Some thoughts on the (speculative) political significance of the 4B movement’s slogans.

Two remarks on the American post-Trump version of the 4B movement (I’m leaving aside the “original” South Korean version, which takes place in a different – and very interesting – context).

You might want to read for starters (among many other gateways) @emmiehine’s very thought-provoking piece on her blog:

https://dair-community.social/@emmiehine/113475534341120269

https://ethicalreckoner.substack.com/p/er-32-on-womens-communes-and-the

In particular, Emmie looks back at the experiences of lesbian separatism in the 60s and 70s, and what she calls a “communal” movement – this “boycott of men” resulted in exile “outside men’s society”. Obviously, the current movement, in reaction to Trump’s election, but, long before that event, to the now-mainstream masculinist discourses in the US (and elsewhere), is unfolding above all on the internet. which Emmie Hine sees as an advantage:

“4B has an advantage over the commune movement because it is virtual, and that means it will stay with us. A movement that exists online rather than in isolated rural communes can simmer unnoticed by most for a long time until the algorithm resurfaces it and brings it back into the public consciousness. And as a form of virtual separatism, a way to cope via meme, it’s likely to persist.”

I’ve read quite a few texts and messages from activist circles: inevitably, a lot of issues emerge, sometimes leading to aporias that I feel are crucial at a time when identities and sexualities – what we might call worlds of desire – are being recomposed. They are part of an already long and complex history (on this subject, I always recommend reading this text by Sarah Ahmed, and her books!, on the relevance of feminist reflections from the “past”: https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/04/08/dated-feminists/  ), but also respond to the current context: the violence that is not only verbal, but also physical, social, economic and political, unfolding in the promises of American white supremacists (and not only them). Admittedly, as I often say, Trump and his clique are merely making explicit the structural violence on which patriarchal capitalist society rests (the model of the “middle-aged white man” as Senator J. Howard in 1866: https://outsiderland.com/danahilliot/le-type-representatif-de-la-race-humaine/), but this now unabashed affirmation increases the threat to all subalterns and the “already oppressed”, and women in the first instance.

I’d just like to add two reflections, which appear in filigree in the comments I’ve read here and there, and which make this movement, at least in theory, or from a speculative political perspective, a brilliant and truly incisive offensive against both the capitalist machine and white supremacism. It touches them at the heart, if we can speak of heart here, at the very heart of the ideology that structures them.

1. Let’s start with white supremacist ideology. One of the obsessions of white supremacists (in the United States, but also in Europe: Anders Breivik and Renaud Camus are sinister examples of this, inspiring American theorists as Alexander Laban Hinton reminded us in It can happen here, White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US, NYU, 2021, a work that resonates terribly today: https://outsiderland. com/danahilliot/suprematisme-blanc/) is the reproduction of the white race, which they address through themes such as the birth rate (and its corollary, abortion rights), demographics, “migratory submersion”, the celibacy of white males, the loss of male hegemony, “deviant” sexualities, the invocation of a “natural” order of things, etc., etc., etc. The future of the white race is threatened by the sexual power attributed to racialized others – this theme of irrepressible (and irresistible) impulses attributed to black bodies is a cliché of slave literature – and, as Saidiya Hartman has shown in her masterpiece Scenes of Subjection, it legitimizes both the “threat” to the damaged reproductive capacity of white bodies, but also the systemic rape of black women by plantation owners (Cf. my presentation: https://outsiderland.com/danahilliot/saidiya-hartman-scenes-of-subjection-extraits-traduits/).

Note that this anxiety about the animal/desirable body of the other, which translates into its inverted projection (or “projective identification”, in Melanie Klein and W.R. Bion’s theory) as a radically “undesirable” body (“inconvenient other”, as Laurent Berlant would say), now focuses not only on the black body, but also on that of other racialized people (designated as Muslims, Latinos, etc.). It’s easy to see why Incels, those single men who can’t find a “woman”, find their place on the list of racial supremacist martyrs: they are the victims of both women’s indifference towards them and a rival seductive power: that of racialized bodies. These others with their irresistible sexuality threaten, as we can read explicitly in certain texts, not only white women who “allow themselves to be seduced” (no doubt because of their “lustful nature”), but also white men, condemned to solitude, that is, to renounce contributing to the reproduction of the race (to be understood here in the sense of a reinforcement of a genetic heritage – admittedly completely fantasized, like everything the supremacists say). I won’t go any further in describing the fabulous narrative (in the sense of a myth) of racial supremacism. But these few aspects are enough to understand why the slogans of the 4B movement constitute a particularly pertinent response, both brutal and ironic, to the sexualist delusions of the white nation. Beyond the refusal to procreate with males (in general, of course), the refusal to enter into relationships with all males, as a matter of principle, directly affects the narcissism of the white supremacist male, which has already been wounded to the quick: it’s not even rivalry with other, more attractive males that’s at stake, but a renunciation of entering into this narrative of the reproduction of the species, which is not just natalistic, but, even more profoundly, cultural. We need to be able to live, say activists, apart from masculinist culture. It’s an intensely deceptive motion: we women are no longer interested in playing the roles you, males, expect of us: the functions of care, generally speaking – taking care of you, your useless penises and worried souls, your children, your culture, consoling you, reassuring you, giving you pleasure and so on. This is exactly what terrifies the white supremacist male: that we no longer love them, that we prefer another man, or, even worse, another woman !

2. How does this offensive by the 4B movement also touch on a crucial point, and even the Achilles’ heel, of the capitalist system? Because it undermines that hidden part of the capitalist machinery, the part of “reproduction”, i.e. women’s unpaid work, the care they take of their offspring – which is destined, in fine, to supply the workforce needed by the capitalist Leviathan, but not only: all the work that can be grouped under the concept of “care”, which I won’t go into here, but which has been a central theme of the feminist perspective since at least the 1980s. The first outline of the revelation of “reproductive labor” can be found in Marx’s Capital, and you can read a remarkable synthesis of these issues in the little book by eco-feminist Stefania Barca that I mentioned here:

https://outsiderland.com/danahilliot/repenser-le-materialisme-historique-en-termes-eco-feministes-stefania-barca/

Refusing to have children, and to participate more broadly in the “society of men”, to the point of not associating with them, for example, in the world of work, no longer taking care of them (and, very concretely, no longer providing them with the “narcissistic consolation” without which he risks sinking into depression, for example, and no longer be in a position to take their place socially and economically), undoubtedly “ruins” many men, leaving them helpless in the face of tasks they avoid performing within the gendered division of labor. And, even more profoundly, it would jeopardize that secret and carefully concealed spring of capitalist accumulation, one of the resources that capitalists monopolize without paying a penny: women’s unpaid work (which, as we all know, goes far beyond caring for the future exploited). Here again, the radical program of the 4B movement (or Lysistrata, as it’s also known in the USA, in reference to Aristophanes’ comedy) hits the nail on the head (consciously or unconsciously, depending on the feminist culture of the activists).

(NB: the logic of racial suprematism, I would point out, is not specific to “white-skinned” populations – it can be found at work in India with the politics of Hindutva (nationalist Hinduism) – the violence of which can be seen, for example, in the oppressive regime to which Muslims are subjected, in Kashmir, in China with the primacy given to the Hans, and the racialization of Muslim populations, notably the Uyghurs, in Xinjiang, or in Israel, where a terrifying genocide is being carried out in the name of racial hierarchy. And in other parts of the world).

(NB 2: the refusal to participate in the great game of reproduction is at the very principle of the queer “position” (or “non-position”, deliberately mobile and precarious). I learned this by reading queer feminists, Lauren Berlant, Sarah Ahmed and many others. I summarized my point of view in an article here:

“when I speak of non-reproduction here, it’s not just about embarrassing the distribution of gendered identities, or disrupting sexual crispations, but also, for example, the refusal to integrate into the system of wage exploitation, the refusal to become a disposable, disposable commodity, like the precarious worker of the neoliberal wage system, the refusal of social and racial hierarchies, the desire to de-familiarize what seems to be taken for granted, the sacredness of the family, of patriarchy, of spaces of apartheid. It means making one’s life a work designed to undermine norms, to create uncertainty and doubt, but also new joys, surprising interruptions that suspend the course of social time, opening up other paths, other possible ways of inhabiting the world, deploying other sources of wealth, more and better desiring.

This is what I call the refusal of reproduction (for example, it’s not so much a question of “not having children”, as of refusing to increase the herd exploitable by capitalism)”.

https://outsiderland.com/danahilliot/paradoxe-du-spectacle-queer/