Against the fascistization of social reproduction

Digital art by @Pazconadie for Ojalá.

Opinion • Susana Draper • July 11, 2025 • Leer en castellano 

Making time to write is welcome respite amid days marked by the intensification of fascist policies in the United States. To do so is to create spaces for other perspectives to circulate, to converse among ourselves with the desire to build other places from which to enunciate, remember, and build possibilities.

This reflection is part of a conversation woven out of Verónica Gago's essay, that traces the evolution of different threads of struggle in the decade since the emergence of Ni Una Menos and the reinvention of the feminist strike.

As part of this dialogue, Raquel Gutiérrez wrote about what’s taking place in Mexico, highlighting the contradiction between a government that sells itself as having ushered in the “era of women” and its rule in a context of ongoing violence, increased militarization, disappearances, and impunity.

Executive power and the police state

The intensification of authoritarian policies from President Donald Trump's executive branch are aimed at dismantling the very possibility of life for anything that exists outside the logic of colonialist and imperial heteropatriarchal white supremacy.

Our positionality is an essential consideration as we seek to keep the historical context that shapes the reactive nature of the fascist expansion we are currently experiencing present. Although different waves of movements in the United States over the last 15 years did not produce consistent and sustained forms of organization capable of building another politics, it is crucial to understand that they touched many crucial touchpoints, and that the current intensification of racist and heterosexist patriarchal policies that seek to re-found a colonialist and imperial national imaginary is in part a response to that.

In the early days of Trump’s second administration, the objectives were clear: Trump declared that the country was being “invaded” by Mexico, issued an executive order reinstating the recognition of two sexes (male and female) under the guise of “defense and protection” of women against so-called gender ideology extremism. This was a direct attack on the long history of LGBTQIA2S+ mobilizations and their achievements, which have taken place despite institutional capture.

These presidential actions were followed by the reinstatement of supremacist policies aimed at reversing what anti-racist struggles had established in the streets and the institutional order. Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., was dismantled. Programs linked to the implementation of racial and gender equity were defunded and attacked.

Trump also declared an emergency on the border with Mexico. His administration suspended the app used to make asylum appointments at the border, and intensified the persecution of and raids against migrants, including making arrests when people attended their “check-ins.” Those who are detained are being sent to detention centers in other states—and even other countries—without even a semblance of due process.

The aftermath of the uprisings

Over the last 15 years, several points of struggle have emerged in the US, often appearing as uprisings which have had a greater impact at the institutional level than at the organizational level. This has led to the deepening of political horizons that are often more focussed on the former.

The patriarchal and racist power that is now attempting to reorder society by returning everyone to the place it deems correct is doing so in part in reaction to a cycle of mobilizations.

Occupy Wall Street (2011) was a form of direct confrontation with the financialization of life. Then there were sustained movements against systemic racism, including Black Lives Matter (2014). Finally, there were women's marches in different parts of the country in response to Trump's first inauguration (2017).

As protests against everyday abuses proliferated, the tensions and complexities that exist between systemic forms of violence became palpable.

Despite various attempts of institutional capture and internal divisions after the first international women's strike in 2017, intersectional struggles against capitalism and heteropatriarchy were reactivated and sustained by anti-racist and anti-prison feminisms.

From there, diverse trajectories of struggle were opened that linked the need for intersectional understandings of oppression. There was #metoo in prisons, organized by trans and non-binary people experiencing incarceration, and struggles against the sterilization of women in migrant detention centers. 

There were collective defense and mutual aid networks set up to protect residents against the intensification of raids, detentions, and deportations, which fed into what was later declared a network of sanctuary cities. 

Following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers during the pandemic, there were mass protests under the slogan of “Defund the police,” which brought the concept of abolition (of prisons and the police) to millions.

The war at home

In the United States, where I live, we rarely use the word “war” in reference to the dynamics that govern all aspects of life. But when we began to use “war” to describe all the ways in which life is expropriated, our concern was that the word could create a sense of powerlessness due to the excessively large scale of what is taking place.

Gago suggests there has been a semantic movement from what we used to call war and the crisis of social reproduction to the fascistization of social reproduction.

I think this is an important point that we ought to explore further. It connects with what the Palestinian Feminist Collective named “reproductive genocide” so as to communicate the extent of the policies of death and the foreclosure of the future that result from the extended attack on the possibility of Palestinian life.

Reproductive genocide is a key element of colonial power. It refers to the difficulty of sustaining life amid siege, criminalization, incarceration, and disappearance, all of which undermine the ability of entire communities to sustain themselves. It also speaks to the way in which the future is being killed for different peoples, and of the colonial strategy of mutilating childhood and generating intergenerational trauma.

The attack on migrants in the US today is directly linked to the fascistization of reproduction because it specifically targets those who perform the reproductive work that sustains life: care, food, nursing, education, and so forth. 

Today, being able to live outside the cycle of disappearance, detention, and deportation implies a logic of impossibility: going to work can mean getting detained by Homeland security agents (ICE), but staying home means not having a way to live. Going to a court appointment could mean running the risk of detention, but failing to show up also carries the risk of deportation.

A feminist response

Different feminist currents teach us to be wary of the feeling of powerlessness that can emerge from the sense that we’re in conflict in a context of war. We exist within a world—and are often forced to communicate in a language that is—built to delegitimize and devalue us. Expressing the confrontation between the capacity to sustain collective life and the expansion of wars on all levels is extremely difficult.

In the face of the advancing logic of war and cruelty, nothing feels like enough. We need to activate the knowledge generated by trans-inclusive feminism and anti-racist movements in struggle. That’s especially true in a context in which everyday efforts at control, confinement, and attempts at domestication are being reactivated and intensified.

As Italian writer and activist Alessandra Chiricosta states: “It is in the logic of war that the logic of the myth of male force is operationalized. These moments are part of myth building through spectacle.” Within this logic we are told we are always on the side of the “weak” and insignificant. This is a crucial element in the propagation of the ultra-heteropatriarchal myth we see magnified in the present, in the face of which it seems that however we act, it amounts to almost nothing. It’s crucial to understand that our power comes from elsewhere: it comes from refining and multiplying our organizational capacity.

We need to strengthen other meanings of different and rebellious ways of taking action on other—no less important—registers. Our ability to act in a united and organized way is crucial. This is what happens when we see small groups of organized neighbors are able to force ICE off their block, in which we are confronted with a jarring image that depicts the defense of life by residents against state agents equipped for war.

I look for clues in these actions, because I believe they allow us to see how even in the face of such immense cruelty, expanding how we think and creating other means of action is, in fact, of great significance.