Patriarchal pacts in the neo-archaic manosphere: warband brotherhoods as fascist masculinity

ABSTRACT

This paper situates contemporary manospheric culture within archaic forms of masculine identity formation foundational to patriarchal political orders and fascism. What happens when 21^st century emergent masculinity is also what Deleuze and Guattari call a neo-archaism? Drawing from Celia Amoros’ understanding of patriarchy as being primarily composed of masculine pacts and packs, I analyse the manosphere as an neo-archaic space for the formation of brotherhoods. Moreover, these fratriarchal groupings are warbands, reviving the Männerbund as fascist patriarchal pact. An analysis that takes seriously the neo-archaic elements of the manosphere sees the archaic not as past imaginary but a revived force that erupts in the present. We can see the manosphere less as one part of the internet than a transnationally spreading zone that expands this archaic war. Finally, the paper argues that the conjuncture is riven by the revival of a patriarchal power that is primordial, defined as a first order in which gender is foundational to its mythical establishment.

KEYWORDS:

• Manosphere
• fascism
• conjuncture
• patriarchy
• right-wing masculinity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In which otherwise Islamophobes embrace its extreme patriarchal dimensions (using women for bioreproduction and performing Islamic honour killings, in particular when women disrespect men) (Possamai et al., 2020).

2. James Martel (2020) summarizes Benjamin’s development of the concept: ‘Mythic violence is Benjamin’s term for the way that illicit economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life … its right to rule is self-proclaimed and then naturalized so that it becomes seen as fated and inevitable. It is violent because, without a genuine basis for its authority, mythic violence must endlessly strike out, killing and hurting over and over again to establish its power and even its reality’.

3. Miller and Yúdice explain this tripartite model thusly: ‘the dominant culture uses education, philosophy, religion, advertising and art to make its dominance appear normal and natural … Residual cultures comprise old meanings and practices, no longer dominant, but still influential. Emergent cultures are either propagated by a new class or incorporated by the dominant, as part of hegemony’.

4. While Griffin importantly attaches this concept to nationalism, I would extend it to state and power formations that pre-exist the nation (such as archaic patriarchal systems), all of which only renew themselves through a foundational eliminationism.

5. For instance, prominent QAnon influencers like Sean Morgan have distributed a series of videos titled to remasculinize via a restoration of gendered social relations. The recent campaigns in Florida, Texas, and other states to further enshrine patriarchal control in law have been built on top of years of mediated cultural work around spiritually inflected misogyny.

6. Resacralization of the world versus materialism; folk/traditional culture versus mass culture; natural social order versus an artificial hierarchy based on wealth; … a harmonious relationship between men and women versus the ‘war between the sexes’; handicrafts and artisanship versus industrial mass-production” (p. 145).

7. Even in the 1980s Pat Robertson saw the significance of creating a channel in the then-burgeoning world of cable TV. His Christian Broadcasting Network cable channel promoted the conservative family values by airing reruns of Little House on the Prairie, I Married Joan, and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

8. Other key figures and sites that traffic in what Moya Bailey refers to as misogynoir (the misogyny that dehumanizes Black women): Donovan Sharpe, The Brother Pill (hosted by Oshay Duke Jackson who created the now-defunct negromanosphere.com), and the Fresh & Fit podcast, and others whose primary goal, in the guise of dating advice and self-uplift, is to blame Black women for all Black men’s suffering. See Onuoha, A. (January 2022).

9. First, a reduction of multiplicity (including the fabrications of gender) to two (Bey 2021), then the further reduction and pacification of one (women) establishes that patriarchal order itself (whether the woman is sinful, unruly, property-object, captured in raids, etc.).

10. See the work of Shane Burley (2017) and Anthony Faramelli (2018) for examples of Leftist invocations of tradition/ancestry.

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Jack Z. Bratich

Jack Z. Bratich writes about the intersection of popular culture and political culture. He applies social and political theory to such topics as social movements, craft culture, reality television, and the cultures of secrecy. He is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and author of On Microfascism: Gender, War, Death (Common Notions, 2022) and Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008), and coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (2003).