“What does our desire endorse?” //
Content Warning: This episode features two Jewish leftist queers in Brooklyn talking about the history, aesthetics, and complicated erotic allegories of fascism. Some graphic references to torture from fictional films including Salò and The Night Porter. //
In the first YAPIT recorded during the COVID-19 quarantine, JB Brager joins me remotely from their home to discuss the spectacle of fascism. Discussed: shiny shiny shiny boots of leather, Nazisploitation, the fashion inspirations of Night Porter, why Salò isn’t actually a BDSM film but could spark scene material, Cate Blanchett's Soviet jodhpurs, why the Borg don't understand dating, the gender politics of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and this entire fucking 1975 Sontag quote: “Fascist aesthetics… flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain... They endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the groupings of people/ things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force... Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized... Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.” //
JB Brager is a writer and cartoonist living in Brooklyn NY, Lenape-ho-king. They are a founding editor of Pinko Magazine and founding host of the Bluestockings bookstore comics reading series In The Gutter. They hold a PhD in Women’s & Gender Studies from Rutgers University New Brunswick. They are on all social media as well as Patreon at @jbbrager
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