BREAKOUT SESSIONS 4
Panel 4A: Gender
Chair: Anne Craanen (Swansea University)
‘White British Births’: The Gendering of Great Replacement Theory in Patriotic Alternative’s Online Discourse Catherine Stinton (University of York)
Abstract: To the Western far right, demographic changes are not only a threat to white people and their way of life but the result of deliberate action from governments and global elites. ‘Great Replacement Theory’ (GRT) asserts that immigration and the growth of minority communities will render white populations a minority group by the designs and policies of the powerful. However, the gendered aspect of GRT is largely missing from the literature on far-right movements. Drawing on a six-month digital ethnography of the British far-right group Patriotic Alternative, I explore how this discourse is both racialised and gendered in an online extreme-right community. Embedded in propaganda pushed in social media, blog articles, and streams, GRT is a framework through which PA’s racism is linked to their ideologies of gender, including misogyny, homophobia, masculinity, and family. In painting demographic change as an existential threat to the white race, far-right movements justify attacks on feminism and abortion rights, and upholding gender roles as a moral imperative. While this is far from a new concept in far-right movements, under GRT this misogyny is inexorably weaved into racism, homophobia, and anti-authoritarianism, providing a rallying cry to harness even mainstream social anxieties. #Tradwives on Pinterest and Whisper: Identity construction and reconstruction in images on public platforms Dr Amy-Louise Watkin (University of the West of Scotland) Ninian Frenguelli (Swansea University) Abstract: There is an ongoing effort by scholars of extremism to map the online spheres in which extremists exist. A neglected aspect of this mapping project is how the narratives, ideologies, and aesthetics present on these platforms are gendered. Due to this neglect of gender as a node of analysis, and the neglect of women in general, the phenomenon of online #tradwife content has also gone understudied. Tradwives believe that it is a 21st century woman’s job to become a wife and a mother, managing all aspects of domestic life in their home. In doing this role, they will be fully submissive to their husbands, present a feminine aesthetic, and take on stereotypically feminine traits, such as being caring and soft. This research aims to contribute to both gaps in the literature by exploring #tradwife content across two understudied platforms, Pinterest and Whisper. #Tradwife content contains narratives of white supremacy, anti-feminism, and male supremacy. Through our data collection and analysis we saw consistent ideas of what constitutes tradwife lifestyle and identity across most of the dataset, but we also saw dissent. Users in our study used the hashtag #tradwife to promote white femininity, traditional homemaking skills, and a nuclear family structure. But they also disrupted this narrative, offering feminist critiques and queer subversions of the traditional tradwife ideology. This presentation explores identity construction in posts marked as #tradwife to see where boundaries are drawn and crossed over who can be a tradwife and what being a tradwife looks like.
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