Antifeminism and White Identity Politics: Political antagonisms in radical right-wing populist and anti-immigration rhetoric in Finland

Abstract

This article analyses how gendered, racialised and classed antagonisms are created in texts by radical right-wing populists and intellectuals connected to the anti-immigration movement and the antifeminist men’s rights movement in Finland. The studied rhetoric focuses on the reproduction of the “white nation” as part of the endangered “Western civilisation”; a feminism “gone too far” and shifts in heterosexual power relations in the postcolonial era. The rhetoric is discussed as political reimaginations that aim to recentre white masculinity in a society that has seen its self-evident and normative position questioned.