Racist skinhead masculinity cannot be explained by a single shared psychological drive

Evidence

The recent emergence of racist skinhead youth movements in Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, the UK, and the USA, often with affiliations to far right nationalist or neo- Nazi groups, would seem to argue for the prescience of much of Theweleit’s analysis (Kaplan and Bjorgo, 1998). These “home boys” with their sentimental odes to “motherlove” tattooed on one arm and death or glory swastikas emblazoned on the other certainly seem to have found in fascist symbolism and racist acts a means of asserting a “strong” form of masculinity that is otherwise disintegrating all around them. The collapse of the culture of manual laborism along with its patriarchal codes of apprenticeship and inheritance, coupled with the deterritorialization of related communities of aspiration, would certainly point to a radical “de-oedipalization” of subject positions (Cohen, 1999). However this may just as easily mobilize white projective identifications with the macho stance of black rap and street culture, setting in motion a very different dynamic based on racial envy. Once again it is dangerous to “read off the object choice - however racialized - from some presumed common psychological disposition of the group. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1376

Categorization

• QUESTION: Theweleit’s analysis is invoked as prescient but not explained here — worth chasing down what specifically Theweleit argued about fascist male psychology.
• XREF: connects to: Exaggerated masculinity compensates for disempowerment and symbolizes racial difference; Psychoanalytic accounts of racism cannot reduce it to a single psychological principle. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1288; Racism cannot be reduced to a scaled-up version of interpersonal prejudice — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1387 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalytic accounts of racism cannot reduce it to a single psychological principle. #corroborates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1288
• Psychoanalytic accounts of racism displace rather than escape reductionism #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297
• Racism cannot be reduced to a scaled-up version of interpersonal prejudice #corroborates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1387
• Universal-psychology accounts of racism substitute an alibi for explanation #expands (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 634
• Exaggerated masculinity compensates for disempowerment and symbolizes racial difference #qualifies (0.72)