Overview

Following Diana Tada's performance “Magdalena, como el río,” Pilar Mendoza will discuss the performance with Diana Tada and Bárbara Luci Carvalho, providing commentary and contextualization for the audience.

This event explores the central role of emotions and affects as political, collective, and historically situated forces that shape feminist mobilizations, experiences of violence, and processes of knowledge production. By focusing on these distinct yet intertwined aspects, we invite interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue on how feelings—such as fear, shame, and numbness—circulate within feminist movements and within the research practices that engage with gender-based violence.

In recent years, “gender” has become a politically charged term. Research on this phenomenon is booming. However, there is still a lack of systematic comparative analyses that also shed light on the historical depth of the phenomenon. The interactions between anti-feminism and processes of de-democratization have also not yet been sufficiently explored. This lecture provides an overview of the field of research and further questions.

In this talk, I discuss the current conjuncture of late fascism by drawing on black radical and anti-colonial readings of fascism, and its relation to colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. I focus especially on anti-colonial feminist readings and bring these into conversation with contemporary abolitionist thought and practice to sketch out the (im-)possibilities of anti-fascist horizons.

Gender is not an invention of feminism. Rather, gender—meaning being female or male based on secondary sexual characteristics and not on identity or identities—has been the central criterion for inclusion and exclusion in terms of social scope for action since the French Revolution. Therefore, the frequently asked question, “Why are women on the side of authoritarian movements?” can only be answered with the counter-question: “Why shouldn't women be?”

In the 21st century, we are witnessing a global resurgence of fascist tendencies. Liberal democracies, politically polarized and shattered by neoliberalism, are in many places veering toward authoritarian self-defense. Right-wing movements affirm destruction in new ways by invoking “freedom” as their central tenet. In doing so, the promise of modernity breaks down into its darkest components: in self-defense and the affirmation of destructive object relations, the hyperbolic freedom of the owner can be realized for a fleeting moment.