Journal of Right-Wing Studies

Scores of male right-wing influencers offer advice to young men online on fitness, diet, and bodybuilding. Representations of the “right” kind of man draw attention to rippling muscles, square jaws, and beautifully symmetrical faces as evidence of racial superiority. This contemporary resurgence of “body fascism” in the hypersemiotized online spaces of the far right, however, remains underexamined. In this article, we analyze Man’s World magazine, a digital publication edited by the neofascist lifestyle influencer “Raw Egg Nationalist.” Through gendered semiotic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the text, we argue that hardness, understood in myriad ways, is the moral flavor of a far-right masculinist speech register that combines elements of mental fortitude, muscular strength, sexual potency, and physical beauty at the individual level with racial renewal and national invulnerability at the political level. We show how readiness for violence and the “return” to traditional masculine violence are legitimated through graftings onto scientific and academic registers, and how neofascist influencers ultimately operate within boundaries delimited by neoliberal modernity. We argue that the production of a “dissident” right-wing male subjectivity is intimately interwoven with the dissemination and use of this register.

Digital ethnographic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the far right is an invaluable resource for explaining the gradual processes of socialization through which individuals are recruited into right-wing extremism. This article examines online masturbation abstention programs in three linguistic contexts (English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) as potential sites that mobilize gender and sexual norms to draw subjects into anti-feminist and racist sociopolitical visions. NoFap (known as nōfappu or onakin in Japan) is a fairly popular trend that is understood to help men regain the focus, vitality, and energy they have lost to pornography addiction. By analyzing the ways figures of personhood are constructed through the enregisterment of disparate semiotic materials in these very different contexts, we argue that the right-wing abstemious masculine subject is produced through tensions between neoliberal generalized competition and the imagined authority of a “tradition” associated with restrictive gender and sexual norms.

In light of the so-called Great Meme War, a meme-based propaganda campaign waged in favor of Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy, this article identifies a type of disembodied far-right “meme warrior” that ironically denies longings for heroism. This ambivalent stance toward heroic masculine ideals, which characterizes the meme warriors’ (self-)portraits, stands in stark contrast to more serious traditional far-right heroic imaginaries. This phenomenon is discussed in relation to the notion of the post-heroic, a concept used in military studies to describe the shrinking willingness and (perceived) need to sacrifice one’s life in combat. The second part of the article explores the construction of a ludic collective heroism in the alt-right’s responses to Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” (HWNDU) project, which was conceived as a participatory video work in public space inviting people to repeat those words while gazing into a camera. The article employs a psychoanalytic depth-hermeneutic method; it asks how “post-heroic” identities created collectively online by the far right might be found alluring on a wider scale. 

This article delves into a recurring dilemma facing contemporary fascist movements: how to communicate ideological purity to its hardcore base and at the same time appeal to imagined new voters and recruits? By analyzing how the most prominent fascist movement in Sweden, the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), publicly communicates its ideas about family issues and the role of women, we shed light on the semiotic work done by the far right to merge common social conservative tropes with an extremist discourse. Using the tools of social semiotics and multimodal critical discourse studies, the article shows how the NRM uses a range of semiotic resources as it interweaves mainstream conservative discourses about the nature of women and men, recognizable to a broader public (not least to supporters of the Swedish right-wing populist party, the Sweden Democrats), with Nazi keywords appealing to ideological in-groups. The analysis also reveals how the NRM uses image bank semiotics, which connote values associated with commercial lifestyle media and genres, as they communicate their views on family issues. In its use of such imagery, the NRM simultaneously draws on the fascist myth of palingenesis. Using gender and family politics as an empirical focal point, the article illustrates that linguistic and semiotic methods provide powerful tools to scrutinize the efforts of contemporary fascist movements to present themselves as ideologically pure and at the same time speak to a broader audience of potential voters and recruits.

Since at least 2012, right-wing politicians, media, and the Catholic Church have been demonizing the LGBTQ+ community as promoters of the “LGBT ideology,” a substitute term for “gender ideology” in Poland. The vitriolic anti-LGBTQ+ discourse has become a central resource in the right-wing construction of Polish patriotism and national identity. This discourse is adopted by many mainstream conservative public figures and is part of the global anti-genderism register that has been taken up by transnationally linked actors and institutions. In this article, I adopt Critical Discourse Analysis, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, and the Discourse Historical Approach to examine how anti-genderist actors in Poland discursively construct “truth” through what looks like logical argumentation and appeals to assumed “common sense” knowledge, and how such constructions are used to support appeals to emotion and Catholic faith while also co-opting and redefining progressive terms and concepts in service of right-wing agendas. This strategy departs from the anti-intellectual rhetoric typical of right-wing populism. The article is based on an analysis of 216 emails sent in an email newsletter by the ultraconservative Catholic NGO Centrum Życia i Rodziny (Center for Life and Family) between September 2020 and July 2023.

This article examines the role of language ideology in the argumentation of both “alt-right” and “gender-critical” discourses about gender. While positioning themselves on different sides of the left-right political spectrum, both groups make use of referentialist language ideologies to establish themselves as authorities over language. Referentialism is a type of tautological reasoning that posits language and dictionary-style definitions as the final arbiter of reality (e.g., “A woman is an adult human female; if it is an adult human female, it must be a woman”). This article contributes to a broader understanding of how language ideology functions as a powerful rhetorical tool in the fight against anti-gender movements.