Exploring Anti-Feminist and Gender Equality Narratives on the Instagram of Female Far-Right Politicians : A Case Study on VOX Representatives

Sammanfattning: After the Catalan conflict in 2017, the number of female politicians and sympathizers in VOX increased notoriously(Bernardez-Rodal et al., 2020). Moreover, the growing participation and engagement of female audiences suggests that the use of several techniques to attract women (Pilkington, 2017; Mattheis, 2018; Askanius, 2021a) or the use of topics that evoque shared feelings (Dietze & Roth, 2020) could also be unfolding at a great speed in Spain. Thus, wanting to spand knowledge on the mentioned phenomenon, this thesis focuses on the Spanish context and explores how three VOX female politicians benefit from Alternative Influence Networks or AIN (Lewis, 2018) in Instagram and use influencer practices to spread far-righ ideas and sell anti-feminist or gender equality narratives.  For veracity and objectivity this research considered every post in the feed of these representatives for the sampling,obtaining a total of 290 relevant posts which were later analysed following a case study methodology. Theories of mediatization and media power, social media, online Interactivity and AIN, gender politics, and post-feminism and anti-feminism, served to understand the content of the analysed posts and classify them into 5 main topics (1. Anti-Feminism;2. Maternity; 3. Gender Politics and Gender Issues; 4. Targeting Women: Fear for the Spanish Race; 5. Christian values: pro-life and heteronormative love) that were repeatedly manifested in various ways. Main findings include how VOX female politicians benefit from social media to target women and sell far-right ideas through influencer practices and other tactics that are similarly used by other far-right actors. From this we could conclude that the role of female representators in VOX is of great importance to attract female audience by posting sensitive content or aiming at empathy through identification as well as to soften the image of the far-right through fear-based techniques or turning to biology.