“We have watched the woke monster destroy everything”: gender and affect in the construction of wokeness on reactionary YouTube

The term “woke” is increasingly used by right-wing political actors to designate left-liberal political positions that they oppose. In this article, I examine how three prominent reactionary influencers on YouTube—Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Dave Rubin—construct wokeness as a figure of hate, ridicule, and fear, a gendered and sexualised other against which they produce a sense of community for their viewers. Where these YouTubers previously framed the left through the distinct figures of the “social justice warrior” and the “cultural Marxist,” wokeness collapses the two together, combining the former’s irrational ridiculousness and the latter’s conspiratorial subversiveness into a singular, all-encompassing enemy. In doing so, the YouTubers construct an affectively charged crisis narrative—wokeness threatens social stability so must be expelled, a call for not only the elimination of woke ideas but also the trans and gender nonconforming people whom they position as wokeness’s embodiment.