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]),
Banu Gökarıksel (
[log in to unmask]),
and Chris Neubert (
[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
[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