Radical right parties and anti-feminist speech on Instagram: Vox and the 2019 Spanish general election

Abstract

Radical right-wing parties often use the attack on feminism as a central argument in their political discourse. The Spanish political party Vox, born in 2013, is a good example of this phenomenon. This paper analyzes Vox’s Instagram posts for the party’s two last electoral campaigns previous to the two successive general elections held in Spain in 2019. After the collection, selection and quantification of these data, we carried out a qualitative analysis of the semantic networks created through the utilization of images, videos, texts, interactions, hashtags and emojis. Our findings identify five fundamental arguments: classic gender nationalism, anti-Muslim gender nationalism, delegitimization and ridicule of feminism, discrediting the concept of gender, and the idea that Vox is, in fact, the party that most advocates for women. An outstanding discursive strategy used throughout the sample is that of contrast and association. Signifiers with a strong positive signified and broad social acceptance (euphoric terms) are associated with this party and its political positions. In contrast, negatively charged signifiers and hate-instigating terms (dysphoric) are associated with feminism and the so-called “gender ideology.”