Eco-Fascism Lecture Series: "Blood and Soil: Race, Gender and Food in Nazi Ideology"

Environmental concerns—from nature conservation to air and water quality—are often associated with progressive politics. But under Fascisms past and present, ecological ideas have also animated authoritarian projects. This speaker series examines how dictatorships mobilize nature as both metaphor and material resource. As a metaphor, agrarianism evokes Fascism’s foundational mythos: the dictator will restore the country’s glorious national past. To live a rural, old-fashioned lifestyle was to be a more patriotic citizen. “Italy must be ruralized!” proclaimed Benito Mussolini in 1927. As a material resource, nature is often put to use in service of eugenics and racial hygiene.

Our speakers will examine the professional biographies of the scientists, industrialists, and entrepreneurs hired by Fascist regimes to determine the limits of biological possibility. Case studies from empire and the colonies will investigate the Fascist programs for experimental plant nurseries, animal breeding, and chemical trials. Rather than treating eco-fascism as a contradiction in terms, our speakers will situate it within longer histories of environmental planning, population management, and technocratic governance. They will explain how dictatorships use the tools of authoritarian governance to modify the environment in their pursuit of more Fascist futures.

Please join us for these illuminating discussions.

Talk details:

Blood and Soil: Race, Gender and Food in Nazi Ideology

Speaker: Prof. Alice Weinreb, Loyola University

This talk will explore the ways in which Hitler’s ‘blood and soil’ ideology raced and gendered the natural environment. According to Nazi ideology, ‘natural’ food was necessary for the maintenance of a pure and healthy Volk. Food thus was a way of constructing (and potentially of threatening) gender and racial identities. Weinreb’s talk will explore the ways in which nature was transformed into something to be consumed, which in turn naturalized Aryan supremacy and radical gender hierarchies. In Nazi Germany, racial and gender identity was performed through daily acts of food production (farming and cooking) and food consumption (shopping and eating). The talk also discusses the ramifications of linking the protection of the environment with the protection of racism and misogyny, discussing connections to contemporary far-right discourses linking environmental contamination, impure food, and racial and gender hierarchies.

For more information, please contact Prof. Diana Garvin, [email protected].

Supported by: Department of Romance Languages, Italian Sector.