Apocalyptic Fear, Heroic Victimization and Destructive Pleasure:The Emotional Politics of Anti-Gender

This article contributes to current work on transnational anti-gender politics by developing a conceptual framework for understanding its emotional dynamics. Synthesizing recent work on anti-gender politics with queer feminist affect theory and scholarship on the psychosocial life of authoritarianism, I outline three key affective dynamics – apocalyptic fear, heroic victimization and destructive pleasure – that animate and sustain anti-gender projects in the contemporary moment. Based on the analysis of anti-gender discourse in Germany, the article argues that these dynamics form an affective circuit also apparent across anti-gender politics transnationally. In doing so, the article elucidates not only how anti-gender politics transforms diffuse anxieties into an emotional sense of injury and the collective enjoyment of punitive restoration, it also highlights how the failure of satisfaction that the destruction of the object of ‘gender’ contains does not terminate the circuit but reactivates it, producing a self-reinforcing catalyst for anti-gender radicalization and authoritarian projects. The analysis offers a conceptual bridge between debates on anti-gender scholarship and the wider analyses of far-right and neo-fascist nationalism by showing that the emotional life of anti-gender politics is not merely reactive but generative of new structures of feeling that sustain an increasingly authoritarian present.