This thesis examines how gender and race are used to shape the far right’s ideas and discourses surrounding inclusion, exclusion, and threat. My research has been conducted through a non-participant digital ethnography of the publicly available online content of the British far-right and white nationalist organisation Patriotic Alternative. Through analysis of their main webpage, blog articles, social media, and video streaming, a holistic view has been taken of the movement’s online material and discourses across eight months of 2022. Patriotic Alternative’s views on racialised gender form a cornerstone of their ideology, from propaganda about the alleged dangers to young, white British women from the racialised, male, immigrant ‘invader,’ to their white supremacist views that place the white, heterosexual, nuclear family at the heart of the nation. Despite the group’s misogyny, women still play a major role in content creation, activism, and leadership, and are integral to shaping discourses on white femininity, domesticity, and the family. Patriotic Alternative hold a clear view of a hierarchical society shaped by normative gender, hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, where the natural order paints women as caregivers and men as providers and protectors, and use this to articulate their ideas of inclusion and exclusion. This is underpinned by conspiratorial thinking where antisemitic and anti-authority attitudes are laced with conspiracy theories about existential threats to whiteness, such as deliberate demographic replacement through mass immigration and collapsing white birth rates. Gender remains integral to these, with this existential threat used to justify the group’s opposition to feminism and abortion to protect the white race. Rather than viewing gender as merely adjacent to or synergistic with the far right’s views on race, I draw on a framework of critical whiteness to argue that both are intertwined and integral to white nationalism’s conception of a hierarchical society.
