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Budapest W10: Nationalism, Gender, Sexuality - Class notes

Femonationalism and Femocrats

 Intersection of nationalism/racism and feminism
Need to protect women, prostitution and undesirability - create gendered/nationalist borders
Femonationalist discourse - global, vision of Swedish prohibitionist feminism

How is femonationalist different/similar/useful from the other weeks?

Farris - feminism's entanglement with nationalism/islamaphobia/racism
Convergence - entanglement, pg.3, surprising intersection, how all three above and neoliberalism create an ideological formation, this is called femonationalism
Political economy and logic of femonationalism, collection of material and symbolic conditions that create it, and give it a particular logic.
Context - situations, conditions of convergence is not just the war on terror or post 9/11 discourse, but also broader set of ideologies and institutions - not just about muslim men, it is a convergence of lots of actors together. It also depends on colonial histories of racism - Farris argues that political economy of femonationalism is broad and deep, critically connected to neoliberalism. Genealogies of feminist racism, orientalism, neoliberalism.

Femonationalism and populism - prominence of populism through which to think about right wing movements in gender, race aspects. Femonationalism as a style and logic.
There is a level of abstraction, disembodiment, desertification - Derrida discussion.

Kulick - Swedish exceptionalism - a place of moral superiority (good, tolerance, rights) - how it is reproduced in ways that mask material realities that means sex workers are much worse off
When people are instrumentalised, what actually gets broken down? The people, in lieu of the message. In this way, the nation is idolised as progressive, whilst the sex workers are put in more danger.
Swedish apparatus that makes borders between Sweden and the EU, and internal borders through hetero-nationalist feminism - no lesbians, no sadomasochists, no lesbians adopting children, no women being sex-workers.

Feminist high ground - competition over who is the most feminist - denigrating against the 'false' feminists in Europe and especially Eastern European women. Swedish keep finding grounds to show they are the 'real' saviours of women. Portraying Eastern European women as attackers, but never as victims of another system.

Farris - search for a 'Third Way' between socialism and capitalism, democracy and authoritarianism.

Janus-faced nationalism - threatened and the victim, and also being the strongest in order to prevent the threat and victimisation. Homonationalism/femonationalism - traditional masculine strength of the nation is under threat (rapist/masturbator), these ways of being nationalist are new: save your nation by being nice to your enemy - being more tolerant, making them assimilate to your values. LOVE = saviour narrative, turning victimisation into moral strength. Concept of generosity - foreign aid with strings attached

Populism - notions of the people, headed by a popular sovereignty
Exaggerating information, also controlling news and information, creating imagined sense of community. Farris says they do this through creating an 'us' and a 'them' through creating distinctions between nationalist and gender.
Femonationalism - distinguishes 'them' group into men and women. Neoliberal logic that Western Europe needs migrant women for care-work
Populism - not democratic, but rather demogogic - need a demigod to sway the people with charisma - populism associated with the leader. Fascism - these ideas come together with the leader principle, where they are the embodiment of the will of the people. Populism is cross-class through different means, making lines of 'love' and 'hatred' through 'us' and 'them'. Farris says populism is not a movement, but a logic. Femonationalism is a style - feminists who care about things like tolerance, embodied (attitude/style).
In the process of giving people voices, their voices are taken away

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