Sarah Bracke: “Death by Equality.” The Violence of “Replacement” Anxieties.
Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam. She leads the research programme EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’, which was awarded a Vici grant by the Dutch Research Council. Together with Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, she recently published The Politics of Replacement (2023, Routledge).
Abstract: White populations feeling “replaced” by non-white and/or non-Christian populations. Men feeling that they are losing out to women and “alfa males” on the sexual and labour market. Both population “replacement” ideologies as well as incel ideologies are driven by an anxious sense of being “replaced”, which is informed by a sense of entitlement – to a country and its culture; to jobs and the economy; to women and sex. The frustration of that entitlement combined with the observation that others who are deemed “inferior” are taking up space (in the cultural arena, economy, public sphere, sexuality) shape a phantasmagorical sense of losing “one’s rightful place”. This leads to violent forms of dehumanization as well as actual violence. Violence which can be understood, as Ghumkhor (2024) suggests, as emerging from the impossibility of anxious/entitled subjects to imagine themselves as equal – a phantasmagorical “death by equality” – that is externalized in actual (male and white supremacist) violence inflicted upon others.
This lecture offers a conceptual analysis of these notions of replacement and entitlement as they circulate within population “replacement” and incel ideologies as well as a psychosocial analysis of the subject of “replacement” in terms of projection, paranoia, and dethronement. In empirical terms, the analysis focuses on the most violent expressions of these ideologies, i.e. manifestos that self-proclaimed population “replacement” and incel mass killers have published in the past two decades. The lecture concludes with a discussion of what this conceptual and psychosocial analysis can tell us about the concept and politics of equality, seeking to contribute to a renewal or our understanding of equality and the kind of defence it might need in the present conjuncture.
Stella Nyanzi, PEN-Zentrum, Germany
