ABSTRACT
Women have long been active in the mobilization of far-right movements. Living at the intersection of whiteness and femaleness, women of the Capitol riot aligned themselves in proximity to power, framing and performing forms of post-feminist whiteness in roles outlined by Campion (2020) as violent actors, thinkers, facilitators, promoters, activists and exemplars. Rejecting liberatory intersectional feminism, women instead aligned themselves with a logic of neoliberalism, embracing competition and collusion with white masculinity as a structural ally. Female involvement in the military and police over the past fifty years, allows women to embrace a more stereotypically masculine performance of female gender identity through performances of power and acts of dominance. White-supremacist forms of ‘feminism’ model traditional feminine roles such as the ‘classic woman’ offering solace in the limited roles of cis-heteronormative wife and mother. This chapter charts some of the terrain of gendered performances at the riot, in the context of the social and cultural conditions that foment this display, considering the on-going impacts and consequences of theories and performances of race and gender in America. We argue that these performances signify an undercurrent of threat and danger signifying the ever-present politics of white supremacy and misogyny.
