Intersectional Representations of 'Us' and 'Them' in Populist Media in Finland and Sweden

Finland and Sweden share the ideal of a Nordic welfare state whereby gender equality is a central tenet of the system. In both countries, a new kind of parties promoting populist or even radical right views has gained prominence in the last elections. While there are similarities in the agendas of the Finns Party and the Sweden Democrats, the parties differ with regard to their political histories and agendas, and modes of expressing discriminatory or even racist views. While ethnicity and racialization are broadly discussed in the research on populism, gender and sexuality often remain under-researched, although in populist reasoning, views on nation, ethnicity and migration, social class, culture and language, gender and sexuality are interdependent in complex ways. In this comparative study, we examine how the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘others’ is articulated in terms of gender, class, ethnicity and race in the party newspapers: Perussuomalainen (Finland) and SD-Kuriren (Sweden). More specifically, we analyse how the meanings of various identity categories are performed intersectionally, whereby intersectionality refers to the interrelations of hierarchically organized and constantly negotiated social categories and subject positions that are performed in order to construct the ‘us’ and ‘others’ distinctions. The aim is to compare the representations of gender and other intersecting categories of power in the discourse of the Finnish and Swedish populist parties, and to find out how the cases differ, considering the two slightly dissimilar societal and cultural discussion climates.