Last week, Secretary of Homeland Security and puppy-killer Kristi Noem made a video standing in front of a group of imprisoned men in El Salvador. This is the prison to which her department renditioned some large number of men, alleging that they were gang members. Some weren’t.
Jeff Sharlet and his wife, Julia Rabig, commented on the visuals in terms of a fascist erotic. The whole thing is worth reading. The visuals are intended both to appeal and to be a trap for those who would comment on them.
The piece threads that needle, showing how it’s done. Gender issues are a central part of the rightwing agenda now being imposed on the nation. Rigid rules for physicality. Insistence that there are only two sexes, not genders, biological essentialism. Persecution of those who do not fall into the approved categories.
In this case, the gender ideology serves a racist agenda. The two are intertwined and almost always appear together, with one or the other predominating.
This week has brought a couple of articles from self-identified conservative women about how badly they are treated, saying it’s no wonder that conservative women hate liberals. They don’t use those words, but that’s the message. As usual, “you made us do it,” which is a constant conservative theme, but it’s also the trap that Noem was setting up with her performance.
(From the article) The trap is: name it, and then you’re the pervert, the one makes something perfectly ordinary—a White House video (or, fetish porn), a video of a cabinet secretary (or, Lara Croft with shirtless caged men)—weird. Which is why we have to identify the whole apparatus of the trap, not just the bait.
….
I don’t need to ask you to resist seduction. But that’s not the only way this bait works. Even ordinary insults are to fascism’s advantage. To give in to speculation about botox or extensions, or to run the gamut of derisive and mostly sexist terms for physical ugliness, is a form of submission to fascism’s eroticization of power. It’s playing a role in a BDSM scenario from which “play” has been excised. Because “erotic” doesn’t equal “attractive.” Eros means desire. Fascism pursues an “erotic” aesthetic precisely because both desire and our rejection of it kneels before fascism’s false terms, in which our only real existence is in relationship to power. The work now is to try to name the whole apparatus of the trap—not just the bait but the springs behind it, the metal jaws above and below, the cage we see in this video and the one that awaits.
There’s a lot more here. The article barely touches on the body modification so common in the Trump circles, Jon McNaughton’s paintings, and the weird AI creations that this group loves. But keep the traps in mind.
Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money
Nuclear Diner