ABSTRACT
The question of how gender and sexuality are connected to conspiracy theories comprises two different aspects. The first aspect concerns the question of how gender or sexuality influence conspiracy theory belief, i.e. who are the people believing in conspiracy theories and who are the people producing them? Are men more prone than women to believe in conspiracy theories or vice versa? The second aspect concerns the question of what importance gender and sexuality are to the content of specific conspiracy theories. In this chapter, I will first address how gender impacts belief in conspiracy theories (there are no studies that examine whether sexual orientation has any significant influence). Second, I will demonstrate by way of two case studies the centrality of gender and sexuality for the image of the alleged conspirators that many conspiracy theories paint and the issues around which they revolve. I will show that especially sexualities perceived as deviant play an important role in establishing the ‘other’ in conspiracy theory’s typical us-versus-them narrative. In the nineteenth century, for example, many American Protestants believed that Catholic priests were sexually abusing innocent American girls and that this was part of a plot by the Pope and the Austrian emperor to conquer the U.S.A. A century later, fervent anti-communists thought that homosexual tendencies made otherwise ordinary Americans susceptible to communism. In contemporary Western societies, white supremacist and nationalist conspiracy theorists are particularly targeting members of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ and feminist movements because they perceive them as a danger towards traditional family values.
