This paper examines prevalent tropes of sexual violence and rape circulating in far-right discourses in and around Sweden. Combining Discourse Analysis with a feminist reading of memes depicting rape collected in online spaces known to harbour far-right extremism, we ask: What is the scene of rape? What are its key tropes enacting in a discursive sense? How can we understand these iterations of sexual violation as key fantasmatic scenes of contemporary fascism? We explore a series of discursive figures and anthropomorphised representations of Sweden identified across these memes. These include Captain Sweden-a proxy for Sweden as a "cucked" nation; the Swedish Soyboy as an emblem of a feminized, castrated state; the Rapefugee invoking the threat of the abject Other, and finally the Swedish woman who occurs in contradictory form as slut, victim and race traitor. These tropes form nodal points in the articulation of the pervasive narrative of Sweden's, and in extension, the liberal order's crisis and retreat. Articulated around fantasies of perversion and abjection, they have evolved into emblems of Western moral degeneration and a loss of male power and serve as entry points to understanding the unfolding resurgence of fascist authoritarian ideology facing liberal democracies.

The persistence of workplace inequality requires female subjects to examine their place in exploitative systems of production and consumption, and to identify means for emancipation beyond masculine dominant orders. In this paper we examine our past experiences as young women in the finance and oil industries, the phallocentric and extractive engines of global capitalism. We do this by employing a duo-ethnographic approach and a feminist reading of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on sexual difference, aiming to contribute to the literature on female identification in phallocentric organizations. Our analysis reveals how we oscillated between accepting subordinate feminine subject positions linked to emotional work and striving to access ‘universal’ masculine subject positions linked to success and achievement. At the same time, we both engaged with imaginaries of uniqueness and critique, control and success in order to keep functioning in our roles. Both our stories feature moments of rupture experienced as affective embodied responses, when our organizations placed ourselves or others at risk. We analyse these as moments when cracks were exposed in our fantasmatic survival strategies, leading to our eventual exit from these industries. We conclude that while a feminist Lacanian framework provides a useful lens for understanding processes of female identification in phallocentric organizations, the quest for female desire and subjectivity outside the masculine dominant order requires other (feminist) frameworks.

This article examines the strategic function of public displays of vulnerability by three powerful male figures: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Canadian psychologist and conservative social media personality Jordan Peterson, and Swedish and Danish politician and Islamophobe Rasmus Paludan. Each is associated with ideologies that are championing 'traditional' masculinity, which means their shows of vulnerability may initially appear at odds with the conservative or right-wing values they promulgate. We examine what is meant to be invoked in the audience by these figures' strategic borrowing of 'feminine' traits in their performances of masculinity.Theoretically, the article is rooted in theories of identification in psychoanalysis and critical theory as they relate to processes of leadership and group identification, as well as treating the masculinist logic of gendered nationalism as underlying contemporary forms of right-wing politics. We find that the three men's strategic borrowing of vulnerability in fact represents a manipulative component of right-wing Weltanschauung, where its performance can solidify dominance over groups of followers, without extending compassion to those othered by this very ideology.

This discussion takes as its starting point recent right-wing protests and -rhetoric, forming part of a conservative moral panic surrounding Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) and LGBTQ+ pride events, and in particular the harm these are proclaimed to be causing children. While mobilizing the figure of the child for political purposes is not a recent phenomenon, the momentum and number of fellow travelers the instrumentalization of vulnerable innocence of children has achieved recently demand an intervention. The aim of this article is therefore-in conversation with feminist theoretical work, primarily focusing on gender-based needs, to explore specific figures of the child at a time when nationalist right-wing politics are naturalized across multiple domains and geographies. We situate our research at a specific historical and political juncture, with the purpose of enabling a feminist reflection of the categories of childhood and adulthood in order to open them up in potentially empowering ways. We focus on the symbolic and political weight of childhood as a particular age category, analyzing political rhetoric from Germany and Sweden, but speaking to transnational discourses about the child and how it is both transformed and anchored in different national contexts. Importantly, this also means inquiring what it means for some population groups to be forcibly adultified, while being infantilized in other contexts. We conclude that the political use and co-optation of the child in order to mobilize actors arguing that the child is only safe within the confines of traditional values and the ethnonationalist state in fact undermines children's rights.

This article explores the discursive linkages between violent misogyny and violent right-wing extremism in the popular Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, which affords anonymous and relatively unmoderated commenting. Empirically, it focuses on the articulations of misogyny and anti-feminism mapped onto extreme right ideology including white supremacism in user comments posted across 16 Flashback threads. To analyze the extensive data set, we first drew on a collocation analysis of user comments (N = 20,359) scraped from a strategic selection of threads. From this sample we chose 36 combinations to be considered for a closer reading. In the second analytical step, critical discourse analysis coupled with the Essex School’s logics approach helped us unpack the logics of conspiracy and male entitlement, as well as the fantasmatic projections of Swedish women as both “race traitors” and “victims” at the heart of extreme right discourse in and beyond Sweden today.

This study examines the social, political, and fantasmatic logics involved in the production of contemporary discourses about Scandinavia as a symbolic site and imagined place of sexual and moral decay and as a gender dysphoric dystopia by actors in the global anti-gender movement. Empirically, we draw on a rich digital archive of multi-modal media texts from an ongoing research project on anti-gender movements in Russia and Germany – two countries which provide particularly poignant examples of sites in which this mode of anti-gender propaganda is currently on the rise. In the analysis, we explore the discursive workings of a particularly prominent node in the material – that of the vulnerable child – and show how this figure is construed and instrumentalised to add urgency and fuel outrage among domestic audiences in Russia and Germany.

This article argues that child protection rhetoric rarely applies to all children and that it, in fact, often contains decisions over whose lives are worthy of protection, and whose are not. In Russia, “traditional (family) values” have effectively become state policy, the 2013 federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” being the most prominent example of this. The fixation of such “traditional values” discourses on protecting children from “early sexualization” by barring them from access to LGBTQ-inclusive education and care demonstrates that the child on whose behalf this protection is demanded is deemed to be straight, while further examples of child protection discourses also show that innocence is often viewed as the exlusive property of white, middle-class children. Responding to the recent escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine, this text discusses how the trauma, displacement and death of children in Ukraine reveals the biopolitical core of traditional values discourses.

This article examines the role of national screen agencies in the realisation of an equitable screen sector. Publicly funded screen agencies like Ffilm Cymru Wales, Screen Ireland, Det Danske Filminstitut (Danish Film Institute) and Hrvatski Audiovizualni Centar (Croatian Audiovisual Centre) directly shape the sector, both on screen and behind the camera. Using interviews with senior decision-makers within several European screen agencies, we critically analyse the logics and practices of these cultural intermediaries in relation to gender equality. We chart how the issue is mediated by screen agencies, including their (in)actions. Alongside formal measures, we observe some staff working in quotidian ways to deliver change through positively leveraging their relationships with the sector. Our research highlights that while most of sampled agencies advocate for gender equality, few recognise ethnicity, socioeconomics, disability or age in their larger policy frameworks, and therefore, questions of intersectionality are rarely addressed formally in institutional approaches. We conclude that for screen agencies to become effective intermediaries for equality, a paradigmatic shift in their logics and working practices would be required. However, this would only represent a first step as wider policy and industrial reform is necessary to redress the exclusionary frames of the screen sector.