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We are delighted to announce that Silvia Díaz Fernández has landed the 2025 Loop Best Blog Prize for her blog piece Metapolitical digital wars on gender, race, and queer life.
After careful deliberation and a rigorous scoring process, the jury gave the 2025 prize to a piece that reveals how proponents of the far-right metapolitical project are shaping public discourse to fit their anti-democratic interests.
In the winning article, author Silvia draws on her path-breaking research into the effects of the normalisation of far-right ideas on women, racialised people and queer communities
Read the full story on The Loop
Silvia Díaz Fernández is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos, Spanish National Research Council. Her work explores digital culture, anti-feminism and far-right politics from an interdisciplinary perspective bridging sociology, media studies and political science.
At a time when the digitalisation of far-right politics and manospheric imaginaries continues to chip away at the dignity of racialised communities, queer people, and women, receiving this award feels especially meaningful. It reassures me that this work matters, and I sincerely appreciate the jury’s recognition. I hope to keep contributing to conversations that not only challenge these harms but also help build more just and feminist futures.
In their laudatory comments, the jury offered the following:
Silvia’s compelling blog piece tackles a phenomenon – digital violence against women and minorities – which is attracting growing attention in politics, academe, and entertainment. Cleverly, she reframes reactionary politics as a form of resistance, explaining how online movements and sentiments are shaping online discourse and a new political culture.
To make sense of current far-right politics, Silvia revisits established theories such as Antonio Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ to lay bare the workings of the manosphere – a concept which has yet to be effectively theorised and pathologised in the academic space.
Silvia did a wonderful job of articulating a theoretical basis for this troubling new phenomenon, equipping us with the tools to reclaim, in her words, ‘the terrain of culture, humour, and emotion as spaces for feminist, queer and antiracist democratic imagination’.
Akudo McGee, Alejandro Tauber and Priscyll Anctil Avoine (2024 prizewinner) – 2025 Prize Jury
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