White Sexual Politics: The Patriarchal Family in White Nationalism and the Religious Right

Abstract

In this paper, I explore how the US-based Religious Right and white nationalist movements are both organized around a similar politics of gender rooted in defending the patriarchal family. While the broader meanings of the family differ in each framework—either providing the foundation for the racial nation or the religious order—there is surprising agreement across these movements around understanding the family as a heterosexual and patriarchal institution that is under attack. Based on long-term ethnographic research in both movements, I show how defending the heteropatriarchal family provides valorized gendered identities for their participants along with a moral justification for prejudice, particularly through a discourse of defending women and children from feminism and queerness. This analysis shows how contemporary right-wing and authoritarian movements rally around this family—modern, classed and raced, and patriarchal—as an anchor of stability in a time of increasing economic and social change.