Demographic Fever Dreams: Fragile Masculinity and Population Politics in the Rise of the Global Right

In the midst of the current global turn to the right, striking resonances across oceans emerge: strongmen and their allies point to specific and vivid tales or images signaling demographic shifts as signs of danger. These could be lesbian farmers (supposedly) staging a takeover of the US Midwest, tales of virtuous headscarf-wearing women under attack by secular men (in Turkey), or of Muslim Romeos luring Hindu women to convert (in India). In each of these cases, the story lodges in the body and takes on a life of its own, inspiring fear and devotion, and centering the need for a heroic rescue. Here, we argue for the need for feminist engagement with political narratives about population change and point to the important work that fantastical stories focused on demographically based fears have done for the recent rise of right-wing politics in the United States, India, and Turkey. We refer to these stories as demographic fever dreams to emphasize their simultaneous obsession with demography and detachment from demographic data. Our analysis shows that demographic fever dreams deploy gendered tropes to create a narrative of vulnerability for dominant groups in relation to a takeover by religious, racial, and sexual others. Attending to the discursive constitution of demographic fever dreams in media and by political leaders in each context, we examine how they effectively invoke populist fears and identify which bodies become threatening and which ones need protection. We show that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Donald Trump in the United States, and Narendra Modi in India have all deployed an imaginary of an authentic nation under threat—whether that is racialized as the white working class in the United States or given religious inflection as authentically Sunni in Turkey and authentically Hindu in India. This imaginary becomes a fetishized group under threat from all manner of others threatening demographic destruction. In each of these instances, we argue that figures with political power use a vivid and fantastic fiction to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality so as to consolidate political power or to dismiss and undermine class tensions and create fictitious communities of homogeneity. Thus, demographic fever dreams effectively produce a rationale for strongman masculinity and contribute to the retrenchment of nationalist values.