This post is a reproduction of a section from our white paper, Countering Male Supremacist Ideology and Violence: Challenges and Recommendations (PDF).
Barrier: Failure to Recognize Misogyny as Ideology
The failure to recognize misogyny as ideology has been a foundational barrier to countering male supremacism and gender-based violence. While, for instance, racist and xenophobic motivations for violence are commonly understood as ideological, media and research often frame male supremacist violence as apolitical–even when perpetrators explicitly articulate misogynist beliefs. Especially when misogynist perpetrators do not have clear ties to a specific male supremacist community or group, analysis is more likely to position them as apolitical, often suggesting that mental health is the issue.2 This neglect creates major gaps in anti-violence and pro-democracy work. It often results in recommendations for individualized treatment of extreme supremacists rather than systemic cultural and institutional change to prevent violence.
In scholarship on right-wing or radical/extreme/far-right ideology, especially as this area of study developed in the West in the 21st century, misogyny was commonly overlooked as one of its core characteristics. When gender was referred to at all, it usually meant the role of women in right-wing movements. Researchers often euphemize misogynist and anti-LGBTQ ideology, especially that coming from religions, by describing it as traditional values or morality. This cedes ground to male supremacists, such as the Christian Right in the United States, who use euphemistic terminology to present their beliefs as legitimate in the public sphere.
Gender-based violence, harassment, and discrimination are so ubiquitous that they are deeply normalized across global society–what can be understood as the invisibility of the universal. Transgender and cisgender women, transgender men, and non-binary people are disproportionately the targets of domestic violence and sexual assault, and cisgender men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of such violence. Yet this “everyday terrorism” is rarely recognized in monitoring of hate crimes or extremist violence.
While researchers and organizations analyzing the far-right, hate, and terrorism that previously overlooked misogyny have begun to incorporate assessments of male supremacism into their work in recent years, the long-standing neglect is felt in the prevalence of misconceptions related to this topic. Furthermore, there remains insufficient attention to the interplay among forms of oppression and the foundational role that male supremacism plays in reinforcing the structure and enforcement of authoritarian hierarchies. Lack of incorporation of intersectionality—a concept advanced by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to further understanding of how race, gender, class, and other forms of identity intersect in systems of oppression—into far-right, terrorism, and related studies contributes to these issues.
Recommendation: Invest in Deepening Expertise around Male Supremacist Ideology and Violence
The first step is simple: recognize misogyny as a central ideology in far-right mobilization and authoritarianism worldwide. Second, expand the understanding of supremacist ideology to include “everyday” and structural violence.
The rise in explicitly misogynist violence in several countries has sparked commentary questioning why this is not recognized as ideological, with Canada and Australia now including extreme misogyny in their categorizations of ideologically motivated violent extremism. Journalists, researchers, and practitioners can reshape the conversation by identifying and naming misogynist ideology. While some violent men may also have diagnosable mental illnesses, that is not causal for misogynist violence.
Far-right studies and related fields that have historically minimized the significance of misogyny can rectify their knowledge gap by reading the foundational, interdisciplinary work on this topic. Despite its underrepresentation in far-right studies and related disciplines, research on misogyny and patriarchy is not a new area of study, and substantive work framed around male supremacism has expanded rapidly over the past five years. Far-right and extremism studies theory and curricula can substantively incorporate this body of research on male supremacism (predominantly conducted by women and femme researchers). Organizations that have recently begun to incorporate research on male supremacism into their work on hate or extremism need to allocate greater resources to this topic to make up for gaps in understanding and misconceptions arising from decades of neglect.
While male supremacism needs to be included in existing tracking, programming, and policy developed to counter ideological violence, it is not enough to simply add misogyny to the list. While some countries have hate crime legislation that includes gender, these still neglect pervasive everyday gender-based violence. Incorporating male supremacism and intersectionality focused a spotlight on needs to evaluate current approaches to discern whether or not they are adequate for responding to systemic violence and oppression.
Finally, more work is needed exploring intersections and relationships among types of supremacism. Acceptance of one type of supremacism predisposes people to accept other supremacist ideologies, as they are founded on shared building blocks of dehumanization and entitlement (as discussed in part one of this white paper series). A framework of intersectional supremacism studies offers a structure for examining how multiple forms of ideology interact to enact harm and structure society. For instance, consider how the Proud Boys leverage narratives of cisgender men’s rightful superiority to recruit men of color, with misogyny operating as the glue adhering the group despite its focus on white supremacist goals.
For the full list of references and sources informing this article, please consult the original white paper, ‘Countering Male Supremacist Ideology and Violence: Challenges and Recommendations’.
