ART& FASCISMII

Morethanourownflesh

My generation is forever infatuated with unreality, as if since we were children, we had foreseen the imminent grief that the truth of all things would cause us. When we were children, we lived through the democratization of television and when we were teenagers, that of the internet, we were formed with an ambiguous and incomplete idea of the rest of the world, perhaps in a very imperfect way we were the first global generation. In a chaotic world that is slowly dying at the hands of man, ruled by wealth and privilege, which bleeds innocence thanks to tradition, millennials always drift towards fantasy, inhaling escapism in order to exhale anxiety.

Growing up, one of the fictions that gripped my generation the most was the wizarding world of Harry Potter, a simple and whimsical story of young people facing the evil that represents discrimination and supremacy while gradually maturing along with their audience. Harry Potter through his books and movies defined a generation of youngsters, many of them shy and introverted, as children he endowed them with distraction, excitement and hope, as young adults he endowed them with interaction and community. It was never my favorite fantasy, but I keep it very present, as if by osmosis its presence has become inescapable in me.

It's a franchise that to this day remains impossible to ignore thanks to the nostalgia of an entire generation. The massive success of the recent video game Hogwarts Legacy is proof of its enormous cultural influence. And yet, this is a success marred by an inescapable controversy, the ideological legacy of its creator, J. K. Rowling. Until a few years ago, thanks to her vocal opposition to Donald Trump, her charity work and a generous reading of her texts that speaks about the fight against discrimination, J. K. Rowling enjoyed a reputation as an open-minded and tolerant feminist woman. I don't know if it’s money, power or influence that corrupts a human being, but at least they reveal what we hide deep inside, they make us apathetic towards the opinions of others and for the same reason, spitefully sincere, skeptical of any truth other than ours.

Something that for me is not in dispute is the essence of Rowling's political discourse. It is indeed a transphobic discourse, focused on painting trans women as perverse, predatory men, who invade female spaces and take away the voice of "real women " , as infiltrators of the patriarchy. Trans men are portrayed as confused women who seek to escape the vulnerability of their own femininity in order to achieve masculine privilege, lacking their own agency, infantilized when they are not just totally ignored. It is an ideological remnant of the political lesbianism of the second wave of feminism, and of its ideas of biological determinism that assume every man as an inevitable agent of patriarchy and an inherent enemy of women.

One of the biggest problems with transexclusionary feminism is that it focuses on the purity of the individual, reducing women to their genitals and their apparent femininity. Although it has its origins in second-wave feminism, its essentialist and authoritarian overtones confines its proponents inside of a fascist fantasy, where the supposed enemy are men infiltrating female identity, and who must be expelled at all costs. It’s an ideology that portrays men as sexual abusers, sadistic monsters, or controlling tyrants, unable to act otherwise. The problem with treating men like monsters, apart from the fact that it can be discriminatory, is that it absolves us of the guilt when we do harm others, because it describes our actions as an inevitable reality of our nature, not as a content of our values or character. It also infantilizes women, because it depicts them as unable to thrive in the presence of men.

The "gender-critical" ideology encourages women to judge other women, to try and qualify how feminine others look because they are always looking for these supposed men who infiltrate their spaces. Any woman who is identified as too masculine is harassed, regardless of whether she is trans or not, because judging other by their appearance is a meaningless solution that stems from a patriarchal privilege bestowed by beauty, whose true purpose, like all ideologies adjacent to fascism, is to create an enemy, even if imaginary, as long as it justifies a constant, kinetic violence.

Essentialism, group identity, biological determinism, aesthetic purity, and the constant search for an enemy that justifies all of the above are common elements of any fascist movement such as Nazism and its racial supremacy, they are the fundamental elements of any form of oppression, be it racial, cultural, economic, sexual or gender oppression.

Harry Potter is a kind of fiction that I feel belongs to the marginalized, to those who had a difficult adolescence or who had a certain social awkwardness, to the nerds and outcasts, to the odd or the rejected. Maybe not exactly for myself, but for people like me, at least that's my experience.

And for this reason, it is not rare to realize that many awkward and insecure teenagers became brave, sensitive, charismatic, and self-confident adults, and perhaps they were only awkward at the time because they were discovering their sexuality or gender identity in a world hostile to those possibilities. And it is then not weird to find that now those queer or LGBTQ millennials find themselves disappointed and hurt by Rowling's rhetoric, as they were convinced that those books were written by someone whose priority was to fight against discrimination and the acceptance of those that society deems to be different.

I have heard many people, ambiguously appealing to The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes without even having read it, reassure that we must separate the art from the artist, that we can consume any cultural product without guilt as long as we do not think about its creators, no matter how cruel and harmful they could be. That no consumption is ethical under capitalism and therefore we can ignore our principles and values whenever it is convenient, but I refuse to believe that this is the solution. Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu once said when he was promoting Birdman that superheroes are violent and essentially right-wing. Alan Moore, comic book writer and author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, in an interview with The Guardian poised that superhero films are precursors to fascism.

The idea of the Marvel and DC movies is an interesting one, that only certain privileged people, who possess certain exclusive powers, can put an end to evil, that only they can decide the moral axis of the worlds they inhabit, where supernatural powers or even focused violence offer simple solutions to complex problems. I do not think that Iñárritu or Moore are wrong, it is true that superheroes, especially when they are used only as a vehicle for entertainment, have many proto-fascist elements. The relevant question then is not whether or not there are fascist elements in our entertainment, art, and other cultural products, but rather what we should do about it. As younger generations we constantly seek to escape from a world that oppresses us through fantasy and escapism, but perhaps the answer is not to escape through the fantasies that come from that oppressive world, at least without judging them more critically and consciously.

Harry Potter is a story based perhaps on British mythological folklore and the idealization of European pre-industrial aesthetics, but more than anything on the authoritarian English society and its eternal status quo. Harry lives in a hierarchical and intolerant world, segregated between a superior and an inferior race, one that possesses magic and one that does not. Many of the wizards at Hogwarts are openly racist, but it is only the Death Eaters, who risk exposing the secret wizarding world through their genocidal desires, who are openly repudiated, and only as far as English propriety allows.

Harry is a passive bystander to most of the injustices of the world he lives in, only acting against them when they directly affect him or his friends, or to seek survival, never to create change. His dream is to become an auror, and thereby become part of the system that created monsters like Voldemort in the first place. The death of Voldemort himself is not the result of a revolution, but the consequence of an unrealized bureaucratic procedure, of a technicality. As Voldemort died by his own hand, he himself argues against the need for any movement for change or revolution with his own death. Voldemort disturbs and repairs the status quo and Harry is only an unwilling participant in Voldemort's story.

Hogwarts and the England in which it resides are not an open and tolerant world that fights against discrimination, they are a mediocre world that belongs to the privileged, a world that does good only to avoid the sudden change of its reality and avoid the terrifying possibilities that the end of segregation would bring. Harry is not a hero; he is just a young man whose empathy is slightly greater than that of the people around him and who is lucky enough to belong to the race that his fascist society has named superior. His achievements do not come from his principles, drive or beliefs, but are mostly the result of money and fame that he inherited at birth or simply pure luck.

Outside of Dobby he doesn't place too much importance on elf enslavement, nor on discrimination against Muggles that isn't either extreme in nature or that doesn't affect his loved ones. Harry never acts, he only reacts, he is a central figure in the fight against extreme racism only because he is the target of Voldemort, not because of his own conviction, he is an incidental activist. Hogwarts is the perfect fascist world, where the otherness that is oppressed and belittled, those who are born without magic, are unaware of their submission and seem to lose nothing by living discriminated against and in segregation. It is a world where magic, like the privileges of our real world, only exists for the use of those who possess it, it is not a tool of empathy but of justified supremacy.

Disney, Marvel, Star-Wars, Harry Potter, there is a whole generation that defines itself through the conformism of the mediocre culture that is used to consuming, I include myself in it. But how do we hope to change our world if we get lost in fantasies as gray and indifferent as our contexts? How do we intend to fight against authoritarianism, ignorance, and injustice if we consume products that feed them? If our superheroes idealize excessive power, violence and machismo and objectify femininity, if our fantastic stories remain indifferent to hatred and discrimination, if we only consume the artistic representation of the marginalized when we feel like it’s aesthetically and erotically pleasing, then it’s impossible to argue for a better world. Perhaps we deserve better fictions and more humanlike stories, a more compassionate and open-minded art. Sometimes we cannot separate ourselves from these cultural products so easily because it is thanks to them that we endure being one more cog in a cruel and indifferent society, that we endure poverty, depression, or fatigue. But just as in fiction, we cannot remain passive in the face of the need for change in a world that demands transformation.

On February 11 of this year, Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl was stabbed to death while walking in a park in Cheshire, England. Two 15-year-olds were arrested in connection with the crime, and it’s believed to be a hate crime. At the same time, Hogwarts Legacy is breaking sales records and the royalties and fame only add to J. K. Rowling's already considerable influence and wealth. Rowling is not just a woman of controversial opinions, she is a woman who donates to transphobic orgs, whose words are quoted by far-right politicians, who allies with fascist and anti-feminist figures for the sole purpose of increasing the scope of her transphobia. Her focus is not on the well-being of women, but on the marginalization of transgender people and their eventual demise.

Voices like those of the author of Harry Potter are responsible for the murder of this young woman and the deaths of many other people. There were outlets that reported Brianna's death as that of a young guy, disrespecting her identity even in the tragedy of her death. We can be more than the flesh that comprises our being would suggest, only if we allow ourselves to be born anew. I long for the day when no one has to justify their preferences, their way of expressing themselves or their identity, that we can be and love whoever we want without anyone judging us for existing differently, I long for the marginalized to disappear into normalcy. In real life there are no convenient magic rules to get rid of villains like Rowling, they are the ones who have the power, wealth, and influence, in reality there is no such thing as superheroes. Our best weapon against cruelty and injustice is constant compassion, insistent generosity, openness to listen and learn, and unending vocal opposition to inhumane humans like J. K. Rowling, die führerin, until the day despair transforms into revolution.