Katharine Burdekin's dystopian novel, Swastika Night (1937), is set 700 hundred years after total Axis victory. The Jews have been extirpated, Nazis and Japanese fascists rule supreme over the entire world, and women have become reproductive chattel: forced to shave their heads, held in prison camps, they are no longer the objects of male sexual or romantic interest, which is turned in on itself in a violently masculinist homoeroticism. The novel opens with a speculative identification of Nazi triumphalism with queer male desire:

This passage – and Burdekin's project in the novel as a whole – may initially appear strange in its intertwining of a notoriously homophobic regime with the queer male gaze. However, it is in fact paradigmatic of mid- to late 1930s British dystopian visions of fascism, and of the sexual politics of Popular Front literature more broadly. From the fantastic dystopias of Rex Warner and Ruthven Todd to more sober critiques of fascism by Winifred Holtby or Storm Jameson, Popular Front literary production incessantly deployed a vigilant homophobia as a key weapon in the antifascist struggle.

That the dystopian novel should prove a particularly important genre for the development of this heteronormative sexual politics is perhaps unsurprising. For the shock of the antifascist dystopia is, at core, the shock of the aberrant, the pathological that relies upon an implicit sense of social and sexual normality.