Description
This paper seeks to contribute to a global understanding of reactionary discursive formations at the current historical conjuncture, which coalesce around self-victimizing articulations of racial nationalism and a rejection of social justice struggles, often delegitimated as “elitist” (in Western core contexts) or “Western” (in the Easts and Souths). I suggest that global whiteness, masculinism, and Occidentalist imaginations are key mechanisms through which reactionary discourse is produced within locally specific political projects and employed to negotiate the relationship between domestic politics and international orders. The first part of the paper illuminates the global and civilizational imaginaries integral to reactionary discourses across geopolitical divides and regime types. I note in particular the emergence of renewed and gendered East/West binaries that reaffirm the superiority of a particular idea of “the West” and lament its alleged “feminization” and unwillingness to “defend its own values”. I then scrutinize the workings of global racial entanglements, masculinism, and gendered East/West binaries in Chinese anti-baizuo discourse, encompassing both techno-nationalist communities on social media and self-styled “Trumpist” intellectuals critical of the Chinese regime. While they both reproduce the far right metanarrative about the “Western civilization”, imagined to be racially pure and socio-politically masculine in the past, being threatened by ethnocultural diversity and an emasculating political culture, they incorporate these representations within different ideological constellations and positionings in relation to global whiteness and liberal hegemony. The article contributes to the growing literature elucidating that reactionary counter-movements to liberal orders emerge within rather than against liberal and neoliberal structures.
