Stealth Supremacy: The Reproduction of Structural Inequality through Everyday Digital Practice.

In this paper, I argue that the concept of ‘stealth supremacy’ offers productive capacity as a ‘racial grammar’ (Bonilla-Silva, 1997), allowing connections to be drawn between everyday digital practices undertaken by Christian conservative women commentators in the USA and the reproduction of hetero-patriarchal-white supremacy. I demonstrate this by locating, interrogating and critically assessing the work of three online producers who create digital content for audiences in the hundreds of thousands. I pay attention first to YouTube content that encourages young women to become ‘stay at home moms’ through self-fashioning practices which promote ‘finding a traditional husband’, before turning to podcasts which encourage young mothers to ‘oppose the killing of babies’ by donating to and funding anti-abortion pregnancy centres across the USA and making specific voting decisions, and then finally analyzing Instagram content which encourages mothers to ‘question everything’ when seeking medical care, and vaccinations specifically, for their children - this content contains a range of medical mis and disinforation. By working through these three empirical cases, data from which was gathered during two three-month periods of digital ethnography, and using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018) to analyse this content in the context of its production, reception and the underlying cultural practices and beliefs of technology designers and users, I show that these types of everyday digital practices require sustained sociological engagement. This engagement must centre questions of structural violence and social reproduction, whilst being mindful of risks of sensationalism and spectacle.It is important to consider this content as ‘structural’ because the content itself promotes the ‘shoring up’ of material advantages to white supremacist movements, through a range of both online and offline practices, which encourage actions from women at all life stages. Deep seated social inequalities are thus refracted and reproduced through everyday, online practices.