Watch the talk The New Right’s Cultural Hegemony and Contradictions. 

Recorded at Disruption Network Lab‘s conference Shadows of Illiberalism: Resisting the Radical Right, which took place in Berlin from 13 – 15 June 2025.

Speakers: Katrien Jacobs (Associate Professor, Monash University Malaysia, BE/MY), Florian Cramer (Professor of Artistic Research, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, NL). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

00:00 Start
00:52 Introduciton by Tatiana Bazzichelli
09:09 Florian Cramer
33:18 Katrien Jacobs
01:01:00 Conversation
1:17:47 Q&A

In order to gain cultural and political hegemony, the New Right can often take contradictory positions: queerness versus anti-gender politics, disruption versus traditionalism, technocracy versus ecofascism, populism versus elitism, etc. These contradictions make their program seem inclusive and attractive to larger demographics. But in the end, they are just a tactic of playing both sides at once. Once in power, the veil comes off. This keynote will consist of two parts: the first will examine the cultural politics of the New Right in general, and the second will focus on gender and sex politics as a case study.

Florian Cramer will address the dialectics of “liberalism” and “illiberalism” – how the latter emerged from the former, and how liberal concepts of spontaneous order informed experimental arts, technological developments, free-market economics, and ultimately the New Right and today’s oligarchic regimes, from the 1950s to the 2020s. The question remains to what extent the cultural regimes of the New Right are aligned with today’s oligarchies, whether its fascism can be called postmodern, and whether it doesn’t amount to an extremism of the political center rather than of the political right.

Katrien Jacobs will argue that New Right politics and the struggle for cultural hegemony thrive on apocalyptic world views including gender phantasms and a contradictory “illiberal sex revolution”. The talk is based on research into anti-gender movements in Belgium and the Netherlands, enigmatic grassroots alliances between religious groups, conspiracy theorists and political campaigns against sex education that led arson in several secondary schools. The talk will also look into Naomi Klein’s ideas of “mirroring” to show that New Right cultural hegemony borrows radical-left sex/gender politics, such as feminist critiques of dry-analytical thought and alt-queer D.I.Y. porn-making.