Exploring the Complex and Contradictory Role(s) of Women within the UK Far Right

Social movement studies have recently turned their attention to the far right and
documented the variety of actors and their action repertoires such as party politics, street
mobilisation and online activism (Castelli Gattinara and Pirro, 2018). A key characteristic far
right movements share is their nativism or nationalism, excluding certain 'others' from their
concept of the nation-state (ibid.). There has been a worrying growth in far right support in
recent years, and even if in the UK this has only led to limited electoral gains, they have seen
some considerable successes such as Brexit. This is a problem not only politically, as
mainstream parties react by shifting further to the right, but for society, as far right ideology
threatens social stability (Jackman and Volport, 1996).
The rise of the far right has therefore been a concern for politicians and social scientists
alike, leading to an increase in academic interest in nearly every aspect of the movement
(Mudde, 2002; Ford, Goodwin and Cutts, 2011; Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Portelinha and
Elcheroth, 2016; Inglehart and Norris, 2017, 2019; Miller-Idriss, 2017; Doerr, 2017; Leidig,
2020). Despite this proliferation of research, there is comparatively little work in this field on
gender. Furthermore, those that do focus on this topic are guided by questions of the gender
gap in far right support, as men are more likely to formally participate in the movement than
women (Givens, 2004; Rippeyoung, 2007; Harteveld et al, 2015; Spierings and Zaslove,
2017). More recently, studies have also considered how the far right narrow this gender gap
by instrumentalising gender discourses to 'legitimise' their anti-immigration and antitransgender
mobilisation (Fekete, 2006; Akkerman and Hagelund, 2007; Erel, 2018; Duina
and Carson, 2019; Phipps, 2020).