Gender, nativism and militant wellness

Wellness communities, long-time proponents of alternative health practices, were shaped by conspiracy thinking prior to COVID-19. The pandemic and infodemic intensified this trend in Europe, North America and Oceania. Right-wing extremist movements based on conspiracy theories are intersecting with wellness communities and micro-influencers, drawing on a history of enmeshment between discourses of moral and spiritual virtue, nativism/white supremacy, ideological purity, and essentialist understandings of gender/sexuality and bodily health (Baker 2022; Proctor 1988). Through online algorithmic environments, wellness communities have thus intersected with far-right agendas that value heteronormative nuclear family structures. In these online spaces women find dignity as child-bearers and nurturers of the younger generations of members of the nation/‘race’ while men are celebrated as breadwinner warriors. Popular within ‘alt-right’ communities, such spaces share similar aesthetics to ‘crunchy’ wellness social media accounts that valorise women making food from scratch and home-schooling children on a homestead – a lifestyle of apparent self-sufficiency and removed from big agricultural, petrochemical, pharmaceutical and tech corporations. Across Europe, the anti-gender ecofeminist offline activism of younger generations of women is similarly infused with neopagan spiritualities and anticapitalistic and environmentalist concerns, articulating within return-to-rural-living and ‘tradwife’ trends (Della Sudda 2022; Leidig 2023). These wellness discourses share with far-right groups gender essentialism and the idealized notion of ‘feminine nature’, viewing the female body and sexuality as embodying a ‘pure’ idealized pre-modern and pre-industrial natural order which needs to be restored against the ills of modern technology and democracy, including feminism, immigration and cultural diversity. Because they appropriate framings which are not conventionally associated with the far right (such as environmentalism, ecofeminism, alternative healing and a critique of capitalism), these novel gendered and racialized ideologies constitute a powerful means of mainstreaming far-right ideas and may serve as a ‘gateway’ to right-wing extremist mobilization. Drawing on digital ethnography and frame analysis, our paper examines the intertwined construction of gender/sexuality and ethnicity/‘race’ in these emerging ideologies in Europe (France, Italy, UK). In particular, we will consider how the framing of gender/sexuality, ethnicity/‘race’ and wellness are interconnected, and how transnational discourses are re-contextualised in distinctive ways within specific country contexts.