Righteousness, Love, and Humor: The Role of Emotion in Swedish Far Right Activist Stigma Management

ABSTRACT Grievances of feeling silenced and excluded are central to the far right social movement’s claims internationally. Throughout twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Swedish movement and interviews with 30 activists, I met with many activists who shared an experience of stigma resulting from their ideology. But despite decades of research in the sociology of emotions linking stigma to shame, I encountered no open expressions of shame during my year and a half of fieldwork. This signals these activists’ absorption into an alternative normative order which insulates them from the shameful status devaluations imposed by others. Grounded theoretically in the work of Margaret Wetherell, I describe the affective practices of righteousness, love, and humor respondents employed in response to stigmatization. I recognize the instrumentality of these practices in the far right’s pursuit of a racialized hierarchy—while arguing they simultaneously promoted in-group cohesion and positive self evaluations. An ethnographic imperative to take the expressions of righteousness, love, and humor seriously but critically (instead of understanding them as purely strategic smoke-screens) contributes to understandings of activist resilience and the persistence of far-right activism over time, while developing emotional sociological approaches to the movement.