Fascism’s Erotic Register

Growing up in Mussolini’s Italy, Umberto Eco knew only Fascism. In 1942, at the age of ten, he writes an essay for the Italian Fascists. The essay must address this question: “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” Eco knows the “right” answer. He wins, receiving what may have been his first award. By 1943, Mussolini is deposed. In 1945, Milan is liberated by partisans, and Il Duce is executed. Once he was all-powerful and idealized. Now his body is kicked and spat upon. Clandestine political parties celebrate their freedom in a public cacophony of difference. Eco learns that “freedom of speech is freedom from rhetoric” (Ur-Fascism, p. 1). 

 

Many years pass, and Eco writes another essay; this one is an antidote to the first. In Ur-Fascism he revisits these memories, and asks, “Is there still another ghost stalking Europe?” (p. 2). Illuminating this ghost, Eco argues that fascism has no particular ideological essence. The content of its ideologies differ, but its structure reoccurs. He lists fourteen features that characterize Eternal Fascism. Many of these coexist in unquestioning contradiction, because fascism disdains thought and reflectivity. Thinking is considered passive, effete, and it is feminized. Fascism is a muscular “cult of action for action’s sake,” in which “life is permanent warfare” (p. 7, italics in original). To Eco, fascist violence is an erotic register of machismo. The predations of hyper-hetero-masculinity; the contempt for women; the assault on sex ed and gendered variance; the attribution of perversion to racial/ethnic minorities: all of this is bedrock to fascist structures.

 

Once there were Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. Now, in 2024, we have Putin, Orbán, Modi, and Trump. Democracy is at risk. In the United States, the enticement of fascism is manifest in MAGA fever. But fascism is not new to the United States (see Maddow, 2023). Paxton identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first fascist movement, well before Mussolini formalized Fascism (Paxton, 2004). The KKK fed into white Christian nationalism in the 1930s. These were pro-Nazi movements, infected with the virulent antisemitism that characterizes the alt-right today (Hochschild, 2022). In these regimes, Real men fight and Good women Mother. The righteous are sanctified, they are “pure,” and they are ascendant. Homosexuals, the Black, and the Jew: these are considered perverse and subhuman. 

 

These systems seem like a call to repair the collective unmanning of men. They sacralize a dominant hyper-hetero-masculinity, and promise communal protection and rescue through submission to an all-powerful Father. But the price of this rescue is the persecutory control of the body politic. These controls are often infused with erotic texts and subtexts that deify cruelty and the hatred of women (see Theweleit, 1987, 1989). Mobilized by the demagogue, lit up by the crowd, these subtexts involve contradictory enticements, prescriptions, and prohibitions. The “righteous” often have lurid projections about the degenerate and the “deviant.” In these movements, fascists issue moralistic edicts; they seek and attack transgressors, and they engage in the unholy acts that they have forbidden. At other times, they perform machismo, dread sexuality, and perpetrate violence on the women whom they sexualize (Theweleit, 1987). In both positions, fascists claim moral purity, and praise their fungible, desexualized Mother-Wife. This “holy” edifice is built upon a perverse structure: a delusional preoccupation with the Other’s  “perversion.” All of this infuses racism and antisemitism. 

 

The celebration of violence, the preoccupation with a repellant, menacing sexuality: this is operating now, in the white Christian nationalism that sees queer and trans people multiplying everywhere. Ostensibly, they are “groomers,” they are “pedophiles,” they will rape your daughter and turn your sons into girls. To the alt-right, Jews and Black and Brown hordes are fornicating with whiteness, polluting that whiteness, and gestating the “Great Replacement.” To white Christian nationalists, liberalism permits the pregnant woman to double as murderer: she might abort her baby the day before she gives birth. Or commit “postbirth abortion.” Only the “righteous” can purge these “deviants” and the democracy that birthed them. 

 

These fixations gestate in cults of phallic supremacy (see Ben-Ghiat, 2020; Weiland, 2015, 2023). These cults are grounded in patriarchal narcissism and erotic splitting. Fascist movements dictate heterosexual conformity and sexual repression. But they do not merely prohibit erotic life. These regimes arouse and activate the desires that expand their powers. The Leader must become the object of desire: 

 

Mussolini cut an incredible figure in the 1930s. Strutting on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in comic opera style in front of 100,000 people chanting “DUCE! DUCE!” He built up an elaborate culture of personality around himself. News photos regularly showed him in a position of command, riding on horseback, flying an airplane…. He would … pose wrestling with a lion cub. 

(The “Death of the Duce, Benito Mussolini,” April 28, 202, The National WWII Museum) 

 

Throughout fascist narratives, women are either sluts or Mothers. The only sanctified form of female sexuality is the passive adoring female gaze cast upon the leader: 

 

“DUCE, I saw you yesterday during your tumultuous visit to our city,” wrote Michela C. of Siena in December 1925. “Our eyes met. I told you of my admiration, devotion…. I feared I would never know love in my life. Now I know that I love you. … I understood that I had touched your heart from the heated way you looked at me just before I fainted” (quoted in Ben-Ghiat, 2023, p. 119). 

 

Michela C. manifests the desire that sustains phallic supremacy. But while Michela C. turns her adoring gaze on Mussolini, let’s turn our gaze toward the Leader’s other witnesses. What if a woman laughs at Mussolini’s posturing? What if she is looking at another woman instead of admiring his prowess? What if a cis hetero man doesn’t want to be him? What if there are cis men who want to relinquish their male identity? What if a cis woman can have surgery and take hormones and just acquire “masculinity”? Watching the rituals of fascism, these people can see what the Leader does not want to be seen. They can look at him and through him. Their eyes seem to be everywhere. In the United States, we can sense that this gaze shatters fascism’s narcissistic mirror. To MAGA, this gaze must feel like a shaming panopticon. It is no wonder that these unregulated bodies evoke paranoia and rage in the dominant. 

 

This perspective helps to explain the ferocity with which MAGA is attacking trans people. Trans bodies scramble the gender binaries and hierarchies that are foundational to fascism. Nontraditional families; racial/ethnic “mixing”; women who want sex, not babies; sex and gender outliers; Black, Brown, and Jewish “vermin”: all of these query, and weaken, the patriarchy. They bust up the heroic mythology of violent hyper-hetero-masculinity. To vacate this threat, authoritarian regimes construct the category of deviance. Fascism’s real perversion is split off into the Other body. The Other becomes a mass focus for erotic obsession, hate, and dread. To save the “pure” from the profane, “deviance” must be purged. In the fascist crowd, violence toward the “perverse Other” becomes a sanctified form of collective madness, mobilized by the dictator. 

 

This virulence suggests that fascism knows something about the locus of its own undoing. To resist fascism, we need to learn from fascism’s paranoia. A great anti-fascist force resides in the category of “deviance”; we need to liberate that force.

 

 

References

Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020). Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: Norton and Company. 

Eco, U. (1995). Ur-Fascism. The New York Review of Books. June 22, 1995. 

Hochschild, A. (2022). American Midnight. New York: Mariner Books.

Maddow, R. (2023). Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. New York: Crown Publishing.

Paxton, R. (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Penguin Books. 

Theweleit. K. (1987). Male Fantasies, Volume One: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. 

Weiland, C. (2015). The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity. New York: Routledge Press.