Through the looking glass: Feminism and reactionary politics in the digital hall of mirrors

Abstract

In recent years, the ‘mirror’ has emerged as a key metaphor for theorizing contemporary digital culture, with its disorienting communicative architectures and bewildering social and political effects. This short piece considers what the dynamic of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture means for the relationship between gender politics and an increasingly authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-opted and warped into perplexing new formations. This happens through manosphere figures and ‘manfluencers’ who mirror feminist practices and discourses, weaponizing them for anti-feminist ends. But we also see uncanny doubles of feminism in the visibility of ‘tradwives’, ‘dark feminine’ dating influencers and self-proclaimed ‘reactionary feminists’. We argue that the tendency is toward a nihilistic anti-politics – or what we call a ‘vampire anti-feminism’ – whose goal is to suck out feminism’s life force, and to kill the possibility of collective political resistance. We argue that grasping the dynamics of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture is crucial for analyzing contemporary gender politics as it plays out in an increasingly reactionary terrain.

Introduction

In the 1948 film noir, The Lady from Shanghai, the famous ‘mirror hall’ shooting scene depicts characters played by the actors Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane confronting each other in a disorienting and confusing way, with each not knowing if the image they are seeing is the actual person or a distorted reflection from the hall of mirrors. The scene is filled with mirrored misrepresentations but also with emotional misrepresentations, about love, desire, trust and violence. The scene ends with the deaths of Hayworth and Sloane, though the viewer is never quite sure of who shoots whom, given the multiple reflections and refractions (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The famous ‘magic mirror maze’ scene from The Lady from Shanghai.

In this short piece, we reflect on the ways in which the mirror metaphor has been deployed in critical scholarship and popular commentaries on gender politics in digital culture, and think through its political and intellectual potential for feminist media and cultural studies. We argue that grasping and analyzing the dynamics of digital ‘mirroring’ is crucial for understanding the increasingly complex relationship between gender politics and a resurgent reactionary right.

In recent years, the mirror has emerged as a key metaphor for making sense of digital media culture, with its disorienting communicative architectures and bewildering social and political effects. The hall of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai is no longer in a funhouse, but rather in our everyday lives. As Naomi Klein (2023) has written, we are living in a time of ‘mirror-worlds’, in which topsy-turvy new social and political formations are taking shape; reactionary movements mirror and absorb discourses from the left, leading to perplexing new political alliances. In the mirror-world, the familiar predicates of politics have been scrambled.

Manosphere groups and reactionary ‘manfluencers’ have been mimicking the tactics and terminologies of popular feminism, both distorting and disavowing the realities of gender injustice. One of us has argued that popular misogyny, in its contemporary networked iteration, takes on a kind of ‘mirroring effect’ in relation to popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018). By mimicking and appropriating the language of popular feminism, popular misogyny claims it is white men and boys who are uniquely injured. In this ‘funhouse mirror’ dynamic, ‘politics and bodies are distorted and transfigured so that men – heterosexual, white men – are the ones who appear to be injured by widespread inequities and structural disparities’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018: 215), and who are able to claim the most authentic ‘victimhood’ (Banet-Weiser, 2021; Chouliaraki, 2021).

The ‘manfluencers’ who adopt these anti-feminist ‘mirroring’ practices include Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, as well as ‘red-pilled’ manosphere groups such as incels, pick-up artists and male separatists. But now, we see yet another form of doubling, as gender politics plays out in the digital mirror-world. In recent years, a range of female-centric groups and influencers – including tradwives, ‘red pill’ women, ‘dark feminine’ female dating strategists and so-called ‘reactionary feminists’ – have begun to mimic the reactionary, fatalistic and bio-essentialist logics of the manosphere: a reflection of a reflection.

Mirrors, media and gender politics

Mirrors do not simply reflect, but can also refract – they can mimic a particular reality, but they can also bend and transform that reality. The Cambridge dictionary (2024) defines the verb to ‘mirror’ as ‘to represent something honestly’, although as any student of critical media studies knows, there can never be any neutral reflection of ‘reality’ in language, media or culture (see Hall, 1997). The dictionary’s definition of the verb ‘refract’ is ‘to change the direction of light, sound, heat, or other energy as it travels across or through something’ (our emphasis).

We might say that as contemporary ‘energies’ – our fears, desires and rage – travel through the terrain of networked digital media, they are reshaped and redirected, often into radically different political trajectories. As Alan Finlayson (2021, 2023) argues, contemporary digital media is changing the ways that societal political education happens, and how political concepts are understood. Rather than the town hall, the mass meeting or even television and print newspapers, the spaces through which political ideas, concepts and arguments are encountered, articulated and understood are increasingly digital: it is YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook and X/Twitter where we increasingly come to see and ‘do’ politics.

Finlayson cites Quentin Skinner (1996), who theorizes the rhetorical strategy of ‘redescription’ – where something is represented in such a way that it moves from the category of virtue to that of vice. Hence, we see how the ‘virtues’ of pluralism, tolerance and equality (and, we would add, feminism) can be redescribed as ‘vices’ of exclusion, oppression or even fascism. These rhetorical practices are key to understanding what Finlayson (2023) terms ‘reactionary digital politics’. The effect – indeed, the point – is for reactionary digital politics to destabilize performatively so-called ‘liberal’ political modes and practices. This is part of a language of what Finlayson calls an ‘anti-politics politics’ – where ideas of justice, equality and the public good are seen as intrinsically wrong, and therefore to be sabotaged. We see this anti-politics politics as part of a longer historical trajectory, which continues to take shape with every new affordance of digital culture.

Contemporary digital media is networked, meaning that ideas are eminently recursive and (re-)circulated; they travel from one part of the Internet to another, routinely and at speed. Political concepts that are ‘formed in one part of the political spectrum are [. . .] easily picked up, adapted and recirculated’ (Finlayson, 2023). And as political ideas, concepts and practices are endlessly reflected and refracted in the digital hall of mirrors, our means for critically analyzing these dizzying formations can struggle to keep up.

Ann-Kathrin Rothermel (2020) argues that the ‘anti-feminist gender knowledge production’ in manosphere spaces ‘mirrors feminist consciousness-raising processes’ (our emphasis). The red-pill philosophy – which incites its adherents to ‘wake up’ to the ‘truth’ that is being ‘hidden’ – also mimics the language of ‘false consciousness’ from Marxism, even though it is virulently anti-Marxist (Butler, 2024).

Crucially, the distorted refractions of the mirror-world are always entangled with power relations. Digital media create the conditions for ‘context collapse’ (see also Marwick and boyd, 2011), which means that political concepts can become radically unmoored from their grounding contexts, and their meanings deeply altered in the process. But this is not simply an ideological free-for-all; despite its apparent subversive potential, context collapse can be patterned by historic and entrenched injustices. In the so-called ‘post-truth’ context, who gets to claim legitimate ownership of ideas – and be ‘believable’ – is fundamentally shaped by misogynistic and racist power relations (see Banet-Weiser and Higgins, 2023). Helen Wood (2024) suggests that in an era of ‘digital complexity’ our media engagements can be understood through the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, with its ‘shape-changing nature’ and perpetual shifting into new constellations. However, Wood (2024) argues that ‘just because the shape is constantly evolving, this does not mean that it has no shape at all’ (p. 161).

The digital mirror-world

While in other cultural and historical moments, feminist thinkers have theorized ‘backlash’ in response to encroachments on women’s civil liberties and human rights, here we offer that the concept of backlash doesn’t quite get at what is happening in the contemporary political moment. Rather, mirror-worlds and mirroring are a more apt frame for understanding the dynamics between gender politics and an increasingly authoritarian right.

Naomi Klein has argued in her recent book Doppelganger that contemporary politics are playing out in a ‘mirror-world’, where political ideas are now subject to a ‘mix and match’ logic; they are scrambled and resignified into ‘topsy-turvy’ new formations. A key example is how critiques of ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Tech’, once associated firmly with left, anti-capitalist movements, are now repurposed by the right; as well as how the slogan ‘my body, my choice’, so important to the movement for abortion rights, is appropriated by anti-vaxx, anti-lockdown and anti-mask activists. And, even more insidious, after Trump won the 2024 US presidential election on a campaign that promised ever-more restrictive reproductive rights for women, social media was replete with young men celebrating the distorted version of this slogan: ‘your body, my choice’; the violence in this mirrored distortion made tragically explicit.

The mirror-world, Klein (2023) contends, has arisen in part because this is a place where ‘unaddressed fears and outrages [are] exploited’ (p. 93). There are many fears, many outrages, in the contemporary political, cultural and economic moment, across the world. There are fears about economic precarity, about war, about identity policing, about attacks on bodily autonomy. And there are also fears about so-called liberalism: ‘wokeness’, cultural marxism, black lives matter, #metoo. And fears about a broken system – and the system is indeed broken. But in the mirror-world, these anxious energies, born of the real crises of capitalism, colonialism and climate catastrophe, are refracted, and redirected toward women, trans folks, people of color and migrants. As Judith Butler (2024) has written, the way that the term ‘gender’ is used by the reactionary right keeps us ‘from thinking more clearly about what there is to fear, and how the currently imperiled sense of the world came about in the first place’. Gender has become a ‘phantasm’, a container into which all manner of threats are displaced.

These nightmarish mirrorings arise in part because of the failures of liberalism, and of the hegemonic forms of popular and neoliberal feminism. The relentless individualism of popular feminism, and its failure to address a collective subject, has left the door open for reactionary forces to fill the political ground that it evacuated. As Klein (2023) argues further: the ‘more dangerous form of mirroring’ is ‘a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences’ (p. 93, our emphasis).

Feminist doppelgangers in the digital mirror-world

Part of the challenge then, as we see it, is that in the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas have become radically decontextualized from their grounding in collective, anti-capitalist, anti-racist politics; and also that reactionary ideas are recontextualized in the language of feminism. One example is of this ‘hall of mirrors’ (anti)-feminism is the Female Dating Strategy (FDS) (see Kay, 2024). This is a self-proclaimed ‘feminist’ community that began on Reddit in 2019, ostensibly to counter the growing power of the manosphere – but which ended up mirroring and reproducing its logics: its bio-essentialistic notions that gendered behavior is ‘hardwired’; and its deep fatalism, even nihilism and hatred of social justice. Mirroring the ‘red pill’ philosophy which claims that liberalism is a lie, FDS claims that liberal feminism is a lie. Instead, their approach is informed by what they call ‘brutal realism’ and even ‘feminist realism’.

FDS claims to be ‘the purest form of feminism’ and to help women ‘live a life of true empowerment’ – but what their ‘strategy’ actually involves is finding a ‘high value man’ who can ‘provide’ for his wife and children. Men are hierarchically categorized according to their ‘value’, which correlates ultimately with their material wealth. Men who are poor, unemployed or otherwise vulnerable are castigated as ‘NEETs’, ¹ ‘a waste of oxygen’ or ‘scrotes’. For FDS, it is women’s responsibility not to date such men – not to continue their ‘bloodline’. Here we see an uncanny double of feminism which is deeply reactionary – even eugenicist – in its orientation.

Finlayson (2023) writes about the rise of reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’, who produce regular content to drive up outrage, seek out access to multiple sites of content and cultivate a ‘following’ rather than a collectivity. Such ideological entrepreneurs are emblematically male, anti-feminist and hyper-masculinist. But in the mirror-world, there are also women and even self-proclaimed ‘feminists’ who operate as reactionary ideological entrepreneurs. One example is the British writer Mary Harrington, who explicitly defines herself as a ‘reactionary feminist’; this is her ideological brand identity. This reactionary feminist ‘brand’ mirrors the language of feminism and the left (she writes about ‘women’s interests’, ‘material conditions’, the need for ‘a feminism of care’), but the solutions she offers are conservative: it is the Pill, abortion and ‘transgender activism’ that are claimed to be the source of women’s misery. She writes that:

Male and female bodies are different; humans can’t change sex; most women want to have children; heterosexuality is the default human condition [. . .] children do better in stable two-parent families [. . .] restating these truths is an act of feminist resistance. (Harrington, 2021)

In the digital mirror-world, reactionary ideas about the ‘natural’, ‘biological’ roles of men and women can end up being framed as ‘feminist’, and patriarchy becomes framed as the best possible social arrangement for women.

Digitally mediated tradwives similarly occupy a position of ideological entrepreneur; women who directly embrace the title of tradwife have created accounts across Instagram and TikTok (with hundreds of thousands of followers), where they create posts explicitly promoting a lifestyle of ‘traditional gender roles’ to their followers. While tradwives rarely identify as feminists, they engage in a mirror-world with feminist ideas and practices. For example, tradwives revolve around promoting heteronormativity and domestic bliss, but also emphasize that this domestic bliss is the response to the cruel optimism of living in a capitalist world that pays lip service to gender equality. In other words, tradwives unify around their hostility toward feminism, often to the point where they blame feminists – rather than the patriarchy – for numerous breakdowns in society.

The online performances of tradwives of a nostalgic, highly stylized femininity are thus framed as romanticized mode of retreat from a broken system. Yet the elements that are broken about the system – hustle culture, lack of care networks, devalued reproductive labor – are the same societal elements to which much of mainstream feminism also responds. Both tradwives and mainstream feminists thus share a reaction to a similar set of circumstances; but the reaction of both groups is quite different and has different effects; the mirror-world in which tradwives are engaged refracts social issues and transforms them into anti-feminist politics (Banet-Weiser and Reinis, forthcoming). The digital media terrain is populated with many such doppelgangers of feminism.

Vampire anti-feminism

As reflections and refractions of feminist concepts and practices ricochet down the digital hall of mirrors, something foundational to feminism is lost; its collective politics and orientation to liberation and structural transformation are not reflected. As a way in to understanding what does not show up in the digital mirror-maze, we suggest that another motif may be apt: the figure of the vampire, who in popular lore has no reflection at all in the mirror.

There is a long history in which the vampire figure has been used as an emblem of deathliness, exploitation and nihilism. Marx famously wrote that capital itself is ‘vampire-like’, and he invoked the metaphor of the vampire to force upon his readers ‘a sense of the appalling nature of capital: its affinity with death’ (Neocleous, 2003: 684). We suggest that the anti-feminism which is articulated through digital media is also vampiric: it feeds off feminist ideas, mimics feminism, dresses in (some of) its clothes – in order to wrongfoot it, destabilize it and suck out its life force. The goal of vampire anti-feminism is literally to kill feminism, to drain it of its power. It, too, has an affinity with death and nihilism.

In the mirror-world, feminism is subjected to ‘mix and match’ logics, and its meanings warped, repurposed and redirected. Wendy Brown (2018) has argued that, ‘This is how nihilism goes – not the death of values but their becoming protean, along with their availability for branding projects and covering purposes that manifestly do not comport with them’, (p. 70). Nihilism makes ‘values into playthings, truth inconsequential, and the future a matter of indifference or, worse, an unconscious object of destruction’ (Wendy Brown (2018: 67).

The endless refraction and reactionary recontextualization of ‘feminism’ – its disconnection from collective, anti-racist, anti-capitalist politics – serves the ends of vampire anti-feminism. When ‘feminism’ becomes what Finlayson calls ‘general containers’ for arguments that anyone can fill, with anything, it is robbed of its liberatory potential. The utopian vision of liberationist feminism, when reflected in the hall of mirrors, threatens to shatter into a million pieces.

The malleability of feminism is not what was intended by transdisciplinarity, and transnational, intersectional feminism. It wasn’t to empty the concept of virtually all and any meaning, only to take on the meaning of the descriptor – neoliberal, reactionary, gender critical, ‘trad’. Part of the visibility of the ‘anything goes’ when attached to feminism owes its history to feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s – you can’t, as Joan Scott has argued, just ‘add women and stir’ to revise history. Part of the struggle is the reflection; to name it as ‘vampire anti-feminism’ is to directly critique the latest influx of descriptors to the concept of feminism as vampiric, not political.

Feminism against nihilism: exiting the hall of mirrors

Feminist ideas and reactionary politics are being mixed and matched, scrambled and recomposed in the hall of mirrors, leading to a vampiric form of anti-feminism and nihilistic anti-politics. Yet we write this critique as feminists, engaged in collective politics. Several years ago, we wrote about respair – a 15th-century word that represents a dialectic between hope and despair. We offered this as a way to recognize the tragic struggles that we face in this world, to which despair is an apt response – but also to insist on rejecting anti-politics as a way to engage in those struggles (Kay and Banet-Weiser, 2019). Reactionary feminism, tradwives and other anti-political ideological entrepreneurs who insist that feminism is the con – these practices center despair and counter hope. In their vampirism – their thirst for draining feminism and collective politics of their energies – they are ultimately underpinned by nihilistic impulses.

In the mirror-world – where feminist ideas are radically de- and re-contextualized – the words of Black feminist Audre Lorde often appear in memes and short quotes, including in reactionary spaces such as the Female Dating Strategy. And so it is worth reconsidering Lorde’s words in the context of her feminist politics, which were explicitly socialist, intersectional and anti-racist. Lorde’s (1984) feminist politics were fundamentally about collective work; for her, this meant ‘doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions’ (pp. 141–142). This form of work was also, crucially, about ‘fighting despair’ and ‘actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming’ (Lorde, 1984).

The digital doppelgangers of feminism that we have discussed in this short piece are fundamentally against futurity, collective hope and feminist liberation. Just as the mirror-maze in The Lady from Shanghai led to a disturbing loss of reality that ended in confusion and death, the mimicking and warping of feminism in the digital hall of mirrors seeks to destabilize and destroy it. The very design of a mirror-maze means, by necessity, that you cannot see beyond or outside of it – and so our political imaginaries become locked into its foreclosing architectures – it is, ultimately, a political dead-end. We argue that we need to escape reactionary digital culture’s anti-politics politics, its vampire anti-feminism and its nihilistic rejection of collective hope. To fight despair, we need to forge a feminist politics against the anti-political logics of reactionary digital culture, and to find our way out of this nightmarish hall of mirrors.