Femonationalism in a Nordic context : An analysis of the Finns Party and the Sweden Democrats

Sammanfattning: In the past decade, scholars have discovered how European populist radical right parties have increasingly resorted to instrumentalizing issues of gender equality within broader anti-immigration and anti-Islam campaigns. This phenomenon has been coined as femonationalism by sociologist Sara R. Farris; building on her theorization, this thesis aims to investigate thisfurther in a Nordic context by examining whether and how femonationalism can be traced within the politics of the Finns Party (FP) and the Sweden Democrats (SD). This has been achieved by conducting an ideational analysis of the parties’ official election material and policy documents provided on their respective party websites. The analytical framework applied is political scientist Mats Lindberg’s VDP-triad, in which the central task is to capture the proposed value, descriptive, and prescriptive statements in a text. The thesis’ main findings indicate that for the FP, femonationalism could most closely be linked to their policy implications. Here, the FP advocates for extensive anti-immigration and anti-Islam policies, while also promoting policies that uphold a traditional gender order amongst Finns. For the SD, femonationalism was mostly found in their expressed value statements concerning the supremacy of western values in relation to gender equality, which migrants are supposed to internalize and respect. Implications for future research are to examine the phenomenon of femonationalism further in different country settings in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how it presents itself.