by Lois Shearing
Manchester University Press
2/18/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781526170699
A daring investigation that explores how women are targeted and recruited by the far right.
As the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the world, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women.
Women play significant roles in far-right movements, acting as propagandists, prizes to be won and mother-warriors of the nation. But up to now their activities have been largely overlooked. In Pink-pilled, Lois Shearing provides a riveting account of how the far right has used the internet to recruit women, while shedding light on what life is like for women within these movements, including their experiences of misogyny and violence.
Understanding how and why women join movements that explicitly aim to restrict their autonomy is essential if we want to fight back. Pink-pilled offers key insights for countering women's radicalisation and building communities resistant to far-right thought.
Reviews:
"Lois Shearing is unflinching about the role of women - and even of certain feminisms - in contemporary Anglo-American alt-right and neo-Nazi radicalisation. A gruesomely engaging study, Pink-pilled urges us to pay better heed to the white-supremacist work that fascism is doing today with cissexual femininity, in order to strengthen our ability as feminists to assert liberatory alternatives." -- Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms
"Sharp, nuanced and thoughtful, Shearing's analysis disentangles complex and contradictory trends in women's willing participation in hateful movements, including misogynistic ones. Should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary far right and its gendered dimensions." -- Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University
"A riveting deep dive into women's involvement in the far right and anti-LGBTQ+ rights. Pink-pilled gives an eye-opening account of the pervasive online ecosystem driven by hate and misogyny." -- Eviane Leidig, author of The Women of the Far Right
About the Author:
Lois Shearing is a freelance journalist and author. They are the author of Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life and the co-editor of It Ain't Over Til the Bisexual Speaks: An Anthology of Bisexual Voices. Their writing on sex, sexuality, gender, relationship, digital culture and politics has appeared in Cosmopolitan, the Independent, Mashable, the Metro and Gay Times, among others.