Authoritarian Feminism
Definition
Authoritarian Feminism refers to the paradoxical fusion of feminist rhetoric with mechanisms of discipline, surveillance, and state control. It emerges when demands for equality and empowerment are redirected through institutions of power, turning liberation into regulation. Rather than dismantling structures of domination, authoritarian feminism retools them—using the language of justice while enforcing conformity, control over intimacy, and biopolitical governance of bodies. In the Hybrid Collapse universe, authoritarian feminism is less a political stance than a lived environment: a regime where personal autonomy is negotiated within the machinery of authority.
Historical and Conceptual Roots
The roots of authoritarian feminism lie in the contradictions of modernity. Classical feminism challenged patriarchy, demanding rights over reproduction, sexuality, and labor. Yet as these demands entered the machinery of law, medicine, and governance, they became entangled with systems of control. Twentieth-century debates on reproductive rights, for instance, often coincided with policies of sterilization, population management, and “moral hygiene.” The feminist struggle for recognition was shadowed by biopolitical attempts to regulate the very bodies it sought to liberate.
Conceptually, authoritarian feminism resonates with Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and Giorgio Agamben’s reflection on biopolitics. It marks a convergence where empowerment turns into regulation, and the language of liberation is absorbed into the structures of command.
Everyday and Cultural Presence
Authoritarian feminism is visible in the everyday regulation of gender and sexuality under the guise of protection or equality. Laws designed to “safeguard women” may impose restrictions on dress, movement, or intimacy. Corporate diversity policies proclaim empowerment but often reduce identity to algorithmic categories. Online platforms censor certain forms of expression in the name of safety, while reinforcing other forms of commodification and control.
Culturally, authoritarian feminism surfaces in media where “strong female characters” are presented within rigid, predefined scripts—symbols of empowerment that conceal deeper patterns of control. Fashion, advertising, and pop culture celebrate empowerment slogans, yet frequently channel them into consumerist rituals and prescriptive identities.
Social and Political Dimension
As a political force, authoritarian feminism complicates the relationship between liberation and authority. It can provide new rights, visibility, and resources, but simultaneously extend surveillance and normative control. For example, reproductive technologies may expand freedom of choice while embedding life more deeply into the apparatus of governance and data extraction.
The central question is not whether feminism is “for” or “against” power, but how power operates through feminist language. Authoritarian feminism shows that emancipation can be weaponized, transformed into a mode of governance that monitors desire, regulates bodies, and dictates acceptable forms of femininity and masculinity.
Philosophical Reflection
Philosophically, authoritarian feminism destabilizes the idea of freedom itself. If every act of empowerment risks being captured by authority, where does autonomy reside? The term forces us to question the boundaries between liberation and domination, desire and discipline. It highlights the fragile nature of emancipation in a world where resistance is quickly commodified, and dissent is repackaged into slogans of conformity.
It also opens a reflection on the ethics of care and protection. Can care become oppressive when institutionalized? Can protection serve as a mask for domination? Authoritarian feminism reminds us that power often operates not through open repression, but through the very languages of support, safety, and progress.
Hybrid Collapse Perspective
Within Hybrid Collapse, authoritarian feminism is not an abstract theory but a lived aesthetic and political condition. It is inscribed in the architecture of the metropolis: billboards proclaim empowerment while data systems monitor sexuality; rituals of liberation blur into rituals of conformity. The female figure becomes both icon of resistance and instrument of control—a biopolitical totem around which authority reorganizes intimacy, reproduction, and identity.
In this world, authoritarian feminism is not simply an ideology but a mode of survival and adaptation. It defines how bodies move through the city, how identities are negotiated under the glare of screens, and how desire is coded into the rhythms of control. It is both a promise and a threat—an unstable equilibrium where collapse and empowerment coexist in perpetual tension.