A cursory look at contemporary right-wing ideologies shows that penises are unexpectedly everywhere. This obsession unites many factions of the far right, from gun rights advocates and conservative U.S. Republicans to biological racists and anti-trans conspiracy theorists around the world. How might we explain such a phenomenon while being mindful of the much-deserved critique of Freudian phallocentrism leveraged by feminist scholars over the last few decades?

In this paper, I propose to use Freudian theory catabolically, not as a universal explanation of sexual subjectivity but rather a window into the subjective structures of those who believe in its universalism. Using techniques drawn from Freud himself (along with Lacan and modern rhetorical theory), I will read far-right discourses in classical Freudian terms, examining their claims for universality as symptoms rather than psychoanalytic priciples of investigation.

To illustrate this process, I will analyze United States Executive Order 14168 which establishes the existence of two biological sexes as official government doxa. Read in the broader context of phallic right-wing discourse, this executive order demonstrates the unspoken fixation on male genitals as a "quilting point" pinning together a broader effort to stabilize (Woman's) sexual identity, and foreclose the contingency of the Symbolic and the impossibility of sex, to borrow from Zupančič.

This project offers a way of thinking about the far-right need to master uncertainty, one aspect of our interconnected "polycrisis." It also offers a potential response. Rather than (only) directly critiquing far right ideology directly, we may capitalize on precisely the thing it cannot tolerate: ambiguity, in this case, irony. Drawing from rhetorical theory, I consider how ironic affirmation and acceptance of the right-wing love of male genitals might destabilize their hermetic self-identities with a (trolling) celebration of their identities without shoring up the rigid categories of cisgender heterpatriarchy.

This study examines the evolution of Falun Gong, a new religious movement, through a series of crises. In the 1980s, China’s post-communist reform brought major challenges, including social anxiety, a spiritual void, and a diminished public healthcare system. In response to such crisis, "Qigong fever" emerged, providing spiritual comfort and low-cost alternative healthcare. Falun Gong emerged as part of this movement and experienced exponential growth.

However, Falun Gong’s success soon led to the Chinese government’s misgivings and subsequent crackdown. This crisis resulted in two key outcomes. First, it ended organized Falun Gong practice inside China, prompting many members to flee abroad. Second, the crackdown transformed Falun Gong into a de facto political movement. In exile, Falun Gong persistently staged protests against the Chinese government, leveraging its massive membership and media networks, which gained broad support in the West.

Less well known, however, is Falun Gong’s alignment with right-wing politics over the years, exemplified by its support for Donald Trump, the spread of misinformation, and opposition to vaccination, minority rights, and gender equality. Falun Gong’s turn to right-wing politics raises two additional questions about crisis.

First, Falun Gong justifies its involvement in right-wing politics through the lens of crisis, asserting that the West is facing the threat of communist domination and a loss of freedom. Second, this study argues that the West’s failure to understand Falun Gong’s multifaceted profile is indicative of an epistemological crisis. To address this latter question, the study applies Deleuze and Guattari’s poststructuralist thoughts to analyze Falun Gong’s transnational metamorphosis through crises.

Rationale: This presentation addresses the various crises through which Falun Gong has evolved, concluding with a discussion of the epistemological crisis scholars face in understanding its complex profile.

In his introduction to Anti-Oedipus Michel Foucault wrote that “the major enemy, the strategic advisory is fascism. [. . .] the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism the causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 2003: xiii). And, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us in A Thousand Plateaus, “what makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism” (2003: 215). Fifty-two years later we see microfascisms metastasising across the globe. This problem is most acute in zones where the economic and social crises of neoliberal capitalism are especially pronounced, begging the question, what is the relationship between neoliberalism, crisis and (micro)fascism?

Drawing from Guattari and Deleuze’s thought, the psychosocial insights of institutional analysis, and the work on Jacques Lacan, this will examine how the financialization of the global economy has created a “perfect storm” environment for fascism to flourish. The talk will argue that the injection of risk and volatility into the global economic system has created a socius that is constantly being torn apart, in other words a properly psychotic system. To live such precarious lives, I will argue that people collective reterritorialize their psyche in either an obsessive neurotic state (the liberal left’s obsession with “norms” as well as the aspiration to middle management and the belief that if you just work extra hard, you can have security) or by turning to authority, i.e. fascism. This talk will be anchored in an analysis of firsthand observations of fascist nationalist groups working together with international business leaders.

This piece is an autoethnographic investigation of the unconscious valences of academic research choices. Using psychosocial theory, the author outlines the biographical events leading to their research on the representation of depression in contemporary popular nonfiction. The Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the super-ego and Big Other are used to describe the pressures of academic knowledge production, and set into relation to the author’s political commitments. The analysis works towards an identification of unconscious elements in the author’s research, understanding it beyond its topic focus as a reparative and intergenerational project.

Concentrating particularly on the theory of Mark Fisher and its relation to their own experiences and work on the politics of mental health, the author follows through a signifying chain of 'the sadness of Marxist men'. This is set in relation to the author's own experiences of depression and relationship to their father.

Beyond an idea of 'including the subject in research' or examing 'underlying feelings', this piece seeks rather to challenge a binary between thought and feeling under the formulation 'feeling as intellectuality'. This is a thus also an interevention into psychosocial studies itself, mirroring descriptions of it as a 'catachresis' (Posocco, 2024) that even while containing an inherent division between 'pscyho' and 'social', at once commits to a totality of structure and experience in which such things are not neatly divisble.

This totality is mirrored in the Marxist political commitments interrogated in the piece, and it thus serves not just as a mediation on knowledge production, but also on the contradictory difficulty and necessity of poitical militancy to change society for the better in our current moment.