Researching Far-Right Masculinities in Authoritarian Times: Emotional Labour and Blurred Social Worlds

This paper reflects on ongoing PhD research examining far-right digital culture centred around masculinist influencers and physical culture. These spaces are shaped by broader authoritarian dynamics, including hostility toward expertise, exclusionary nationalism, and the valorisation of discipline, hierarchy, and masculine order. With the author hailing from a working-class and military background, his own social worlds intersect in complex ways with those studied. Many of the far-right narratives analysed increasingly circulate within these everyday social worlds in the current political climate. This proximity creates distinct methodological and ethical challenges. Emotional labour in this context therefore also involves navigating moments in which far-right framings travel across social boundaries, blurring the lines between research and everyday life, as well as moments of affective alignment related to gendered positionality. Drawing on the concept of critical empathy, this paper reflects on the challenges for researchers in maintaining analytical distance when the social worlds they have inhabited and are in close proximity to increasingly overlap with those they seek to analyse in authoritarian times.