ABSTRACT
With the rise of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) since 2013, Germany has been witnessing an unprecedented politicization of intimate relationships. The New Right not only deploys anti-immigration discourses but also successfully promotes traditional family values. How can this success be explained? We argue that the New Right offers and mobilizes a programmatic reaction to the crisis of the family as the hegemonic form of intimate relationships.
As an empirical example, we focus on the online appearances and videotaped speeches of the initiative Demo für Alle (‘Demonstration for all’), which is part of the civil society network of the AfD. Drawing on Deborah Gould, we argue that the decline of the traditional family model as the normative form of intimate relationships creates a specific ‘affective ontology’. It is experienced as a precarization of traditional forms of intimate relationships as well as of gendered subjectivities. Hence, it is characterized by a diffuse feeling of insecurity, fear and disorientation. Here the Demo für Alle offers an ‘emotional pedagogy’ that implies an alleged explanation for the experienced crisis as well as a ‘solution’. The heteronormative family here functions as the historical code for security, stability, a specific distribution of gendered roles and the reactivation of specific forms of affective inequalities.
