Media,Riots and the Social Contract of Gender during COVID-19: Andrea Long Chu’s Females in Pathologized Times

Abstract

The conceit of Andrea Long Chu’s Females (2019) is that ‘everyone is female, and everyone hates it’. To be female in the sense that Chu intends it is to learn that one’s body is a liability, to be policed by systems that serve to protect the violator while blaming the vulnerable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, populations whose bodies have not historically been subject to pathologization have been forced to consider their bodies, and boundaries, reframed in relation to threat, as containing pathological potential. In this article, I consider two events (the 6 January 2021 riots at Capitol Hill, and the series of riots in Melbourne in 2021) that reflect this resistance to the idea of individual vulnerability and collective responsibility implied by the social contract. The logic of protecting and policing physical boundaries implies permeability, feminizing all bodies (and everybody hates it).

Keywords

Andrea Long Chu COVID-19 feminization gender masculinity

‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. (The White House, 2025)

During early development the gonads of the fetus remain undifferentiated; that is, all fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female. (Wizeman and Pardue, 2001: 45)

Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. (Chu, 2019)

Through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic aftermath, backlash against the prospect of a social contract that includes a sense of care or responsibility to community developed, with a peculiar focus on re-asserting white western gender norms. In this article, I refer to two events that occurred in 2021: the 6 January riots at Capitol Hill in the US, and the series of protests-turned-riots that occurred between May and October in Melbourne, Australia, both of which reflected a resistance to restrictions imposed on the basis of protecting community health, characterised by reactionary performances of masculinity. Australian examples have previously been compared to the 6 January riots (Day and Carlson, 2023), demonstrating how COVID-19 health regulations have been understood (and rejected) by some sectors of the population, buoyed by ambivalent news reporting, and the development of a collective perception of threat to (particularly white) hegemonic masculine ideals. By deploying the argument and premise of Andrea Long Chu’s polemic Females: A Concern (2019), these riots can be understood as expressions of a rejection of the possibility of even a temporary experience of any kind of feminization, or ‘being female’ by attempting to (re)gain the imagined position of hegemonic masculinity, characterized by invulnerability, in the expression of a rigid contract of gender that opposes the obligation to community found in an understanding of the social contract.

The 6 January riots occurred following the election of President Joe Biden in November 2020, and subsequent widespread misinformation that voter fraud had affected the outcome of the election (which was immediately proven to be false) (Eggers et al., 2021). While the election result was the explicit primary motivation for the unrest, the preceding period, in which COVID-19 health regulations had been imposed on (and then rejected by) large segments of the US population, along with the unique proliferation of misinformation and radicalization of those populations, primed them for the event. Of those who participated in the 6 January riots, ‘93 percent were white, and 86 percent were men’, reflecting the expression of grievance by a very specific demographic (Katz, 2022).

In Melbourne, Australia, similarly composed groups developed more extreme views in response to the COVID-19-related lockdowns. The spread of the disease in Melbourne necessitated some extreme and long-running measures, including rolling, highly restrictive lockdowns (which included stay-at-home orders, one hour outside the house per day, and 5 km radius rules, curfews and a ‘ring of steel’ around the city; Wahlquist, 2021). These measures also included restrictions on building sites and other similar workplaces, sparking widespread protest by workers affected (Wahlquist and McGowan, 2021), which was unexpected, primarily as workers were paid for the time they were stood down as both the Federal and Victorian State governments provided substantial support packages to individuals and businesses. Frequent protests that began in response to these restrictions were hijacked by anti-vaxxers, who had also developed right wing and white supremacist views (Day and Carlson, 2021; MC, 2021).¹ While statistical analysis is not readily available for the Melbourne unrest in the same manner as for the 6 January riots, as Day and Carlson write:

While not all settler conspiracists or anti-vaxxers are white, it is important to note that many of the core themes and ideas in these movements stem from predominantly white nations and most often from movements defending whiteness within these nations. (2023: 4)

And news footage and photographs taken at these protests further reflects the overwhelmingly white and male composition of these crowds.

This is evidence of the unsurprising observation that those least accustomed to having their individual freedom curtailed resist most vehemently when asked to sacrifice some of that freedom, particularly for a cause they refuse to recognize as affecting them. This violent resistance can be understood through the lens of Chu’s characterization of human motivation in Females, as a rejection of ‘being female’ as central to the human condition. In this case, it emerges that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the associated health regulations issued in response to it, has reminded men, specifically white men, of their being female, in Chu’s terms, and the performance of refusal to comply with public health orders, culminating in violent protests, riot and insurrection, as a defence mechanism, performed publicly to enforce the recognition of autonomy that this group has learnt to consider to be what is owed to them by societies.

White (cis) men are socially encouraged to consider themselves to be invulnerable, as delegates who, to echo Chu’s parlance, were not selected for the constant social experience of feminization (despite being female):

literature on risk perception shows that white males are comparatively less likely than women and Black respondents to feel threatened by everything from gun violence to climate change, even when controlling for risk exposure and other key variables such as education. (Vargas et al., 2023: 221)

The remainder of the population are constantly reminded of their being not only obligated to, but vulnerable to, the whims of others. Vargas et al. observe that:

white privilege manifests as a protective cultural lens that filters out the fears, anxieties, and vulnerabilities that individuals might encounter . . . [this is] a broader manifestation of power relations and racial hierarchies. (Vargas et al., 2023: 221)

While only describing whiteness and masculinity in the context of contemporary US society and how that position informs an understanding of risk in relation to COVID-19, it is not a stretch to consider this a broader indication of how colonialism has worked to position this group in western and global cultures. An association between what is commonly described as ‘toxic masculinity’ and resistance to public health regulations associated with attempts to control COVID-19 has been convincingly established (Bridges et al., 2021; Day and Carlson, 2021; Harsin, 2020; Victor, 2020; Wood et al., 2021). It has been noted that suspicion, as well as ‘masculinist selfishness’, extends beyond the responses of the general population to the then leaders of Western countries, including ‘Bolsonaro, Trump, Johnson and Putin’ (Harsin, 2020: 1063). Refusal to wear masks, suspicion around the reported severity and the aggressive continuation of physical contact with others is used as a marker of what such leaders perceive to be masculine vitality. This is a mediatized performance designed to be perceived as reassuring absolute certainty through aggressive insistence that the threat of uncertainty does not exist; ‘simply put, during this global pandemic, investment in masculinity as fearless and in control facilitates the spread of the disease’ (Bridges et al., 2021: 165). This is reflective of the always gendered nature of populist governance, demonstrating selfishness that implies a lack of empathy, an absence of willingness to sacrifice individual autonomy for the sake of the vulnerable (and, obviously, by extension, also refusing to admit potential vulnerability), while, perhaps more importantly, refusing an obligation to a broader community, and to the social contract that underpins it (Mostov, 2021). The association between adherence to the social contract, the perception (and fear) of feminization (as the experience of having one’s tacit femaleness recognized and enacted) is tangibly articulated through this refusal.

Policing of Bodies, Boundaries

The female is always the product of force, and force is invariably feminizing.

(Chu, 2019: 84)

In Females, Chu writes that ‘being female’ is the universal human condition (ontologically, as well as biologically and, to some extent, socially; 2019: 11). Being female, for Chu, is ‘defined by self-negation . . . any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another’ (2019: 11). Chu’s argument and characterization of ‘being female’ provides a basis for understanding how social experiences of feminization operate. Chu’s work appears focussed on the tension between being female, gender identity and self-determination, and the question of social recognition on an interpersonal, aesthetic and cultural register. However, in this article, I have focused on how Chu’s framework can be deployed to understand the complexity of relations between the individual and a sense of obligation to community, particularly through experiences of socialization. I use the term feminization to describe instances where the experiences of individuals, predicated on how others perceive their bodies, dictate their capacity for autonomy in a space. Feminization, in this sense, is an external force, applied to individuals, based on the external gendered recognition, reception and perception of bodies by others in a given group, and accordingly an individual’s obligation to bend to that external force. In other words, people of every gender experience feminization. Feminization is not a reflection of an individual’s sense of their gender but, rather, how an individual’s gender is perceived by others, and the consequences of this perception and set of assumptions. While each of us, individually, have some (and variable) mastery over how we appear, and the semiotics of gender allows us freedoms to generate different effects, ultimately, how other people perceive us is out of our control, or, as Chu writes, ‘you do not get to consent to yourself – a definition of femaleness’ (2019: 38). In this way, the feminization of, for example, men with disabilities, of Black men, and the ways in which white women are less female (and more identifiably woman) than women of colour can be described. Nevertheless, to some extent, ‘everyone is female, and everyone hates it’, and therefore gender is a performative practice enacted in the begging for recognition by others (Chu, 2019: 11).

This claim underpins Chu’s examination of the motivations behind human behaviour, including, most importantly for this article, the desire to be recognized as gendered (regardless of the gender a person, a female, wishes to be recognized as), by identifying the contradiction that desire produces at the heart of experience. Chu claims this is a tension between the conscious desire humans have for autonomy, as individuals, and to be active drivers of our own lives, and the desire to submit to the will of a group or community, relinquishing autonomy, and losing the capacity to make demands about needs in the process (2019: 12). The submission of oneself to community is something required, to an extent, of everyone who lives in a society, but the extent to which any individual human is required to do it, in other words, the extent to which anyone is female in any given context, is contingent on how bodies are perceived and gendered (and affected and modulated by race, class, ability and other markers of identity and advantage).

Chu’s Females has received a largely frosty reception in the fields of Transfeminism, Gender, Trans and Queer studies (see Susan Stryker, Jack Halberstam and Jules Gleeson’s essays in a special issue of TSQ, as well as Kay Gabriel in Los Angeles Review of Books). While Chu may have provoked this, to some extent, in her declaration that Trans studies is ‘over’ (Chu, 2019: 103), many central criticisms (including Halberstam’s) rely on what appears to be a willed misreading of the text, namely, the insistent, continued confusion between being female and being a woman (which Chu clearly and exhaustively separates, describing women as the ‘select delegates’ of femaleness; 2019: 13) and the reading of an implied binarization between being female and being a man, most confusingly and glaringly in the response of Gleeson (2020), who is noted by the journal as an intersex scholar. There is more than a hint of paternalistic disapproval in Halberstam’s essay, which variously argues that Chu is being simultaneously ‘old hat’, obvious, and patently absurd. Gleeson takes issue with the jokes, specifically, as if the jokes are disingenuous and not routinely designed to reveal the truth of phenomena, as Chu describes, as a ‘commitment to a bit’ (Chu, 2019: 18).

One of the few positive responses to Females was a review essay written by Mckenzie Wark (2019) that takes seriously the premise. For Wark, it offers a consideration of how the experience of being Trans (and of gender more generally) is narrativized and accounted for, and crucially for whom. Wark, like Chu, reflects an exhaustion with the anxiety that afflicts Trans studies, that of a constant underlying battle with people who refuse to acknowledge their shared humanity, or the right of Trans people to exist at all.² It is in this context that Females offers an insight that can be built upon to create a useful, if somewhat confrontational, frame through which to tease apart the workings of phenomena of our present, pathologized time.

The use of the term ‘feminization’ to describe the process by which people learn (and are disciplined) to be female is inspired by Chu, but it is indebted to a tradition that includes Simone de Beauvoir (2011 [1949]), as well as Valerie Solanas (2015 [1971]) (whose work Chu responds to in Females). Feminization is an experiential and ongoing process that is configured differently for each person, and is inflected by different kinds of experiences, dependent on whether an individual is trans or cisgendered, whether they are a person of colour, white, belong to a specific racial group, social class or religion, whether they are Indigenous, or how and whether they are disabled. Feminization is a tool of control applied unevenly and inequitably across racial and other divides. Consider the femininity required of Black women,³ as compared to white women, as compared to Asian women or Indigenous women – each of these and many others have distinctions in how femaleness is judged, corrected and coded (hooks, 1981; Moreton-Robinson, 2021; Phan, 2019; Pyke and Johnson, 2003). Power and privilege trace complex lines across these boundaries, exerting divides in predictable – and at the same time unexpected – places.

This practice of feminization is, crucially, inextricably bound to colonial power, which in turn forms our relationships, communally and individually, to the social contract. The rigid binarization of gender is a colonial project, and one designed to trace the lineage of whiteness (to the exclusion of the racialized, Indigenous other; O’Sullivan, 2021). This practice reproduces whiteness through the classification and disciplining of gender normative behaviours, experiences and morphologies, necessarily pathologizing and limiting gender diversity in First Nations cultures in colonial contexts (O’Sullivan, 2021; Tallbear, 2020). As both Tallbear and O’Sullivan have observed (in different, although related, settler-colonial contexts), sexual monogamy, compulsory heterosexuality and rigid gender roles, including the practice of feminization (as Chu defines it), are all colonial practices used to reproduce whiteness, crucially, ‘linked to concepts of property’ (Tallbear, 2020: 469). In other words, feminization is a key practice of colonization, the ‘making-property’ and the ‘taking-as-property’ of other people, other bodies, justified by their modulated difference to the colonial holotype of straight white cis-masculinity.

Day and Carlson have argued that in the context of so-called Australia, colonialism informs particularly cis white men to feel aggrieved entitlement:

Aggrieved entitlement describes the intensifying anger and anxiety experienced by men when they are not able to access the privileges necessary to fulfil their culturally prescribed gender roles. (Day and Carlson, 2023: 6)

This phenomenon, specific, but not exclusive to settler-colonial states, describes the way in which colonizing whiteness seeks to reproduce itself in a way that cannot cope with any kind of giving way, or collectivist action. In Day and Carlson’s example, anti-vax protests in Ngunnawal country reflected an attempt to colonize Indigeneity itself. The defence of masculinist self-determination, alongside an attempt to colonize Indigenous cultures and practices by white settler men, is heightened at precisely the time that their experience is restricted, subject to over-policing and restriction of movement, akin to what the colonized, and the feminized have long experienced. If everyone is female, the consciousness of that subject position is contingent upon their individual racialized, colonized and gendered circumstance. Other kinds of people never feel either the entitlement or obligation to protect an imagined whiteness, or an imagined nuclear family structure that perpetuates it, and therefore do not respond with violent aggrievement when their conditional femaleness is presented to them for the first time.

My Body, My Choice

Everyone is female, and everyone hates it (Chu, 2019: 11)

The experience of having a body, constituted as a pathological threat, and material vulnerability is an experience of being female, as well as it is characteristic of the experience of living during the COVID-19 pandemic. The set of everyday restrictions imposed upon everyone closely resembles those that regulate and discipline women’s bodies in general. Feminization, or the designation of being female, is distinct from the feminine, or femininity, as Julia Serano (and others) have most clearly defined it (Serano, 2016). It is not inherently feminine to be controlled, oppressed, or reduced, but rather a reflection of (patriarchal) social control of femininity that constitutes feminization (Halberstam, 2018: 119). Nevertheless, the process of feminization can be understood as a set of lessons, transfigured into a set of behaviours, designed to train that individual towards normative, if not stereotypical, feminine behaviour. This can include common examples like ‘self-protection’ messages routinely communicated to women about their movements and behaviour in public spaces (i.e. don’t be out at night, don’t be drunk, wear modest clothing) as well as culturally specific standard practices about how women should appear and behave. These are rules that explicitly restrict, prohibit and make transgressive behaviour by women perceived to be socially inappropriate, and those behaviours are typically (although not always) far more socially acceptable for those people perceived to be, or who perceive themselves to be, men.

Feminization is, broadly speaking, a tactic of limitation and control, the consequence of the application of force. The prohibition of being female binds all kinds of bodies, beholden to limitations that offer relational freedom to those who most easily escape the clutches of this process of feminization. Key to most narratives or sets of appropriate behaviours associated with feminization is the expectation of the reduction of the body in public space, framing female bodies as otherwise ‘at risk’ from physical and sexual harm. Female bodies are socially framed as porous, to be penetrated, and hence the codification of how and when this should occur (Irigaray, 1985). It is a fourth wave feminist catch-cry, adapted from Iris Marion Young’s seminal essay ‘Throwing like a Girl’ (Young, 1980), that women should acclimatize themselves, as well as the world, to the idea that they should ‘take up space’, an idea that has been explored in Ted Talks and Instagram influence as much as in academic scholarship, which is, as Chu (2019) observed, a way for women to resist being female.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the notion of taking up physical space has become complicated by practices like social and spatial distancing. Speaking up is complicated by the visual and physical barrier of masks, and the virulent disease itself is a challenge to a body’s robust health. Perhaps most importantly, the best way to control the spread of the disease, and serious illness from it, has emerged as vaccination which is provided through a series of intramuscular injections, breaching the physical and psychic barrier of the skin. The mediatized, global and spatial controls that have governed populations under COVID-19 have given all people a palpable sense of feminization. This has meant that the pandemic has revealed this hatred of being female, as it has laid bare a range of interventions that, as mentioned above, men, and particularly white cis-men, are unaccustomed to, and are less likely to comply with (Bridges et al., 2021; Liz, 2020). Physical distancing, which has come to be referred to as ‘social distancing’, has been a mainstay of life under COVID-19 regulations. In addition to government advice to remain ‘at least’ 1.5 metres away from the next human, populations have also been subject to a variety of regulations designed to keep them separated. In Melbourne, these included a complex matrix of rules including radiuses, time limits, curfews, activity specifications and definitions, as well as mandatory mask wearing, all of which have changed regularly, and all of which have been rigorously enforced by a police force that obtained additional powers (Ore, 2023).

This level of policing and population-level surveillance is disturbing, and certainly the expansion of police powers has disproportionately affected already marginalized populations and, amongst other negative effects, saddled many people with life-ruining debt associated with fines imposed for minor breaches (Ore, 2023). Nevertheless, as has been well-documented, women, people of colour, and particularly women of colour were both disproportionately affected by COVID-19 regulations and often their most diligent adherents (Liz, 2020). Conversely, and as evidenced by the riots in Melbourne and on 6 January at Capitol Hill, white (cis) men who are least accustomed to adhering to physical resistrictions were the most likely to resist them, as a response to having to consider the material vulnerability of their bodies, individually and collectively, en masse, arguably, for the first time.

The terms of the COVID-19 pandemic have forced populations ordinarily inoculated by privilege to consider the vulnerability of embodiment in an unprecedented way. While there are parallels with the AIDS crisis (particularly in relation to Sontag’s observation that the language of infection is politicized), the COVID-19 virus has made its politicization different (Sontag, 1989: 103). From this, a culture has emerged where masculinity is performed through a refusal to wear protective equipment or take protective measures to avoid infection (of one’s own body, or that of another), including vaccination, which has contributed to the emergence of violence (as in Melbourne and at Capitol Hill in 2021). This phenomenon reflects a desire to refuse even the suggestion of having a permeable or vulnerable body or, in other words, the tacit, terrifying suggestion of being female.

In an additional ironic twist, feminist activism and discourse around bodily autonomy, challenging the lack of control over one’s own body that comes with social feminization (Stevenson, 2019), has been appropriated by forces wanting to avoid vaccination (Blom, 2024). The same political groups who routinely disapprove, protest against, or even legislate against the ability of people to make decisions about what penetrates their bodies (medically or sexually) have come to cynically misuse feminist ideas in support of a refusal to be vaccinated. The distinction between people’s right to make decisions about their body’s reproductive capacity and the social obligation to community in obtaining a vaccination is clear. If one refuses sexual penetration, there is no harm caused to the broader community as a result (regardless of what an incel might claim; Srinivasan, 2021). Similarly, a pregnant person’s decision to terminate a pregnancy also does not cause harm, as the foetus in question is an undifferentiated cluster of cells – they terminate a potentiality, which again, does not cause harm in proportion to the physical, social and psychological risks that pregnancy poses (NHS, 2024).⁴ By comparison, the refusal of vaccination by an individual has the potential to cause great harm, particularly when considered in proportion to the very low risk the person undergoing a vaccination is subject to (Fisman et al., 2022). The objection these groups have, then, is to the experience of feminization, the experience of being female,⁵ through the perceived lack of choice, the idea that they must subject their bodies to be penetrated, and that they have an obligation to others as a result.

Submission and the Social Contract

Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole. (Rousseau, 2016 [1762]: 44, emphasis in original)

. . . leading men as a group (and in many nations white men in particular) to be more likely than women to risk their health by avoiding masks and questioning the helpfulness of vaccines, and be more likely to infect others in the process. (Bridges et al., 2021: 165)

The social contract, the principle that individuals forgo some freedoms for the protection of social cohesion and fulfillment of community, is, after Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2016 [1762]), a well-established tenet of modernity. The interpretation of the social contract varies widely, but generally speaking, it insists that in order to live in a community the individual has an obligation to that community. Where Rousseau imagined the obligation as one of equals, this framework of obligation to the other, broadly speaking, and to those around us, in particular, is one far more familiar to people who have experienced feminization, by virtue of their gendered appearance, race, sexed body or sexuality. It has been observed that effective promotion of COVID-19 management, as well as vaccination updates, should feature an appeal to (and even a reinvigoration of) the social contract (Kihato and Landau, 2020; Razavi et al., 2020). The ‘common interest’ is best served through vaccination, and the individual, after Rousseau, must submit to the needs of the collective (Rousseau, 2016 [1762]: 46).

If a citizen refuses to adhere to the social contract, then ‘he shall be forced to be free’ (Rousseau, 2016 [1762]: 46) – the implication being that without citizenship, the subject can no longer expect the comfort and protection of the society that requires the contract. Many anti-lockdown protesters may desire this ‘freedom’, primarily because they lack an understanding about what it means to live without the protection of social order, as a result of the social cushioning that white masculinity and modernity provide. As Charles Mills has argued, this social cushioning is predicated on a ‘racial contract’ that relies on the exclusion of non-white people and their objectification in relation to the western humanist white (male) subject (Mills, 1997). In engaging with Mills’ characterization of the racial contract, Armond R. Townes emphasizes the gendered framing of the social contract, writing that ‘Western man, emerged from the “state of nature” through both moral and political contracts with other men’ and argues that regardless of the model of social contract, ‘for Mills, what matters is that there remains a specific human who is assumed as a consenting signer’ (Townes, 2020: 854). The consequence of this, as Townes argues, is that ‘there is a subset of people who cannot fully come out of a state of nature’, and those people remain objectified resources in the service of white (and male) supremacy (Townes, 2020: 855). Similarly, as argued by Gatens (1996), women and people subject to feminization are socially constructed as reproductive resources, historically without access to full citizenship or suffrage, meaning they are subject to the social laws and prohibitions but are historically limited in their capacity to change them,⁶ while access to the protections associated with the social contract are predicated on their racialization (where white women are afforded greater social protection than women of colour; Nash, 2019: 11).⁷

One way or another, individuals are trained to bend to the demands of the social contract and social order. We all bend differently, and to different extents in different circumstances, but everyone has a sense of making way in common, an experience of ‘being female’. This also gives us the potential to see community, the capacity to appreciate the experience of another, and to empathize, which is most infrequently socially required of white (cis) men, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rage that results from newly experiencing this sense of obligation has been demonstrated and spread through ‘alternative’ media, such as QAnon inciting violent resistance (Bracewell, 2021: 2). Being female is a condition of the social contract, which is least often asked of white (cis) men.

A striking characteristic of the policing of both the Melbourne anti-lockdown protests and the Capitol Hill riots was restraint. In both cases, despite numerous reports and recordings of police being assaulted by participants, the police response showed a lack of aggression, which, when compared to the far more aggressive responses to the comparatively law-abiding Black Lives Matter protests in the US and in Australia, as well as to women’s rights protests in the UK, suggests tacit support, if not complicity in policing. Again, the police force in both instances, characterized by whiteness, and a colonial institution, judges the aggression of white men differently, and punishes it less severely, than that of other kinds of people, the result being – in the case of Capitol Hill – rioters whose aim clearly appeared to be the assassination of elected officials and who got very close to their aim, whilst in Melbourne, the CBD was overrun by violent protesters repeatedly between August and November 2021, with police repeatedly failing to stop them from engaging in unlawful and violent acts (including assaulting and intimidating passers-by and in at least one case, a dog, while another protester punched a police horse). The protesters were described as ‘angry, aggressive young males there to fight’ (Wood et al., 2021), and perhaps this indicates there was little expectation of their willingness to submit to the rules of the social contract.

More than the crowd simply being constituted primarily by white men, the lockdown protests, like the Capitol Hill riots, were characterized by members of the crowd sporting far right, white supremacist and other extremist symbols. Models of gallows were seen at both events, and in both cases questions were raised about those people who marched alongside Nazi symbols, implying their support (BBC News, 2022; Wahlquist and McGowan, 2021). Again, the fear of feminization is racialized, as only white men are able, for the most part, to entirely avoid ‘being female’ in nearly all circumstances, and so they are the most outraged when they perceive an imposition on their individual autonomy. Protesters in Melbourne held flaming swords, wore ‘V’ masks (from the film V for Vendetta), and held the Eureka flag, which has a contested history, initially designed as a symbol of rebellion and republicanism in Australia in 1854, before becoming ‘a rallying point for white miners to attack Chinese mining camps’ in 1861 (Simpson, 2009: 22). Since then, it has been adopted as a symbol of the Australian Union movement, but it has also become associated primarily with white supremacy, particularly since the Cronulla race riots in New South Wales in 2005. Therefore, in the current context, brandishing a Eureka flag can be understood as roughly akin to a the use of a Confederate flag in a protest in the US (MacDonald, 2010; News.com.au, 2020). Australian ‘far right’ groups mirror the populist politics of Trump followers, particularly in their ‘anti-science . . . racist . . . and primarily anti-women’ positions (MC, 2021).

These events reflect a broader inability for those whose masculinity is most fragile to cope with health advice given and restrictions imposed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rage of these white (cis) men in response to the imposition of community, in response to the experience of being female, is one supported by colonialism, which promises white (cis) men that their desires should never be compromised for the will or sake of anyone or anything else. And everyone hates it.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Erin K. Stapleton

Notes

Erin K. Stapleton teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Their research focuses on the relationships between destruction, colonialism, identity, media and visual cultures. Their book The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy of Expenditure After Georges Bataille was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2022. Their work has also been published in edited collections, including Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century, Genre Trajectories, Teaching Gender, and True Detection, as well as in the journals Rhizomes and Third Text.

References

ABC News (2021) Police label protesters ‘cowards’ as 62 arrested after crowd storms through Melbourne’s CBD. ABC News, 21 September. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-21/victoria-construction-industry-shutdown-melbourne-protest-police/100478450 (accessed 3 June 2025).

BBC News (2022) Capitol riots timeline: What happened on 6 Jan one year ago? BBC News, 6 January. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916 (accessed 3 June 2025).

Blom

Tashina

(2024) My body my choice: The hostile appropriation of feminist cultural memory in American anti-vaccine movements. Memory Studies 17(5): 1089–1104.

Botting

Eileen Hunt

(2021) Predicting the patriarchal politics of pandemics from Mary Shelley to COVID-19. Frontiers in Sociology 6: 624909.

Bracewell

Lorna

(2021) Gender, populism, and the QAnon conspiracy movement. Frontiers in Sociology 5: 615727.

Bridges

Tristan

Barber

Kristen

Nelson

Joseph D.

, et al. (2021) Masculinity and COVID-19: Symposium introduction. Men and Masculinities 24(1): 163–167.

Cassidy

Caitlin

(2021) Melbourne freedom day: World’s most locked down city takes first cautious steps to reopening. The Guardian Australia, 22 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/22/melbourne-freedom-day-worlds-most-locked-down-city-takes-first-cautious-steps-to-reopening (accessed 3 June 2025).

Chu

Andrea Long

(2019) Females: A Concern. London: Verso.

Chu

Andrea Long

Drager

Emmett Harsin

(2019) After trans studies. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6(1): 103–116.

10.

Convery

Stephanie

(2021) Australia COVID protests: Threats against ‘traitorous’ politicians as thousands rally in capital cities. The Guardian Australia, 20 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/20/australia-covid-protests-threats-against-traitorous-politicians-as-thousands-rally-in-capital-cities (accessed 3 June 2025).

11.

Day

Madi

Carlson

Bronwyn

(2021) White supremacist and far right ideology underpin anti-vax movements. The Conversation, 22 November. Available at: https://theconversation.com/white-supremacist-and-far-right-ideology-underpin-anti-vax-movements-172289 (accessed 3 June 2025).

12.

Day

Madi

Carlson

Bronwyn

(2023) So-called sovereign settlers: Settler conspirituality and nativism in the Australian anti-vax movement. Humanities 12(5): 112.

13.

de Beauvoir

Simone

(2011) The Second Sex, trans. Borde

Constance

Malovany-Chevallier

Sheila

. London: Vintage Books.

14.

de Gouges

Olympe

(1979) Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 1791. In: Levy

Darline Gay

Applewhite

Harriet Bronson

Johnson

Mary Durham

(eds) Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795: Selected Documents Translated with Notes and Commentary. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 87–96.

15.

Eggers

Andrew C.

Garro

Haritz

Grimmer

Justin

(2021) No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(45): e2103619118.

16.

Fisman

David N.

Amoako

Afia

Tuite

Ashleigh R.

(2022) Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: Implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission. CMAJ 194(16): 573–580.

17.

Foster

Johanna E.

Foster-Palmer

Sophie

(2023) Theorizing racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism in the age of COVID-19: A framework for feminist policy change. Journal of Social Issues 79(2): 794–821.

18.

Gabriel

Kay

(2019) The limits of the bit. Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 November. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-limits-of-the-bit/ (accessed 3 June 2025).

19.

Gatens

Moira

(1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge.

20.

Gleeson

Jules Joanna

(2020) Are jokes going to cut it? Concerning Andrea Long Chu’s females. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7(3): 332–342.

21.

Gould

Carol C.

(2021) Editorial: Patriarchy and populism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Sociology 6: 722393.

22.

Halberstam

Jack

(2018) Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

23.

Halberstam

Jack

(2020) Nice trannies. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7(3): 321–331.

24.

Harsin

Jayson

(2020) Toxic white masculinity, post-truth politics and the Covid-19 infodemic. European Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6): 1060–1068.

25.

hooks

bell

(1981) Ain’t I A Woman?Black Women and Feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press.

26.

Irigaray

Luce

(1985) This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Porter

Catherine

Burke

Carolyn

. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

27.

Katz

Jackson

(2022) White masculinity and the January 6 insurrection. Ms. Magazine, 5 January. Available at: https://msmagazine.com/2022/01/05/white-men-insurrection-january-6-masculinity-trump/ (accessed 3 June 2025).

28.

Kihato

Caroline Wanjiku

Landau

Loren B.

(2020) Coercion or the social contract? COVID 19 and spatial (in)justice in African cities. City and Society 32(1): 10.1111.

29.

Liz

Jordan

(2020) State racism, social justice, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Public Philosophy Journal 3(1): 1–11.

30.

MacDonald

Kim

(2010) Eureka flag ‘hijacked by racists’. The West Australian, 22 January. Available at: https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/eureka-flag-hijacked-by-racists-ng-ya-224116 (accessed 3 June 2025).

31.

Ali

(2021) Australia’s far right gets COVID anti-lockdown protest booster. Aljazeera, 5 October. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/5/australias-far-right-gets-covid-19-booster (accessed 3 June 2025).

32.

Mills

Charles W.

(1997) The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

33.

Moreton-Robinson

Aileen

(2021) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

34.

Mostov

Julie

(2021) Populism is always gendered and dangerous. Frontiers in Sociology 5: 625385.

35.

Nash

Jennifer C.

(2019) Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

36.

National Health Service (NHS) (2024) Common health problems in pregnancy. Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/pregnancy/related-conditions/common-symptoms/common-health-problems/ (accessed 8 June 2025).

37.

News.com.au (2020) Unley Council rejects request to fly Eureka flag amid racism concerns. News.com.au, 28 October. Available at: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/unley-council-rejects-request-to-fly-eureka-flag-amid-racism-concerns/news-story/14534cd735723c07f5886e85ca560fdb (accessed 3 June 2025).

38.

Ore

Adeshola

(2023) ‘It’s the first thing that they look at’: Claims of racial profiling levelled at Victoria police after Covid fines report. The Guardian Australia, 4 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/04/racial-profiling-victoria-police-covid-fines-report (accessed 3 June 2025).

39.

O’Sullivan

Sandy

(2021) The colonial project of gender (and everything else). Genealogy 5: 67.

40.

Phan

Thao

(2019) Amazon echo and the aesthetics of whiteness. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1): 1–38.

41.

Pyke

Karen D.

Johnson

Denise L.

(2003) Asian American women and racialized femininities: ‘Doing’ gender across cultural worlds. Gender and Society 17(1): 33–53.

42.

Razavi

Shahra

Behrendt

Christina

Bierbaum

Mira

Orton

Ian

(2020) Reinvigorating the social contract and strengthening social cohesion: Social protection responses to COVID-19. International Social Security Review 73(3): 55–80.

43.

Rousseau

Jean Jacques

(2016 [1762]) The social contract. In: Blaug

Schwarzmantel

(eds) Democracy: A Reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 43–51.

44.

Saphore

Steven

45.

Serano

Julia

(2016) Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.

46.

Sharp

(2023) Feminist geopolitics and the global-intimacies of pandemic times. Gender, Place & Culture 30(12): 1653–1670.

47.

Simpson

Andrew John

(2009) What mattered then, what matters now. Museums Australia Magazine 18(1): 20–23.

48.

Solanas

Valerie

(2015 [1971)]) SCUM Manifesto. London: Verso.

49.

Sontag

Susan

(1989) Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin.

50.

Srinivasan

Amia

(2021) The Right to Sex. London: Bloomsbury.

51.

Stevenson

Robin

(2019) My Body, My Choice: The Fight for Abortion Rights. Victoria, BC: Orca Book Publishers.

52.

Stryker

Susan

(2020) Introduction: Trans* studies now. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7(3): 299–305.

53.

Tallbear

Kim

(2020) Identity is a poor substitute for relating: Genetic ancestry, critical polyamory, property, and relations. In: Hokuwitu

Brendan

Moreton-Robinson

Aileen

Tuhiwai-Smith

Linda

, et al. (eds) Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 467–478.

54.

The White House (2025) Presidential action: ‘Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government’ (executive order). Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ (accessed 3 June 2025).

55.

Townes

Armond R

. (2020) Towards a black media philosophy. Cultural Studies 34(5): 851–873.

56.

Vargas

Nicholas

Mora

G. Cristina

Gleeson

Shannon

(2023) Race and ideology in a pandemic: White privilege and patterns of risk perception during COVID-19. Social Problems 70(1): 219–237.

57.

Victor

Daniel

(2020) Coronavirus safety runs into a stubborn barrier: Masculinity. The New York Times, 10 October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/us/politics/trump-biden-masks-masculinity.html (accessed 3 June 2025).

58.

Wahlquist

Calla

(2021) How Melbourne’s ‘short, sharp’ Covid lockdowns became the longest in the world. The Guardian Australia, 2 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/02/how-melbournes-short-sharp-covid-lockdowns-became-the-longest-in-the-world (accessed 3 June 2025).

59.

Wahlquist

Calla

McGowan

Michael

(2021) How Daniel Andrews’ beleaguered pandemic bill became fuel for Victoria’s anti-government protests. The Guardian Australia, 16 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/16/victoria-pandemic-bill-daniel-andrews-new-laws-legislation-covid-far-right (accessed 3 June 2025).

60.

Wark

McKenzie

(2019) Commitment to the bit: On Andrea Long Chu. Public Seminar. Available at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/commitment-to-the-bit/ (accessed 3 June 2025).

61.

Wizeman

Theresa M.

Pardue

Mary-Lou

(2001) Chapter 3: Sex begins in the womb. In: Exploring the Biological Contributions to Health: Does Sex Matter? Washington, DC: National Academies Press, pp. 45–78.

62.

Wood

Richard

Attanasio

Joe

Bennett

Emily

(2021) ‘Angry young men’: 235 arrested and 10 police officers injured in Melbourne anti-lockdown protests. Nine News Australia, 18 September. Available at: https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-victoria-update-large-anti-lockdown-protest-in-melbourne/f3c51ad2-5fde-4d15-a4d9-5bf6ece1d0c3 (accessed 3 June 2025).

63.

Young

Iris Marion

(1980) Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies 3(2): 137–156.