Introduction: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on ‘Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right’. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a metalanguage in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-feminism
• climate change
• far-right
• misogyny
• white hegemonic masculinities

Overshaded by the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was not only the second hottest year on record for the planet,¹ but was also characterised by extreme fire events, heat waves, and droughts across the globe. Even though average temperatures on Earth and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have fluctuated over the last hundreds of thousands of years, both are currently increasing at the fastest rate in recorded history (WMO 2017). Among the vast majority of climate scientists there is no doubt that this rapid rise of both the global average temperature and the greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere are caused by human actions – or more specifically mainly by the burning of fossil fuels (IPCC 2018).

As the global temperature rises, the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet is unfolding before our eyes and climate catastrophes hit the world at an alarming rate.² At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented intensification of anti-environmental politics and various forms of climate change denialism.³ From the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, to dismantle environmental regulations, and to install industrial magnates with close ties to oil and gas industries in sensitives places such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to Jair Bolsonaro’s support of illegal ranchers and mining operations in the Amazon forest as well as his role in inciting violence against environmental and indigenous activists, far-right leaders around the world not only fail to address climate change as a serious environmental and societal threat but also mobilise and embrace different forms of anti-environmentalism and climate change denial for populist politics. While climate change denial was rarely an issue in the far-right until the beginning twenty-first century, (see Forchtner, Kroneder, and Wetzel 2018) the dismissal of environmental science research and knowledge on anthropogenic climate change has become a core concern of the far-right in the past two decades, posing a serious planetary threat as it stands in the way of climate action and social justice.

In the past few years, a shift can be witnessed in far-right discourses on the environment. Across a variety of far-right authoritarian regimes, anti-environmentalism and anti-feminism have become entwined, posing threats to both environmental justice and gender equity. The designation ‘far-right authoritarianism’ is understood as an umbrella term for different forms of right-wing ideologies, identities, subjectivities, and politics ranging from anti-liberal to anti-democratic and openly fascist.⁴ While far-right authoritarianism and the question of the environment in far-right discourses have been explored extensively on their own, (see, for example, Forchtner 2020; Lockwood 2018; Taylor 2016) the intersection of far-right authoritarianism, anti-environmentalism, and anti-feminism is still a little researched topic. Even less researched are the ways far-right authoritarianism and anti-feminism are informing discourses on climate change denial. This is the focus of this special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.

Conspiracy theories, the denial of scientific evidence, and attacks against scientists are not new phenomena. Similarly, females in the public sphere have faced sexism, violence, and disadvantage for a long time, and the field of science is no different. What seems to be novel in our current conjuncture however is the intensity of the threats and violence directed towards female scientists and activists in the public sphere. According to Climate News – a non-profit organisation focusing on environmental journalism – ‘death threats, sexist remarks, claims of fraud, bomb threats, letters laced with powdery substances, references to rape and Nazis have become almost standard’⁵ for climate scientists, journalists covering climate change, and environmental activists alike. For example, the Canadian environment minister, Catherine McKenna, has been assigned a security detail, after receiving verbal attack not only by far-right hate groups online but also by members of the Conservative Party in 2019.⁶ Canadian oil and energy company X-Site Energy Services was recently forced to apologise for distributing decals at job sites with a graphic image of the then sixteen-years old Greta Thunberg.⁷ Despite the fact that the recent orchestrated attacks against Katharine Hayhoe, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Catherine McKenna, Vanessa Nakate, Greta Thunberg, and many other female climate activists and scientists have gained some media attention, the question why it is particularly female activists and scientists who have become the main targets is rarely asked. What cannot be denied however – as the interview with Katharine Hayhoe in this special issue demonstrates – are the gendered impacts of this climate of harassment and violence.

We start with the observation that the function of anti-feminism as a politicised and institutionalised form of misogyny in the anti-environmental ideology, rhetoric, and politics of the far-right remains largely underexplored. In investigating these links, we argue that anti-feminist ideology and rhetoric is a powerful gateway to not only White supremacy and ultra-nationalism,⁸ but also to a radical anti-environmentalism of which climate change denial is but one, however crucial, manifestation today. Anti-feminism functions as a tool for coalition building against social and environmental justice that ties together the far-right with right-wing populists, (neo-)conservatives, and religious dogmatists⁹ in their attempt at transforming society as a whole through cultural and political hegemony (see Dietze and Roth 2020; Sauer 2019; Spierings 2020). We are thus convinced that analysing the rise of far-right anti-environmentalism and in particular climate change denialism is not possible without an intersectional feminist perspective. Exploring gender/ed identities and norms and their role in the contemporary far-right when it comes to the environment and climate change is both much needed and timely. The articles in this special issue also demonstrate that such analyses must also include a recognition of the ongoing relevance of racism, capitalism, as well as past and present imperialisms and colonialisms.¹⁰ Moreover, the articles assembled in this special issue relate far-right authoritarianism not only to extremist hate groups, but also to religious conservatism and right-wing populism, since both have shifted considerably to the right in the past decades. The reason for this lies in the fact that the boundaries between extremism and populism are often fluid and that there is an important transfer of ideas between the two of them.

Nature and the environment have been and continue to be ‘thorny terms’ for feminist theory (Alaimo 2016, 530). Since Simone de Beauvoir (1952, 301) famously noted that ‘one is not born, one becomes a woman’, feminist and queer scholars have not only contested the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘women’ in the history of ideas (see, for example, Alaimo 2010; Haraway 1991, 2016; Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010), but also explored the ways ‘nature’ has been mobilised for the domination of ‘all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self’ (Haraway 1987, 32). It has to be understood in this light that over the past few years, climate change, too, has become a key concern in feminist research. Important contributions explore, for example, the gender/ed aspects and impacts of climate change (Dankelman 2010), how environmental challenges threaten females, indigenous peoples, and marginalised communities in the Global South the most (Detraz 2016), the ways through which climate change, extractivism, and overconsumption are driven by White masculinist ideology (Gaard 2017; McCright and Dunlap 2011), how environmental pollution affects communities of colour exceptionally strong and thus calls for intersectional analyses of environmental and climate justice (Turner 2016), the historic interconnectedness between the rise of the fossil fuel industry and White masculine power, demonstrating how masculinist anxieties intensify the desire for far-right authoritarianism (Daggett 2018; Malm and Collective 2021), the emergent ethical and epistemological issues at stake in the context of global climate change (Tuana 2013; Tuana and Cuomo 2014), as well as how the Anthropocene calls for a different (posthumanist) form of democracy and environmental ethics (Neimanis, Hayes, and Åsberg 2015). However, so far, it has been hardly explored how anti-feminism serves as a driver for anti-environmentalism in the far-right. Hence, the aim of this special issue is to shift our attention to the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right with a particular focus on the denial of anthropogenic climate change as an emergent field of study in feminist theory and beyond.

Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a metalanguage in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, at the heart of this special issue lies the attempt to explore how anti-environmentalism and anti-feminism merge and inform one another in the contemporary far-right. As Krange, Kaltenborn, and Hultman (2018, 1) argue, recent research strongly suggests that resistance against the environmental and climate sciences ‘may be part of a larger complex of right-wing nationalism. This tendency is just starting to attract scholarly attention, despite the possibility of providing new and important knowledge specifically on resistance towards effects of climate politics as well as on broader political issues such as democracy, human rights and diversity’. Being aware of the fact that denialism comes in different shapes and that the boundary between denialism and scepticism is thin, we nevertheless find it useful and in fact even important to focus on climate denialism rather than scepticism for at least two reasons.

First, denialism works through the deployment of rhetorical arguments in order ‘to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none’ with ‘the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which scientific consensus exists’ (Diethelm and McKee 2009, 2). We see this as the case in much of the far-right discourse on environmental challenges and climate change. Second, as McCright and Dunlap (2011, 1171) demonstrate in their ground-breaking study of the denial of climate change among conservative White males in the United States, ‘climate change denial is a form of identity-protective cognition, reflecting a system-justifying tendency’. It is for this very reason that it would be a mistake to understand the anti-environmental stance of the far-right and its denial of anthropogenic climate change under the knowledge deficit model (see also Anshelm and Hultman 2014; Daggett 2018; Krange, Kaltenborn, and Hultman 2018; McCright and Dunlap 2011). Hostility against science and the denial of scientific knowledge does not so much result from a supposed lack of knowledge but rather has to be understood as revolving around the protection and conservation of particular forms of identity which have been identified more recently as ‘industrial/breadwinner masculinities’ (Hultman and Pulé 2018) or ‘petro-masculinity’ (Daggett 2018), as well as around the current capitalist order that provides power and (White) privilege for some at the expense of a vast majority and the environment (Gaard 2015). Climate denial, as this body of research suggests, thus ‘serves fossil-fuelled capitalist interests’ (Daggett 2018, 27),¹¹ it ‘epitomises white male effect, providing us with a destructive example of the convergent mechanics of race, power, and resource exploitation’ (Hultman and Pulé 2018, 22). Denial, here, functions as a form of refusal – and as such it is ‘active. Angry. It demands struggle. […] Refusal can no longer rest at defending the status quo but must proceed to intensifying fossil fuel systems to the last moment, which will often require resorting to authoritarian politics’, as Cara Daggett (2018, 41–42) emphasises. Since the figure of ‘the sceptic’ is extensively used in far-right discourses as a means for self-legitimisation and for the immunisation against critique,¹² we will use the notion of ‘denialism’ in favour over ‘scepticism’.

Even though the intensity and misogyny that becomes visible in these attacks against female climate scientists and environmentalists is considered to be a rather novel phenomenon, anti-feminism as an organised and politicised form of misogyny is not. Historically, anti-feminism emerged as a reaction to the growing movement for women’s emancipation in Europe of the late nineteenth century. The notion itself dates back to Hedwig Dohm, a German writer and feminist. In Die Antifeministen (1902), Dohm not only describes how anti-feminist resentments gained traction as a political response to the foundation of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in 1894 – which functioned as an umbrella organisation of the women’s civil rights movement in Germany until the National Socialist party seized power in 1933 – but also creates a typology of anti-feminist characters. According to Dohm (1902, 4–10), anti-feminists can be categorised into four types: those who believe in the moral superiority of the social order of the past and hence tend to reject modern science and society (‘the conservatives’), those who believe in the allegedly natural inferiority of the female body and mind (‘the masculinists’), those who reject women’s rights because they see no gain in it and are afraid of losing their own privileges (‘the practical egoists’), and lastly those who consider themselves as chivalrous protectors of women’s honour, romanticising femininity as inherently benevolent and in need of male defence (‘the knights of the Blessed Virgin’). Despite their differences, for Dohm, they all share the belief in the superiority of a hegemonic form of masculinity that is understood as the last line of defence of the nation and indeed also of the future of the Volk itself against an imagined moral and sexual ‘degeneration’.

While Dohm was convinced that anti-feminism would be overcome with time,¹³ the past decades have been characterised by a new form of politicised and institutionalised form of misogyny: ‘anti-genderism’ (see Brandini-Assis and Ogando 2018; Dietze and Roth 2020; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Tuzcu, and Winkler 2018; Hark and Villa 2015; Sauer 2019).¹⁴ Rejecting sexual emancipation, LGBTQI rights, and gender equality, anti-genderism has become a cornerstone that traverses contemporary far-right anti-feminisms in the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, and South America. As Sauer (2019, 342) stresses, the fight of the far-right against gender equality hence has to be understood as a fight for hegemony and power in the attempt at dismantling liberal democracy in favour of authoritarian regimes and so-called ‘illiberal democracy’.

Growing out of the necessity to better understand the complex ways in which anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism inform one another, the contributions of this special issue present a first broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-environmentalism and anti-feminism in the context of far-right authoritarianism, providing a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the far-right. Combining cutting edge theoretical insights from interdisciplinary and intersectional research with strong empirical analyses and case studies, the articles explore the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues for far-right identity politics. Moreover, the articles provide a geographically and culturally broader perspective by engaging with different actors, movements, and developments in the Netherlands (Spiering and Glas), Scandinavia (Hultman and Vowles), Brazil (Rocha), Ecuador (Coba and Moreno), Germany (Schultz), as well as North America (Hayhoe; White), tying the findings back to global phenomena of climate change and the rise of authoritarian movements. Taken together, these contributions show the importance of addressing gender and racial oppression in consort with environmental degradation and climate change.

The special issue opens with an interview, entitled ‘A climate of misogyny: Gender, politics of ignorance, and climate change denial’, with renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe exploring how the widespread pairing of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism poses serious challenges to female climate scientists. Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian who engages in significant public outreach efforts around climate change, describes the steps she has had to take to deal with misogynist online harassment alongside discrimination within academia. The conversation shows how encountering misogyny impacts public education outreach efforts significantly, particularly on social media. Moreover, the interview demonstrates the profound ways a culture of misogyny impacts the work of climate scientists and is often paired with a fundamental opposition to environmentalism.

The first two articles of this special issue explore far-right oppositions to climate activist Greta Thunberg. As one of the most visible climate activists, Thunberg has become a target of online harassment and the subject of far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. Through exploring the content of these critiques, these two articles demonstrate the inseparability of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism. Michele White shows in her article ‘Greta Thunberg is “giving a face” to climate activism: Confronting anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and ableist memes’ how opponents develop ‘straw versions’ of female activists to criticise them, and to reinforce a gendered opposition that sees males as civilisational forces and females as rooted in nature. Studying a large corpus of memes about Thunberg, White finds that gender, age, the environment, and disability status are used simultaneously to dismiss Thunberg’s person and message. This importantly shows the ways ableist themes are used to both dismiss expertise and re-focus discussions away from the climate crisis and onto Thunberg’s embodiment. In doing so, White aims at an understanding of how movements and social media spaces critiquing Thunberg understand environmentalism as a threat to hegemonic White masculinities.

In their article, ‘Dead white men vs. Greta Thunberg: Nationalism, misogyny, and climate change denial on Swedish far-right digital media’, Martin Hultman and Kjell Vowes also explore the opposition to Greta Thunberg in far-right alternative media. They demonstrate that while climate change denialism is a relatively new phenomenon in the Swedish far-right, views about climate change have become almost as divided in Sweden as in the US in recent years. Hultman and Vowles identify the reason for this shift in the emergence of a far-right media ecosystem that is characterised by a propaganda feedback loop and the policing of its members allowing for the fast spread of disinformation. Analysing four large Swedish far-right digital news sites, they mobilise the concept of ‘industrial/breadwinner masculinities’ in order to understand how feminism, immigration, and climate change are imagined as threatening White male privileges. In this light, the repeated devaluation, infantilisation, and pathologisation of Thunberg and other female, queer, and indigenous climate activists also have to be understood as an attempt at stabilising an imagined sense of community and modernist rationality along with hegemonic masculinities that – to a certain degree – have lost their hegemonic position.

Morgan Rocha’s article, ‘Commodified nature: Intertwined threads of identification’, explores similar themes through scrutinising the ways anti-environmentalism is mobilised to defend hegemonic masculinities in Brazil. To this end, she employs a thematic analysis of representatives of Brazil’s current far-right government, showing how concerns about gender, race, and class merge with discussions of sustainability, nature, and development. In doing so, Rocha not only demonstrates how anti-feminist and anti-environmental right-wing positions can stem from similar ideological streams, but also reveals how settler colonies are often at the forefront of extractivist and anti-environmental politics, through pushing an ideology that does not accept any limits. Through an engagement with eco-feminist theory, Rocha shows how ideas about gender, class, and race are inseparable from conceptualizations of nature and the environment and that these linkages are united in far-right politics.

The final three articles explore how gender is shaping the discourse and politics on climate change, beyond denialism. Instead of analysing far-right rhetoric, in ‘Green or gender-modern nativists: Do They exist and do they vote for right-wing populist parties?’, Niels Spierings and Saskia Glas engage in voter studies to explore the ways that anti-environmentalism and anti-feminism shape support for right-wing populist parties in Europe. They demonstrate how gender, environmental, and anti-immigrant politics have co-emerged in often-contradictory ways in right-wing politics. Spierings and Glas find that nativism is a central motivator for support of right-wing populism, and national contexts determine how nativism is configured alongside gendered and environmental politics. Against this backdrop, their study shows that anti-immigrant attitudes are the central feature of right-wing populism and while this is often paired with anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism, local gender politics can create different configurations. This analysis calls for more quantitative studies of gendered voting politics to assess the nuanced ways these different issues combine in supporting right-wing parties, noting that both anti-feminist and feminist nativists can lead to support for such parties. They show that significant clusters of what they call ‘gender progressive nativists’ can be found across Europe, pointing to the need for more research on this intersection of feminism and nativism.

Taking the Vatican consecration ceremony of Pachamama – the Andean goddess of fertility – as starting point, Lisset Coba and María Moreno’s contribution, ‘The Pachamama in the Vatican Garden: Integral ecology, climate change and conservatism in the Pan-Amazon Synod’, explores how anti-feminism intersects with seemingly progressive environmentalism in the context of the Catholic Church. Through analysing the conflicts emerging around the ceremony of Pachamama, the authors show the ways that ideas about gender and the environment become mobilised by conservative movements within the Catholic Church. Coba and Moreno demonstrate that the notion of an integral ecology in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ emphasis the inseparability of social, ecological, and economic crises, and acknowledges the history of colonial violence along with indigenous knowledges and self-determination. At the same time, however, the synod reaffirms what the church perceives as ‘gender ideology’ as threat to the conservative image of the nuclear family, naturalising gender binarism and gendered power relations. Coba and Moreno conclude that by accepting the central role of women – particularly of indigenous and marginalised women in the Amazon – in struggles against extractivism and environmental destruction, the synod might function as ‘a Trojan Horse of anti-feminism’ that reinforces the idea of women as life-givers, producing a call for caring for the environment alongside a call to subjugate women to a reproductive role.

Finally, in her article, ‘The neo-Malthusian reflex in climate politics: Technocratic, right wing and feminist references’, Susanne Schultz shows how far-right ideas about environment and (over)population have trickled into feminist environmental discourses. Focusing mainly on Germany, Schultz problematises how from fossil fascism to eco-fascism, a neo-Malthusian reflex can be observed in the climate debate, shaping concerns over and constructing the category of ‘population’. Turning to feminist and other radical movements such as ‘birth strike’, Schultz traces the links between statistical calculations and strategies for birth control that underly progressive responses to climate change. Identifying three dimensions of neo-Malthusianism – the construction of an ‘excess population’, the colonial and racist history of attributing this excess to ‘others’, and totalitarian visions of managing ‘fertility’ on a global scale – Schultz shows how they flow together and influence each other even in feminist engagements with climate change, environmental destruction, and social inequality. Against this backdrop, Schultz proposes an anti-Malthusian feminist take that draws on Black feminist understandings of reproductive justice in order to undermine the technocratic-statistical formulations of problems in the context of climate change and beyond.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josef Barla

Josef Barla is a Postdoc Researcher in the Biotechnologies, Nature and Society research Group based at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on questions at the intersection of race and technology, feminist epistemologies, science and objectivity, and critical theories of the Anthropocene. He is the author of The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production: A New Materialist Theory of Technology and the Body (2019) and the co-editor of Biokapital: Beiträge zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie des Lebens (2022).

Sophie Bjork-James

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (2021) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feminist Anthropology, and Transforming Anthropology.

Notes

1 An alarming fact is that the world’s ten hottest years have all occurred since 2005 (NOAA 2021).

2 The rise of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution has not only resulted in an increase of the global average surface temperature by 1.1 degrees (WMO 2017), but also in the increase of extreme weather, floods, droughts, sea level rise, (IPCC 2018, 53) and an estimated 60% decline of wildlife populations in just forty years (WWF 2018). In a disturbing sense, while the loss of wildlife and biodiversity increases, conservation scientists are currently faced with the rise of politically funded and well-connected actors sabotaging evidence-based science and policies through the discredit of scientists and the organised denial of the biodiversity crisis (see Lees et al. 2020).

3 In contrast to ‘weather’, which refers to short-term conditions of the atmosphere, ‘climate’ describes the average weather conditions over a long time. Climate change, hence, is defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as ‘a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g. by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer’ (IPCC 2018, 544).

4 We follow the definition given in Forchtner (2020, 1) that the far-right ranges ‘from the radical right which opposes some elements of liberal democracy to the anti-democratic extreme right’.

5 See https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11122015/climate-change-global-warming-denial-ugly-side-scientists-hate-mail-hayhoe-mann/, accessed 9 April 2021.

6 See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49627153, accessed 9 April 2021.

7 See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/greta-thunberg-graphic-image-x-site-energy-alberta-1.5482369, accessed 9 April 2021.

8 See also Maskovsky and Bjork-James (2020).

9 In a sense, dogmatism might not be the proper term since an anti-gender rhetoric lies at the very heart of all major systems of belief. Even Pope Francis, who is often considered as a reformer, regularly warns against a gender mainstreaming as an alleged ‘ideological colonization’ which would be driven by liberal governments and non-governmental-organisations with the aim to destroy marriage and the whole family particularly in poor Catholic countries (Case 2019, 641).

10 For a deeper-going analysis of the historical ties of fossil capitalism to nationalism, imperialism, and White supremacy, see Malm et al. (2021).

11 In The Birth of Energy. Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, Cara Daggett (2019) provides us with a highly insightful and historically rich analysis of the connection between imperialism, fossil fuels, and power, demonstrating how fossil fuels have become the source of power for both Western petrocultures and White hegemonic masculinities. The recent press release of the US Department of Energy in which not only fossil fuels are rebranded as ‘molecules of U.S. freedom’ but also the importance of ‘spreading freedom gas throughout the world’ (US Department of Energy 2019) is stressed, too, has to be understood in this light.

12 A similar logic can be witnessed in the face of the current COVID-19 pandemic where far-right extremists, right-wing populists, and openly fascists blend together, claiming to be merely ‘sceptics’ who are critical toward ‘excessive’ control measures and only interested in ‘the truth’; while in fact it is not the measures or the pandemic, for that matter, what is rejected and fought but liberal democracy and social equity.

13 Dohm concludes her essay writing: ‘Revolutions are not made by rose water, but it does not have to be blood either. Time is the greatest revolutionary; even though she marches slowly, uphill, in heavy steps. Such is the tragedy of the avant-garde – to be always ahead of their time, which only arrives when they themselves have been gone’ (Dohm 1902, 155–156; own translation).

14 For an early intersectional analysis of anti-feminism and racism that regards both as constitutional for US society see Chisholm (1970).