From Love Jihad to Grooming Gangs: Tracing Flows of the Hypersexual Muslim Male Through Far-Right Female Influencers

these far-right female influencers tap into their viewers' fears of orchestrated sexual violence through intimacy techniques.

In particular, children symbolise the nuclear family unit as the foundation for a nationalist myth for the far-right. The vulnerability of children places women's roles as nurturers and men's role as protectors in far-right reproductive logics, echoing Mattheis' concept of "alt-maternalism" within alt/far-right communities

However, Agarwal's performance as an intellectual makes a distinct departure in providing an aura of legitimacy for her claims. The types of microcelebrity practices that she engages in on YouTube are not necessarily framed by revealing personal information, but she creates authenticity and relatability instead through acting as a religious guru in an intimate setting, which is then weaved into a nationalist myth of Hindu identity. This affords her a public profile that is accepted within a conservative society given that her activism constitutes a moral and religious conviction.

These far-right influencers effectively merge political content with personal branding techniques in order to gain an audience and, over time, fans. Maly (2020) describes a similar effect as "networks of influence," in which "the more people follow an influencer, the more chances that their content will be liked, shared, and distributed in the network" (p. 4).

The Great Replacement theory was initially developed by French philosopher Renaud Camus, in which indigenous French people would be demographically replaced by non-European people, specifically immigrants from Africa or the Middle East, in a deliberate plot fostered by elites. Camus' notion of the Great Replacement has intellectually influenced the European Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and the Identitarian Movement.

What marks these far-right women as distinct from their predecessors is how they deliver the message: as influencers they cultivate an audience through a social media performance. These Hindu nationalist and Western far-right female influencers rely upon a network that is attuned to their sensationalist and reactionary rhetoric, which is bolstered by platform affordances, such as algorithm recommendations, likes, comments, and shares. Fundamentally, they exploit dynamics of the online attention economy to promote an exclusionary political ideology that is in line with a personal brand.

Hindu nationalist and European/North American far-right female influencers engage in such practices of the "attention economy" to generate clicks, likes, and comments. They operationalize the affordances of social media platforms in order to promote their personal brands in accordance with a political ideology.

Influencers are here defined according to Abidin (2015) as "everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in 'digital' and 'physical' spaces, and monetize their following by integrating 'advertorials' into their blog or social media posts and making appearances at events".

Accordingly, women's involvement centers upon traditional, heteronormative gender roles that are premised on the archetypes of femininity and masculinity. Their primary function is to serve as wives and mothers for the movement, what Mattheis terms "alt-maternalism", or "new maternalist logics paired with anti-multiculturalism, white ethno-nationalism, and hate frameworks" (p. 143). This alt-maternalism becomes racialized into the desire for family and stability.

More recently, the visibility of these women is asserted by the European far-right through the lens of gender equality vis-à-vis Muslim immigrants who supposedly engage in oppressive gender practices in the name of Islam. This type of framing is described by Farris (2017) as "femonationalism," or the emancipatory rhetoric of women's rights in which the discourse mobilizes on "the profound danger that Muslim males constitute for western European societies, due, above all, to their oppressive treatment of women" (p. 2).

Although this discourse is derived from some feminist agendas, Farris argues that it is simultaneously articulated by right-wing nationalist and neoliberal actors to advance their ideological claims.

Love jihad refers to the phenomenon of Muslim men who intentionally seduce and convert Hindu women as an act of Islamization

Southern similarly attributes the media as responsible for turning a blind eye:

The mainstream media have been just as complicit in not talking about it.