On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
reading group kick off
with Jack Z. Bratich
How is fascist subjectivity produced and how might we sabotage this production process?
These are the questions we will explore in our reading of On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death, which offers a compelling account of the diffuse cultural forces that form the building blocks of later fascist movements and state power. MAGA may have its billionaire backers, but what remains to be explained is why the call to “Make America Great Again” inspired so many.
Drawing on research into ancient male warrior cultures and their reemergence in hypermodern and hypernetworked late capitalism, On Microfascism argues that a “war of restoration” to refound white male sovereignty through eliminationist violence is at the heart of fascism. For our first session, author Jack Bratich will join us as we parse out the commonalities of fascist expressions from school shooters to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill" and the erasure of trans and bisexual people from the Stonewall Monument website, including the importance of misogyny and the paradoxical tendency of fascists toward self-destruction. This will also set us up to discuss the rest of the book.
For the first session reading the introduction is great (but not necessary). Reach out for information on getting hold of that—and copies of the book are available at the store.
Jack Z. Bratich applies social and political theory to such topics as social movements, craft culture, patriarchal subjectivities, and the cultures of secrecy. He is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and author of On Microfascism: Gender, War, Death (Common Notions, 2022) and Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008). His latest publication is “What Can a Body Do(om)?: Fratriarchy’s Affects and the Capacities to Break Together” (2025) in Capacities to: Affect Up Against Fascism.
John Bohn is a writer and organizer living in Brooklyn. He previously organized the “Anti-fascist, Anti-Imperialist Moby-Dick Reading Group” at The Word is Change.
About the book:
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.