This course will be offered by Speier Visiting Professor Shireen Hassim. We live in (yet another) age of backlash against feminism’s victories: reproductive rights have been rolled back, global alliances have been formed to attack sexual rights and reinstate religiosity, and gender studies courses – along with critical theory and queer studies - are being starved of funding or dismantled altogether. Governments are recriminalizing non-normative sexualities, redefining citizenship and reinventing authenticity. Austerity programs reinstate the traditional nuclear family as the basis of policy making. Anti-feminist/ anti-queer ideologies are centred on narratives of fear. Equality and hospitality (particularly towards migrants) are reframed as socially destructive, with white men being foregrounded as the victims. Right wing narratives weave into their politics the defense of family, the nation and ultimately the reproduction of the white race itself. This robust, even aggressive, set of ideas creates public discourses that work to cohere social groupings around reconstituted nationalism. In defense of a ‘way of life,’ a coded framing of white privilege, new languages of entitlements are emerging against liberal and left movements. This course addresses the fictions that attend to this new politics, rooted in fear and loss, and with powerful material effects. We will consider the ways in which racism is woven into the founding myths of nations in Europe and North America, as well as some postcolonial countries. We will ask whether feminism itself is complicit in foregrounding the concerns of white women at the expense of people of colour, and the affective languages that are imbricated in dominant forms of feminism. We will think through the kinds of affective and political strategies that might weave together different types of democratic and radical demands.