This article asks how an anti‐racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion of the radical right, with a focus on the online white nationalist movement. It demonstrates how homophobia and anti‐feminism are two of many pathways into the online white nationalist movement. In effect, white nationalists work through online venues to racialize homophobia and anti‐feminism. They articulate a view of white racialization where gender and sexuality are central to ideas about biological and cultural superiority. Through tracing the linkages between gender, sexuality, and race in different ideations of the white nationalist movement, this article shows a continuity of these core ideas to white nationalism across different manifestations of the movement, even as the expression of them has changed. An aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways an anti‐racist, feminist anthropology provides tools to understand how concerns about gender animate this authoritarian movement.

In this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique understanding of sexuality and the person. As my respondents explained to me in over sixteen months of field research, evangelical rejection of LGBT individuals and practices is rooted not simply in prejudice but also in a culturally specific notion of personhood that requires Christian bodies to orient themselves to the divine. In evangelical Christianity, the body, along with its capacity to feel and communicate, is understood as a porous vessel receptive to communication with God. In contrast to a dominant idea that sexual orientations shape individual identities, sexuality within this religious world instead facilitates the movement of moral forces across individual bodies and geographic scales. Sexual desires and sexual acts are broadly understood in evangelical cosmology as communicative mediums for supernatural forces. This understanding of sexuality as a central component of moral agency shapes widespread practices of ostracism of people who identify as LGBT within evangelicalism and often leads to anti‐LGBT political positions. Claiming an LGBT identity is seen as making one a distinct kind of person incommensurate with evangelical porosity. [evangelical, sexuality, embodiment, United States]

This article explores the relevance of the ethnographic study of the Internet for feminist scholars interested in families. The online world is an emerging field site for feminist scholars investigating spousal, parental, and kin relations, one that opens up new arenas of study but also requires novel methodological approaches. The proliferation of cybercommunities and computer-mediated communication has radically altered how we live, communicate, and gather, share, and produce knowledge. This is particularly true for families, as new media technologies have impacted how families form, interact, and understand themselves and the world. Web 2.0 offers the potential for new imagined communities, new forms of social and political resistance, and new identities and networks that can transcend or reinforce traditional understandings of community, nation, and family. This article begins with a critical review of relevant literature (primarily from the United States) and offers several case studies that show the relevance of cyber-ethnography to feminist researchers interested in families. As the cases illustrate, ethnographers face new methodological and ethical issues associated with cyber studies and cyber-ethnography. Given the changing media landscapes families find themselves in, scholars of gender and families are well served to think through the effects of new media on families and the methodological benefits and challenges for studying these new forms of communication.

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.

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