Awake, not woke: militant wellness, gender and white supremacy

Wellness communities, long-time proponents of alternative health practices, have been shaped by conspiracy thinking prior to COVID-19 (Ward and Voas 2011). However, the current pandemic and infodemic have intensified this trend. Protests against public health regulations designed to contain the Covid-19 pandemic have revealed a growing phenomenon. Right wing extremist movements based on conspiracy theories are intersecting with elements of Western wellness communities by drawing on a longer history of enmeshment between discourses of moral and spiritual virtue, white supremacy, ideological purity, and essentialist understandings of gender and bodily health (Halafoff et al. 2022; Proctor 1988). Built around a shared propensity to conspiracism (particularly belief in conspiracies around public health measures), distrust in institutions and government, pseudoscience, rejection of the biomedical model, and Darwinian notions of survival of the fittest, these novel formations represent an increasingly urgent yet understudied phenomenon within scholarship on extremist movements. The pandemic has provided an ideal environment and opportunity for extremist actors to mobilise around shared holistic understandings of health that bond and link them while conflicting with public health measures. Wellness adherents may have little trust in government institutions and pharmaceutical companies, but readily place their trust in para-social relationships with micro-influencers (Baker 2022) with whom they share an investment in awakening, bodily autonomy, essentialist understandings of gender, magical thinking (Parmigiani 2021), purity, simplicity, superiority and vaccine hesitancy. At a time of increased strain and absence of supports, alternative spiritual and wellness communities provided an interpretative lens that brought certainty and comfort at a time of crisis; they were attuned to community concerns about the impact of lockdowns and new generation vaccines being mandated. Through online algorithmic environments and offline protests, wellness adherents have intersected with radical right agendas and organisations that value heteronormative nuclear family structures underpinned by essentialist gender roles (Dietz & Roth 2020) in which women find dignity as child-bearers, home-makers and nurturers, and men as breadwinner warriors. These roles intersect with traditional housewife and ‘cottagecore’ return-to-rural-living movements. Popular within alt right communities, their online spaces share similar aesthetics and characteristics to ‘crunchy’ wellness social media accounts that valorise women at home making food from scratch, ideally home-schooling children on a homestead – a lifestyle of apparent self-sufficiency that is at a remove from big agricultural, petrochemical, pharmaceutical and tech corporations. Drawing on digital ethnography and in-depth interviews with female-identifying wellness adherents who experienced exclusion from mainstream society during the peak pandemic years, this paper will explore the nature of these novel intersections and whether and how they might serve as a 'gateway' to more sinister forms of radical right extremism.