Please consider submitting to this session for the 2017 Feminist
Geography Conference, May 18-20, in Chapel Hill. The full text is below,
and a link is available here:
https://feministgeography.org/demographic-fantasies-and-fever-dreams-taco-trucks-burkini-bans-and-the-basket-of-deplorables/
<https://feministgeography.org/demographic-fantasies-and-fever-dreams-taco-trucks-burkini-bans-and-the-basket-of-deplorables/>
The deadline for submission is January 31.
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*Demographic fantasies and fever dreams: taco trucks, burkini bans, and
the “basket of deplorables”*
In September 2016, we sent out a call for papers to explore the role
of*demographic fever dreams and fantasies in political life*. This was
sparked by the odd specificity of some of the US campaign rhetoric – an
imaginary that called to life a deluge of dreams and fantasies: that
migration would result in an epidemic of “taco trucks on every corner”
[1] and that an Obama-sponsored invasion of lesbian farmers would
undermine red state agricultural strongholds,[2] as well as Clinton’s
description of a “basket of deplorables” containing half of all Trump
voters. We discussed these as fever dreams because of their vivid
specificity and seeming detachment from demographic data with a
simultaneous obsession with demography. We describe these as fever
dreams and fantasies because of their *strikingly specific and
dream-state* features that leap from numerical measures and policy into
a surreal and multivalent landscape of threat…or delight.
We find parallels with other forms of demographic fantasies that lead to
bans on shariah law, on the burkini, or on certain forms of hijab, even
in places where these are a remote possibility or a rare practice.
Recent survey research demonstrates that residents of the European Union
greatly overstate the Muslim population residing in the UE – for
instance, residents of France estimated that 31% of the French
population is Muslim, when research suggests the population is actually
at 7.5%. How does this imagined demography play into concern about
burkinis, hijab, and minarets? In the time since the election in the
United States, we have again been taken by the new ways that a
demographic imaginary of the “white working class,” becomes a fetishized
explanation for a range of complex processes, as residents and observers
of US electoral politics search for a demographic explanation. We could
perhaps add phenomena such as “Pantsuit nation,” which imagines or
perhaps even materializes a subterranean world of feminists, existing,
surviving, and resisting Trump’s America.
With this paper session, we build on a session to be convened at AAG in
collaboration with Joshua Inwood and Carolyn Gallaher. Following recent
calls for critical and feminist human geographers to take demographic
change seriously, we are inviting submissions about *demographic fever
dreams and fantasies*. We’re interested in the work that they do, the
danger that they pose to building solidarity across difference, but also
the potential for play and subversion that is embedded in their vivid
specificity. Traditionally, critical human geography has overlooked or
ignored demographic change, and yet global demographic shifts are
animating and inspiring political movements worldwide. Often, these
shifts are mobilized in political discourses through specific
demographic fantasies to instill anxiety and fear of perceived threats
to the success of nations. These fantasies rely on normative ideas of
gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious difference, but also
invent compelling narrative justifications for those ideas and a means
for them to mutate and multiply.
Demographic fantasies are not uniform across contexts – for instance,
while in the US context we find fear-based fantasies of demographic
decline or resurgence, in Turkey we note a demographic fantasy of young
pious economic and cultural resurgence. Both these tropes rely on a
common rhetoric of marginalization: that “we” are the majority but the
political elite has not listened, that after “we” have been oppressed
for years, it is now time to rise. As we consider the political purpose
of these demographic fantasies, the fears underlying them, and how the
vivid imagery ties into fears of white masculine decline and panic, we
wonder how we can unravel these oddly specific imaginaries. In each of
these instances, a vivid and fantastic fiction is used by figures with
political power to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of
migration, birth, or mortality to consolidate political power or to
dismiss or undermine class tensions and create fictions communities of
homogeneity.
While it is easy to be smugly dismissive of fears about an unlikely
takeover by “others,” here we hope to more carefully consider the
content, deployment, and mechanisms of these vivid demographic
imaginaries of threat. In so doing, we hope to build on, but also
disrupt and complicate theoretical explorations in feminist political
geography, which evoke the embodied life of territory and borders and
the political life of demography. We invite papers exploring demographic
fantasies through political speech, popular culture, government policy,
or other venues, and engaging with questions such as the following (but
not limited to these):
* What political and cultural work do demographic fantasies do, and
how do they do it?
* What role do gendered, sexualized, and racialized body politics play
in demographic fantasies?
* What are effective responses to demographic fantasies? What is the
potential for play and subversion (e.g., the social media responses
to taco trucks on every corner, and the “basket of adorables”)? How
might we combat the violence these nationalist fantasies engender,
particularly in a “post-fact” media context?
* How do demographic fever dreams travel across contexts and political
lines?
* How do demographic fantasies explicitly or implicitly engage with
temporal and metanarratives and geographic imaginaries (such as the
dangerous and uncertain future, and porous borders)?
* How might we respond to or understand the flights of demographic
fantasy that emerge from rumors, exaggerations, or denials of
seemingly incontestable truths? Especially when drawing attention to
the fallacy only fuels the fantasy?
Please send abstracts to Sara Smith ([log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>), Banu Gökarıksel ([log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>), and Chris Neubert ([log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>), by January 31st, 2017.
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[1] Chokshi, Niraj. September 2, 2016. “‘Taco trucks on every corner’:
Trump supporter’s anti-immigration warning” New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/us/politics/taco-trucks-on-every-corner-trump-supporters-anti-immigration-warning.html?_r=0
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/us/politics/taco-trucks-on-every-corner-trump-supporters-anti-immigration-warning.html?_r=0>
[2] Erbentraut, Joseph. September 4, 2016. “These lesbian farmers aren’t
here to take over America. They want to grow it.” Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lesbian-farmers-rush-limbaugh_us_57c879d6e4b0e60d31ddf5c0
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lesbian-farmers-rush-limbaugh_us_57c879d6e4b0e60d31ddf5c0>
--
Christopher Neubert
Department of Geography
UNC-Chapel Hill
