Log cabin Republicans, move over, Sasha’s here.
Given what we know about Dugin’s far-right affiliations, it is tempting to imagine that his presentation of sex and gender in the Fourth Political Theory will take those of the previous three in more extreme directions. But this is not the case. Having given an overview of gender in the previous three political theories, the very first thing Dugin states is, “The Fourth Political Theory represents an aspiration to overcome the gender construction of the three political theories of modernity.” In other words, Dugin signals from the start that he does not wish to perpetuate traditional understandings of gender.
Dugin initially grapples with the attributes of gender in the Fourth Political Theory, first through the process of negation (in other words, what it is not): “In the face of this construction of ‘man’ as he who possesses reason, wealth, responsibility, city, white skin color, and so on, we revolt. This image of man must die; he doesn’t have a chance to survive, as he is closed inside modernity’s historical deadlock.” So, traditional masculinity is gone. Dugin then looks to positive attributes of gender in the Fourth Political Theory: to the “pre-logical” world of children, madness, intellectual transgression and, more generally, those who are “non-White/European, insane, nonurban or defined by a constructed landscape … the ecologist or aboriginal.”
It is in his discussion of the gendered subject of the Fourth Political Theory that Dugin starts to sound eerily like a queer theorist as he suggests it should be in a state of “between.” Dugin opts for the model of “Dasein,” referring to Heidegger’s understanding of existential being, which “can somehow be sexualized, but that sex which it has cannot be either male or female. It may make sense to speak about it in terms of the androgyne.” Even then Dugin does not want us to get stuck in the rut of thinking the androgyne is a combination of a binary sex or gender: “Should we say that the Fourth Political Theory may be addressed to the androgynous being, and its gender is the androgyne? Perhaps, but only if it is possible not to project onto the androgynous the obviously split models of sex as halves of a whole.” He wants us to think of the androgyne “not as a result of a combination of the man and the woman,” rather “primordial, untouched unity.”