Ordinary affects of global reactionary politics

Emotions and affect have long been a topic of interest to those studying the global circulations of reactionary, far-right and/or fascist politics and political sensibilities. Studies that focus on how political parties, organisations, institutions and media bodies articulate these politics by mobilising emotions such as fear, anxiety and resentment are plenty. However, there is still too little attention paid to the ways in which micro, banal and ordinary processes produce attachments to reactionary politics at the molecular level. This special section on interventions brings together and reflects on ordinary affects of global reactionary politics. Across these interventions, we take Kathleen Stewart’s work on ‘ordinary affect’ (2007) as our starting point to conceptualise the role of affect in shaping global reactionary politics and to interrogate the emergence of reaction beyond the institutional, the national and that which has been labelled the ‘extreme’. In this piece, we introduce the short-form academic and creative pieces that comprise this line of intervention, and which focus on the ordinariness of reactionary affect through varying problematics: anti-globalist conspiracism, wounded attachments to white masculinity in East Germany, queer love in an increasingly queerphobic India, anti-democratic futurism of Silicon Valley and the bodily politics of the manosphere.