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

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.