In this paper, we propose to analyse the phenomenon of female right-wing influencers on (German) social media and interpret it on the basis of Freud’s classic paper “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919).

Freud saw the fantasy, “a child is being beaten,” offered by his analysands as a recollected fragment during analysis, to fall into three distinct, yet overlapping, layers of relational meanings. The first layer holds a sadistic meaning, with the child, beaten by the subject’s father, being an unspecified other to the self, most likely a sibling as a ‘significant-other-like-myself.’ The second, more repressed layer concerns a masochistic level of meaning, with the beaten child identified as oneself, implicating the subject in the violently intimate scenario. The third layer, in turn, might be called the “phatic” layer, in that it is stripped of all relational context and stands by itself as a monolithic, yet highly sexually exciting, observation, decoupled from all social ties.

Recently, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster (2023) has applied Freud’s text to the politics of reproductive rights in the US, repurposing it as “a child is being aborted”. “Perhaps there is an attempt here,” she writes, “to get closer to what it feels like to be on the other side of a divide. The problem is that this is being done through what I can only call a beating fantasy” (p. 275).

In our paper, we build on Webster’s advance and offer analyses of the different positionings of right-wing female influencers in order to unpack the various layers and variations of what might likewise be called a “beating fantasy.”

This article explores men’s psychic attachments to organisational masculinities in the context of gender equality initiatives in the UK finance sector. Deploying an object-relations psychoanalysis and generating interview data with 30 male executives and non-executives, it unpacks why and how men outwardly support but unconsciously repudiate workplace gender equality. We explain how this conflict indicates the presence of what Melanie Klein (1946) terms the paranoid-schizoid position. We examine two key unconscious processes of the paranoid-schizoid position in men’s accounts: gender-splitting, when men dissociate undesirable aspects of organisational masculinity, and projection, when repressed, negative parts of their masculine ideals are instead attributed to women. This article’s contributions demonstrate how the paranoid schizoid position is defensive, enabling men to articulate support for gender equality, but also protect paranoid constructions of organisational masculinity when it is threatened by women. Empirically and theoretically, this article shows how organisational masculinities are ambivalent, which in Kleinian terms underscores how masculinity has ‘good’ and ‘bad’ components that are constituted unconsciously through its relationship with the object world. This article concludes by drawing out the implications for (re)positioning men within workplace gender equality debates and activities.

This essay is a feminist of color meditation on anger that draws from postcolonial psychoanalysis and feminist phenomenology. Thinking through anger by way postcolonial and feminist theory provides us with the blueprints for how to think about anger historically, structurally, psychologically, and culturally. By situating feminist anger as a response to an excessively violent modernity, with its modes of inferiorization, I examine the coloniality of everyday sexism through my own recollections of anger. It’s a story that moves between the patriarchy of the home, the neighborhood, the workplace, and then back home again. In resisting patriarchy, I learned vital lessons about anger. Anger contests subordination to survive. Anger makes demands on humanness, but its expression can ironically lessen its claim. An angry woman of color is unhinged, excessive, has lost control. This is familiar feminist terrain.

Anger is part and parcel of a feminist affective inheritance. The basis of this inheritance is violence—psychic, corporeal, and material. Everyday sexism, along with other forms of oppression, are a system of violences that have been normalized and naturalized since the dawn of modern Europe with its colonial conquests. Most women can recall times when they were made to feel inferior, when they had their bodies accosted, and/or when they faced economic insecurity—and so can most people of color. When you belong to a subjugated culture, there are shared ways of being and understanding that reflect and embody a critique of dominant culture; part of that is a shared anger. That anger is expressed through knowing glances, secret cabals, and outbursts. Every subjugated group has a culture of anger that makes up the counter-modernity, which has at its foundation hope. And it is in the feminist counter-modern I end my narrative by looking at the bonds between women as they transform their worlds.