The current misogynistic backlash continues a long tradition of gender-specific discrimination, which it updates by harnessing technological and political developments. The present issue responds to this moment by examining the recent revival of sexist dynamics and tropes in art and pop culture in light of today’s changed media and sociopolitical conditions. With Kate Manne, we understand misogyny as a cross-cultural phenomenon that – in contradistinction to isolated sexist practices or remarks – articulates a deep-seated, though often unconscious, attitude of contempt for women.

Since the early 1990s, TEXTE ZUR KUNST has repeatedly turned its attention to the more or less subtle and more or less violent push to reverse feminism’s successes. In 1993, an issue on “Feminisms” charted different conceptions of feminism; it was followed in 1994 by “­Sexisms,” which turned the spotlight on the diverse ­manifestations of gender discrimination. Six years ago, an issue focused on “The ­Feminist” called on writers and readers to scrutinize processes of subjectivation and the historical contexts in which this culturally contentious term, buffeted by trends and countertrends, figures. Since then, masculinist identity ­politics has been regaining ground. With a view to earlier reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on major feminist achievements such as those won in the early 1970s, the main thrust of the misogynistic backlash we are observing today is hardly surprising. It is fueled by a general lurch to the right and by online platforms that have proven an ideal breeding ground for ideologies that demean women.

Global conflicts, ecological crises, economic recessions, imperialist tendencies, and profound technological transformations have enabled conservative political agendas and ­authoritarian movements to gain strength – along with ­reactionary perceptions of women. The return to a traditional model of femininity is best ­illustrated by the tradwife phenomenon, the subject of the roundtable in this issue. In conversation with Sabeth Buchmann and the editors of TZK, the artist Petra Cortright, the art historian Friederike Sigler, and the ­political theorist Birgit Sauer discuss the paradoxical performances with which a growing number of young “housewives” – in reality, also shrewd online entrepreneurs – convince legions of ­followers of their lifestyle and persuade them to buy the products they advertise. The panelists point out how the politics of the New Right ties in with specific socioeconomic conditions and explore the historical antecedents that the social media trend reprises.

The glorification of the stay-at-home mom has been accompanied by a rising tide of misogynistic campaigns and hate speech against professionally successful and socially visible women. A prominent example of this trend on the German political scene was last year’s failed election of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf to a seat on the Federal Constitutional Court; in the United States, Donald Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric has repeatedly taken aim at ­opinionated Democratic congresswomen – and has long spread from the proverbial locker room into the official scripts for White House press conferences. To what extent do pop culture, especially the so-called “lean-in” feminism named after Sheryl ­Sandberg’s 2013 book, share responsibility for the widely internalized contempt for women today, and what is moral philosophy to make of misogyny? These are the questions the critic Sophie Gilbert and the philosopher Kate Manne discuss in conversation with the pop feminist Kersty Grether.

Blaming feminist achievements and related progressive policies for one’s own social and economic misery is a key argumentative ­strategy in the manosphere, which first attracted public attention in the mid-2010s as a loose online ­network. Its denizens’ assertions of male primacy are increasingly echoed by the conservative political mainstream and amplified by ­algorithms; meanwhile, the users of online platforms like 4chan, on which the manosphere originally coalesced, have shifted toward a more nihilistic worldview – a development that ­Marcus Maloney retraces.

Like liberal feminists, trans people are a favorite menace of the New Right. The antidiscrimination coach Mine Pleasure Bouvar probes the specifics of transmisogyny by examining ­representations of transfeminine bodies that seek to appeal to the bourgeois gaze. Bouvar emphasizes that, on the one hand, such depictions are bound up with the capitalist social order, and on the other, they effect a calculated sexualization of trans individuals for military, propaganda, and other purposes.

With her discussion of the depiction of women in the work of Martin Buber, Vivian Liska looks back to the historical backlash in the early 20th century, which sought to undo the achievements of the first feminist wave. As Liska argues, Buber’s views and writings are exemplary of the paradox of creating something new through the revival of older traditions, an idea that links certain modernist thinkers and authors to the neoconservatism of today.

For the image spread in this issue, Victoria ­Colmegna appropriated ­illustrations from the book Astrología esotérica (1962) by the ­Argentinian politician José López Rega, whose orthodox ­Peronist and far-right politics in ­combination with his interest in ­occultism earned him the moniker El Brujo (the ­Warlock). As though in a coloring book, the typified images of women named after signs of the zodiac from López Rega’s book now appear drained of all color, awaiting the reader’s creative intervention. Meanwhile, they may also be read as a ­reference to historical ­misogynistic ­violence and to the figure of the witch as a ­symbol of female resistance to patriarchal structures, reminding us of the remarkable continuity of anti-feminist tropes.

Sabeth Buchmann, Ben Caton, Isabelle Graw, Leonie Huber, and Anna Sinofzik

Translation: Gerrit Jackson