Make Women Great Again: women, misogyny and anti-capitalism on the right

Abstract

Neo-confederate blogger Dissident Mama describes the January 6 Capitol Insurrection as "#resistance without the corporate sponsorship".  In a series of blogs, she appropriates the language of anti-capitalist movements to defend armed resistance from Charlottesville to the Capitol.  In this essay I look at the role of women, like Dissident Mama, in far-right activism online, both their role in organizing and the ways in which they use anti-capitalist language to reinforce the gender roles of post-war American breadwinner capitalism. This emerges out of real failures of liberal feminism and late capitalism, but instead appropriates critiques of capital that might challenge the identity politics of the white right, instead encouraging the reinvestment in the conservative social order. Arguing for a rerun to "traditional" roles as an answer to economic as well as social challenges, the women of the right see home as a battle, and their language displaces anxieties about capitalism onto anxieties about gender, family and love.