For Toscano, in his discussion of what he calls “late fascism,” fascism remains a product of “returns and repetitions” (x), but failure to diagnose its contemporary distinctions “runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent or complicit” (xi). Traverso defines “postfascism” as a set of contradictions, because “the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality” (4). Postfascism belongs to this historical moment, “which explains its erratic, unstable, and often contradictory ideological content, in which antinomic political philosophies mix together” (7).
2. This panel assembles a diverse group of horror scholars who have a specific interest in fascist and anti-fascist politics. As such, the collection of voices on this panel promise to resonate with each other and produce important scholarly and political insights for a historical moment in which global (post)fascism is on the rise.
3. While some horror scholars have discussed horror cinema in terms of encroaching authoritarianism, few have addressed the specific quality of postfascist politics. For example, some work examines contemporary horror in terms of the first Trump term in the White House; Victoria McCollum’s Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear focuses on Trump himself and the period of his first term. Some scholarship, such as Damien K. Picariello’s collection The Politics of Horror, examines horror and politics from a broader perspective that includes media other than cinema. In his book Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, W. Scott Poole locates a foundational era of horror cinema in the post-WWI 1920s, and to some extent we see a potential parallel between the rise of postfascism and horror cinema of the past twenty years.
4. The panel will consist of a 5-minute introduction of the topic; each presenter will have 15 to 18 minutes to speak; and then there will be 15 to 25 minutes for an open Q&A.
5. The papers on this panel are the following:
“Sisu and the Postfascist Nazisploitation Film” by Michael Truscello
The 2022 Finnish film Sisu resembles a classic Nazisploitation film in certain ways, but in other important ways it is distinct from this subgenre. This paper argues that Sisu embodies a postfascist telling of the Nazisploitation film, a narrative detour that diminishes the typical offensive eroticism and settings of Nazisploitation in favor of a neoliberal trajectory that falsely posits capital as the propulsive force between and against both fascism and communism.
"Abjection as Anti-fascism in I Saw the TV Glow, The Substance, and Love Lies Bleeding" by Johanna Isaacson
In their formulations of contemporary fascism or “postfascism,” Enzo Traverso, Alberto Toscano, and Sophie Lewis all note the transforming role of gender in contemporary fascistic formations. In this paper I will look at the rise of women fascist leaders and the convergence of TERFs (Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists) with postfascism in relation to the problem of positive representation in contemporary horror films. While many critics measure feminist progress in horror through the inclusion of “strong female leads,” this paper argues that negation and abjection offer more salient critiques of postfascism than does “lean in” horror, which offers women authoritative rather than subversive roles.
“Blackness, Brutalism, and the Terror of Living in Remi Weeks’ His House” by Patrick Walter
In this paper, I will think with and alongside Remi Weeks’s 2020 film His House in considering how traditional cinematic grammar conspires with contemporary programs of dislocation and captivity, that is, necropolitical technologies inflicted upon surplus populations to fortify the borders of the individuated Subject and the Nation. By revising the conventions of cinematic horror, particularly the porousness of Gothic space famously theorized by Eve Sedgwick, Weeks underscores the importance of movement, stasis and spatiality to the current politico-economic moment, a moment characterized by what Enzo Traverso terms “postfascism.”
6. Our panel includes a diversity of ideas and presenters. Our topics include: a feminist interrogation of anti-fascist horror; a theorization of Blackness and gothic spaces; and a discussion of Indigenous erasure in the postfascist Nazisploitation film.