Gender and Far-Right Women in the Digital Age: Leaders, Members, Influencers, and Followers

Abstract

The far right constitutes an increasingly multifaceted and evolving constellation (Blee et al., 2021; Gattinara & Pirro, 2019), encompassing diverse actors such as political parties, grassroots movements, subcultural communities, and loosely connected online ecosystems. Here anti-feminist, anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses and traditionalist/essentialist gender norms play a central role as key axis of alliance-building and ideological convergence (Meret & Scrinzi, 2024). Simultaneously, the far right has strategically appropriated gender equality issues to advance nativist and exclusionary agendas (Scrinzi, 2024; Farris, 2017). Younger female influencers engage in online antigender/antifeminist (informal) leadership/activism promoting nostalgic ideals of traditional womanhood, gender essentialism, and critiques of gender equality policies and feminism (Stotzer and Nelson, 2025), while instrumentalizing demographic anxieties to reinforce nativist narratives. ‘Tradwives’ and identitarian digital subcultures are often linked (ideologically and sometimes organizationally) to broader antigender/far-right mobilizations. This new sphere of female digital leadership/activism can represent a novel channel of recruitment into far-right groups, raising questions about digital radicalization (Leidig 2023; Darby 2021; Shearing, 2025). Unlike traditional party-based/movement-based politics, digital arenas enable far-right women leaders and their followers to use personalized and commodified practices, and personality-driven forms of communication. Digital environments have become crucial arenas for the diffusion of gendered far-right metapolitics, where ideological dissemination occurs through health/lifestyle contents and aestheticized affective politics rather than through traditional activism/party mobilization (Pichel-Vázquez & Enguix Grau, 2021). Despite these scholarly developments, limited research has examined notions of leadership, charisma, and leader-and-members dynamics, in ways that connect this emerging scholarship on far-right female actors in the digital space with the established literature on women, gender and activism in far-right parties/movements. These point to gendered division of work whereby women mobilize around ‘women’s issues’ such as the family or education, which appear as non-threatening and non-ideologically motivated (Bellé 2025; Blee 2002; Scrinzi 2024). Female party leaders and activists enact political performances of gender to negotiate the contradiction between far-right masculinist culture and their participation and visibility in such movements/parties (Geva 2020; Meret 2015; Meret, Siim, Pingaud 2016). Here too, women are key to engaging in seemingly apolitical activities and messages which significantly contribute to mainstreaming far-right ideas. This panel aims at promoting a dialogue between, on the one hand, research on women/gender in ‘traditional’ party/movement-based activism and leadership, and, on the other, studies of far-right gendered digital subcultures and of women as digital activists and (informal) leaders. The panel welcomes contributions engaging with these various issues through diverse methodological and interdisciplinary approaches. Possible themes include: • How the digital subcultures of ‘tradwives’ and emerging contribution of women to the ‘manosphere’/red pill digital communities are linked to broader anti-gender networks and/or far-right parties/movements; • How women activists in far-right parties/movements engage in digital activism and the use of social media for political purposes; • How antifeminist digital activism can constitute a gateway of recruitment into far-right parties/movements; • How gendered ideological contents are produced, shared, and consumed by women in these digital milieus; • How this growing hybridization between ‘traditional’ far-right politics and far-right digital subcultures sheds new light on notions of far-right leadership, strategy, and ideology.

Title	Details
Female Leaders and the Populist Right in the Nordic countries	View Paper Details
An intersectional approach to analyzing far-right women’s activism: Gender, generational and class differences among female activists of the Lega (Italy) and the Rassemblement national (France)	View Paper Details
Anti-(trans)gender politics as the new frontier of femonationalism	View Paper Details
Comparing Far-Right Women’s Engagements with Feminism: Collective Identity Repertoires in France and Germany	View Paper Details
Varieties of Femonationalism in Far-right Female Leadership: Comparing Le Pen, Meloni and Weidel	View Paper Details