The Great Replacement and Gender: the Far-Right use of Gender in Contemporary Conspiracy Narratives

Research on conspiracy narratives tend to overlook the role of gender, despite its crucial importance in uniting far-right actors, and linking various conspiracy narratives together. Prominent far-right conspiracies like the Great Replacement, White Genocide, Eurabia have been examined through the lens of racial and ethnic components in enemy construction, but gender, masculinity/femininity and sexuality also play a pivotal role. Gender adds concrete context to grievances and fuels anxieties about demographic decline, societal destabilization, and status loss using falling birth rates as fact-based evidence. The lack of focus on gender in current research leaves an essential dimension of these theories insufficiently examined. This paper looks at how masculinity, femininity, and normative gender debates have become central themes in far-right conspiratorial narratives, with feminists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and gender scholars together with Muslims and Jews, depicted as main threats to the imagined racial purity and cultural homogeneity of the West.