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Public Emotions and the Affective Forces of Social Activism, Vol. 32 - 2025, No. 2
Emotions and Identities in Anti-Gender Contention: A Reinvention of Radical-Right Protest Culture
This article analyses the emotions evoked by the visual and performative mobilisation of the anti-gender movement through a case study of the March for Life in Zagreb, Croatia. Relying on theories of collective action investigating the role of emotional mobilisation in the public sphere, we argue that the anti-gender movement accentuates ritual practices that transcend the instrumental functions of protest and belong to a new, postmodern repertoire of identity expression traditionally reserved for left-wing movements. We examine the role of emotions in movement's collective identity formation using multimodal analysis and the participant observation method. First, we employ multimodal qualitative analysis on 600 posts from the actors’ Facebook page. Second, we analyse a poster of the March in depth, investigating its symbolic, rhetorical, and connotative meanings. Finally, we analysed the cultural logic of the March for Life and its kinaesthetic and symbolic aspects as participants, including music, signs, route, organisation, and artefacts. The paper argues that the movement's success is mainly due to its articulation of emotions, as it adopts the discourse, emotional tone, and performative elements of identity politics. The movement enables collective emotional expression to construct a positive participatory political identity rooted in an idealised vision of the heteronormative family.
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