Far-right youth are often characterized as embodying an aggressive, violent, and hateful hypermasculinity, epitomized by the neo-Nazi skinhead or the race revolutionaries involved in militias and street militancy. This paper challenges these assumptions by examining how three distinct Swedish far-right youth movements and activists construct masculinity through their ideological messaging and performative activism. By analyzing Ungsvenskarna (the youth wing of the Sweden Democrats), the influencer the Golden One, and the Swedish branch of the Active Club movement—representing what Teitelbaum (2017) characterizes as cultural nationalists, identitarians, and race revolutionaries respectively—we investigate how these actors articulate masculine ideals in their propaganda, social media presence, street activism, and public rallies. Drawing on an ongoing study of far-right youth and gender in Sweden, which includes qualitative interviews with 15 far-right activists and analysis of social media communication, we employ feminist and cultural studies frameworks that understand gender as embodied and enacted through style, aesthetics, taste, and lifestyle practices.
Our data suggest that while there are ideological and tactical differences among these groups, we identify a convergent trend toward clean-cut masculine aesthetics, marking a deliberate departure from hedonistic presentations traditionally associated with far-right subcultures. However, this shift manifests differently across factions: whereas cultural nationalists tend to foster a “neat” style, both young race revolutionaries and identitarians in our study emphasize healthy lifestyles and well-trained bodies in line with fascist body ideals.By foregrounding internal diversity within the far-right, this paper offers a more granular understanding of how young heterosexual masculinity is variously constructed across the Swedish far-right spectrum.
