A feminist exploration #3: The great replacement
Channel: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union
Date: 2020-09-18

In this third edition of “A feminist exploration” - we focused on "The great replacement" - Reproductive policies and demographic doom fantasies within the ‘Identitarian Movement’”. Together with Judith Goetz, literary scholar and political scientist at the University of Vienna, we dove into the naturalisation of inequalities, a cornerstone of right-wing extremist thinking. Andrea Pető, Professor at the Central European University in Vienna, moderated the discussion.

The idea of a “great replacement” has become increasingly popular in right-wing discourse and promotes the fantasy of a somewhat orchestrated replacement of populations. The seemingly apolitical reference to "nature", "normal families" or "demography” is highly popular. In the context of gender relations, this premise openly invokes nature to legitimise racist, colonial or classist structures.

In this mini lecture, we acquired an insight into the close link between anti-feminist discourses and right-wing extremism’s core belief, i.e. to a racialised/ethnicised world-view. How does the far right use the topics of gender/sex and sexuality to bring racist population politics back into the political sphere without actually calling it by that name? How adaptable are anti-feminist discourses and how are they able to gradually include more and more issues in their relatively coherent master-narrative of the threatened "natural order"?