Though getting it together may signal a practice of spontaneous collectivity, “get it together” is also a gendered command—one which affiliates a performance of femininity with certain aesthetic expectations and demands the unbounded work of love, care, and social reproduction. How do we understand the aesthetics of femininity in a moment where feminism has been defanged of its oppositionality, when it functions as an alibi for the tide of fascism in the form of TERFs and girlbosses? Everyday injunctions toward norms of femininity appear in the form of “Get Ready With Me” videos, Planned Parenthood’s decision to offer Botox, ceaseless trend cycles, and the normalization of weight loss medication, with Serena Williams as its icon. A recognizably fascist femininity has emerged through Mar-a-Lago face, the labors of trad wife-influencers, Sydney Sweeney’s jeans/genes advertisement, Kristi Noem’s ICE Barbie persona—the list goes on. Indeed, perhaps these seemingly banal forms and their fascist counterparts are not so different from each other, linked as they are to the performance of feminized labor and the naturalization of increasingly limited modes of womanhood. This panel returns to Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis and accompanying appeal in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: if fascism aestheticizes politics, then those who seek to resist fascism must politicize art and aesthetics in turn. The other side of looksmaxxing, Shein, and Ozempic is Operation Epic Fury, landfills of clothes in Accra and Panipat, and manufactured famine in Gaza. While looksmaxxing, Shein, and Ozempic all aid in our desire to appear right, proper, “together,” it is this panel’s suspicion that the ever-mounting dictums around appearance etiquette and feminine performance today directly relate to political failures that feel increasingly undeniable on the left.

We invite papers that consider what Marxist feminisms, in tandem with ethnic and postcolonial studies, might bring to bear on this historical moment. How might the aesthetics of femininity index the fraying line between liberalism and fascism? How might femininity’s (capitalist) terms of aesthetic pleasure and work help us diagnose this contemporary milieu of economic and geopolitical crises? How might we reinvigorate the oppositional force of feminist critique amidst the rise of gender conservatism? Leveraging the conference organizers’ exhortation that the notion of “getting it together” emerges in and through the “failure to cohere, organize, and act,” this panel queries how a feminist understanding of the (political) imperative that we “get it together” might set into motion an inquiry of fascism and aesthetics, political failure and possibility today.

Please submit an abstract of maximum 250 words by April 13.