Hidden in plain sight : the metaphysics of gender and death / by Kathleen O. Kane.

In my thesis, I work towards developing a theory of the ways in which political ideologies, with fascism as the most salient, constitute and articulate not only pure race, but pure gender. Some of the arguments that I make: that ideologies of dominance are about maleness, and about femaleness, and are therefore about impure maleness and femaleness; that in the constitution of meanings and practices, violence and eroticism are reinscribed on one another, and in cultures and ideologies of dominance; that fascist acts of extermination are important to understand in relation to women and issues of gender, because the forms of reality production that are constantly present and possible within fascism are to be seen in the relations of male to female; and, that those relations of power existed not only in Nazi Germany, at a particular time in a particular place, but are our relations of power, here and still. Finally, it strikes me that we who are women may be in a different, and more terrible, kind of trouble than we think. That terrible trouble is about the conviction that in the reinscription of violence and eroticism on one another, that which is salient in fascism ideology and practice is hidden-in-plain-sight in modern and liberal ideologies, meanings and practices The female (its bodies, its knowledges, its eroticism, and its histories) is the site of the play of violence and eroticism with one another on a Procrustean bed of modernity.