16:50 - 18:30
P5-S117
Room: 0A.06
Chair/s:
Nathalie Giger
Discussant/s:
Anna Clemente
Backlash and appropriation? How right-wing actors speak about gender on TikTok
P5-S117-3
Presented by: Sophie Mainz
Sophie Mainz
Uppsala University
How do right-wing actors speak about gender and women's issues on social media? Backlash against gender is on the rise across Western European democracies and commonly propagated on digital media that lack traditional journalistic gate-keeping. Previous research shows a tension in right-wing actors rhetoric on gender: while they have been shown to be key protagonists in the spread of traditional family values and anti-gender ideas, the same actors also increasingly appropriate liberal gender themes for the promotion of anti-immigrant stances. However, researchers lack a systematic understanding of the prevalence of gender backlash and appropriation on contemporary social media, which themes are used in that context, who the key actors are, under which conditions they chose different themes, and the extent to which these resonate with audiences. To advance these questions, this study explores right-wing gender themes on the visual social media platform TikTok in five Western European countries. Employing computational text analysis methods such as dictionaries and narrative mining, this paper seeks to discover, categorize and quantify gender themes by right-wing actors.
Keywords: social media, gender backlash, femonationalism, TikTok, text-as-data

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