Gökarıksel Et Al. "Demographic Fever Dreams"

Banu Gökarıksel
Christopher Neubert
Sara Smith
Demographic Fever Dreams: Fragile Masculinity and

Population Politics in the Rise of the Global Right
I n a 2015 photograph, Vijaykant Chauhan poses casually on a motorcycle

decorated with an Indian flag, answering a phone while a man out of
the frame hands him a sword (Sethi 2015). Chauhan has pledged to de-
fend Hindu women from “love jihad,” an elaborate conspiracy for Muslim
men to marry Hindu women and change India’s demographic composi-
tion through conversion and then through their production of Muslim ba-
bies (Sethi 2015). In August of 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the US
South, white nationalists in khaki pants and white shirts took over the Uni-
versity of Virginia campus. Tiki torches in hand, the crowd chanted Nazi
slogans: “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” These
violent messages materialized in the death of Heather Heyer and injuries
of at least nineteen other counterprotestors. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Er-
doğan rose to power by enacting a strongman leadership that mobilized a
religious-conservative populism, promised to empower the oppressed (maz-
lum) and victimized (mağdur) masses against the (secular urban) elites and
to defend the nation against the supposed threats embodied by a range of
others (Ateş 2017, 112; Yilmaz and Bashirov 2018). Erdoğan locates Tur-
key’s future strength in a young and large population, stoking fears of popu-
lation decline and of immanent betrayal by suspect others who might escape
the government’s attempts to raise a “pious generation” (Ateş 2017, 112–
13).
These cases are situated across oceans yet tied together by global flows
and histories of colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy into a constellation
of ideas that center future threat as a justification for political action and vi-
olence. In the fears of “love jihad,” in the rallying cry against replacement,
We would like to thank participants and the audience who participated in our “Demo-
graphic Fever Dreams” panel at the 2017 American Association of Geographers Conference
in Boston. We are also grateful for conversations with LaToya Eaves, Mabel Gergen, Azreet
Johnson, Dinesh McCoy, Nathan Swanson, and Pavithra Vasudevan.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019, vol. 44, no. 3]
© 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2019/4403-0002$10.00
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Downloaded from www.journals.uchicago.edu by Tulane University on 02/16/19. For personal use only.
562 y Gökarıksel, Neubert, and Smith
and in warnings of immanent betrayal, we see an epic reversal: men with ma-
jority privilege justifying violence by flipping the roles of aggressor and po-
tential victim, placing those in need of protection (such as racialized or re-
ligious minorities) in the role of attacker, and thus enabling a violent
response to be rhetorically justified as a form of existential defense (Ahmed
2004; Gergen, Smith, and Vasudevan forthcoming). Gendered tropes of
women’s supposed vulnerability and men’s necessary strength are central to
this message about the threats facing the nation. This discursive reversal is a
critical tool of white supremacy and settler colonialism in the US context and
is embedded in the exclusionary nature of the religious tones reshaping the
nation-state in Turkey and India. Such a discourse formulates fears of disen-
franchisement in terms of a perceived demographic threat: all manner of
others replacing majority male bodies in positions of power or leading to
chaos and societal breakdown.
The resurgent white supremacist and right-wing populist movements that
have spread across the globe are astounding. While agendas range from the
migration-engendered epidemic of “taco trucks on every corner” in the
United States (Chokshi 2016) to worries about the presence of minarets in
Swiss skylines and calls for white Germans to make Germany’s babies (NPR
2017), the political discourses and material practices that catalyze majority
anxieties are similar in their generation of perceived threats to an unmarked
but implicit national integrity based in majority identity—at times racialized,
at times imbued with specific religious characteristics, and at times bringing
these together. These resurgent political formations rely on normative ideas
of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religious difference but also in-
vent imaginative narrative justifications and a means for them to mutate and
multiply. In each context, specific histories shape which bodies become the
main objects of fear and what sets of difference are deemed threatening (Ah-
med 2004). Here, we develop the concept of demographic fever dreams to
theorize the role they play in the realm of the political. The term foregrounds
the role of demography in driving politically pertinent anxieties and points
to elements that often are only partly rooted in facts. Like a feverish dream,
these narratives lack coherence even as they evoke deeply felt emotions. Rather
than dismissing these demographic fever dreams as nonsensical, we argue that
they do crucial political work to animate and inspire right-wing populist po-
litical movements worldwide.
Demographic fantasies are not uniform across contexts. As we consider
the political purpose of these demographic fever dreams, the fears underly-
ing them, and how the vivid imagery ties into fears of masculine decline and
panic, we unravel these oddly specific imaginaries. In each of these instances,
a vivid and fantastic fiction is used by figures with political power to amplify,

S I G N S Spring 2019 y 563
imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality

to dismiss or undermine class tensions and create fictitious communities of
homogeneity.
Here, we focus on three specific dream forms: the mobilization of mas-
culine virility in the service of creating a strong, loyal, and pious Sunni nation
in Turkey; the political work done by “love jihad” in India; and the white
heteromasculine nationalism of the US Right. In the sections that follow,
we begin by laying out the intersections of literature on feminist geopolitics,
embodied nationalism, fascist masculinities, and political demography that
help us make sense of demographic fever dreams. We then turn to the cases
in Turkey, India, and the United States where demographic fever dreams
have become key to the recent resurgence of right-wing nationalist political
movements despite different histories of colonialism, nationalism, and lo-
cally inflected forms of patriarchy. In tracing the similarities and differences
between these three case studies, we deploy discourse analysis (LeGreco and
Tracy 2009), examining media sources from news stories and politicians’
speeches to radio shows and Twitter. Our analysis focuses on the most salient
aspects of these narratives and their resonance as they travel from one source
to another. Through this examination, we identify four aspects common
to each of the demographic fever dreams that are key to their functioning
as a technique of political animation: first, vivid specificity through an evoc-
ative story line or character; second, a focus on population; but, third, de-
tachment from demographic data; and, finally, a gendered dimension that
attaches these demographic fears to the potential of changing gender norms.
We end by discussing how we can use the demographic fever dream frame-
work to understand our times.
Embodied nationalism, masculine power, and their insecurities

We turn to feminist geopolitics to understand the embodied and everyday
workings of the state, borders, and political ideology, and how bodies and
the most intimate aspects of life are deeply geopolitical.1 Recent research has
analyzed, for instance, the ways that differently valued bodies are counted or
uncounted (Hyndman 2007), violence of war spills into domestic violence
(Pain 2015), the idea of the nation impinges on the bodies of ordinary people
traveling through their daily lives (Fluri 2011), and the “war on drugs” comes
home (Massaro 2015). This scholarship builds on well-established work on
embodied nationalism that demonstrates how the nation is racialized and
1
See Hyndman (2001), Fluri (2011), Dowler (2013), and Clark (2016).

gendered to justify violent masculinity in its defense.2 Its focus on the politi-
cal emergence of a violent masculinity as dominant complements theories of
masculinity, specifically R. W. Connell’s (1987) conceptualization of hege-
monic masculinity as an idealized form that regulates and shapes the range
of masculinities possible within a society (see also Connell and Messerschmidt
2005). Linking embodied nationalism to emergent hegemonic forms of
violent masculinity deepens the analysis provided by ethnographies and oral
histories that center the lived and gendered experience of such violence.3 At
the same time, this research contributes to geographies of masculinities that
emphasize multiple, fluid, and relational production of masculinities that are
influenced by the political, racial, gendered, religious, and class dynamics of
specific localities, as well as global discourses and geopolitical strategies.4 Pe-
ter Hopkins’s (2008) work, for example, shows how the US-led war on ter-
ror has deeply impacted the formation of youthful Muslim masculinities and
their everyday lives in Scotland, while Claire Dwyer, Bindi Shah, and Gurcha-
then Sanghera (2008) analyze the effects of the transformation of South
Asian Muslim men’s image, from “cricket lover” to “terror suspect” in in the
post–September 11 United Kingdom.
Feminist political geography has been especially effective in noting the
ways that a national sense of insecurity is generated by political actors to
shore up agendas, while human security is simultaneously undermined.5
Here, we train our eyes on embodied life as the site where nationalist and geo-
political conflicts are constituted through webs of affective relationships and
mark certain bodies as threatening and fearsome.
Barbara Spackman’s (1996) work on fascist virilities and Klaus Thewe-
leit’s (1987) work on male fantasies point to a relationship between the pol-
itics of strongmen and gendered narratives around the creation of mascu-
linity and the risks of the feminine. Theweleit connects military masculinity
with violence, specifically fear-based hatred of women and femininity in the
fantasies of the Freikorps, a volunteer army that fought internal revolution
in interwar Germany. Many of the Freikorps would go on to Nazi leadership.
In their narratives, Theweleit finds that female figures are the object of vio-
2
See Enloe (1989), Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992), Das (1995), Collins (1999), Mayer
(2004), and Roberts (2014).
3
See Das (1995), Butalia (2000), Chatterji and Mehta (2007), and Saikia (2011).
4
See Berg and Longhurst (2003), Ehrkamp (2008), Hopkins and Noble (2009), and Gö-
karıksel and Secor (2017).
5
See Mountz (2004), Oza (2007), Fluri (2011), Martin (2011), Christian, Dowler, and
Cuomo (2016), and Gökariksel and Secor (forthcoming); see also special issues on feminist geo-
politics, including Dixon and Marston (2011), Williams and Massaro (2013), and Pain and
Staeheli (2014).

lence but violence that is imagined to be self-defense and linked to fears of

dissolution—of society, of one’s own masculinity, and of the prospect of be-
ing overwhelmed, softened, dissolved. It is a masculinity that is both hard and
violent but also quite fragile. As Sara Ahmed (2004, 33) suggests, “the nor-
mative subject is often secured through narratives of injury: the white male
subject, for example, has become an injured party in national discourses, . . .
as the one who has been hurt by the opening up of the nation to others.”
The spread of this discourse is facilitated by the majority male subject’s access
to resources and thus access to “the capacity to mobilise narratives of injury
within the public domain” (33). The need for both the strong masculine fig-
ure and the victim narrative means that the figures to be protected are major-
ity women; this enables men to both claim injury (to “their” women) but also
claim the position of the strong though embattled savior.
In these rhetorical moves, demographic fever dreams provide a similar
fantasy world to fulfill the logics critiqued by scholars above, by rewriting
histories and futures with majority figures centered as the true protagonists
of history. The stories told by white nationalists in the United States and
Europe, by Hindu nationalists in India, and by Erdoğan’s espousal of a vig-
orous and modern Sunni youth are stories in which the chaotic diversity of a
multicultural world and the messiness of women and femininity are both
backdrop and adversary in a story line centering strength and the masculine
hero as the true protagonists of all stories. Here, the centering of one man
as savior is not a fluke, a distraction, or a sideshow but is critical to the func-
tioning of the dream.
The politics of population and demographic fever dreams

Demography plays an important role in the interactions between politics and
space.6 Population-based desires and fears are not limited to one party or ide-
ology but animate political discourses, as we have seen in Hillary Clinton’s
reference to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” during the 2016
US presidential campaign, a move that plays to liberal desires by flattening
opposition to a collection of simplistic demographic caricatures. However,
demography’s Malthusian legacy “reinforces patriarchal and capitalist logics”
by claiming that demographic change will lead to catastrophe (Robbins and
Smith 2017, 201). These logics motivate and support right-wing movements
across the globe that see their hegemonic positions threatened by migration
6
See Silvey (2004), Legg (2005), Hopkins and Pain (2007), Bailey (2009), and Robbins
and Smith (2017).

and the reproductive fertility of racialized others.7 An important part of this

politics is the demographic fever dream. Nightmarishly absurd, the “dream”
also implies an orientation toward the future, one that is demographically
apocalyptic for the dominating population and thereby requires active, often
violent intervention. Along similar lines, Stephen Marr (2012) analyzes the
discourses that emerged in urban Botswana as a result of perceived “demo-
graphic claustrophobia.” These discourses are mobilized to clearly identify
those who are outside the dominant population, essentially making a spatial
distinction that identifies who is and is not “from around here” (Abelson
2016, 1542). Moreover, while these discourses appear to those employing
them as solid and durable, in fact they are in constant need of maintenance,
adapting quickly to respond to rapidly circulating rumors (Marr 2012, 84),
giving them a “dizzy quality” not unlike that experienced by a person with
a high fever (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005, 396).
Fundamentally, these fever dreams are motivated by the fears of the dom-
inant population being made a surplus population (McIntyre and Nast 2011,
1468). The demographic fantasy thus serves to shore up the position of cer-
tain surplus populations at the expense of others. Demographic fever dreams
like those we explore here are intended to be disruptive, provocative, and
agitating, while deepening anxieties about penetration by others. Here, bi-
ological survival becomes the stake in an intimate geopolitical battle, where
declining demographic dominance is read as “a symptom of broader de-
cay” (Bialasiewicz 2006, 705) and future success depends on demographic
growth and meticulous engineering of the population to ensure dominance.
As such, these fever dreams work to securitize territorial boundaries by dis-
ciplining the individual bodies of dominant populations, drawing them closer
to the biopolitical regime. These dreams are imbued with a form of “repro-
sexuality” (Warner 1991, 9) in which gender, sexuality, and reproduction
are not only bound together but also understood to be weaponized. When
the dream centers the figure of the migrant, or the undeserving/inauthentic
citizen (in the case of India’s Muslims), they may be gendered male and im-
plied to be sexually aggressive (e.g., Donald Trump’s description of Mexi-
cans as rapists). Majority women’s reprosexuality may be described positively
(mothers of the future nation, in Turkey) but in need of protection and guid-
ance. The perceived threats from migration and reproduction are distinct but
also linked and sometimes blurred: in fact, often the intent is to blur, such
that people who have lived in a place for generations are eternal migrants,
and their reproduction a form of invasion.
7
See Bialasiewicz (2006), McCann (2009), Cowen and Siciliano (2011), and Smith and
Vasudevan (2017).

When presented as common sense or “hard facts” by someone who “tells

it like it is” as opposed to “intellectualizing commentators and academics,”
these fever dreams become tinged with the ring of truth and are thus much
more potent as biopolitical discourses (Bialasiewicz 2006, 713). We differ-
entiate these dreams from generic right-wing discourses, which may include
a broader array of espoused positions—suppression of dissent, desire for a
strong military, conservative values—by pointing to their intimate, embod-
ied, and feverish nature. The demographic fever dream is thus an essential
technique through which discourse becomes lodged in the body and mind,
at times becoming the central message itself. The dreamlike quality both en-
ables the narratives of threat to “stick” to particular figures (Ahmed 2004)
and creates an image or story, which sticks in the imagination of those who
come to fear this figure.
Turkey: A pious and vigorous future

Since the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party)
came to power in 2002, it has sought to position Turkey as a devout Sunni
Muslim nation that plays a leadership role regionally and globally. Central to
this geopolitical strategy have been orchestrated attempts to widen the AKP’s
support base by economically and politically enfranchising segments of the
population that long felt abandoned by the state and put down by the secular
urban elite despite their claims to be the demographic majority. While mas-
culine power and virility have been key to Turkey’s state tradition and national
identity since the beginning, AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s embodied
performance of a strong masculinity that is simultaneously all-powerful and
always threatened does important political work in his ambitious program
to create what he calls a “New Turkey.”
Erdoğan’s personal story becomes crucial to his embodiment of fragile
virility and his claims to be one of the marginalized with his provincial back-
ground, religious orientation, and conservative moral attachments (Gulalp
2003; Gunter and Yavuz 2007): his family’s origins in a conservative city in the
Black Sea region that has sent many migrants to Istanbul; his upbringing in the
working-class neighborhood of Kasımpaşa, known for its kabadayıs (rough
men who protect the neighborhood and the honor of its residents); educa-
tion in an Imam hatip Islamic school (a system of schools key to the Islamist
struggle against the more secular national system); and even his time playing
soccer, a highly masculinized sport (Nuhrat 2017)—all mark his suffering
and masculine strength. The elements of this story take form in his bodily
conduct—from the way he carries himself in confident strides to his combat-
ive rhetorical style and use of his voice to project simultaneous vulnerability

and aggression. Erdoğan’s rise on the national scene came with his election
as the first mayor from an Islamist party to preside over metropolitan Istanbul
in 1994. His 1997 persecution for publicly reciting a poem that the secular-
dominated judiciary and military deemed provocative became another in-
stance of Erdoğan’s suffering that linked his body to the oppressed masses
once again. He was sentenced to ten months in prison, served four months,
and was barred for life from public office (Rotham 2016). When he was re-
leased from prison, he participated in the establishment of the AKP as an
Islamically oriented, thoroughly neoliberal capitalist, initially pro-EU party
that came to power in 2002. After the AKP lifted the ban preventing him from
serving in public office, Erdoğan became the prime minister (2003–14) and first
president to be elected by the public (rather than Parliament) in 2014.
In his rise to power, Erdoğan presented the AKP as the party of the op-
pressed and victimized and continues to formulate his powerful position as a
direct representation of the will of the nation, and thereby unquestionable.
Despite the unprecedented power he has amassed over the decade and a half
the AKP has ruled the country, solidified by the transition to a presidential
political system in 2017, Erdoğan continues to remind the masses of their
shared victimhood and an ever-existing threat of returning to a past of op-
pression. This threat is variously located in the mostly liberal and leftist Gezi
protestors of the summer of 2013, the Kurdish and Alevi minority popula-
tion that threatens a Turkish and Sunni majority, and the failed July 2016
coup attempt allegedly organized by the religious Fethullah Gülen’s hizmet
(service) movement, which used to be an AKP ally (Demiralp 2016; Yavuz
and Koç 2016) and is now labeled a terrorist organization and persecuted
(BBC 2016). When Erdoğan stated that no Muslim family should practice
birth control (Hürriyet 2016), he not only expressed the importance of a
young and large population for Turkey’s economy and political power but
also argued that the “events” of the previous three years had clearly shown
the need for “growing our own generations” and taking the matter into
“our” hands to ensure their piety—and their loyalty, referring to the perceived
betrayal of Gülenists and others. Thus, Erdoğan has framed his ambitions to
“raise a pious [Sunni Muslim] generation” within an understanding of betray-
als of those whose loyalties are suspect, and he has politically reinforced the
link between Sunni piety and loyalty (Hürriyet 2012). In fact, the AKP govern-
ment has proposed and implemented a series of measures to reengineer Tur-
key’s population for this purpose by introducing religion classes that focus
on Sunni Islam in primary schools and by expanding religious education
in middle and high schools. Critics also point to the placement of Syrian ref-
ugee camps in or near Alevi villages in eastern Turkey as a strategy to change
the demographic composition of these areas to ensure Sunni hegemony

(Dağlar 2016). By 2017, Turkey’s fertility rate had fallen below replacement
level to 2.1, its lowest since World War I (Sarıoğlu 2017)—a fact that gained
fantastical elements in the government’s persistent narratives that link declin-
ing fertility rates to the threat of population decline and the demise of the na-
tion.
While Erdoğan targets young, vigorous, devout Muslim men as the source
of New Turkey’s power, he relegates women mainly to the role of repro-
ducers (like his wife, who bore their four children). This approach to women
is central not only to Erdoğan’s conservatism but also his authoritarianism
(Yılmaz 2015). In an infamous speech that he gave at the first international
meeting of the women’s organization KADEM (Kadın ve Demokrasi Der-
neği, Women and Democracy Association) focusing on the topic of “Women
and Justice,” Erdoğan denied the equality of men and women, arguing that
gender equality would be against fıtrat (creation; Milliyet 2014). He con-
tinues to depict women—especially headscarf-wearing women who suffered
under the secular regime’s implementation of dress codes that restricted ac-
cess to education, employment, and public service—as victims and empowers
men and masculinist institutions such as the police force to protect women
and stay vigilant in the face of constant threat. During the tumultuous time
of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, which began as a sit-in against plans to de-
molish a central city park and quickly evolved into a wider criticism of the
AKP regime and its neoliberalism, imposition of an Islamic lifestyle, and re-
strictions on civil liberties, Erdoğan kept referring to a story that was proved
to be false months later. According to this story, a young, headscarf-wearing
mother and her baby were attacked by a large group of men while waiting for
a bus in Istanbul. There were several reliable reports of headscarf-wearing
women being harassed at the time, but there were also many headscarf-
wearing women participating in the protests, including a group who orga-
nized a demonstration that criticized harassment of all women. Yet the pro-
government media and politicians, including Erdoğan, repeated the story of
the attack. As the story circulated, twenty men became forty, and other em-
bellishments appeared to make the narrative even more appalling: supposedly
men had bare chests, some carried chains, and they urinated on the baby. By
the time the story was proved false by CCTV footage, it had already done the
political work of rallying crowds to counter the Gezi protests and discredit
the protestors as thugs whose only goal was to bring back “secular tyranny”
(Gökarıksel 2016, 236).
If the story of a woman being assaulted by secularist brutes served the
AKP’s narrative of an ever-present threat, the 2016 coup attempt helped so-
lidify the empowerment of ordinary men who are loyal to Erdoğan as the
defenders of democracy and protectors of the nation. Only a few hours into

the coup, in a televised Facetime connection, Erdoğan called on people to

come out into the streets and fight against the soldiers. Although women
were among the crowds that poured out in response this call, and several im-
ages show women transporting men, walking toward tanks, and challenging
soldiers (Akınerdem 2017), civilian men were the heroes of the night. Men
came out of that night with a sense of masculine power, symbolized perhaps
most strikingly by the photograph of a man mounted on top of a tank with
the tank’s cannon tube protruding like an oversized penis or a phallic attach-
ment (Korkman 2017, 182). Civilian men had succeeded in stopping tanks
and fighter jets with no weaponry other than their courage—or so the nar-
rative went. If the coup was deeply rooted in a long, masculinist military tra-
dition and culture, the reaction to it also worked to strengthen and legitimize
aggressive, violent masculinities of civilian men and the police (Gökarıksel
2017, 174). Since then the country has been in a nightmarish frenzy driven
by fear and suspicion, looking for betrayal and labeling thousands “terror-
ists” whether they are coupist soldiers, Kurdish nationalists, Gülenists, or lib-
erals. The military, partly emasculated by the failed coup attempt (Açıksöz
2017), has been waging war against the Kurds in the southeast and across
the border in Syria, while the police have solidified their power as the back-
bone of the state. Thus, the current regime is characterized by claims to a
masculine virility, but one that is fragile. This fragility requires the double
work of displacement of vulnerability onto convenient and compelling vic-
tims, mostly women, and of being on the offensive against a dizzying list of
threatening groups, institutions, and individuals and necessitates the crea-
tion of a population with unwavering loyalty. Hence Erdoğan’s ambitions
for creating a pious (Sunni Muslim) generation and obsession with declining
fertility rates. Demographic fever dreams in the Turkish case come to life in
the vivid specificity of the story of the headscarf-wearing mother under as-
sault; amplified anxieties over potentially declining population growth and
perceived betrayals by those close to the government and the potential threat
of different others; and the emergent need to vigilantly defend the nation
against disorder and chaos, which necessitates a strong masculine leader.
The demographic fever dream in the Turkish case is more like a fantasy that
centers on a demographic utopia: only when the population is cleansed of
enemies and recreated to ensure loyalty, vigor, and piety can the cultural and
economic flourishing of New Turkey be achieved.
India: Love jihad and romance as threat

Following the 2014 victory of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in national parliamentary elections and Narendra Modi’s ascendancy

as prime minister, “love jihad” discourses have proliferated and been accom-
panied by a ghar wapsi (“homecoming”) campaign seeking Hindu converts,
as well as new rounds of violence stemming from “cow protection” (Pal-
shikar 2015; Gupta 2016; Varma 2017). While Modi has at times sought
to distance himself from the BJP’s Hindu nationalist roots, for many this
centrist posturing has been unconvincing, and under his leadership regional
party leaders and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or National Volun-
teer Organization, a militant part of the family of Hindu national organiza-
tions) have been emboldened (Palshikar 2015; Jaffrelot 2016, 2017). This
has been particularly evident in comments made by regional party members—
for instance, the new chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, who
threatened, “if one Hindu girl is converted, we will convert 100 Muslims
girls. . . . The way Hindu girls are insulted, I don’t think a civilised society
would accept it. . . . If the government is not doing anything, then the Hin-
dus will have to take matters into their own hands” (in Safi 2017).
The love jihad narrative first emerged in 2009, following a case of two
women allegedly abducted from their local college in Kerala and coerced
into Islam in order to marry Muslim men (Gupta 2009; Das 2010). Subse-
quent court cases in Kerala and Karnataka, widely reported in the national
media, alleged a wider conspiracy, and police even investigated whether or
not there was a love jihad organization (Das 2010). Within days, pamphlets
were passed out at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (one of India’s most
prestigious institutions). The text warns:
A Pakistan-based terrorist organization is planning, abetting and fi-
nancing the enticement of college students from different communi-
ties in the State to become cannon fodder for its jihad in India. The
report terms such young women as “Love Bombs.” . . . Trapping naïve
Hindu girls in the web of love in order to convert to Islam is the modus
operandi of the said organization. Already more than 4000 girls have
been converted to Islam by these Jihadi Romeos . . . recruits need to
trap a Hindu girl within the time frame of 2 weeks and brainwash
her to get converted and then get married with her within 6 months.
Special instructions to breed at least 4 kids have also been issued. . . .
College students and working girls should be the prime target (in
Das 2010, 381).
As Charu Gupta (2009), Veena Das (2010), and Mohan Rao (2011) have
argued, love jihad is fundamentally linked to older tropes in South Asia on
the potential for violent responses to (and need to police) Hindu-Muslim re-
lationships, particularly in reference to women’s sexuality. As we see in the
pamphlet above, this language also targets specific segments of the popula-

tion (“college students and working girls”) and is one of a series of technol-
ogies for policing women (Varma 2017), which have included restrictions
on movement, mobile phones, and clothing (Phadke, Khan, and Ranade
2011; Varma 2017). We see the vivid specificity of the bewitched Hindu
woman and the Muslim “Romeo” and the conflation of women’s bodies
with territorial conquest, which is both a predisposition of colonial processes
(McClintock 1995; Simpson 2009) and a lasting element of what Ann Laura
Stoler (2013) refers to as “colonial ruination”: the ongoing destructive ef-
fects of colonization that are perpetuated and transformed after indepen-
dence (see also Das 1995; Butalia 2000). As Das (2010, 378) explains in her
extended ethnography of a Hindu-Muslim couple in Delhi, within this con-
text, for ordinary couples, “something as simple as a Hindu boy having fallen
in love with a Muslim girl becomes a seed scattered in the soil of the every-
day. It carries within it the potential to unleash great violence—but also an
opportunity for intimate aspirations to be realized by all who have to re-create
their relations around the couple.” However, while religious intermarriage
on the ground is a complex set of shifting relationships between individuals,
the state, parents, and community organizations (Mody 2008), in the accu-
sations of love jihad it becomes something else entirely—ordinary life is trans-
formed into a feverish kind of fantasy in which a seemingly impulsive inter-
action—flirting—could turn out to be part of a jihadi conspiracy.
This particular form of demographic fever dream is linked to fears built
over the course of the twentieth century, which reached their specific for-
mulations beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, with what has been described
as “Saffron Demography” (Jeffery and Jeffery 2005; Rao 2010). As Patricia
Jeffery and Roger Jeffery (2002, 1806) argue, the “threat” of a rising Mus-
lim population is used to solidify a Hindu voting base through manipulation
of how population is represented and through omission of the ways that
use of family planning is more clearly linked to socioeconomic status, level
of education, and other marks of inclusion that are difficult for religious mi-
norities to obtain.8 More pertinent to our argument are the ways that this
population thinking is profoundly tied to the colonial encounter (e.g., Ap-
padurai 1996; Dirks 2011) and resonates with gendered narratives of col-
onization in which “white men [save] brown women from brown men”
(Spivak 1988, 305; see also Mohanty 1991). It echoes Erdoğan’s “saving”
of the woman pushing the stroller and Trump’s fantasies of protecting
(white) women from the rapists he (a sexual abuser himself ) imagines cross-
ing the US-Mexico border.
8
See Dharmalingam and Morgan (2004), Bhagat and Praharaj (2005), Rao (2010), and
Ghosh and Singh (2015).

India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, came to national power

by positioning himself as an efficient, neoliberal “development man,” who
would deploy the “Gujarat Model” of economic growth across the nation
(Mehta 2010; Jaffrelot 2016). However, as scholars, journalists, and activ-
ists have noted, his roots as a member of the RSS and his role during the
2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat are the backdrop for a proliferation
of Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) campaigns. As a corollary to the love jihad
discourse, there is now the ghar wapsi campaign to “welcome home” Hin-
dus who had been converted to Islam. While his 2014 campaign was im-
bued with a focus on the economy (Palshikar 2015), Modi retains his history
as the boy who joined the RSS at the age of eight and then as a young man
abandoned his seventeen-year-old wife for a life of Hindu activism and ap-
parent celibacy. Modi developed his political career as the chief minister of
Gujarat, beginning his term in 2001, and his role during the 2002 Gujarat
riots (which left 2,000 people dead and 150,000 in refugee camps) was widely
criticized as enabling ethnic cleansing.9 Only months after the violence, Modi
participated in a Gujarati pride pilgrimage (Gaurav yatra) across the state,
delivering controversial remarks in September of that year on Muslim Gu-
jaratis, accusing them of a population boom and asking: “What should we
do? Run relief camps for them? Do we want to open baby-producing cen-
tres? But for certain people that means ‘hum paanch, hamare pachis’ (We
five and our 25). . . . We must teach a lesson to those who multiply like this”
(in Bunsha 2002).
“We five, our twenty-five” is a reference to the family planning call for
small families. This is meant to evoke an image of a Muslim man with four
wives and twenty-five children (we five, our twenty-five) as the opposite of
the government family planning slogan that encourages a nuclear family of
two parents and two children (we two, our two). This imagery willfully ob-
scures the fact that the Muslim population of Gujarat had at that time held
steady at 10 percent for over 50 years. When asked about his role in the Gu-
jarat riots, Modi restated his Hindu nationalism, declined to admit culpabil-
ity, and went on to compare Muslim deaths to those of “puppies,” saying,
“if we are driving a car . . . if a puppy comes under the wheel, will [it] be
painful or not? Of course, it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human
being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad” (Times of
India 2013).
Christophe Jaffrelot (2016) has argued that Modi began his political rise
through his rhetorical strategy of embodying Gujarat and positioning him-
9
See Engineer (2002), Brass (2004), Varshney (2004), Jaffrelot (2008), and Chatterjee
(2009).

self as fighting for Gujarat against an indifferent center. He has also done so
in a way that resonates with other nationalist work to define Hindu mascu-
linity in reference to a pathologized Muslim other (Blom Hansen 1996; Bac-
chetta 2000; Banerjee 2005). Modi has forged a new path by working toward
a carefully cultivated image, rising from humble roots as an Other Backward-
Caste tea seller to become the face of India in a suit with pinstripes spelling
his name, presiding over a wave of traditionally communalist incidents of
violence such as cow-protection killings and the love jihad/ghar vapasi cam-
paigns, while simultaneously promoting a deepening neoliberalism in tan-
dem with cultural symbolism appealing to Hindutva (such as his embrace
of yoga).10 Gupta (2016, 292) convincingly argues that the BJP victory in
2014 was inseparable from a deep shift to the right and was dependent on re-
ligious symbolism and the discourses of love jihad and ghar wapsi, which “op-
erate at a subterranean level,” sometimes translating to common sense, such
that some Hindu majoritarians feel emboldened by national politics even as
others vote for the BJP in spite of rather than in deference to its embrace
of Hindutva, either because of Modi’s promise of an economic miracle or
due to India’s tendency to vote out incumbents (in this case the Congress
Party) rather than reelect them. This narrative resonates with the politics of
white supremacy in the 2016 presidential elections in the United States.
United States: They are constantly on the march

In our final case study, we turn to events surrounding the 2016 presidential
election in the United States, which saw Donald Trump elected president
following a campaign filled with appeals to xenophobia, often through the
deployment of demographic fever dreams. Our goal here is not to argue that
demographic fever dreams were somehow responsible for the election of
President Trump. We seek instead to demonstrate how they have given life
to a vivid and unforgettable right-wing discourse of existential demographic
precarity where a white masculine nation is being usurped by queer “toxic
assets” (Chen 2012, 191) and “brown threats” (Silva 2016). We begin with
an in-depth exploration of one particular fever dream before turning to
broader statements made by the president and other prominent politicians
to show how the 2016 election was permeated with fever dreams that would
come on quickly, and intensely, before dissipating into the fog of the fever it-
self.
10
See Manor (2015), NPR (2015), Indian Express (2017), Jaffrelot (2017), and Patel
(2017).

In the summer of 2016, the US Department of Agriculture hosted a con-

ference at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa—a “Rural Pride” summit—
celebrating LGBT contributions to agriculture. Held in a swing state dur-
ing an election year, this otherwise low-key event attracted the attention of
popular right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh, who on his August 17
broadcast warned his national audience of a sinister plot by the “Obama Re-
gime” to divert federal funds to “convince lesbians to become farmers” and
thus “change the perception of what it means to be a farmer in America away
from the ‘white, rich male’” (Limbaugh 2016). On its face, the premise seems
absurd, and even Limbaugh had to admit that most people would see the
news and “ignore it or laugh at it but ultimately cast it aside.” Still, he insisted
that lesbian farmers posed a serious threat to the conservative, “self-reliant,
rugged individualist types” currently populating his vision of the rural United
States. For Limbaugh, this was part of a larger conflict being waged on demo-
graphic terrain, and he left his listeners with an ominous warning: “No matter
where you turn, you can’t escape this fact: if you are conservative, Republican,
straight and white, you are yesterday. You are so yesterday. You are so irrel-
evant. You are so unnecessary.” The implication here is clear: Limbaugh’s au-
dience is in danger of losing the future and being replaced by queer and
brown bodies (here represented by the lesbian farmers sent by the Obama Re-
gime) that, as he claimed, “are constantly on the march.”
Limbaugh provided hope for listeners in the form of his own spectacular
masculinity delivered daily through his radio program. He concluded his
segment on lesbian farmers by telling his audience that even though every-
one else would laugh or ignore the signs, “I, El Rushbo, am able to read the
stitches on the fastball and clearly see what this is about.” Once again, the
fever dream is positioned as a toxic threat to the hard, masculine nation that
can only be cured through the intervention of a strongman like Limbaugh
himself. Later in the program, he cautioned a distraught woman from Maine
by telling her, “you can’t grow immune to” such threats. Indeed, immunity
renders the toxin imperceptible and negates the need for a cure. Limbaugh’s
story here is thus emblematic of the demographic fevers dreams we have
outlined: the image of the lesbian farmer is vivid and specific, positioned
in this narrative as a threat to the dominant rural population all while being
detached from data and infused with an underlying fear of a gender role re-
versal. Moreover, this particular threat positions lesbian farmers as toxic as-
sets, where queerness becomes both valued by capital (in an aside, Lim-
baugh reveals his envy for gay couples who are “smarter,” and “hip,” and
“sophisticated”) and simultaneously a danger to the “affective fabric of im-
munity nationalism” where pure, impenetrable populations are the key to
healthy nations (Chen 2012, 192; see also Puar 2007).

Limbaugh’s claim is premised on the idea that the demographic purity of

the rural United States is being undermined by the intentional efforts of the
federal government (at the time, led by President Obama) to displace, re-
place, or convert farmers. This rhetoric positions an embodied white mas-
culinity as constantly under threat from outside demographic forces repre-
sented by brown, Black, and queer bodies moving from the city into rural
space. As Katherine Cramer (2016) notes, the history of political discourse
against government redistribution and regulation in the rural United States
has “historically been made by equating deservingness with whiteness,” such
that political conversations in these communities “are about race even when
race is not mentioned” and foster a particular resentment against nonwhite
bodies (86). Similarly, research on white fragility shows us that when faced
with “even a minimum amount of racial stress,” white communities will re-
act defensively (DiAngelo 2011, 57). The fever dream of the lesbian farmer is
interesting in this context because while Limbaugh has not explicitly racial-
ized the queer bodies, they are threatening in part because they are being
sent by the federal government, represented at the time by President Obama,
a Black man whose own national origins and religious affiliation had been
openly questioned by Limbaugh and then-candidate Trump. Thus, we see
that the object of resentment cannot be placed above race; nor can we sim-
ply accept that race is intertwined with place and class in rural consciousness,
because life in the rural United States has been made possible only through
a “hieroglyphics of the flesh” where power has been etched into human flesh
to create the appearance of a natural sociopolitical hierarchy (Weheliye 2014,
50). In other words, we have to understand rurality in these discourses as
fundamentally about whiteness. Such fever dreams are thus effective because
they are deployed in this existing discourse where white, rural Americans al-
ready see their livelihoods as constantly being threatened (Cramer 2016), but
they function to intensify the political valence of this discourse by providing a
more vivid and enticing story line to understand existential and prolonged
economic crisis (Fojas 2017). “Lesbian farmers” stand in for a whole host
of queer and brown threats to the integrity of masculine white supremacy.11
These are all bodies that “aren’t from around here” (Abelson 2016), and
Limbaugh appeals to fears of declining fertility in rural, white populations
by positioning lesbian farmers as nonreproductive bodies that will disrupt
the livelihoods of traditional, masculine farmers, who view themselves as the
world’s food providers. As Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai (2002, 117) observe,
the queer intruder resonates with the unknowable and monstrous other fig-
11
See Puar and Rai (2002), Puar (2007), Silva (2016), and Fojas (2017).

ured elsewhere as the terrorist, the failed heterosexual, the queer monster,
and the foil to “aggressive heterosexual patriotism.”
When Limbaugh speaks of “rural America,” he is invoking a particular
image of “home” as a space of “excessively romanticized belonging” that
also serves as a proxy for the nation-state, where belonging is “based on iden-
tifying and producing those who did not belong” (Silva 2016, 19). When
considering the space of the rural United States, then, we must contend with
how that space is marked as white and how queer and brown bodies threaten
the boundaries of whiteness when they enter rural space. In another exam-
ple, Iowa Congressman Steve King signaled support for Dutch nationalist
Geert Wilder’s Islamophobic xenophobia by tweeting that “culture and de-
mographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody
else’s babies” (in Haag 2017). We must understand how this message under-
lines the political significance of demography in animating fever dreams
about threats to the future of the nation. That is, “our civilization” in this
tweet quite clearly means white civilization, and “somebody else’s babies”
means brown babies. King’s tweet is just a local variation on the emergent na-
tionalism in the United States that centers an ironically strong and existen-
tially threatened white heteromasculinity under attack from others who in fact
suffer from marginalization, underrepresentation, sexism, and racism.
Importantly, this same rhetoric, with its coded fears of an ever-encroaching
“brown threat” (Silva 2016), was picked up by Trump in his 2016 presi-
dential campaign. Speaking to a group of farmers, bikers, and veterans at a
“Roast and Ride” hosted by Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst in Des
Moines, candidate Trump told a mostly white crowd, “I know what’s hap-
pening to you. . . . We get it. We all get it. We understand what’s going
on.” He never explicitly said what’s “going on,” but the audience received
the message—the cheers in response were deafening. Trump positions
“what’s going on” as a battle, where pure white space is being penetrated
by toxic threats, and he promises “to end this war on the American farmer”
(Henderson 2016). The unspoken assumption is that rural America belongs
to white men like the speakers, who view themselves as good, normalized
subjects with an inherent right to own and cultivate the lands they occupy
(DiAngelo 2011). For Trump, these bodies are engaged in a demographic
war against white farmers. The maintenance of fear and anxiety toward lesbian
farmers, Latinx immigrants, and any other demographic group considered
“outside” is thus essential to maintaining this status of the white man as
good subject: a provider and protector. When Trump speaks of “bad hombres” or
claims that Mexican men are crossing the border to rape US women, the fever
dream is a call for a renewed commitment to masculinity (Pascoe 2017). This,
then, is the work that demographic fever dreams do: identify those who must

be kept outside any vision of a future nation; continuously maintain a vivid

sense of fear, foreboding, and anxiety about what would happen if those
others suddenly took over the state; and set up the strongman as the only pos-
sibility of preserving the integrity of the nation and its normative subjects.
As demographic fever dreams, these narratives center white masculinity
as crucial to current right-wing populist rhetoric in the United States and
locate threats to the nation in nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheteronorma-
tive bodies while seeking purification and power through a series of violent
technologies. This technique of power renders class irrelevant, uniting white
Americans across class divisions through an embodied fear of the toxic other
and sustaining that fear through the constant introduction of new fever
dreams. Trump’s “defensive obsession with his embodied masculinity” (Gö-
karıksel and Smith 2016, 79) reveals that gender is central to the feverish
panic that is intended to lead to the inevitable conclusion that only Trump’s
exaggerated masculinity can save the nation from racial and moral decline.
Conclusion
What are the points of resonance between white panic over demographic de-
cline; the hoped-for, called-into-being upwelling of a vigorous Sunni youth;
and the fear-mongering of love jihad rhetoric? Putting these three distinct
and empirically rich cases next to one another reveals the important political
work demographic fever dreams do to identify all manner of others as threats
and present strongmen as saviors. Four aspects of demographic fever dreams
are key to their functioning as a fleshy and sticky set of stories that take on a
life of their own.
First, demographic fever dreams’ vivid specificity catches the imagination
and invokes strong emotions through its centering on a particular figure or
scene. Second, these narratives are obsessed with demographic changes that
link the past and the future of the nation to population. Third, despite the
previous observation, these narratives are strangely detached from demo-
graphic data. Finally, these fever dreams reflect a specifically gendered dimen-
sion, and they respond to particular masculinities that are understood as both
threatened and resurgent. Gendered tropes in fever dreams often project the
sense of victimhood and fragility onto a specific or anonymous woman whose
imagined vulnerability is compelling and does not challenge strong masculin-
ity but makes it necessary. The strongman can then emerge as the savior who
can protect women and the nation, restore order, and ensure the population’s
present and future well-being. This gendered representation of masculinity
undergirds all the demographic fever dreams analyzed here and is bolstered
by the embodied performances of Erdoğan, Modi, and Trump, among

others. These figures skillfully translate perceived masculine strength into the
perception of a strong political leadership. Yet their narratives and embodi-
ment also shore up a sense of grievance and loss, enacting a “politics of re-
sentment” (Cramer 2016) and victimhood that often relies on a corollary
femininity in need of protection. The feverish dreamlike aspects of demo-
graphic narratives espoused in Turkey, India, and the United States thus un-
derline a masculinity that is simultaneously strong and weak, under constant
threat and (potentially) victorious.
Demographic fever dreams operate similarly to postapocalyptic narra-
tives that play on “fears of being overwhelmed or overpowered by racialized
others”: in these narratives, “the only thing worse than being killed and eaten
by a zombie is becoming a zombie oneself ” (Fishel and Wilcox 2017, 341–
42). Fear of conversion and recruitment is central to many of these demo-
graphic fantasies. Love jihad threatens to transform Hindus into Muslims,
declining fertility rates and a perceived lack of piety threaten the nation in
Turkey, and queer farmers in the United States threaten agriculture as we
know it. Each of these fears is intensely and intimately embodied and called
into operation through seductive and deceptive means—threatening to in-
fect the heart and body, to render college girls into love bombs, to bring
queer identity to the heart of rural and agriculture heartlands, to harm moth-
ers and daughters through corruption and impurity. Such fictions reflect a
strong desire by dominant groups to contain the threat of contamination rep-
resented by otherized bodies or future-oriented dreams and to build a loyal,
homogenous nation. The demographic fever dream warns its audience to
turn to the strongman in a suit or else risk all manner of chaos and danger,
and it provides specific characters and story lines to allow the fever dreams to
take on a life of their own.
We do not care to smugly dismiss fears about an unlikely takeover by
others or calls for women to have at least three children but, instead, desire
to more carefully consider the content, deployment, and mechanisms of these
vivid demographic imaginaries. In her work on fascism in Italy, Spackman
(1996) emphasizes the ways that pathologizing fascism risks marking it as
irrational and allows us to evade our own participation. Spackman (1996, xi)
suggests that the syntax of fantasy can be mapped onto social and cultural fan-
tasies in ways that “bind together a knowledge and a nonknowledge” so that
“fantasy acts as a structuring illusion.” Similarly, demographic fever dreams
shape the affective experiences and perceptions of (at least part of ) the public
and help craft what makes sense even when it does not. In putting forward
the demographic fever dreams framework, our hope is that we can begin to
unwind this binding and identify its resonances and contradictions to bet-
ter understand how to combat the violent technologies of purification and

policing that they enable. When demographic fever dreams begin to spread,
often a first response is incredulity and feigned or sincere shock on behalf of
those who do not wish to partake in these feverish escapades, or a knowing
eye roll from those who are all too familiar with these story lines. We joke,
we satirize, we highlight the absurdity of a wave of taco trucks or the burkini
as dangerous. But absurdity turns out to be not a sign of the fever dream’s
failure but rather its success. As we saw in Charlottesville, however absurd
the army, their aim is violence. In moving forward, we must instead push into
the discomfort of working to understand the origins of these feverish scenar-
ios, to unravel their logics, and to pinpoint the ways that they are not outside
“normal” but rather an intensification of the everyday violences that we al-
ready inhabit.
Department of Geography
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
References
Abelson, Miriam J. 2016. “‘You Aren’t from Around Here’: Race, Masculinity, and
Rural Transgender Men.” Gender, Place, and Culture 23(11):1535–46.
Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2017. “He Is a Lynched Soldier Now: Coup, Militarism, and
Masculinity in Turkey.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13(1):178–80.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Akınerdem, Feyza. 2017. “Are There Women Out There? Democracy Vigils and
the Politics of Representation after the Failed Coup Attempt in Turkey.” Journal
of Middle East Women’s Studies 13(1):189–93.
Anthias, Floya, and Nira Yuval-Davis. 1992. Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation,
Gender, Colour, and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle. London: Routledge.
Appadurai, Arun. 1996. “Number in the Colonial Imagination.” In Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 114–39. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Ateş, Kazım. 2017. “AKP, Dinsel Popülizm ve Halk-olmayan” (AKP, religious pop-
ulism, and not-public). Mülkiye Dergisi 41(1):105–29.
Bacchetta, Paola. 2000. “Sacred Space in Conflict in India: The Babri Masjid Af-
fair.” Growth and Change 31(2):255–84.
Bailey, A. J. 2009. “Population Geography: Lifecourse Matters.” Progress in Hu-
man Geography 33(3):407–18.
Banerjee, Sikata. 2005. Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism
in India. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). 2016. “Turkey Coup: What Is the Gulen
Movement, and What Does It Want?” BBC News, July 21. http://www.bbc
.com/news/world-europe-36855846.

Berg, Lawrence D., and Robyn Longhurst. 2003. “Placing Masculinities and Geog-
raphy.” Gender, Place, and Culture 10(4):351–60.
Bhagat, R. B., and Purujit Praharaj. 2005. “Hindu-Muslim Fertility Differentials.”
Economic and Political Weekly 40(5):411–18.
Bialasiewicz, Luiza. 2006. “‘The Death of the West’: Samuel Huntington, Oriana
Fallaci, and a New ‘Moral’ Geopolitics of Births and Bodies.” Geopolitics 11(4):
701–24.
Blom Hansen, Thomas. 1996. “Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Vio-
lence, and the Exorcism of the Muslim ‘Other.’” Critique of Anthropology 16(2):
137–72.
Brass, Paul. 2004. “The Gujarat Pogrom of 2002.” Contemporary Conflicts, March
26. http://conconflicts.ssrc.org/archives/gujarat/brass/.
Bunsha, Dionne. 2002. “The Modi Road Show.” Frontline. https://www.front
line.in/static/html/fl1921/stories/20021025006900900.htm.
Butalia, Urvashi. 2000. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ceuppens, Bambi, and Peter Geschiere. 2005. “Autochthony: Local or Global?
New Modes in the Struggle over Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Eu-
rope.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34:385–407.
Chatterjee, Ipsita. 2009. “Violent Morphologies: Landscape, Border, and Scale in
Ahmedabad Conflict.” Geoforum 40(6):1003–13.
Chatterji, Roma, and Deepak Mehta. 2007. Living with Violence: An Anthropology
of Events and Everyday Life. Delhi: Routledge India.
Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chokshi, Niraj. 2016. “‘Taco Trucks on Every Corner’: Trump Supporter’s Anti-
Immigration Warning.” New York Times, September 9. https://www.nytimes
.com/2016/09/03/us/politics/taco-trucks-on-every-corner-trump-supporters
-anti-immigration-warning.html.
Christian, Jenna, Lorraine Dowler, and Dana Cuomo. 2016. “Fear, Feminist Geo-
politics, and the Hot and Banal.” Political Geography, no. 54: 64–72.
Clark, Jessie Hanna. 2016. “The ‘Life’ of the State: Social Reproduction and Geo-
politics in Turkey’s Kurdish Question.” Annals of the American Association of
Geographers 106(5):1176–93.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1999. “Producing the Mothers of the Nation: Race, Class, and
Contemporary US Population Policies.” In Women, Citizenship, and Difference,
edited by Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner, 118–29. London: Zed.
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics.
Cambridge: Polity.
Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Re-
thinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19(6):829–59.
Cowen, Deborah, and Amy Siciliano. 2011. “Surplus Masculinities and Security.”
Antipode 43(5):1516–41.

Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wis-

consin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dağlar, Ali. 2016. “Maraş’tan Sonra Sivas Divriği: Alevi Nüfusu Yoğun Ilçeye Mülteci
Kampı Hazırlığı” [Sivas Divriği after Maraş: Preparations to build a refugee camp
in a town with a large Alevi population]. Diken (blog), May 12. http://www
.diken.com.tr/marastan-sonra-sivas-divrigi-alevi-nufusu-yogun-ilceye-multeci
-kampi-hazirligi/.
Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2010. “Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday Life.” In Ordi-
nary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, edited by Michael Lambek,
376–99. New York: Fordham University Press.
Demiralp, Seda. 2016. “The Breaking Up of Turkey’s Islamic Alliance: The AKP-
Gulen Conflict and Implications for Middle East Studies.” Middle East Review
of International Affairs, April 20. http://www.rubincenter.org/2016/04/the
-breaking-up-of-turkeys-islamic-alliance-the-akp-gulen-conflict-and-implications
-for-middle-east-studies/.
Dharmalingam, A., and S. Philip Morgan. 2004. “Pervasive Muslim-Hindu Fertility
Differences in India.” Demography 41(3):529–45.
DiAngelo, Robin. 2011. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Peda-
gogy 3(3):54–70.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2011. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern In-
dia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dixon, Deborah P., and Sallie A. Marston. 2011. “Introduction: Feminist Engage-
ments with Geopolitics.” Gender, Place, and Culture 18(4):445–53.
Dowler, Lorraine. 2013. “Waging Hospitality: Feminist Geopolitics and Tourism in
West Belfast Northern Ireland.” Geopolitics 18(4):779–99.
Dwyer, Claire, Bindi Shah, and Gurchathen Sanghera. 2008. “‘From Cricket Lover
to Terror Suspect’—Challenging Representations of Young British Muslim
Men.” Gender, Place, and Culture 15(2):117–36.
Ehrkamp, Patricia. 2008. “Risking Publicity: Masculinities and the Racialization of
Public Neighborhood Space.” Social and Cultural Geography 9(2):117–33.
Engineer, Asghar Ali. 2002. “Gujarat Riots in the Light of the History of Commu-
nal Violence.” Economic and Political Weekly 37(50):5047–54.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Inter-
national Politics. London: Pandora.
Fishel, Stefanie, and Lauren Wilcox. 2017. “Politics of the Living Dead: Race and
Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse.” Millennium 45(3):335–55.
Fluri, Jennifer. 2011. “Bodies, Bombs, and Barricades: Geographies of Conflict
and Civilian (In)Security.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
36(2):280–96.
Fojas, Camilla. 2017. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in
Pop Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Gergan, Mabel, Sara Smith, and Pavritha Vasudevan. Forthcoming. “Earth beyond
Repair: Race and Apocalypse in Collective Imagination.” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space.
Ghosh, Abantika, and Vijaita Singh. 2015. “Census: Hindu Share Dips below 80%,
Muslim Share Grows but Slower.” Indian Express, January 24. https://
indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/census-hindu-share-dips-below
-80-muslim-share-grows-but-slower/.
Gökarıksel, Banu. 2016. “Intimate Politics of Protest: Gendering Embodiments and
Redefining Spaces in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park and the Arab Revolutions.” In
Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, edited by
Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime, 221–58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2017. “Making Gender Dynamics Visible in the 2016 Coup Attempt in
Turkey.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13(1):173–74.
Gökarıksel, Banu, and Anna J. Secor. 2017. “Devout Muslim Masculinities: The
Moral Geographies and Everyday Practices of Being Men in Turkey.” Gender,
Place, and Culture 24(3):381–402.
Gökariksel, Banu, and Anna J. Secor. Forthcoming. “Anxiety, Pain, and Ethics in
the Encounter with Syrian Refugees in Turkey.” Environment and Planning
C: Politics and Space.
Gökariksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. 2016. “Making America Great Again? The Fascist
Body Politics of Donald Trump.” Political Geography, no. 54: 79–81.
Gulalp, Haldun. 2003. “Whatever Happened to Secularization? The Multiple Islams
in Turkey.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102(2/3):381–95.
Gunter, Michael M., and M. Hakan Yavuz. 2007. “Turkish Paradox: Progressive Is-
lamists versus Reactionary Secularists.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies
16(3):289–301.
Gupta, Charu. 2009. “Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions.”
Economic and Political Weekly 44(51):13–15.
———. 2016. “Allegories of ‘Love Jihad’ and Ghar Vapasi: Interlocking the Socio-
religious with the Political.” Archiv Orientalni 84(2):291–316.
Haag, Matthew. 2017. “Steve King Says Civilization Can’t Be Restored with
‘Somebody Else’s Babies.’” New York Times, December 22. https://www
.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/us/steve-king-white-nationalism-racism.html.
Henderson, O. Kay. 2016. “‘We Must Come Together,’ Joni Ernst Tells Crowd at
Her ‘Roast and Ride.’” Radio Iowa, August 27. https://www.radioiowa.com
/2016/08/27/we-must-come-together-joni-ernst-tells-crowd-at-her-roast
-and-ride/.
Hopkins, Peter. 2008. The Issue of Masculine Identities for British Muslims after 9/11:
A Social Analysis. Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen.
Hopkins, Peter, and Greg Noble. 2009. “Masculinities in Place: Situated Identities,
Relations, and Intersectionality.” Social and Cultural Geography 10(8):811–19.
Hopkins, Peter, and Rachel Pain. 2007. “Geographies of Age: Thinking Relation-
ally.” Area 39(3):287–94.

Hürriyet. 2012. “Dindar gençlik yetiştireceğiz” (We’re going to raise a pious youth).
February 2. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/dindar-genclik-yetistirecegiz-19825231.
———. 2016. “Erdoğan: Nüfus Planlamasıymış, Doğum Kontrolüymüş . . .” (Er-
doğan: Family planning, birth control . . .). May 20. http://www.hurriyet
.com.tr/erdogan-zurriyetimizi-arttiracagiz-40110923.
Hyndman, Jennifer. 2001. “Towards a Feminist Geopolitics.” Canadian Geogra-
pher 45(2):210–22.
———. 2007. “Feminist Geopolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq.” Professional
Geographer 59(1):35–66.
Indian Express. 2017. “PM Narendra Modi’s Earlier Statements on Cow Protec-
tion: Cow Is Mother, but No One Should Take Law in Hand.” July 16. http://
indianexpress.com/article/india/pm-narendra-modis-earlier-statements-on
-cow-protection-opposed-to-beef-exports-wanted-national-law/.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2008. “Gujarat: The Meaning of Modi’s Victory.” Economic
and Political Weekly 43(15):12–17.
———. 2016. “Narendra Modi between Hindutva and Subnationalism: The Guja-
rati Asmita of a Hindu Hriday Samrat.” India Review 15(2):196–217.
———. 2017. “India’s Democracy at 70: Toward a Hindu State?” Journal of De-
mocracy 28(3):52–63.
Jeffery, Patricia, and Roger Jeffery. 2002. “A Population out of Control? Myths about
Muslim Fertility in Contemporary India.” World Development 30(10):1805–22.
Jeffery, Roger, and Patricia Jeffery. 2005. “Saffron Demography, Common Wis-
dom, Aspirations, and Uneven Governmentalities.” Economic and Political Weekly
40(5):447–53.
Korkman, Zeynep. 2017. “Castration, Sexual Violence, and Feminist Politics in the
Post–Coup Attempt Turkey.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13(1):181–
85.
Legg, Stephen. 2005. “Foucault’s Population Geographies: Classifications, Biopoli-
tics, and Governmental Spaces.” Population, Space, and Place 11(3):137–56.
LeGreco, Marianne, and Sara J. Tracy. 2009. “Discourse Tracing as Qualitative Prac-
tice.” Qualitative Inquiry 15(9):1516–43.
Limbaugh, Rush. 2016. “Archives F The Rush Limbaugh Show.” August 17. https://
www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/08/17/.
Manor, James. 2015. “A Precarious Enterprise? Multiple Antagonisms during Year
One of the Modi Government.” South Asia 38(4):736–54.
Marr, Stephen. 2012. “‘They Treat Us like Dogs’: Demographic Claustrophobia
and the Zimbabwean Struggle for Space on the Streets of Gaborone, Botswana.”
African Historical Review 44(1):80–108.
Martin, Lauren. 2011. “The Geopolitics of Vulnerability: Children’s Legal Subjec-
tivity, Immigrant Family Detention, and US Immigration Law and Enforcement
Policy.” Gender, Place, and Culture 18(4):477–98.
Massaro, Vanessa A. 2015. “The Intimate Entrenchment of Philadelphia’s Drug
War.” Territory, Politics, Governance 3(4):369–86.

Mayer, Tamar. 2004. “Embodied Nationalisms.” In Mapping Women, Making Pol-

itics, edited by Lynn A. Staeheli, Eleonore Kaufman, and Linda J. Peake, 156–
61. New York: Routledge.
McCann, Carole R. 2009. “Malthusian Men and Demographic Transitions: A Case
Study of Hegemonic Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Population Theory.”
Frontiers 30(1):142–71.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Co-
lonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
McIntyre, Michael, and Heidi J. Nast. 2011. “Bio(Necro)Polis: Marx, Surplus
Populations, and the Spatial Dialectics of Reproduction and ‘Race’*.” Antipode
43(5):1465–88.
Mehta, Nalin. 2010. “Ashis Nandy vs. the State of Gujarat: Authoritarian Develop-
mentalism, Democracy, and the Politics of Narendra Modi.” South Asian History
and Culture 1(4):577–96.
Milliyet. 2014. “Kadın Ile Erkeği Eşit Konuma Getiremezsiniz Çünkü o Fıtrata
Terstir—Haberler” [You cannot have equal status for men and women because
that would be against the laws of creation—news]. November 24. http://www
.milliyet.com.tr/erdogan-batsin-bu-dunya-siyaset-1974189/.
Mody, Perveez. 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi.
New York: Routledge.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited
by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 51–80. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Mountz, Alison. 2004. “Embodying the Nation-State: Canada’s Response to Hu-
man Smuggling.” Political Geography 23(3):323–45.
NPR (National Public Radio). 2015. “Modi’s Fancy Pinstripe Suit Lands $694,000
at Auction,” February 20. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015
/02/20/387822916/modis-fancy-pinstripe-suit-lands-694-000-at-auction.
———. 2017. “In German Election, Campaign Posters Are More Important Than
TV Ads,” September 23. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09
/23/552583400/in-german-election-campaign-posters-are-more-important
-than-tv-ads.
Nuhrat, Yağmur. 2017. “Fair to Swear? Gendered Formulations of Fairness in Foot-
ball in Turkey.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13(1):25–46.
Oza, Rupal. 2007. “Contrapuntal Geographies of Threat and Security: The United
States, India, and Israel.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(1):9–
32.
Pain, Rachel. 2015. “Intimate War.” Political Geography, no. 44: 64–73.
Pain, Rachel, and Lynn Staeheli. 2014. “Introduction: Intimacy-Geopolitics and Vi-
olence.” Area 46(4):344–47.
Palshikar, Suhas. 2015. “The BJP and Hindu Nationalism: Centrist Politics and Ma-
joritarian Impulses.” South Asia 38(4):719–35.

Pascoe, C. J. 2017. “Who Is a Real Man? The Gender of Trumpism.” Masculinities

and Social Change 6(2):119–41.
Patel, Aakar. 2017. “Cow Slaughter Row: Narendra Modi Has Condemned Gau Rak-
shaks, but When Will He Act?” Firstpost, July 2. http://www.firstpost.com
/politics/cow-slaughter-row-narendra-modi-has-condemned-gau-rakshaks-but
-when-will-he-act-3766687.html.
Phadke, Shilpa, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade. 2011. Why Loiter? Women and
Risk on Mumbai Streets. New Delhi: Penguin.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press.
Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. 2002. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terror-
ism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 72 20(3):117–48.
Rao, Mohan. 2010. “On Saffron Demography.” Economic and Political Weekly
45(41):27–29.
———. 2011. “Love Jihad and Demographic Fears.” Indian Journal of Gender
Studies 18(3):425–30.
Robbins, Paul, and Sara Smith. 2017. “Baby Bust: Towards Political Demography.”
Progress in Human Geography 41(2):199–219.
Roberts, Dorothy. 2014. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Mean-
ing of Liberty. New York: Vintage.
Rotham, Lily. 2016. “Erdogan’s Way: How Turkey’s Erdogan First Came to Power.”
Time, July 18. http://time.com/4410491/turkey-president-erdogan-history/.
Safi, Michael. 2017. “Controversial Hindu Priest Chosen as Uttar Pradesh Chief
Minister.” The Guardian, March 19. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017
/mar/19/uttar-pradesh-yogi-adityanath-hindu-priest-chief-minister.
Saikia, Yasmin. 2011. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering
1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sarıoğlu, Bülent. 2017. “Turkey’s Fertility Rate Falls to Critical Level of 2.1 for First
Time since WWI.” Hurriyet Daily News, May 26. http://www.hurriyetdailynews
.com/turkeys-fertility-rate-falls-to-critical-level-of-21-for-first-time-since-wwi
-113583.
Sethi, Aman. 2015. “‘Love Jihad’ in India and One Man’s Quest to Prevent It.” The
Guardian, January 29. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/29
/love-jihad-india-one-man-quest-prevent-it.
Silva, Kumi. 2016. Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Silvey, Rachel. 2004. “On the Boundaries of a Subfield: Social Theory’s Incorpora-
tion into Population Geography.” Population, Space, and Place, no. 10: 303–8.
Simpson, Audra. 2009. “Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gen-
dered Citizenships of Grief.” Wicazo Sa Review 24(2):105–29.
Smith, Sara, and Pavithra Vasudevan. 2017. “Race, Biopolitics, and the Future: In-
troduction to the Special Section.” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 35(2):210–21.

Spackman, Barbara. 1996. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in
Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–
313. London: Macmillan.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Theweleit, Klaus. 1987. Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Vol. 1. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Times of India. 2013. “2002 Riots: Modi’s ‘Puppy’ Remark Kicks Up Political
Storm,” July 12. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/2002-riots
-Modis-puppy-remark-kicks-up-political-storm/articleshow/21040114.cms.
Varma, Rashmi. 2017. “(Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence, and
the Politics of Hindutva.” Feminist Dissent, no. 2: 57–82.
Varshney, Ashutosh. 2004. “Understanding Gujarat Violence.” Contemporary Con-
flicts, March 26. http://conconflicts.ssrc.org/archives/gujarat/varshney/.
Warner, Michael. 1991. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text, no. 29:
3–17.
Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics,
and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Williams, Jill, and Vanessa Massaro. 2013. “Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking
(In)security, Animating Social Change.” Geopolitics 18(4):751–58.
Yavuz, M. Hakan, and Rasim Koç. 2016. “The Turkish Coup Attempt: The Gülen
Movement vs. the State.” Middle East Policy 23(4):136–48.
Yilmaz, Ihsan, and Galib Bashirov. 2018. “The AKP after 15 Years: Emergence of
Erdoganism in Turkey.” Third World Quarterly. Prepublished online, March
22. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1447371.
Yılmaz, Zehra. 2015. “The AKP and Its Family Policy in the Re-establishment Pro-
cess of Authoritativeness in Turkey.” In Authoritarianism in the Middle East, ed-
ited by Jülide Karakoç, 150–71. London: Palgrave Macmillan.


Gökarıksel Et Al. "Demographic Fever Dreams"

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gökarıksel Et Al. "Demographic Fever Dreams"

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Banu Gökarıksel

Demographic Fever Dreams: Fragile Masculinity and

I n a 2015 photograph, Vijaykant Chauhan poses casually on a motorcycle

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality

Embodied nationalism, masculine power, and their insecurities

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

lence but violence that is imagined to be self-defense and linked to fears of

The politics of population and demographic fever dreams

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

and the reproductive fertility of racialized others.7 An important part of this

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

When presented as common sense or “hard facts” by someone who “tells

Turkey: A pious and vigorous future

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

the coup, in a televised Facetime connection, Erdoğan called on people to

India: Love jihad and romance as threat

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, came to national power

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

United States: They are constantly on the march

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

In the summer of 2016, the US Department of Agriculture hosted a con-

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Limbaugh’s claim is premised on the idea that the demographic purity of

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

be kept outside any vision of a future nation; continuously maintain a vivid

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wis-

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Mayer, Tamar. 2004. “Embodied Nationalisms.” In Mapping Women, Making Pol-

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Pascoe, C. J. 2017. “Who Is a Real Man? The Gender of Trumpism.” Masculinities

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019.44:561-587.

You might also like