On 25 March, NORFAS-researcher Celestine S. Kunkeler will be presenting their latest research on gender and far-right activism at a digital seminar at Pennsylvania State University. The lecture is titled “Women of the Counter-Revolution: The mobilisation of reactionary femininity in interwar Europe” and will be accessable through the following registration link: https://psu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwuf-yrpj8qE9bOnAWfvkaANAZDqogPHn3L#/registration.
Kunkeler writes about the lecture:
The Russian and Central-East European revolutions and attendant civil wars of 1917-21 brought the dangers of Bolshevism to the forefront of right-wing politics. Coinciding with a new era of mass politics and an expanded realm of female activism, the interwar period mobilised reactionary women in new ways. The Counter-Revolution, though traditionally characterised by male paramilitarism, saw the involvement of numerous women as military volunteers, nurses, intellectuals, and political leaders in organisations ranging from paramilitaries to international anti-communist networks, from Norway to Britain to Hungary. This anti-communist mobilisation constructed distinct femininities against not only a fantasised contagious and degenerate Bolshevism, but also against feminists, democrats, and whoever else fell outside the reactionary gender order by socialistic association. While the gendered link between the revolutionary upheaval of Bolshevism and a range of contemporary progressive and left-wing causes is historically contingent, it continues to shape far-right women’s political activism, as it motivates reactionary projects of sexual and gendered exclusion in the present.
The seminar is part of the Sawyers Seminars series Birthing the Nation funded by The Mellon Foundation.
You can read more about the seminar at the event page.