ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that to understand fascism we first need to explain its relationship to the commodity form as a structured social practice which conditions the ways in which reality is understood. As a social form, the commodity is independent of its material content, implying that ‘value’ – as a social mediation – is contingent on the specificity of historical-social relations in different commodity-determined societies. In this final chapter, we will be concerned with the kinds of body fascism produces by analysing the social production of gender and sexuality in fascist societies. Building on the argument in Chapter 8, the aim is to highlight not simply the aestheticization of gender and sexuality in fascism, but the connection between the triumphant fascist body and its cultural and economic coordinates. Here it is important to link our discussion of gender with Foucault’s (1977) conceptualization of productive power as control over the homeostatic social body, focusing on the techniques adopted by fascists to cultivate the internal equilibrium of the race-nation by adjusting its physiological reproduction. The organization of the social body in fascism exceeds the constraints of bourgeois law, medicine, demography and criminology to acquire a totalizing force: the fascist body becomes a ‘corporeal text’, the site of breeding practices and disciplinary projects which exceed the established framework of liberal governmental regimes.
