Performing Fragility and Masking Hate: Women’s White Supremacist Rhetoric

Abstract

By examining several prominent extremist women, this essay explores the rhetorical maneuvers of female rhetors who espouse supremacist views and promote extremist political platforms, particularly how they seize social media avenues to promulgate their extremist arguments. At the intersection of hegemonic white femininity and white supremacy, these female rhetors perform an assertively defended, yet fragile white womanhood that is enacted in a complicated space of misogyny that denies their agency.