A dialogue with Jack Z. Bratich and Leopoldina Fortunati on feminist antifascism, which emphasizes social reproduction as a key node of a micro-antifascism capable of confronting and dismantling fascism’s latent energies.
Exploring themes from Jack Z. Bratich’s recent book, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death, the conversation will examine the cultural dimensions of patriarchy, white supremacy, and nationalism, and why feminist antifascism is needed in order to see how microfascism is part of every fight we have to confront in order to live.
ABOUT ON MICROFASCISM
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions.
To do this, Jack Z. Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. In addition to On Microfascism, he is also author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture and coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality.
Leopoldina Fortunati is professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics at the University of Udine. She is the founder of the laboratory of research on new media, NuMe (nume.uniud.it). Her research in the field of gender studies, cultural processes, and communication and information technologies is extensive and informed by autonomist feminist and marxist insights developed in feminist and workerist struggles in Italy since the seventies. Leopoldina Fortunati is the author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital.
Livestream via the Common Notions YouTube Channel.