In this paper, using Sweden as a case study, I explore the misogynistic so-called ‘incel’ movement, which is a self-ascribed identity, used by men in ‘involuntary celibacy’, who express gender-based hate in male-separatist communities online. Specifically, although the incel movement has often been seen as quite a fringe phenomenon, I here seek to illustrate the discursive overlaps between incels and the broader ideology of the established far-right. Specifically, I will explore a large dataset of posts from the incel discussion section of the Swedish Flashback forum—a Reddit-like site that is known for its far-right leaning. I use a mixed-methods approach incorporating both computational text analysis to uncover underlying, large-scale patterns, and critical discourse analysis to scrutinise ideological dimensions of a smaller sample of the texts. Initial findings show similar patterns of entitlement to a societal position of greater power, a perceived victimisation by the ‘establishment’ which favours others at the expense of white men, and finally, a nostalgic longing back to an imagined Sweden when women and other minority groups knew their place, and when white men held authority, without the threat of Muslim immigrant men.

Since 2016, we have seen the emergence of successive online mobilisations linked to the far-right. The illiberal politics these promote threaten the safety of minoritised individuals and impede social justice. However, we still understand little about how and why individuals become attracted to, engaged with, and supportive of this form of online politics, because research into this phenomenon rarely connects online content with offline lives. The current research sought to bridge this gap, taking support for Brexit on Facebook as a case study. Between 2018 and 2019, I conducted two in-depth interviews with each of 15 UK users who participated in the “pro-Brexit Facebook milieu”, discussing how their political views interacted with their Facebook use and what this meant to them. Between the interviews, I observed their Facebook posts for one month with consent to “thicken” the analysis. Based on the experiences and interpretations of those involved, I demonstrate how the technological opportunities provided by Facebook converged with the populist discursive opportunities of the post-EU-referendum period, creating a gateway to far-right political engagement. The findings affirm that no single factor drives these mobilisations; rather they are enabled by the complex convergence that characterises our current techno-social-political moment. The prominence of far-right conspiracy theories within this milieu also indicates the possibility that far-right actors deliberately capitalised upon these discursive and technological opportunities to disseminate their ideology to new audiences. These findings further our urgently needed understanding of how and why the online far-right mobilisations that afflict global society are possible.

The paper presents initial findings from an ongoing research project that investigates the discursive construction of race, gender, and sexuality in the visual culture of three online far-right extremist platforms in Scandinavia. This interdisciplinary project brings together feminist theory of humour and harm with digital media research into memes and the far-right in order to explore the hateful discourse in the online humour of the far-right.

The data consists of visual content posted to three different social media platforms in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

As the paper discusses work in progress, the findings of the project are limited at the time of writing. However, the initial coding of the data set reveals similar themes across the three websites:

1: The function of humour in the visual content, which works to create insiders and outsiders.

2: Far-right ideology which discursively constructs the “ideal” Scandinavian citizen as a white man via the discursive “othering” of the racialized (mostly Muslim) non-citizen. This othering is expressed via a characterization of the non-European outsider as barbaric, sexually perverted, and culturally backward.

3: The overlap between racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia which is expressed through an anti-woke discourse that ridicules women’s rights, feminism, and questions the existence of trans lives.

In a discursive space where hate and humour coexist, violent discourse might be trivialised and considered “just a joke”. The paper, however, makes a point of taking humour seriously by critically addressing the hate hidden under the guise of humour.