HUMOUR, HARM, AND HATE: THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN FAR-RIGHT EXTREMIST MEMES

Resumen

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.