Pink Pilled: Lois Shearing on Women and 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. Writer and journalist Lois Shearing joins us to unpack a daring investigation into how women are recruited by the far right online.

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, journalist Lois Shearing interviews leading experts and infiltrates communities of tradwives and femtrolls to provide a cutting-edge account of how the far right uses the internet to recruit women. Shining a light on women's experiences within these movements, Shearing reveals horrifying examples 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.

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

Our Speaker:

Lois Shearing is a freelance journalist and author. They are the author of Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life (2021) and the co-editor of It Ain't Over Til the Bisexual Speaks: An Anthology of Bisexual Voices (2024). 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.