Description
PROMPT 1: Question/Prompt(s): How are white nationalist and related right-wing beliefs, tropes, and politics framed, rationalized, and interpreted in public and political discourse? With what impact? In your essay, incorporate the film “The Man Card” (screened in class), and the four readings from 2/12- 2/26 (Ross, Lindgren, Bjork-James, and Berry, Glaser & Schildkraut).PROMPT 2: Question/prompt(s): How is the white right shaping and affecting contemporary U.S. politics? Your discussion should incorporate at least 4 of the 6 readings from 3/4-3/11 (Sparks, Rosen, Bracewell, Kitchener, Isom et al, and Ebin), as well as the film “American Insurrection” (screened in class. If specific course materials are required for a particular essay, the essay question/prompt will specify. Otherwise, you may choose which course materials most support your discussion.For written assignments, please use double-spacing, 12-point font, and insert page numbers. When citing materials, you may use academic citation style MLA.
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DOI: 10.1002/fea2.12011
Feminist Anthropology 2020; 1: 176–183
Racializing misogyny: Sexuality and
gender in the new online white
nationalism
Sophie Bjork-James1
1 Anthropology Dept. Vanderbilt University
Corresponding author: Sophie Bjork-James; e-mail: [email protected]
This article asks how an anti-racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion
of the radical right, with a focus on the online white nationalist movement. It demonstrates
how homophobia and anti-feminism are two of many pathways into the online white nationalist
movement. In effect, white nationalists work through online venues to racialize homophobia and
anti-feminism. They articulate a view of white racialization where gender and sexuality are central
to ideas about biological and cultural superiority. Through tracing the linkages between gender,
sexuality, and race in different ideations of the white nationalist movement, this article shows a
continuity of these core ideas to white nationalism across different manifestations of the movement,
even as the expression of them has changed. An aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways an
anti-racist, feminist anthropology provides tools to understand how concerns about gender animate
this authoritarian movement.
Keywords Anti-racist, feminist anthropology, white nationalism, homophobia, digital cultures, racialization
Just before committing a massacre at two New Zealand mosques in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant
posted on the infamous 8chan imageboard forum /pol/ (short for “Politically Incorrect”), saying
he was going to carry out an “attack against the invaders.” He also shared a link to his
planned video livestream, ensuring he would have an audience. Less than twenty-four hours later,
with Brenton Tarrant in police custody and first responders still recovering bodies, 8chan was
celebrating the murders. A popular post discussing Tarrant’s manifesto articulated a sexualized
racial identity central to the white nationalist ideology that both inspired the massacre and provided
a transnational public to celebrate it. The posters discussed the concept of “acceleration” found in
Tarrant’s manifesto and articulated what they believe they are fighting against: “The endgame of
globohomo is to make everyone a weak, mongrelized, degenerated, passive-aggressive tranny cuck
worshiping the [Jew].”1 On both 8chan and 4chan /pol/ boards, perhaps the most common form of
address, and insult, is “faggot.”
In August 2019, another massacre occurred in El Paso, Texas, shortly after an anonymous
manifesto was posted to 8chan. The site’s security service provider, Cloudflare, terminated its
contract, and 8chan was shut down. Days later, Gab.com tweeted that it was adding 1,000 new users
a day (many of them likely former 8chan users) (Paul 2019). Gab.com gained national attention in
2018, when it was revealed that a gunman who committed a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh,
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Sexuality and gender in the new online white nationalism
Pennsylvania, had frequently posted anti-Semitic messages to the site. While 8chan is now shut
down, the racist and anti-Semitic ideology it cultivated is migrating to the far corners of the internet,
with no signs of slowing down.
A few imageboards and chat rooms have inspired a number of high-profile mass murders in the
last few years, one indicator that the online white nationalist movement is growing in membership,
influence, and violence. While both racist and anti-racist political movements utilize digital media
to achieve their goals, white nationalists have proven adept at using social media to amplify their
message. Their expansion into what has come to be called the “manosphere” has proven particularly
effective and dangerous. The manosphere is a constellation of sites where individuals gather to
decry what they believe is a loss of male power and “aggrieved manhood” (Ging 2017). I argue
that homophobia and anti-feminism are now central recruitment pathways into the online white
nationalist movement. While these issues have been central to white nationalism for decades,
the gendered politics have changed as the movement has expanded from early self-contained
cybercommunities and alternative news venues into a wide variety of social media spaces. In
effect, white nationalists use online venues to racialize homophobia and anti-feminism, affirming
a normative white masculinity. They articulate a view of white racialization as both privileged and
under attack; in this view, gender and sexuality are central to ideas about biological and cultural
superiority. This provides a potent mix for both expanding the movement and inspiring outbursts of
violence.
In this article, I situate the research on the gendered nature of white nationalism, exploring
how the current moment allows homophobia and anti-feminism to serve as recruitment streams
for racist radicalization. In doing so I lay out several potential research questions well suited for
feminist anthropological analysis about the relationship between changing gender relations and
various forms of recalcitrant politics (Hale, Calla, and Mullings 2017), many of which appear more
focused on race or nationalism, but—as I will argue—are undergirded by gendered concerns. This is
an important endeavor today, as the white nationalist movement has expanded in membership and
inspired a rash of violence. This analysis also speaks to a variety of authoritarian movements that
are reshaping democracies around the world, often uniting patriarchal politics with racial platforms
(Bjork-James forthcoming).
Leith Mullings (2005, 669) argues that anthropology has had a contradictory relationship with
the study of racism, both contributing to evolutionary theories that justified European colonial
expansion, slavery, and eugenics and later challenging the very scientific racism it helped to
create. While anthropology’s contribution to anti-racism over the last few decades has been, per
Mullings’s description, “modest,” the possibilities for anthropological work to explore and challenge
the structural production of race and its relations to broader material inequalities are great (Mullings
2005). Ethnography, including cyber-ethnography, is particularly well suited for multidisciplinary
theoretical engagements that can challenge racial thought (see Brodkin 1999). Given that racial
identities are “social processes that are created and recreated by people in their daily lives” (Perry
2002, 3), ethnographers can provide important insights into the interactions between broad political
changes—such as national discussions about immigration, demographic shifts, etc.—and individual
identities and political positions. A feminist, anti-racist anthropology—that is, an anthropological
approach that takes seriously both concerns about gender and the production of racial meaning
and inequality—can serve as an important guide to understanding this movement. I begin with a
history of the online white nationalist movement, and then note how it has changed in the past five
years.
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Gender, Sexuality, and Online White Nationalism
I have studied the online white nationalist movement since 2004, when I began researching
Stormfront.org, then the largest white nationalist chat room, with the question of how participants
in this online community understood whiteness. I found broad conversations about gender, sexuality,
and the nuclear family (Statzel 2006). The site hosts specific forums for women and homemaking, a
children’s forum with games, and a dating section. A significant amount of the discussion focuses on
issues of reproduction, child-rearing, gender, and sexuality. White women are frequently discussed
as victims of sexual violence by men of color and Jews. I came to see whiteness in this venue as
a gendered geography, where women produce children and cultivate moral values in the home, and
men use strength and valor to defend that home from others seen as threats, an insight reflected
in other feminist studies of this movement. As in all nationalisms, sexuality, gender, and the family
figure prominently in white nationalism (Mayer 2000; McClintock 1997; Yuval-Davis 1997).
When I began studying Stormfront in 2004, it had a membership of 30,000. As of 2019, the
site has well over 100,000 members and around 25,000 visitors a day. Although a number of other
racist groups have established an online presence, Stormfront is unique in providing an expansive
platform for various elements of the racist right to converge and share ideas and news (Caren,
Jowers, and Gaby 2012). Today, the online white nationalist movement has expanded dramatically,
largely through the growth of social media.
What unites this movement is a commitment to separate whites from the broader integrated
society, focusing opposition on “intermarriage, minority population growth, growing minority crime
rate, increasing immigration, and the loss of jobs to minorities” (Dobratz and Shanks-Meile 1997,
114; Kaplan and Weinberg 1998). Sociologist Abby Ferber (1998, 5) found that the central idea
in white supremacist literature is that whiteness is threatened, and the main concern is “almost
exclusively articulated as the threat of interracial sexuality.” Ferber shows the meaning of the threat
of miscegenation by exposing that both race and gender are based on binary social constructions
that rely on “borders and boundaries.” Racial categories, like gender categories, require boundary
maintenance, and what secures both the race and gender binaries is heterosexuality. Thus, a racially
segregated heterosexuality secures both whiteness and the masculine/feminine binary. Sociologist
Jessie Daniels (1997) writes, “The highest duty and honor of a white man, according to white
supremacist discourse, is to preserve the white family and with it a hierarchy of race, gender, and
sexuality.” Anti-Semitism, particularly a conspiracy of what is referred to as a “Zionist Occupation
Government,” is blended with these sexual fears by framing Jews as secretly controlling institutions
throughout the West, from governments to banks to media. Jews are blamed for misogyny, feminism,
and encouraging miscegenation.
In many ways, white nationalist beliefs reflect formerly hegemonic racial systems. Scholars have
demonstrated the ways that race and racism are organizing devices of modern states (Goldberg
2002; Hylton 2006; Marx 1998). Anti-Black racism in particular has profoundly shaped institutions
in the United States (Smith 2015; Taylor 2016) and globally (Bowen et al. 2017). Anti-Muslim
sentiment, too, has come to define forms of public culture over the past two decades across
North America (Razack 2007). In an essay about her study of women in white supremacist
movements, Kathleen Blee (2004, 52) writes that although the “ideas that racist activists share
about whiteness are more conscious, elaborated, and tightly connected to political action than
those of mainstream whites … they also reflect the views of whiteness dominant in mainstream
culture.”
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The concerns about gender and sexuality that animate the contemporary white nationalist
movement have strong historical precedent. Norms rooted in patriarchal heterosexuality have
served as a central axis for the construction of European nationalism (Mosse 1988) and
racial categories in both colonial America (McClintock 1997; Povinelli 2006; Stoler 2002) and
post-independence United States (Dorr 2004; Jordan 1968), particularly in the form of antimiscegenation laws (Pascoe 2009). Anne McClintock’s (1995) groundbreaking work on the role of
sexuality in the colonial period argues that race, gender, and class were interconnected in intimate
relations, actual and represented (see also Ivekovic and Mostov 2002; Stoler 1995). In the United
States, racism was most commonly justified as a protection of white sexual morality, particularly
the purity of white women from a perceived threat from African American or Native American men
(Collins 2004; Dorr 2004; Hartman 1997; Jordan 1968). Anti-miscegenation remained a central
concern of white society throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Frederickson
1971). Given the historical coarticulation of whiteness, nationalism, and gender and sexual norms, it
is no surprise that the contemporary white nationalist movement similarly focuses on these issues.
White Nationalism 2.0
Social media has dramatically changed the recruitment possibilities of organized cyber-racism, as
well as its sexual politics. In Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil
Rights, Jessie Daniels (2009) focuses less on the recruitment potential posed by white supremacist
sites than on their epistemological impacts. Daniels describes as particularly effective “cloaked”
white supremacist websites, sites that were designed to appear unbiased and educational but were
covertly racist. Through creating web content about the civil rights movement or the Holocaust,
some white supremacists learned to disguise racist propaganda as historical fact, to great success.
Many cloaked sites consistently appear as top options in Google search engine results (for years, a
Google search for “Martin Luther King” turned up a white supremacist site as one of the top sites)
(Daniels 2009). While white nationalists sought to expand their ranks through online activity, there
was little evidence of their effectiveness.
Whereas the first instantiations of online racism focused on building communities and sharing
alternative news (Statzel 2008), the prevalence of social media allows for an expansive landscape
to spread the movement’s ideology. The reality that so many people outside of the movement spend
time online, often constructing social identities, provides many potential recruitment targets for
white nationalists. Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, 4chan, and Facebook were all developed
primarily for social interaction, but racist activists have continued to make these sites their own.
This new media ecology has been a significant boon for the movement, which had spent decades
cultivating unique cybercommunities frequented primarily by those already converted to white
nationalism. While their ranks grew steadily and slowly, it wasn’t until the expansion of social media
that they were able to take full advantage of the internet to expand their movement. By strategically
using social media, white nationalists have been able to achieve a platform that far outshines their
actual numbers. A 2016 report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism found
that white nationalist groups added 22,000 followers on Twitter between 2012 and 2016, about a
600 percent growth (Berger 2016).
Jessie Daniels (2018) points to the importance of internet technologies in the growing white
nationalist movement, particularly the role of algorithms in facilitating the expansion of this
ideology. For example, when Dylann Roof searched for “black on white crime,” the search engine
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algorithm directed him to a white supremacist website (Daniels 2018). This is part of a far larger
problem where internet algorithms tend to perpetuate racial bias (Noble 2018).
Of all online communities, perhaps the most important to the expansion of white nationalism is
the proliferating manosphere. While the men’s rights movement has been growing for some time,
social media provides it with a much larger audience (Hodapp 2017). Although these sites tend not
to emphasize white supremacy explicitly, their focus on criticizing feminism and celebrating virile,
heterosexual patriarchy provides a cohesive overlap to the gender politics of white nationalism.
A backlash against feminism, particularly a critique that feminism has “gone too far” and is
now victimizing men, is a central complaint in this online community (Rafail and Freitas 2019),
as evidenced by the recent Twitter campaign “Him Too” that frames men as victims of false
accusations of sexual assault. “Incels,” men who identify as involuntarily celibate, are a large part
of this community (Donnelly et al. 2010). Self-identified incels congregate on Reddit and 4chan
and have generated a language culture that frames men as entitled to sex with attractive women
and describes a cruel feminist movement that oppresses men, thus depriving a large population of
straight men of sex. And, similarly to white nationalist social media spaces, incel sites have inspired
a number of violent outbursts, including mass shootings in Isla Vista, California; Toronto, Canada;
and Tallahassee, Florida. Alex DiBranco (2017) finds that male supremacism is an increasing focus
of online organizing. While white women historically played important roles in racist movements
(McRae 2018), this new iteration of white nationalism often inspires a militarized movement of
primarily young men. Unlike Stormfront, with its forums celebrating homebirths and homeschooling
and an active forum for women, white nationalism 2.0 embraces a more hostile sexism.
Other sites, like Gab.com, were developed not expressly for white supremacists but for the
expression of sensitive or violent content that might be censored elsewhere; they have similarly
become sites for radicalization. As Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram limit the presence of violent and
racist discourse, these conversations are migrating toward sites that protect hate speech. Take, for
example, 4chan, which was created in 2003 by a fifteen-year-old American as an English-language
version of a Japanese anime imageboard. In 2011, a 4chan subforum called /pol/, or politically
incorrect, was created. This site, along with 8chan (founded in 2013) and the Reddit forum /the
Donald/ (founded during Trump’s presidential campaign), became spaces where young men with
various grievances came together. In observing these sites, it is clear that individuals espousing
white nationalism have worked to turn these sites into white nationalist recruitment venues. In these
spaces white men are taught to understand themselves in a new way: superior, hypermasculine,
and under attack. Instead of a random grouping of grievances, white nationalists then unite these
into a coordinated attack based on anti-Semitism. White nationalists identify Jews as the center
of a conspiracy that is bent on attacking and destroying whites (Ward 2017), sometimes through
immigration and sometimes through challenging heterosexuality, patriarchy, or birth rates.
Men who visit these sites due to a sense of aggrieved manhood are then introduced into a
conspiracy where—so long as they are identified as white—their gender complaints are framed as
a result of an anti-white conspiracy. This serves to racialize misogyny. An example is found in the
language of the “red pill,” a reference to the film The Matrix, where a red pill is offered as a way
to strip delusions and make a hidden reality visible. Across the far right, to be “red pilled” means
different things depending on the group using the term. On the Reddit forum Red Pill, for example,
to be “red pilled” is to awaken to the reality that women are dominant in society, a belief that sees
feminism as a movement focused on oppressing men. Overtly white nationalists, such as members
of the group Identity Evropa, use the term to refer to adopting a belief that white people are actually
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a besieged group. This meme, then, can have male supremacist or white supremacist meaning, or
both, depending on the context. The ambivalent meaning of internet memes—particularly as they
travel—can also have the effect of spreading ideology.
Conclusion
I propose that emphasizing homophobia and anti-feminism can have the effect of racializing young
white men’s discontent. This discontent can stem from anything from economic marginalization due
to increasing stratification under neoliberalism (Maskovsky and Bjork-James, 2020) to frustration
about being unable to find a romantic or sexual partner (as in the case with incels). The class make-up
of these sites is unclear, but this discourse succeeds in minimizing ideas of class by prioritizing the
view that a raced masculinity is a primary site of identity. More work is needed that takes seriously
how social media facilitates the production of raced and gendered selves for various ends. Clearly,
online cultures can facilitate racist or anti-racist ends; after all, #BlackLivesMatter started as a
hashtag and has largely grown online (Taylor 2016), and “Black Twitter” has inspired a variety of
anti-racist campaigns (Sharma 2013). Within the broader reality of race and cyber identities and
ideologies, there is a need for more anti-racist, feminist analysis of the spread of white nationalism
online, particularly in relation to the expanding manosphere.
Feminist anthropologists have shown in multiple contexts how attending to the meanings of
gender within cultural formations often changes how they are understood. As Michelle Rosaldo
(1980, 390) reminds us, “what we can know will be determined by the kinds of questions we learn
to ask.” Centering questions about gender often changes the stories we tell. Bringing such a lens
to the study of contemporary racist movements helps to show how a gender ideology is often at
their core. Such an analysis also reveals that a backlash to feminist and queer gains can manifest
in multiple formats, including in nationalist and racist movements. More research is needed on how
and why these gendered articulations remain at the center of online white nationalism, why they
have changed, and how this changed gender ideology will impact the movement and its relationship
to violence.
Going back to the 8chan quote at the beginning of this essay, contemporary racist online
discourse articulates a conspiracy where Jews emasculate and queer white men to make them easier
to control. On these sites, to claim a dominant male identity is, at least for men of European descent,
also to claim a racial identity. This conspiracy shows that the expansion of LGBTQ rights and feminist
cultural and political articulations can provide fodder for racist actors, as they frame these gains
as attacks on white men. We need a robust feminist, anti-racist anthropology to help understand
the ways a backlash against feminism and LGBTQ rights is fueling many conservative movements,
including nurturing a revival in racist violence. These recalcitrant politics not only fuel an expanding
white nationalist movement in the United States but are animating similar nationalisms around the
world. Perhaps the clearest example is found in the 2018 ban on gender studies master’s programs
in Hungary, signed into law by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. A feminist, anti-racist anthropology
will be critical to unraveling why concerns about gender are animating both white nationalism
and authoritarian movements across the globe, and possibly in covering ways to counter their
spread.
Note
1
Accessed on 03/16/2019, the website 8chan has since been shut down.
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The Forum 2020; 18(3): 297–317
Jeffrey M. Berry*, James M. Glaser and Deborah J. Schildkraut
Race and Gender on Fox and MSNBC
https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2020-2011
Abstract: The political content on cable TV is symptomatic of the highly polarized
era we live in. In this study of Fox and MSNBC, we sampled primetime evening
programs on both and analyzed each major story presented. Our approach
conceptualized each segment as a narrative and, as such, we coded the political
arc of these stories and focused on the villains animating each set piece. On Fox the
villains, who are harshly denounced, are disproportionately people of color. In
contrast, on MSNBC, the villains are rarely minorities. Likewise, women are
disproportionately the villains on Fox, frequently described as unintelligent and
out of control. On MSNBC, women are almost never the villain. Despite the abrasiveness of its content, Fox’s business model works as there is a substantial
audience for this type of outrage programming.
Does anything reflect America’s hyper-polarized politics more than cable network
news? Fox Cable News and MSNBC are guided by a unique business model,
attracting viewers by offering content designed to polarize them more than they
already are. Partisan talk is part and parcel of a free society and there are plenty of
historical antecedents for the vitriol that emanates all day, every day, from cable.
Yet, that such talk represents a form of freedom does not mean it is without
consequences.
As we’ve watched the two networks over the years, we’ve noticed distinctive
treatment of two central concerns in American politics, race relations and gender
equality. As the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements have gained
strength, questions emerged in our minds as to how the networks inform the
ongoing debate about the best path forward on both
