Formations, Locations and Reproductions of Fascist Fantasies

Abstract

The conjunction of fascism and fantasy inevitably recalls Klaus Theweleit's extensive two volume study of Freikorps' Male Fantasies (1987). Now a decade later, four books-representing some of most important, innovative scholarly work on fascism-shift our focus to literal and figurative matrices of fascist fantasies-women. The naturalization of motherhood; fantasy of harnessing as literal reproductive organs of fascist collectivity; representation of sexualized violation, and destruction of signifiers of feminine to demarcate sexual and economic autarky: given these staples of fascist ideological fantasies, women's roles in, accommodations to, and revisions of gendering of power in Italian fascism and National Socialism--one of main foci of these studies-make a particularly compelling topic for analysis. It is safe to say, without leveling out specificities of particular historical and political articulations of fascism, as ideology and/or regime, that fascist ideology recognized and celebrated insofar as they remained in domestic, or private, sphere as mothers and wives, while it also called upon them to participate politically. And yet, as each author here asks, what do we know about affiliated with, or supportive of, fascism, yet excluded by narrow gender prescriptions of such an ideological filter: unmarried; childless; those who occupied a public role; those whose defense of women's rights made them intolerant of misogyny of reproductive scripts and disdainful of paucity of roles accorded to them in fascist ideology? How do negotiate, or rewrite, what Barbara Spackman refers to as the fascist topography of sex and gender-the boundaries of public and private space-when, as she observes in discursive regime of Italian fascism, stepping out into public sphere 'masculinizes' and 'sterilizes' women, and production and reproduction are strictly, and asymmetrically, linked for men and women (35). Negotiating and renegotiating public and private space constitutes not only objective of fascist ideology; it is also