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: Queer African Feminist Politics of the Oppressed within Academia.
Stella Nyanzi is a fellow of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative who is hosted at the Institut für Medienwissenschaft at Ruhr Universität Bochum in Germany. Her publications are available at Stella Nyanzi – Google Scholar.
Abstract: Can a people without a legible history have terms? Can the non-existent have any terms of their own? Do the erased, invisibilised, alienated, criminalised, psycho-pathologised and demon possessd have the right to make any demands on their own terms? Can the mute(d) articulate their own terms? The posture and possibility of “having one’s own terms” comes from a position of privilege and power. Authorial voice is a political question. Academic choice is a political question. Freedom within structural and systemic hierarchies in the academy is a political question.
In this keynote address I will deliberately emphasise my identitarian positioning as a radical queer African feminist producer of knowledge straddling multiple genres as a medical anthropologist, feminist activist, dissident poet and opposition politician located within multiple margins of academia. As a queer African feminist scholar, I will explore and anlyse the politics of the oppressed within academia. For me, as a Ugandan refugee scholar living in Germany in 2025, it is critical to engage with the question of the politics of academic freedom because in Uganda I have no freedom to research, publish and teach my chosen speciality – Queer African Studies.
My context of academic knowledge production for the past 25 years negates my research subjects and criminalises my knowledge production with severe penalties of up to a maximum of 20 years in prison for “promotion of homosexuality.” Dominant narratives screech this negation and criminalisation. “Homosexuality is un-African!” “Feminism is western!” “African queers are antithetical!” “African feminism is an oxymoron!” “African queer scholars are handmaidens of neo-imperialism.” These hegemonic tropes circulate and diffuse daily in Uganda specifically, and many other African countries more generally.
To exist as a negation is necessarily resistance. To study the negated must thus be an extension of the resistance. To maintain Queer African Feminist Studies is to deliberately engage in epistemic resistance against colonial, patriarchal, heterosexist, capitalist and autocratic epistemic violence that is entrenched within the academy. There is an urgent need to queer academic freedom within universities. In countries that criminalise knowledge production and circulation about some genders and some sexualities, academic freedom to undertake Queer Studies is necessarily subversive and dissident. Exclusionary questions are increasingly foreclosing possibilities of universalising academic freedom. “Should the luxurious audacity of academic freedom be extended to the study of mere women, gender minorities, homosexuals and other sexual minorities?” “Should poor African academics dare leave their marginal locus and participate in on-going contestations of feminist knowledges and minoritarian politics in current times?”
I will make a case for animating academic guerillas and enlisting academic freedom fighters embroiled in the critical struggle of extending academic freedom to even Queer African Feminist Studies. Without dismantling the heterosexist and patriarchal status quo within academia, academic freedom will increasingly become illusive to queers and feminists, as well as queer scholars and feminist scholars in neo-conservative settings such as Uganda in East Africa.
