Intersectionality and Fascism

Abstract

Five years before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Dobbs decision, reproductive justice scholar-activist Loretta Ross used the term “Americanized fascism” to describe right-wing social movements that promote totalitarianism, the systematic erosion of civil rights, and the consolidation of a patriarchal White ethno-state. Her warning about the mainstreaming of White supremacy and aligned political projects seems obvious in retrospect now that abortion is illegal or severely restricted in most U.S. states, teaching and scholarship about anti-Blackness and racism is regularly banned or policed, and a barrage of legislation has emboldened discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and especially transgender individuals, across registers of social and civic life. Yet much public or “mainstream” discourse and even activism about the rise of fascism fails to account for the coalitions of violence that have profoundly undermined civil rights in the United States. In this essay, I explore how single-axis logics that obscure the intersectional dimensions of fascism remain dominant in American institutions, including psychology. Despite persistent handwringing about how best to use intersectionality responsibly in psychological science, fixation on the methodological challenge of intersectionality averts attention from a far more intimidating question about how psychologists will respond to Americanized fascism today and in a deeply precarious future. If psychological science is to contribute meaningfully to social transformation and social justice, we must confront our chronic unwillingness to use tools we have readily available to disarm fascism and its techniques of structural violence.