Fever for Heights: Petro-masculinity and the Fascist Sublime in Vox

Abstract

The fascist mountain genre is exuberantly reappearing in the contemporary propaganda of the Spanish far-right party Vox.  This article presents the symptom  as the continuation of its manifestation during the 20th century, as heir to the bergfilm and the Francoist mountain genre, but  also as one whose genealogy begins with the modern armored Rückenfigur. The liberal and the fascist subject, although they consider each other ultimate nemeses, evince in their images an identical way of representing their petro-masculinity: in them, we persistently see an individual who repeatedly looks dominantly into the abyss of the experience of the sublime and who reads the affectation that overwhelms him on the cliff under the rain of the eroticization of violence. At the same time, and contradictorily, they both despise the role that the body plays in the event. An altitude sickness with which we are all afflicted