Maxi Wallenhorst | Sex in Decline. Facism and the Attack on Trans Life
03. Dec
6:00 pm, C40.530
For the international far right, trans forms of life and "gender ideology" function as allegories of global decline. By juxtaposing the image of the "irreversibly damaged" child with that of weakened geopolitical force, queerness, often racialized, becomes a scalable emblem of a crisis of social reproduction. From Male Phantasies to the liberal strands of queer theory, the right-wing battle of the sexes escalating in this arena has often been understood as primarily defensive and/or retaliatory in nature, as a response to a supposed sexual liberalism. Drawing on trans history and materialist analysis, this talk aims to complicate this "backlash" hypothesis in the hope of clarifying how contemporary fascisms operate, with a focus on contemporary Germany and the US: Beyond psychological resentments and demagogic deflection, trans moral panic enables, for example, the extension of racist "great replacement" theories, the escalation of neoliberal campaigns against public education and unions, the further development of fascist feminisms. Engaging with trans literary work from the last years, the talk asks: How can queer and trans knowledge be taken seriously without reducing them, in turn, to an allegory of fascism? How can trans forms of life be understood not as inherently decadent (or progressive) per se -–but as a social formation capable of a distinct critique of how sex is lived in decline?
Maxi Wallenhorst
Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer based in Berlin. As a PhD candidate at Leuphana University, she's currently working on a queer materialist poetics of metabolic disorder. Most recently, her work has been published in Berlin Review.
An event organized by the Research Initiative The Disruptive Condition
Contact: Anne Gräfe (anne.graefe@leuphana.de)