Concluded projects
of the Institute of Conflict Research
Antisemitism and Antifeminism: On the Intersection of Prejudices
| Project Management: | Univ.-Prof. Dr. Frank Stern (Institute of Contemporary History, Vienna University) |
| Project Team: | Mag.a Karin Stögner |
| Financed by: | Jubiläumsfonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank, Project No. 11801 |
| Concluded in | December 2007 |
It was the aim of this project to analyse the multilayered intersections of antisemitism and antifeminism from the perspective of political, economic, and socio-historical approaches. These approaches were analysed according to the specific peculiarities, correspondences and differences of antisemitism and antifeminism in order to reconstruct the subjective and objective structures of both prejudices and thereby to relate to their coherent interactions.
The main focus of the analysis was on two corresponding aspects: the way, society deals with a specific construct of nature and the social compulsion to unity and unambiguousness. In the 19th century, women and Jews alike were identified with "nature" and were thus categorised according to hegemonic structures of naming and defining. Thereby, the concept of nature turns out to be ambivalent: on the one hand it represents an idea of overwhelming omnipotence, strength and power; on the other hand, "nature" is a conglomerate of all those elements which society has judged as "impure" and "foul", as "retarded" and "uncivilised", as "weak" and "unfit". Paradoxically, Jews and women were identified with both weakness in social and physical terms (thus they contradict the "right of the strong") and omnipotence as well as superiority, the latter being intertwined with imaginations of destructive power. Due to this ambivalent combination of antithetic moments the paranoid imaginations of a "Jewish world conspiracy", or of an "evil and devouring female omnipotence" and "women’s regime" receive an impermeable character.
The apotheosis of strength and the corresponding construct of masculinity, as well as anti-intellectualism play an equally important role in antisemitic and antifeminist prejudice. These strands are held together by an aversion against the body, which is stylised and put on a pedestal, but which is not loved and appreciated. In antisemitic and antifeminist constellations the body figures only as an object that is being adapted to the machinery, viewed solely from a functionalist and instrumental perspective. "Jews" and "women", are perceived as "the other", which in these contexts is the non-identical, ambiguous, uncategorised.
The specifically gendered and racialised images of the "Jew" and the "woman", which played a central role in the antisemitic and misogynist discourses especially of the fin de siècle, but which are still perceivable in today’s discriminatory discourses, are to be analysed as performative acts of antisemitism and antifeminism. Against this analytical background it becomes evident that anti-Jewish and misogynist images do not only express the discriminatory practices of a society, but have the potential to (re-)produce domination and discrimination. These images, therefore, have an important share in institutionalising and enhancing antisemitism and antifeminism
