizen. This insidious train of thought already exists at large even inside of feminist academia.

Sex workers are often trans, disabled, immigrants, and/or women living the most precarious realities. Yet, it is one of the most overlooked academic points of dialogue in the classroom, at symposium and in research.

~butterfly angel club~ is a living exhibition of archival and contemporary work made by sex workers. ~bac~ puts workers as the narrators of their own story through physical media, photography, zines, magazines, literature and more.

~butterfly angel club~ presents an opportunity to question and engage with one’s own internalized carceral feminist and push back potentially budding internalized fascism. ~butterfly angel club~ brings dialogue and witnessing of sex workers to Feminisms Against Fascism as an experiential exhibit that asks participants about their relationship with internalized fascism, carceral feminism, performative feminism and patriarchy sits within them.

Fascism seeks to reduce marginalized groups to begin systematic erasure with the most compromised first. In a time that encourages isolationism, we must reach to each other for collectivism and see solidarity in our struggles as an opportunity to learn from one another. When remaking the world asks us what it looks like to dream up new systems, new worlds, ~butterfly angel club~ asks what we can learn from the ingenuity of sex workers and their active engagement with mutual solidarity.

Anne Lesley Selcer (aka Alx) will present work from their forthcoming book, CLUB SPACE. Míša Stekl will reflect critically on CLUB SPACE’s interventions in writing on raving. Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, CLUB SPACE’s takes place amidst the most recent wave of feminism, the trans wave. In sensory body writing, it describes the tremendous multi-directional forces of energy required to make cultural change. The cultural energy that may feel like a wave of utopia that seems to crash or to dissolve, has done its work on the bodies, minds, and souls of the people who made it. It’s not concretely outside of us: utopia has done its work inside, upon us. As queer femininity jailbreaks the codes and semiotics of femininity designed to serve patriarchy, the characters in CLUB SPACE liberate and misuse the radical connectivity of individuals made possible by Internet culture. While the binary code and algorithm developed in accelerating tech-fascist corporate spaces link us inside the panopticon of work, manipulation, addiction and ever-increasing surveillance, CLUB SPACE experiments with the capacity of nonlinear space and musical time to form new modes of sensing, communicating and becoming. Stekl will offer a psychoanalytic perspective on how rave/club space may permit the dissociation of dominant political fantasies and constructions of subjectivity and sociality. Yet they also wonder about the limits of rave/club spaces to effect utopian cultural change, given the confines of our increasingly fascist world order as well as the potential for authoritarian reappropriation (from Boiler Room to Berghain, and beyond). This dialogue between Stekl and Selcer will probe new perspectives on the political possibilities of aesthetic culture as an incursion into politics.

Bios: Anne Lesley Selcer (aka Alx) is a poet, writer and artist working across media on the senses. They are author of Sun Cycle and Blank Sign Book. Excerpts their in-progress novel CLUB SPACE can be read in Writing on Raving (O/R Books, 2025) and Norient magazine.

Míša Stekl is the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow Brown University. Their project, “Accursed Races: Anti-Blackness and Queer/Trans Modernity,” explores how modern regimes of gender and sexuality are parasitic upon anti-Black racial hierarchies. She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University.

In this paper I discuss three projects that move past negational critiques of patriarchal and property-based paradigms to prefiguratively stage “matriarchal social dramaturgies;” 1) a micro village compound in Kumasi, Ghana built by trans-feminist matriarch Va-Bene Fiatsi Elikem to protect and sustain the lives of her extended family—LGBTQAI people, midwives, spiritual practitioners, and others considered “witches”—in the face of Christian-nationalist violence, 2) an artistic performance called “Rap on Race with Rice,” lead by Dominique Duroseau, through which Duroseau’s immediate community of self-identified women artists debate and intentionally re-construct the epistemic instrument RACE, and 3) my own collective philosophy thinktank “Our Studies Show,” through which participants develop feminist, queer, and neurodivergent ways of performing auto-research into our own cognition and epistemological frameworks. While these projects are staged intentionally as models of socialist/decolonial feminist praxis, and do prefigure structures and formats for feminist “assemblies” (Butler), and “social technologies” (Cohen), my embodied involvement in these projects has also forced me to recognize the creative dynamics of matriarchal dramaturgies; each of these projects is just as much about metaphysics and what is meant by “creativity” as they are about prefiguring “structures.” How are our social practices constitutive with our senses of autonomous artistic activity, spiritual agency, and cosmological space? What must we believe, or not believe, or at least not reject as possible modes of belief, about our “creative” power (across reproduction, self-making, and artistic creation) if we aim to practice feminist/antifascist self-shaping species-being?

Bio: Neff is the organizer of PPL, which collectively researches social dramaturgies across spheres. PPL has operated as a cultural institution (publishing a compendium called Institution is a Verb with the Operating System), an embodied social intelligence (Embarrassed of the (W)hole, published as an “operating manual” by Ugly Duckling Press), and materialized through thinktanks, operas, and conferences. Writing has appeared in PAJ, Paradigm, Performance Philosophy, CONTENTS, the Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy, and the Palgrave Macmillan Handbook for Queer and Trans Performance.

This political education and strategy workshop explores how the feminist killjoy—drawn from the work of Sara Ahmed—can become a method for confronting adult supremacy as a pillar of rising fascism. Fascist movements depend on rigid hierarchies: nation over migrant, man over woman, white over racialized, adult over young. While feminist and anti-racist movements often name patriarchy and white supremacy, adult supremacy remains under-theorized as a system that disciplines young people’s autonomy, knowledge, and political agency.

Grounded in embodied reflection and collective inquiry, participants will examine how adult supremacy shows up in organizing spaces, faith communities, classrooms, and families—especially through silencing and the policing of youth dissent. We will ask: What does it mean to become a feminist killjoy when young people refuse obedience to authoritarian norms? How do we resist internalizing adultist logics in our own movements?

The workshop integrates short political education inputs, small-group storytelling, and intergenerational strategy mapping. Participants will leave with shared language to identify adult supremacy, practical tools to interrupt it, and a framework for building intergenerational solidarity as an anti-fascist practice.

This session is designed for organizers, educators, faith leaders, and comrades engaged in struggles against gendered, racialized, and state violence. By reclaiming the killjoy as a collective survival strategy, we practice refusing fascism not only at the level of the state, but in our everyday relationships of power.

Bio: Sirajum Sandhi is a Muslim abolitionist organizer and founder of the Killjoy Institute, a popular education and organizing collective. An asylee from Bangladesh, their intimate experiences with political and gender-based violence shaped their community organizing and advocacy efforts. They studied Gender & Sexuality at Dartmouth College, where they were a Race, Migration, and Sexuality Scholar. Sirajum is pursuing a master’s in Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

Fascism operates not only as a political regime but as relational habits embedded in everyday institutional life. In the university, we see these patterns: the “parental” administrator who knows best, grading systems that enforce hierarchy, tenure structures mirroring patriarchal lineage, competition for funding naturalizing scarcity logic, and silence around harm enforced as loyalty.

Drawing on our published case study (Crean & Cruz, 2026) in which we applied futuring methodology with students to imagine a university centered on embodied needs. We now use this tested approach to examine how these fascist relational logics shape university life and collectively imagine alternatives, asking: What care infrastructures become possible when we practice repair, collective agency, and collective imagining as refusals of fascist relationality? We propose a participatory workshop using collective futuring to imagine a university in which anti-authoritarian pedagogy is already in practice and to imagine the systems that would need to exist to make this possible.

To do so, in small groups, participants will iterate on sketches/designs work with a combination of 3 prompts: Values ( Plurality, Interdependence, Accountability); Institutional Domains (Student Health, Governance, Housing); Design Qualities (Distributed, Transparent, Restorative). Through these combinations, participants will imagine what systems, pedagogical structures, economic models, spatial interventions, and governance forms necessary to support such a university.

We conclude by identifying which of these speculative propositions might be prototyped in the present, treating collective imagining itself as a method for institutional inquiry.

Bios: Lorraine Cruz (they/them) is a researcher, and designer born in the Dominican Republic and based in New York City. With a background in psychology, philosophy, and a Master’s in Design and Technology, their work reimagines possible futures through decolonial practice. Lorraine explores what it means to unlearn Western frameworks by positioning the body as a site of knowledge, one that connects us to our environments and shapes how we create meaning.

Melanie Crean is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, performance, social practice, and emerging technologies. Her work draws from speculative design, science fiction, and myth to reimagine cultural archetypes and intervene in civic systems. Often working collaboratively, she explores storytelling as a political tool and collective imagination as a method for envisioning reparative futures. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design.