Positive affect in ecofascist ideology and propaganda

This study examines how ideas about nature and gender are affectively communicated in Nordic radical nationalist movements. It focuses specifically on the role of ‘positive affect’ – emotionally uplifting experiences such as joy, love, and harmony – in ecofascist social media propaganda. The central puzzle is a seeming contradiction: why does a political ideology that is masculinized in its structures and appeals rely so heavily on feminized, nurturing aesthetics in its visual communication? By taking gender as its primary analytical lens, the study investigates how this contradiction operates and what political work it performs.

Existing research on far-right mobilization has largely focused on negative emotions such as anger, resentment, and hatred, associating these affects with masculinity and right-wing radicalization. This project contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that complicates this picture. Ecofascist social media channels present images of pastoral landscapes, domestic life, family, and animals — content that appears wholesome and apolitical at first glance, but that is structured by exclusionary ideologies of race, gender, and nation. The study argues that these positive, feminized aesthetics constitute a deliberate and effective communication strategy which contribute to normalize radical nationalist ideology by embedding it in familiar, emotionally resonant imagery.

The empirical material consists of multimodal content collected from the social media platform Telegram between 2020 and 2025. The primary method is multimodal critical discourse analysis, which allows for the examination of how visuals, text, and affect together produce meaning. The study is organized around four sub-studies. Three analyze specific visual tropes identified in the material: "the cute masculinist protector," "the contemplative man," and "the wheat girl." The fourth is a systematic literature review mapping existing scholarly knowledge on gender in studies of the far right and its natural environment. Together, these sub-studies address how gendered dichotomies are maintained and negotiated in ecofascist visual communication, and how positive affect functions to make radical nationalist ideology appear attractive and legitimate.