Royal Holloway, University of London, and an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. She co-authored Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter.
Pearson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Extreme Britain: Gender, Masculinity and Radicalization, and reported the following:
Extreme Britain is about masculinities in extreme groups, and by chance, this page explains a key concept, ‘masculinity challenges’, and how they feature in pathways to the anti-Islam far right. The important point here is that violence and confrontation have meaning that is rooted in class and place. Violence enables men – and women too, but I get to that later - to claim the ideological ownership of physical space. Violence helps create extreme men and on this page, one far right activist, formerly in the British Army, explains a milestone moment of violence in his path to the far right.Learn more about Extreme Britain at the Oxford University Press website.
The Page 99 test works really well in telling readers what Extreme Britain is about. The book explores radicalisation as a ‘masculinity project’: extremists aim to fulfil certain ideals of manhood in their radicalisation journeys. Violence, class, race and faith are really essential to the stories that ‘extremists’ in both the far right, and in a quasi-jihadist network, told me about how their lives turned out. And masculinity is a useful concept to understand how these actors understand themselves: what kind of manhood they aspire to, how women fit into hierarchies of gender and power in their groups, what kinds of sexual and moral behaviours make real men – and women.
Page 99 is in a chapter about the lives of the far-right actors before they joined the group. It shows how their gender values relate to their ideas about citizenship, and Britishness. It also shows how much their identities are rooted in their local spaces, friendships and antagonisms. In the next chapter, the book goes on to show how those gender values and masculinities are exploited in far-right groups, how they are continued there, and amplified. For instance, the idea that real men can handle themselves on the street, in a fight, to protect ‘their’ women and culture, and that elite liberals who cannot do that are inauthentic, and have no right to condescend to them on how they live.
What the page doesn’t reveal is the different masculinities and values in the jihadist network. Nor does it explain how women navigate these male-dominated groups, and the strategies they use to deal with the misogyny inherent in extreme networks, to take their place, and even to lead organisations, in the case of the far right.
The book is about Britain, but anyone who follows US politics, and is interested in populism, the far right and anti-Islam rhetoric will find a lot here that resonates. Masculine competition, misogyny, class and wider attitudes towards feminism and the state are key to understanding the popularity of Donald Trump, admired by all the far-right actors in my book. Page 99 encapsulates much of this and is a great place to start – (although I’d still recommend readers begin the book at page 1!)
--Marshal Zeringue
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