Description
On the 19th of February 2020, eleven people were killed by a Nazi terrorist in the German city of Hanau. Attacks such as these need to be understood in relation to a long history of right-wing terrorism in Germany and growing transnational terrorist networks. In this talk, I argue that what connects these attacks to other right-wing terrorist attacks in Germany and beyond is the perpetrators' adherence to conspiracies of the ‘great replacement’ which fuse racist and anti-gender narratives to conjure the spectre of the extinction of the white race through migration and falling birth rates allegedly caused by feminist emancipation. In doing so, I dispute ‘lone wolf’ narratives and argue that the sexual politics expressed by these actors such as the presumable threat of a declining populous, the possessive claim over female sexuality and calls for the protection of the white nuclear family are part of wider (neo-)colonial fantasies of white male decline. These ‘great replacement theories’ operate as an extension of the ‘logics of obliteration’ inherent in transnational anti-gender discourse (Hemmings 2020) which target racialised minorities, liberal elites (framed as Jewish conspirators) and feminist and queer activists as threats to white masculine hegemony.
