Haunted by Gazaplatsen in our hearts: Exploring microfascist encounters in everyday activism

Abstract

This article explores the complex interplay between activism and academic research, particularly in the context of ongoing crises such as the genocide in Palestine and anti-gender politics. Drawing on ethnographic observations from two different research fieldworks and the experiences of anti-genocide activists, this article examines the persistent presence of the Palestinian issue in diverse contexts as a haunting feeling. Inspired by the insights from feminist ethnography and theory, we challenge the traditional separation of academic and activist identities, recognizing the influence of our academic knowledge and background as well as our activist experiences in shaping our understanding of contemporary political discourses and tensions at universities. As such, we analyse how seemingly minor acts of suppression and control within academic spaces and public life can be read through the concept of microfascism, and contribute to the broader silencing of dissent and the erosion of democratic principles. Through a nuanced exploration of microfascist encounters aimed at suppressing activism, such as purported security concerns regarding small informal student encounters organized for Palestine, and micro-regulations on putting up posters and announcements that permeate the daily lives of anti-genocide advocates, we discuss subtle yet pervasive forms of oppression that undermine academic freedom, social justice movements, and freedom of expression. Considering the growing presence of microfascist tactics in academia, we invite a reconsideration of the power systems that underpin universities in order to resist these oppressive forces within scholarly work and academic environments.

Activist diary

30 October 2024, Gothenburg – Sweden. We meet at the ‘Gazaplatsen’ encampment, which has now become a home for students demanding that the University of Gothenburg sever ties with Israeli universities due to their academic complicity and support in Israel’s settler-colonial project (BDS Movement, 2024; Wind, 2024). Today, however, there is little comfort to be found here. The cold is biting all the attendees when the people who stay at the encampment announce that they received a notice that some of the structures built by the protesters in order to withstand the winter cold (better isolated tents made with wood and plastic) needed a construction permit and have to be dismantled. They were also told by the police that they were not allowed to have any kind of contained fires, just as temperatures are starting to dangerously lower. They report the difficulty of finding people who will share guard responsibilities, and feeling unsafe due to regular harassment from people outside. Just the other day, they tell us, a passerby stopped to look at the banners and materials that were displayed around the whole premise. After spending some time looking at the statistics of people killed so far in Palestine, the pictures of bombings, of mangled bodies, of innocent children, and the details of Sweden’s complicity in those war crimes, she was overcome with emotion. ‘Shame! I feel shame!’, she cried. The people at the encampment went to comfort her, telling her they understood, that it was awful, that they were thankful that people cared, and this is why they protested, to end these horrible, shameful things as soon as possible. After a few minutes of holding her hand, when she finally managed to calm down, she clarified: ‘No, no . . . I feel shame that we allow you to stay here’.

Similar scenes, the people at the encampment confessed, were not uncommon.

18 November 2024, Gothenburg – Sweden. After almost 200 days standing, Gazaplatsen, the longest-lasting student protest encampment in Europe, has received a notice that a demonstration will be held at the same spot where the camp stands, and they need to vacate the area. In this way, a coalition of disjointed actors seems to have finally succeeded in its months-long campaign to get rid of this peaceful protest by seeking a permit to hold a demonstration in the exact same spot. The stated purpose for this pressing demonstration? To talk about the fact that ‘basic democratic principles should apply’. The protesters at Gazaplatsen, in fact, agree with the sentiment: the place where the encampment stands is a public space, they said, so the demonstrators are welcome at the encampment, where the anti-genocide protestors will gladly host them. But Axel Darvik, municipal councillor belonging to the Liberal Party, has confirmed that the gathering is, indeed, being staged in order to get the tent camp to leave (Sweden Herald, 2024).

Fieldwork notes

15 September 2024, Istanbul – Turkey. Sarachane Square was filled with demonstrators eagerly awaiting the start of the ‘Great Family Gathering’. Children carried placards denouncing ‘socio-cultural terrorism’ and the perceived threat of ‘gender ideology’ to family values and national security. This scene, typical of anti-gender mobilizations, raises intriguing questions. A sea of Turkish flags, hats, and t-shirts was interspersed with striking Palestinian flags. One Palestinian speaker was brought on stage and claimed that ‘This war against “gender ideology” is no different than the war in Gaza’. While some Muslim demonstrators showed their agreement by clapping, ultra-nationalist secular groups did not show any support. Although this claim by the speaker received different reactions, how can one reconcile the simultaneous expression of anti-gender and pro-Palestinian sentiments? Does this juxtaposition suggest a complex interplay between national identity, ‘gender ideology’, geopolitical concerns, and a symbolic gesture of Western imperialism? Or does it reveal a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, power and ‘social justice’? Else, does this striking presence of Palestinian flags evidence ‘gender as symbolic glue’ (Kováts and Põim, 2015), at least for some anti-gender actors in this demonstration? While keeping these questions in mind, I couldn’t shake the thought of how to comprehend the anti-gender demonstrators’ stance on Palestine while witnessing the diverse motivations blended with pro-Palestinian sentiment during my fieldwork. As a feminist researching anti-gender rhetoric in Turkey, where supporting Palestinian liberation carries specific connotations, the complexity demands not only a careful, contextual, and close reading of my empirical material but also navigating a precarious tightrope between multiple occupations of gender, lands, and securitization, which are inextricably linked. Amid this complexity and the many questions swirling in my mind, how can I grasp the role of anti-gender rhetoric without taking the Palestine issue into account?

24–28 November 2024, Malaga – Spain. Feminist efforts to protest gender-based violence commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women are underway. On 24 November, a group of around 80 feminist activists walked in silence through the city center, all dressed in black and carrying a lit candle, and the name of one of the murdered women who were victims of femicide in the country (more than 80 this year alone). To my surprise, a good number of these silent activists wore Palestinian keffiyehs around their neck or as a veil. When they arrived at their destination, a popular square in the city, the names of the murdered women were read, shouted aloud in a moment of catharsis. The demonstrators’ manifesto against gender-based violence included the demand to end the militaristic regime that was allowing the genocide in Palestine to continue. At the end, a group of Palestinian women who had been among those who participated in this March of Silence, invited the rest to participate in a traditional Palestinian dance. Although this small march was partly organized to counter the perceived over-institutionalization of the now-traditional feminist demonstration of the 25 November, their ultimate goals have much in common. And this year, they were united by yet another thing: among the thousands of people who attended the 25-N demonstration protesting violence against women, many Palestinian flags could be seen. Only a few days earlier, as I interviewed a research participant about her feminist activism, she confided in me that she was also an activist against the Israeli illegal occupation of Palestine. In fact, she explained, she had been to Palestine four times as a volunteer of Unadikum, a small local association. ‘What for?’, I asked. Her answer: ‘To act as a human shield’. She recounted her experience of climbing on top of a tractor to shield a Palestinian man who was trying to work his field, while IDF soldiers tried to scare her off by shooting at the ground near her feet: ‘One time, my foot was saved because I had thick soles on my shoes’. When asked why she put her life at risk in that way, she answered: ‘Because my life has more value there. Killing a Palestinian only costs them the price of the bullet, while if they killed me, it was a diplomatic issue . . .’. ‘Of course, she added with dark sarcasm, we wouldn’t make a difference now’. Meaning: the already brutal regime of apartheid and killing from a few years ago has now escalated to such a murderous frenzy that human rights initiatives would meet the same bloody fate as the defenceless Palestinian people. This anecdote illustrates an important lesson. Sometimes, my role as a researcher of social movements demands that I leave my anti-genocide activism at the door while I work. Reality, however, proves much more stubborn: this issue haunts us, because it is an urgent part of the society we seek to study.

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As two early-career scholars conducting fieldwork in two different countries on diverse topics, we have encountered the reality of genocide in various forms. In one context, Palestinian flags are associated with anti-Western sentiment against ‘gender ideology’ allegedly produced by ‘Western imperialism’. In another, interviews with an ex-human shield in Palestine are closely linked to the kind of feminist thinking and feminist activism that would probably be denounced by those decrying ‘gender ideology’. While our research projects differ significantly, both interact with actors who attach different meanings to the ongoing Israel-Palestine issue. Our work, which revolves around various forms of populism, feminist and queer activism, and the rise of illiberal anti-gender movements, confronts us with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, independent of our involvement in Palestine solidarity activism.

In this short article, we aim to reflect on the complex ways in which our activism and scholarly work may inform each other, and the haunting sensation we feel with the ongoing genocide in Palestine through the complex dynamics of our ethnographic fields, especially while engaging in anti-genocide activism at home. Here, ‘home’ refers to both our fieldwork sites and the city where we currently live and work. Notably, our respective fieldwork is conducted at home, as each of us researches in the places of our birth, upbringing, and profound sense of belonging. The unexpected encounter of Palestinian symbols, discourses, and signs within our fieldwork settings has been a haunting experience. Employing Avery Gordon’s (2008) approach, we understand this haunting as a disruptive sensation which has a lingering effect arising from history, social injustices, and subjectivity. This sensation is a way to recognize hidden, unseen, and invisible social realities that, though intangible and physical, constantly assert their presence. As Gordon describes, these affective feelings, like ghosts, pave the way for investigating and delving into the intersection of past and present, where society and individual lives intertwine, in order to awaken a transformative recognition of the ghostly matters that continue to haunt us.

As such, we chose to reconsider our approaches to fieldwork by following our haunting experiences. This awakening has challenged our initial conception of fieldwork as a process of adopting a different persona and temporarily setting aside other aspects of ourselves. It has revealed the multifaceted and nuanced nature of our research, which involves diverse groups with their own intricate histories and struggles. On the contrary, we are and aspire to be both academics and activists within the spaces we inhabit. Our desire to challenge global injustices extends beyond personal ambition; it is rooted in our feminist-queer activism and our commitment to the politics of solidarity. Still, it has never been our goal to permanently bring together those two identities (activist and researcher), as good research may perhaps entail that we sometimes leave our activism momentarily behind so that it will not cloud our analyses. However, the question arises: How can we conduct feminist ethnographic research while the ongoing genocide occupies a significant and distinct space within our diverse fieldwork sites? And how, in turn, do our scholarly backgrounds help us understand our experiences as activists?

Since the historical and political formations of ethnography and anthropology have critiqued binary approaches to individuals’ lives, meaning-making, actions, and worldviews, ethnographers have highlighted the importance of addressing complex and multilayered stories (Abu-Lughod, 1990, 2013; Boellstorff, 2005). This endeavour is certainly challenging both to execute and to comprehend. However, this pursuit can only be possible by abandoning objective claims through ethnography and instead considering the researcher’s subjective experience as an integral part of the fieldwork. This practice can open up new avenues for discussion by raising significant questions and contributing to the production of knowledge within a broader context (Farahani, 2010). Returning to the feminist ethnographic research in the above question, our individual situatedness (Haraway, 1988) and our feminist presence in our fieldwork fields require us to investigate our research questions and outcomes attentively without falling the trap of adopting binary views – in this case, letting go of the belief that we can ever leave completely behind our experiences as activists when we go out as researchers into the field, and instead trying to be cognizant of this complex interplay in our work.

At the same time, our academic knowledge informs how we understand and analyse our experience as students and activists. As such, considering the political contexts of our fieldwork and activism, our feminist research perspectives, and our understanding of political philosophy, we recognize, for example, that the interlacing of multiple crises in various contexts reveals the increasing prevalence of microfascism. Much has been written about fascism as a political system and philosophy, but Deleuze and Guattari aimed, through the concept of ‘molecular fascism’ or ‘microfacism’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Foucault, 1983) to understand the psychological dispositions through which fascism is able to come to power. The historical advent of democratically elected fascist leaders is, in their analysis, only the ultimate expression of ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Foucault, 1983: xiii).

Thus, as activists, our attempts to even put up posters on university public boards announcing informal events, such as inviting people who were concerned about the ongoing genocide in Palestine to have lunch together, were met with significant resistance, and the insistence that we needed permits and departmental approval for these informal meet-ups, or that perhaps we would be more comfortable in a closed room. Meanwhile, students attempting to protest in university public spaces are prohibited and prevented in the name of public order, or for ‘security concerns’. Swedish universities’ attempts to eschew these debates and to – willingly or inadvertently – suppress students’ organizing and freedom of expression have, thus, mostly taken the form of appeals to micro-regulations and ever-more restrictive interpretations of university policies. However, unlike in Lund and Stockholm, where protest encampments were violently evicted, Gothenburg University’s management had taken a different approach towards Gazaplatsen: to allow the protest to continue, instrumentalizing it to show the university’s ‘openness to dialogue’ and commitment to ‘freedom of speech’ (Adam, 2024), while otherwise refusing to engage in any meaningful dialogue with the students, restricting students’ freedom of speech and assembly, and continuing to undermine university independence by insisting that they must abide by government policy on this issue – which is supposedly why institutional collaborations with Russia remain paused, but debate on pausing the ones with Israel, found by the ICC to be ‘plausibly engaging in genocide’, is impossible. It is through these often kindly-worded micro-sanctions, and through shallow, even distorting readings of laws and regulations, that the denunciation of human rights violations is shut down, that freedom of expression and academic freedom and independence are killed by a thousand cuts.

In the end, the ‘shame’ felt by the passerby near Gazaplatsen that ‘we’ (be it the municipality, the city of Gothenburg, the broader society) ‘allow you to stay here’ (where you should not be allowed to be) and universities’ appeal to ‘security concerns’, ever-increasing micro-regulations to tightly control the freedom of speech and assembly within their premises, and their claim that Swedish universities cannot choose their own academic collaborations but must follow the current government’s whims, all speak to the microfascist ‘profound desire for more organization, for more management, for more order and control’ (Mohammed, 2020: 202). Expressed through attachment to order and rules, even over civil rights or justice, we believe that microfascist desires explain how the mild disturbance of a poster announcing ‘Lunches for Palestine’ or a peaceful protest that occupies public space becomes a greater concern than the actual human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide that these actions attempted to bring attention to. It is why any attempt at earnestly negotiating solutions and finding collective ways to bring international pressure to end suffering in the region have been met with either ‘benevolent suppression’ through kind referrals to new university policies, or with ire that they dared disturb the existing order built on epistemic ignorance and silence. It speaks to how, through this desire, the masses can come to desire their own oppression (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987).

Conclusion

How can we make sense of the interconnectedness between contemporary (anti)feminist politics, our subjectivities as feminist researchers, and the world’s profound failures? As PhD students, how can we navigate the emotional toll of conducting research during times of crisis – genocide, the rise of anti-gender politics, and the backlash against gender studies – when our research continually confronts us with these crises physically, politically, and emotionally? And how do we ‘escape’ our civic engagement and activist personas when doing scholarly research, as the issue of Palestine keeps ‘haunting us’ in unexpected places? Should we even, as researchers, attempt – or want – to do so? These questions are central to the work of so many scholars and remain open, but insights from feminist ethnography provide some helpful hints in disturbing the possibility of a complete disembodied objectivity, and in making sense of the complexity of the interactions between the researcher and the research.

As scholars focused on the analysis of patriarchal structures and reactionary social movements, the concept of micro-fascism has been useful to us in understanding why some individuals can willingly participate in those systems that contribute to their oppression, or to follow arbitrary social rules that have no clear logic or justification. The haunting, however, comes when we are presented with such stark, grave examples of it in our own private lives from institutions that claim to be the heralds of freedom, human rights, and democratic principles – when denouncing a genocide in ‘the wrong way’ (without asking for the ‘right’ permits, with a too-forceful tone or imagery, or refusing to do demonstrations in a closed room) becomes more pressing and concerning an issue than the genocide itself.

As such, on 21 November 2024, supporters of the student encampment gathered for a final farewell at Gazaplatsen, located on the main campus of the University of Gothenburg. Earlier that week, students at Gazaplatsen had received a notice from the municipality ordering them to dismantle the tents and vacate the area due to an upcoming demonstration. The police notice also prohibited students from returning to the encampment. This heartbreaking news deeply affected students and supporters, not only because it marked the end of the longest-running student encampment in Europe – lasting 192 days – but also because it was a place where individuals concerned about the situation in Palestine could share a sense of solidarity, unity, belonging, and hope from each other’s existence. Early the next morning, around 6:00 a.m., a large number of police officers arrived at Gazaplatsen to dismantle the tents, once again confronting us with the harsh reality of everyday microfascism as students sought justice and solutions for academic freedom in Sweden. As the police dismantled the tents, students raised their voices in unison, chanting:

‘Long live Palestine, long live Gazaplatsen!’

While our hearts remain with the spirit of Gazaplatsen, we once again feel a profound urge to call for collective feminist-queer action to challenge the forces of oppression and the systems of power that perpetuate them in these turbulent times of multiple crises. It is imperative that we, as feminist researchers and activists, continue to engage in critical reflection, solidarity, and the exploration of our subjective experiences as a way of sensing the ongoing, often ghostly, matters (Gordon, 2008). We believe that only by acknowledging and responding to the physical and emotional manifestations of haunting can we access the emotional, intellectual, and transformative insights that our ghosts offer from the past to the present (Gordon, 2008: 8).