Representation of women in the digital discourse of Spanish far-right female leaders

Abstract

The Spanish far-right party – Vox – articulates several ideological components in public discourse, among which nativism and anti-feminism stand out. Anti-feminism is being central in the digital discourse of Vox female leaders, Carla Toscano and Rocío de Meer, and of the former Congress deputy, Macarena Olona. With the aim of deepening the analysis of the discursive representation of women in Vox, this research employs the approach and methodology of critical discourse analysis with the corpus, consisting of 6753 tweets from the accounts of these three leaders, taking into account three of the representation that they (re)produce. The results show the imaginary of the Spanish and Catholic-woman. The discourse of racial Spanishness is initiated through mystified historical events. This occurs with the representation of the Mother-woman, which reinforces the device of patriarchal femininity and the frame of the demographic change based on nativism. The representation of the Tormentor-woman is used to deny both the specificity of gender violence and the need for gender equality policies. These three frames are used to justify the anti-feminist discourse and to explain its modulations. The results show that we need to pay attention to gender in order to understand the discursive strategies of the far-right parties, with special care to the femonationalism strategy, as well as to observe its mobilizing and agglutinating capacity.