Within mainstream modern liberal feminism—especially as filtered through America’s bitterly polarized culture wars—to be feminist is self-evidently to be left-wing. Admittedly, one need not dig very deep among “anti-feminist” writers to find individuals who seem to dislike women. And especially on the wilder fringes of the contemporary online right, it is easy to find instances of virulent woman-hating. What, then, are we to make of conservative women? Do they merely suffer from false consciousness and internalized misogyny?
One of the many frustrating aspects of The Women of the Far Right, a new academic study of women in right-wing internet subcultures, is that this crude hypothesis is never interrogated. The book’s author, Eviane Leidig, has the progressive views you would expect of a postdoctoral fellow in culture studies, and the book itself is no very extensive survey either of the far right or of its female adherents. Rather, it surveys a handful of right-wing female online influencers, active during the period between Trump and Covid, circa 2016 to 2020. A more accurate title would have been “E-Girls of the Alt-Right.”
Within its narrow ambit, Leidig’s overall argument does not extend far beyond the observation that right-wing female social media influencers use practices typical of social media influencers—such as mixing personal disclosure with general commentary and inviting audience feedback—to build rapport with their audiences and thus propagate right-wing opinions, all of which are self-evidently false and malign. But even with this narrow range, made narrower by its author’s ideological presets, the survey lets slip enough thought-provoking details to invite closer examination of the thorny question of conservative women.
