Caitlin Graziani
Caitlin Graziani is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at University of California, Davis. Her research includes thinking about the creation and maintenance of digital publics like the manosphere as well as how these communities travel between digital and non-digital space in violent ways that reproduce dominant formations of sexuality, gender, and race. She is interested in how these practices help create and maintain affective relationships and settler colonial subjectivities among neo-fascist organizations and alt-right communities, among others.
“‘Your Children’s Body is Your Private Property’: White Supremacy and Settler Colonial Rhetoric Among the Far and Alt-Right”
1. Introduction
The alt-right movement, which comprises a part of the far-right wherein the focal ideology centers around a belief that white people are under attack, utilizes a rhetoric of white supremacy and anti-Indigeneity to sustain a relationship to reproduction and children that rests on notions of ownership and property. I will demonstrate how the language and rhetorical strategies that these groups use reproduce settler colonial sentiment through associations between children, ownership, and land. Colonial notions of white heterosexual reproduction are made visible through the use of dog whistles, antiphrasis, and appeals to audience by members of the alt-right. It is through this discursive process that the settler comes to know themselves and the concept of family, and colonized communities are produced in such a way that they are either implicated in this process or disappeared entirely. By looking at the rhetorical tools used, we can see circuits of power in the relationship between speaker and audience that serve to reinscribe and maintain settler ideologies about family and property. They become tools through which both the speaker and audience maintain a stable and shared sense of identity. These strategies create a sense of self and community that is dependent upon continual Indigenous disappearance and colonial practices of land privatization and ownership. By tracing rhetoric through anti-sustainable development conservative conference panels by a far-right conspiracy theorist and twitter posts by far and alt-right members, I trace the movement of settler colonial rhetoric from offline to online, demonstrating the breadth of such discursive practices, which ultimately serve to shore up settler colonial identity that works to disappear Indigenous life.
The language of sustainable development resistance and conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement and QAnon rely on what Mark Rifkin terms “the common sense of national life”– the idea of a particular kind of civilized, bourgeois homemaking that constitutes normative ways of living.[1] Rifkin is writing specifically about heteronormativity and settler formations of family, care, and governance which serve to position Indigenous formations of family and political subjectivity as dangerous and in contrast with modernity. Here, privatization and ownership are the natural formations of relations, familial and otherwise. An underexplored way to analyze this structure is through an analysis of the quotidian rhetoric by members of the alt-right movement that works to reinforce and reproduce the “common sense of national life” that rests on the erasure of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. By looking at the everyday rhetoric of settler colonialism, we can examine the mechanisms by which settler logics are reproduced through affective and discursive relationships. To demonstrate how this works, I will trace the movement of one far-right individual as she speaks in two conservative conferences, and pair the rhetorical relationships performed with the ones that occur among tradwives and far and alt-right conspiracy theorists on Twitter. The term tradwives is short for traditional wives, which refer to women, most of whom are white, who valorize being a stay-at-home wife, whose fulfillment can be found in submission to her husband in all things. By exploring the rhetorical strategies used in these spaces, I will highlight how the language of property, land, ownership, and reproduction construct and sustain a settler self. This is the preservation of Rifkin’s “common sense” in action.
Colonial thought, desire, and hopes for the future can be analyzed through a reading of the rhetorical strategies used by members of the far and alt-right. Of course, the far and alt-right are not the only communities that construct themselves via settler colonial language; however, I find it imperative to examine how these practices help construct a sense of self whereby violence has become allowable.
1.1 Rhetorical Strategies
To ground my analysis of settler colonial rhetoric within far and alt-right communities, I center my work on three strategies: dog whistles, antiphrasis, and affective appeals. Settler identity is present in rhetorical strategies including political dog whistles, whose meanings are presumed to be already shared, a process that can most closely be termed ‘antiphrasis’, which refers to a rhetorical device in which someone says the opposite of what is actually meant in such a way that signals an in-group meaning, and through affective appeals to the audience.
Far and alt-right communities have increasingly made use of political dog whistles in response to the increasing discourse on sustainable development, migration, and reproduction. A political dog whistle is defined as “an expression or statement that has a secondary meaning intended to be understood by a particular group of people.”[2] For example, the words communal, Agenda 21, and borders are typical dog whistles among the alt-right. Similarly, antiphrasis as a rhetorical tool works so that the opposite of what is actually meant is said in such a way that it is obvious what the true intention is. For settler logics, this signals in groups status much like dog whistles, because the obviousness of the meaning is really only clear to other members of the ingroup. Finally, affective appeals are utilized mostly through questions, both rhetorical and otherwise, calls to action, or references to crisis or doom. Oftentimes, these strategies are used together, to create a discursive relationship between speaker and audience through which settler colonial subjectivity is reinforced and maintained. Through this process, settler identity becomes naturalized, and the relationship between property, ownership, and reproduction becomes solidified.
2. Agenda 21 and Privatization
In September of 2015, the Citizen’s Equal Rights Alliance (CERA) held a conference titled, “This Land Is Our Land…Or Is It? Corrupt & Unconstitutional Federal Indian Policy and Rogue Federal Agencies” in Kalispell, Montana. One session, titled “Integrating Federal Indian Policy with Agenda 21, Agenda 30, and United Nations” was off to a bizarre start. The session’s speaker, Debbie Bacigalupi is an Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist from the Bay Area and has publicly supported both the militia group the OathKeepers and the far-right secessionist movement the State of Jefferson.[3] She might also be recognized as a vocal supporter of white property owners in Klamath County in Oregon, whose ongoing battle over water rights have played out in explicitly and violently anti-Indigenous ways. Most importantly for the CERA conference, Bacigalupi is an outspoken critic of the United Nations’ Agenda 21—a non-binding agreement to encourage global, national, and local solutions to the human impact on the climate. For Bacigalupi, Agenda 21 is an insidious, communist plan to take away the rights and freedoms of Americans. Certainly, her definition for rights, freedoms, and Americans are up to interpretation, but are implicated in her language throughout her talk. I argue that Bacigalupi’s rhetoric points toward a settler colonial subjectivity that rests on an attachment to white reproductivity and ownership over children.
After spending the first twenty minutes of her talk pontificating about corporate logos and children’s books, she focuses on the threat the UN’s nonbinding agreement titled Agenda 21 poses to hard working Americans. Through the use of dog whistles, antiphrasis, and affective? appeals to the audience via ominous speaking tones, pauses, and pointed questions, Bacigalupi paints an image of the American family under attack by way of sustainable development. Peppered throughout are references to Indigenous ways of life that are framed to present harmony and a communal relationship with nature and other humans as dangerous. By association, Indigeneity becomes linked with the destruction wrought (supposedly) by Agenda 21. Ironically, Bacigalupi and the United Nations are doing the same work—actively writing out Indigenous sovereignty by relegating Indigeneity only to its relationship to the political structures of the settler state.
Throughout her talk, Bacigalupi repeatedly uses the phrasing of “Agenda 21” to signal to the destruction of life as she and her audience knows it. Bacigalupi makes a clear connection to private property, (white) reproduction, and sustainability part way through her talk:
If your dollar were to go toward saving what we know is the greatest nation in the entire world. The only nation that has granted you your private property rights. Do you know that private property is also your body? It is your religion, it is your, who you say is your Creator, that is your private property and that is under attack. Your children’s body is your private property. And they want to just completely destroy private property.[4]
Bacigalupi links the body and sense of self with private property. Not only is your body intimately linked to the privatization of property, but your child’s body is also yours to own. As such, the supposed destruction of private property under this amorphous, communal spectre of a fully realized Agenda 21 means the destruction of the child. Bacigalupi’s claim that she and her audience have a mandate to save “the greatest nation in the entire world” and the children within it by resisting a non-binding guide for a sustainable future certainly implies an exaggeration of epic proportions at best, and a mandate to further erase and destroy the possibility of a futurity that centers the thriving of Indigenous life at worst. Similar to other analyses figuring gender, reproduction, and nation together, the (white) child’s body is converted to the nation.[5] The kind of nature that Bacigalupi and others like her do not fear, is the natural-ness of white reproduction, which is, of course, a stand-in for the endurance of the settler colonial nation. Thus, the imposition of a more communal and harmonic relation with land threatens the safety of the child, and therefore, the nation.
The ways in which Bacigalupi links Agenda 21 to private property and ownership of children relies on a practiced interpretation from the audience rather than solely on her literal words. She does not have to imbue every claim with explicit mentions of death or danger for her audience to read these results in her material. She utilizes phrases such as “they want us to be communal with nature,” “it’s about sharing; that’s what this is all about,” “it’s about communalism,” and of course, this quote; “we are the pilot program for an agenda that would bring us all into one big happy family, planet living situation…this is why the borders are not being protected.” These innocuous, or dare I say, positive sounding, remarks are punctuated by ominous pauses and expectant looks at the audience, telling us that sharing, communion with nature, or a big happy family, poses in fact, some sort of danger for the listeners. She links together the use of political dog whistles, antiphrasis, and affective appeals to make an impact. Her speech is an active practice in producing colonial desire and identity. Aside from the loss of private property, Bacigalupi never mentions explicit dangers or consequences of implementing Agenda 21 frameworks. Rather, she relies on the relationship between her and her audience. They share a kind of knowledge that does not need an explicit framing of danger. The word communal is enough. Bacigalupi does not imagine her audience to be pro-United Nations, to be members of Indigenous tribes, to value communal living, or to be interested in the dissolution of borders. Already the identities of the audience members are being fixed, and the audience appears all too happy to maintain this characterization. This is a reciprocal relationship, as the audience actively solidifies this identification with their participation. In this, we can see the ways that settlers maintain their association with colonialism outside of their identification with the structures of state and federal political power.
With the CERA’s conference title explicitly mentioning “Indian Federal Policy,” you might expect the central focus of the sessions to be Indigenous communities and their relationship to federal programs and policies as they relate to environmental sustainability. However, Bacigalupi only talks about Indigeneity explicitly twice, and briefly at that. The first is in her vocal response to a piece written by Chuck Tanner for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), where Tanner discusses the upcoming CERA conference and Bacigalupi’s history of anti-Indigenous political work.[6] She states that she couldn’t possibly be “anti-Indian,” by making the inexplicable statement, “she’s a hero of mine and she’s a lesbian by the way, so if IREHR wants to call me racist…” The “she” in question is a Democratic lawmaker who is also against the implementation of Agenda 21 policies. Her trailing off suggests that she believes her connection with a white lesbian gives her immunity from racism and thus from the undeserved moniker of “anti-Indian.” This speaks tellingly of her association of Indigenous people as a racial category. By conflating race with Indigeneity (not to mention the interesting conflation of non-heterosexuality with racialization), Bacigalupi is contributing to the continued project of elimination of Indigenous communities and bodies.
The refusal to see Indigenous tribes as colonized nations and instead to see them as racialized categories obscures the ongoing structures that necessitate the elimination of these bodies for the continued access and acquisition of land for private property. Racializing Indigenous people reduces the analysis to a static and essentialist racialized category, obscuring the assertion that Indigenous people belong to sovereign nations.[7] And of course, property is what Bacigalupi is concerned with here. By tying private property, conceptualizations of ‘freedom’ and ‘rights,’ and the (unspoken) Indigenous person, Bacigalupi is reproducing a rights and recognition-based relationship to Indigeneity, one that would all too happily legislate the Indigenous out of existence.
The second and final time Bacigalupi mentions Indigeneity is when she references the shared language between sustainable development documents and tribal petitions. We are left to presume, then, that Bacigalupi, and her audience, are linking “corrupt and unconstitutional federal Indian policy” with “rogue federal agencies” as if they are one and the same. Indigenous communities have effectively been disappeared, whose only legacy is found in the meddlesome government and its policies that are viewed as a continual infringement on American rights.[8] Bacigalupi is linking Indigenous communities with the very political institutions that also seek to erase them. The reduction of Indigenous tribes to racial groups, the subtle connection to ‘deviant’ sexuality, and the belief that their land—the land of white farmers– is being attacked, constitutes a form of violent erasure that presumes the disappearance of the Native for white land and livelihood to be in crisis. Bacigalupi’s vehement hatred of Agenda 21’s suggestion to shift to seeing environments regionally implies an inherent, and reductive, reference to Indigenous relationships to land.
While it is true that not everything that connects to sustainability or creating better relationships to the land is inherently Indigenous, Bacigalupi is framing her argument in such a way that it would be irresponsible not to connect her words to anti-Indigenous sentiment, particularly when we consider the titling of her session and of the conference. Violence towards the other, rather than challenging one’s sense of self, actually constitutes it; “violence is not always in conflict with the self or the community but something whose very loss may threaten the self.”[9] Settlers are attached to the conditions of settler colonialism, of violence, because it allows their sense of self, and privilege, to endure. One might be hard pressed to find an explicit enunciation of violence in Bacigalupi’s talk, but it is threaded throughout regardless. When Bacigalupi frames regionalism as a threat, she reproduces a relationship to land that rests on ownership, privatization, and individuality. When she casts loss of ownership of the symbolic child’s body as destruction, she is refusing to see an alternative pedagogy whose foundation is on agency—both the land’s and the body’s.[10] When she frames her talk around “Indian policy” and then never actually discusses it, she is relying on the violence of erasure to maintain her sense of self (and the audience’s as well). Bacigalupi is doing all this while engaging with her audience in ways that position themselves as more than complicit in the reproduction of settler logics—they are active contributors. To not own the bodies of one’s children anymore, to be communal with nature, to be a big happy family—these are things that constitute danger to the boundaries of the settler self. Bacigalupi and her peers understand themselves as being at home in the United States. By this, I mean that their community and sense of belonging is made possible by the (settler) violence of the past, and of the present and future.
Fast forward to 2021, and Debbie Bacigalupi is speaking at another conference. This time, it is at Camp Constitution, and her panel is titled: “Harmony With Nature, Another Huge Land Grab.” Again, she is discussing Agenda 21 and sustainable development, and a few moments stand out. The first is a moment where she shows a video of children singing at a climate conference about the destruction of the natural world. Bacigalupi begins by describing how heart wrenching this video is, as, for her, there’s nothing more beautiful than hearing children sing. She then goes on to say, “these children are innocent, they do not deserve this.”[11] Of course, Bacigalupi is not talking about the injustice of inheriting a world of rapid climate change. She is more concerned with the ways in which children come to know about, and be concerned by, climate change. The reference to innocence suggests a belief that children ought to be unmarked by the politics of sustainability, while mobilizing them herself for the ideological goals of the far-right. Shortly after, she describes a moment during a climate event where she converses with Duke University students, who are telling her about the “no movement”—a movement to have no children. While she does not talk about this for long, she leaves a long space for the indignant cries of the audience, and her shock and disbelief is apparent in her expression. Finally, towards the end of her talk, Bacigalupi begins to talk about the land back movement: “The stolen land movement is the land that we’re standing on right now, belonged to the First Nation forests and because white colonialism, oppressive white colonialism, conquered the land, they [colonizers] stole it. And there’s a movement to get it back. So I told you that this is all about a land grab.” This is the only time she mentions whiteness in her talk, but the direct recognition of her place in the endurance of settler colonialism signals the ways in which her identity as a property owner is tied with white reproduction and anti-Indigeneity. Children become a signifier for the nation in propertied frameworks.
The kind of rhetoric utilized by Bacigalupi is mirrored by far and alt-right Twitter users. Many of these users make more direct connections between whiteness, reproduction, and nation, whereby the child continues to function as a signifier for the nation. More importantly, given the fluid nature of online discourse, these moments have the capacity to reach a wider audience than Bacigalupi’s conference presentations.
3. #whitebabychallenge: In Defense of Children
Renaud Camus popularized the phrase “the Great Replacement” in his 2012 book, Le Grand Remplacement. It has since been used by numerous members of the far and alt-right to describe the conspiracy theory that there is an agenda to bring nonwhite people to the United States for political means. The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York in 2022 that resulted in the deaths of 10 Black people was committed by a man who wrote extensively about the Great Replacement in his manifesto. The number 14 was painted on the barrel of his gun, referencing a popular 14-word slogan among white supremacists reads; “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children,” which echoes the same fear of extinction that the Great Replacement evokes. This is just one of many mass shootings whose perpetrators utilized the language of white replacement. It is, then, impossible to not consider how this language rests on both the disappearance of Indigenous life– after all, whose land is it, if not white land?– and the ownership of children, whose bodies function as a vehicle for a stable (white) future and nation. While there are highly public figures we can point to that are utilizing this rhetoric of replacement and futurity, I am more interested in the quotidian rhetoric used between far and alt-right digital communities to create a sense of identity and belonging that necessitates the disappearance of Indigenous life.
The Twitter account of Grace Shelby is popular among alt-right communities because of her commitment to white reproduction. She is one of many ‘tradwives’ who dedicate themselves to maintaining the white population by increasing the birthrate of white babies.[12] Her most notable claim to fame is her #whitebabychallenge. In one of her tweets, a text image states, with bold, black letters, “My Children Are White,” she states: “White. Say it loud! And most of all, say it proud. There is no upgrade. We’re it. Our children know their value. They will continue our legacy. #WhiteBabyChallenge.”[13] Perhaps this legacy is a reverberation of the 14 words so intensely used by white supremacists. It is certainly an affective appeal to her (presumably white) audience. In another post, she writes: “We encourage our people to multiply in love. Find your White someone and make as many beautiful babies as you can. We need more light in this world.”[14] Of course, these posts are laden with all sorts of assumptions about sexuality– that white people are straight, that they are interested in producing biological children, that this reproduction will occur with another white person, and that there is a legacy attached to the reproduction of white bodies. Grace Shelby’s posts are ripe for a Berlantian analysis, whereby the “light” Shelby references “will only be achieved when the body is safe for the future.”[15] In other words, the fantasy of white reproduction as solution becomes realized when the nation forcibly secures fetal life as an inevitability rather than as a potential. This plays out in the reversal of the protection of the ‘right to choose,’ all while maternal mortality rates for Black mothers are skyrocketing.[16]
By tracking the ‘follows’ and ‘retweets’ on Grace Shelby’s Twitter profile, we find ourselves at the Twitter page of Henrik Palmgren, whose page shows an image tweet of a farmhouse-style landscape with a white woman in tradwife clothing carrying a white baby. The text above the image says: “Tribes will soon become necessary for those who want to preserve a way of life that runs counter to the world. Start finding your people now.”[17] Of course, this sentiment relies on the replacement of Indigenous life such that Indigenous communities become subsumed by the ‘native white.’ A return to land and ‘tribal life’ is figured here as a structure of safety for white families, in stark contrast to the big happy family in harmony with nature that Bacigalupi warns against. This post references the growth of ‘homesteading’ accounts in which white, heterosexual families idealize living off the land as a way to reinscribe white heteropatriarchal family values. In thinking about the use of words like “legacy,” “light,” and “tribe,” it becomes clear that those of the far and alt-right are reproducing the enduring structure of settler colonialism in language. Moreover, through a tricky sleight of language, far and alt-right rhetoric mirrors the language of Indigeneity without marking an affinity, thereby disappearing Indigenous life and naturalizing whiteness and white reproduction in relationship to land. In fact, “tribe” becomes a dog whistle for a whiter, purer fantasy past in which white settlers become figured as the original ‘owners’ of the land.
Taken alongside the conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement, it becomes clear that white children become the currency through which “blood and soil”—the Nazi slogan to refer to a fully white race bounded in specific territory—becomes realized. The subject of the white child then becomes something to be mobilized toward a goal, much in the same way that private property is mobilized by Debbie Bacigalupi to symbolize the vitality of life and the (settler) soul. Settler colonialism in the United States has explicitly linked normative familial reproduction to property rights. Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor, Kim TallBear explores the relationship between reproduction and ownership, writing that “growing the white population through biologically reproductive heterosexual marriage…was crucial to settler colonial nation-building.”[18] Implicit in this is a critique of who gets to have children and whose children are figured as legible in the national imaginary.
The language of the alt and far-right, particularly among the more conspiracy-minded, works as a slippery pipeline from innocuous sounding values to outright violence. In the US, this pipeline violence might look something like this: Women, particularly mothers, concerned with child trafficking turn to movements like “Save the Children” to feel involved in the protection of the nation’s children. This movement is an appendage of the conspiracy theory, QAnon. ‘Protect the children’ quickly becomes ‘protect the sanctity of heterosexuality’ through organizations like Super Happy Fun America (SHFA)—an organization that runs Straight Pride Parades.[19]
It is not a far jump to then, to ‘save the white race.’ Once these ideologies condense, they fall to us in moments like members of SHFA chartering buses to storm the Capitol on January 6th, mass shootings, and kidnapping, among other forms of violence. It is especially interesting to consider how the language of QAnon becomes normalized in social discourse, in ways that reflect the ideology of the conspiracy movement without requiring an explicit affiliation. This process is insidious that those who come to identify with such language might not identify themselves as QAnon believers.
In the Southern Poverty Law Center’s podcast, “Sounds Like Hate”, Geraldine Moriba talks with a woman who left the alt-right white supremacist group Identity Evropa.[20] The ex-member explains the treatment of women who were a part of the group—they were expected to pair with a man who also held membership and they were expected to produce white babies. Much like the wives of KKK members, these women were responsible for “the preservation of the ‘proper place’; of women in society and the maintenance of widespread notions of what constituted acceptable ethical behavior.”[21] Historically, the KKK violently corrected “behavior that specifically threatened the maintenance of the family—especially the existence of undiluted white bloodlines.”[22] For many, particularly the alt-right, whiteness is attached to straightness in a way that cannot be done with other racializations. Indeed, as Gramsci writes that every nation creates a particular kind of citizen the excludes the rest, and that “ U.S. law…implicitly mobilizes such doctrines as part of validating and maintaining a political economy of privatization enacted through various legal measures with respect to issues such as marriage, the transmission of property, home ownership, zoning and child welfare.”[23] While an outline of the legal and political structures that link property to children to belonging is beyond the scope of this paper (and has been illuminated elsewhere), it is imperative to recognize that these structures move fluidly between policy and people. By this, I mean that the ideological bolsters of property and ownership that sustain settler identity becomes recognizable in the language between individuals, and this rhetorical maintenance is particularly visible in alt and far-right communities. This is particularly salient in the contemporary moment, where a number of states are working on banning books and information about sex, sexuality, and gender. Transphobic discourse becomes mobilized such that the child is framed as a stand-in for the nation similar to the other rhetorical moves I have outlined earlier.
By continuing a historical thread that frames non-reproductive, non-white sexuality as actively dangerous to children, the current conversations online by self-titled gender critical people works to reinforce a settler subjectivity that rests on children as property.[24] The child is deployed in almost every conversation about anti-trans legislation; “the child, imagined as the future subject of the nation, becomes a symbolic site through which the state harnesses repressive disciplinary power in the name of present sacrifice and future promise.”[25] It is not, however, only the state that is harnessing disciplinary power. More and more gender critical white supremacists can be found attending school board meetings, using settler colonial discourse that figures the child as always already victimized– which suggests the nation as always already a victim in need to defending–, whereby proper control of both child and nation relies on exclusive ownership of what happens to them/it.
Members of the far and alt-right are intensely preoccupied with a crisis of white reproduction. This is demonstrated through hashtag campaigns aimed at increasing the white population, as well as through sexual violence, and all of this is deeply tied to the settler state. As Kim-Puri asserts, “gender, sexuality, state, and nation are mutually constituted.”[26] How members of the far and alt-right understand themselves and their bodies, and those around them, is intimately tied up with national identification and a belief that they are the rightful owners of the land upon which they live. The current discourse around the rights of transgender persons, particularly children, is steeped in settler colonial notions of property. The argument that parents and future parents should have “exclusive power to determine the circumstance in which [they have] a child…wrongly traits future children as the property of their prospective parents.”[27] Of course, this is not an argument that the political structures of the nation should determine parenthood for individuals, but, rather, a provocation on how we uncritically assume ownership over children– that this notion is embedded in how we speak about reproduction and parenting. The refusal to provide gender affirming (and life-saving) healthcare to gender nonconforming children rests on the fervent belief that a child’s body belongs to their parents.
4. Conclusion: Ghostly Assemblages
Part of the always-disappearing Native, whose ghost is necessary for this kind of thinking, rests in the history of boarding schools. The boarding schools of the 1800s and onwards functioned through the literal theft of Indigenous children, and since Indigenous populations were often seen as being capable of being whitened, these children were made to disappear through the violent installation of colonial norms. Given this violent history and its persistence of intent, it makes sense that this genocidal process continues to this day. I argue that settler colonial rhetoric is part of this lasting process. The language of ownership of children, and of the future works to sustain settler colonialism in its enduring structure. These rhetorical strategies become layered upon the history of violent boarding schools, slavery, and child labor, practices that all support the settler colonial system through linking property with reproduction.
The rhetoric around QAnon and ‘save the children’, reproduction and child education, and the challenging of sustainable development policies create a discourse of “white sexual politics”, which works to reinforce white heteropatriarchal norms of (re)production and property.[28] White sexual politics encompass a variety of behaviors and beliefs, but they all return to settler colonial frameworks of normative familial structures and property. Each of these arguments made by the far and alt-right deploy the narrative of the imagined child, which functions both as a stand-in for the nation, and as an extension of settler property. These arguments make liberal use of political dog whistles, antiphrasis, and appeals to audience to signal shared knowledge and functions as an identity and community-making practice that ultimately works to sustain the ongoing structure of settler colonialism within the United States.
During a time of increased legislation determining what care, support, and education on can or cannot provide for children, it is important to state that this is not an argument for removing decisions about childcare from parents. It is, however, a provocation for how we think about what this care and support can look like. Perhaps we can consider bell hooks’ demand that children be provided with full civil rights, that “we acknowledge by our every interaction that they are not property.”[29] Certainly, this must be grounded in a robust decolonial movement that seeks to radically disrupt and challenge the presumed inevitability of the settler state.[30] This paper has contributed to studies of the far and alt-right by centering a discursive analysis of these communities and how their use of language and rhetorical strategies is imbricated in the structure of settler colonialism.
[1] Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? : Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
[2] Merriam Webster, “dog whistle,” accessed December 16, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dog&20whistle.
[3] Montana Voter, “This Land Is Our Land… Or Is It? Part 06”, YouTube, October 06, 2015.
[4] Montana Voter, ibid.
[5] Lauren Gail Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 100.
[6] Chuck Tanner, “Anti-Indian Escalation in Montana: CERA Announces Regional Conference in Kalispell on Heels of Elaine Willman’s Move to Montana”, IREHR, September 17, 2015, https://www.irehr.org/2015/09/17/anti-indian-escalation-in-montana/#_edn11.
[7] Huanani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).
[8] To be clear, I am not arguing that Indigenous voices exist only through government legibility. What I am stating, is that for Bacigalupi and her peers, Indigenous communities have been effectively reduced to their relationship to the settler government. Indigenous scholars such as Huanani-Kay Trask and Leanne Simpson write about the complicated relationship between sovereignty, recognition, and government legibility.
[9] Hagar Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” Political Theory vol. 48(1), 14. Emphasis in text.
[10] One such way of thinking about the agency and autonomy of children is through Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s paper, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.”
[11] Camp Constitution, “Harmony with Nature, Another Huge Land Grab with Debbie Bacigalupi at Camp Constitution 2021”, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSQdo3-Wl2A.
[12] One of many pieces that explore the tradwife movement is Annie Kelly’s “The Housewives of White Supremacy”, New York Times, June 01, 2018. Archived. https://web.archive.org/web/20200122154237/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt-right.html.
[13] @shelby_grace21, Twitter. September 16, 2020.
[14] @shelby_grace21, Twitter, August 31, 2020.
[15] Lauren Berlant, The Queen Of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 103.
[16] The maternal mortality rate for Black women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births (2.6 times the rate for white women). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20the%20maternal%20mortality,for%20White%20and%20Hispanic%20women.
[17] @Henrik_Palmgren, Twitter, April 03, 2023. https://twitter.com/Henrik_Palmgren/status/1642982477835714560
[18] Kim TallBear, “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler and Family,” Making Kin Not Population, (Chicago, Il: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), 146.
[19] Super Happy Fun America’s Twitter page defines the group as “a right of center civil rights organization focusing on defending the American Constitution, opposing gender madness, and defeating cultural Marxism.” The profile picture is bold lettering the declares “It’s Great to be Straight.” https://twitter.com/superhappyfuna?lang=en.
[20] Geraldine Moriba, interview with Samantha, Sounds Like Hate, podcast audio, August 18, 2020.
[21] Glenn Feldman, “Home and Hearth: Women, the Klan, Conservative Religion, and Traditional Family Values,” Politics and Religion in the White South, (KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 59.
[22] Feldman, ibid.
[23] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare,
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 256.
[24] Those who label themselves as “gender critical” believe that biological sex is immutable, and that feminism (and policy more broadly) should be organized with an emphasis on this biology. In this ideological framework, trans people are either faking it, or need intervention to keep them in compliance with the sex they were assigned at birth.
[25] Juana Maria Rodriguez, “Who’s Your Daddy?: Queer Kinship and Perverse Domesticity,” Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings, (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2020), 35.
[26] H.J. Kim-Puri, “Conceptualizing Gender-Sexuality-State-Nation: An Introduction,” Gender & Society 19 no. 2 (2005), 139.
[27] Carter Dillard, “Future Children as Property,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy vol. 17(1), 20120, 49.
[28] Cody Buntain, Monique Deal Barlow, Mia Bloom, & Mila A. Johns, “Paved with Bad Intentions: QAnon’s Save the Children Campaign,” Journal of Online Trust and Safety vol. 1 (2) (2002), 8.
[29] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 30.
[30] Glen Coulthard’s book Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition and Jodi A. Byrd’s The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism both challenge the concept of the US as an enduring empire, among others.