Recently, historians and researchers from allied disciplines have developed innovative approaches to analyzing the gendered dimensions of white supremacy. Their work has enriched scholarship on the subject and illuminated interplays between gendered and racial hierarchies. Those scholars also sit at the intersection of dynamic fields with expanding graduate student populations and popular audiences. According to data from the American Historical Association, women’s and gender history overtook social history as the most popular topical specialization among U.S.-based historians in the mid–2000s. Meanwhile, the number of historians studying the Right has grown exponentially since the 1990s. Led by scholars analyzing women’s roles in rightwing politics, historians have increasingly come to understand how women activists and ideological constructions of womanhood have been central to rightwing movements, whether mainstream forms of conservatism or white supremacist extremism closer to the fringe. Others have led the field to consider how male supremacism and ideas of masculinity, and those ideas’ relationships with rhetorics of rage, grievance, and entitlement, have shaped those political mobilizations. Recent violence, including the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the January 6th Insurrection, have inspired even more investigations of far-right groups, ideologies, and movements. Academic and popular interests in the gendered dimensions of modern white supremacy have never been higher.

This roundtable gathers scholars currently interrogating connections between gender and modern white supremacist ideologies and movements inside, and sometimes outside, the United States. Using their own work as starting points, roundtable members will discuss methods, sources, and subjects available to anyone interested in researching gender and modern white supremacy. The presentations cover terrain from the 1960s to the present and highlight a range of approaches. Interviews with veterans of the men’s and fathers’ rights movements illuminate how overwhelmingly white groups of activists consciously excluded people of color from their ranks between the 1960s and early 2000s even as they tried to compare fathers’ and men’s rights to the Black freedom movement. Recently declassified records from the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee illuminate women’s practical roles in civil rights–era white supremacist groups, especially Ku Klux Klan organizations. The dystopian novels that have influenced modern white and Christian supremacist communities offer another archive. These texts reveal how today’s extremists use highly gendered historical narratives to imagine, and idealize, a white supremacist future. Contemporary white supremacist movements typically operate in digital ecosystems. For this reason, Stormfront, the longest lived online white supremacist forum, offers a useful venue for analyzing discourses of race, gender, and sexuality among the site’s international user bases. Through discussions of these sources and approaches, this panel will take stock of recent developments in studies of gender in modern white supremacist movements and ideologies and suggest areas for further research.