Browsing by Subject "Far-right"

While humanity is experiencing a worsening climate crisis, its mitigation has been significantly hampered by far-right leaders and parties around the world. Understanding how these political movements manage to mobilise their voters and make their communication effective is thus extremely important. Climate scepticism correlates not only with socio-political ideology, but also with gender. Growing research has noticed how far-right climate scepticism expresses misogyny, as a reaction to white patriarchal masculine identities being threatened in the face of climate justice. Research on climate scepticism, the far-right and gender is still a rather new field of research. This study seeks to fill a gap in the research from a Finnish context, by examining how hegemonic masculinities and misogyny are expressed in the Finns Party's climate sceptic communication. The study examines two decisive publications by the Finns Party’s think tank, entitled Manual for the Climate Realist and Floods and Brimstones. Furthermore, this study utilizes as its methodology critical discourse analysis. The results of the discourse analysis are analysed using theories on masculinities in climate scepticism and misogyny in climate scepticism. The results show that climate change in the documents is constructed as a masculine problem, demanding masculine solutions and masculine intellectualism. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the documents construct the green left as excessively emotional and irrational using misogynistic language. Consequently, the study confirms that underlying misogyny and opposition to gender equality exists in the Finns Party's climate sceptic communication. The study contributes to the research on gender and climate scepticism, and shows that the fusion of hegemonic masculinities, misogyny and climate scepticism also occurs in the Finnish context.