Solidarity as an Infrapolitical Tool of Repression in a Far-right Online Community
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v19n2p558-579Keywords:
Infrapolitics, Solidarity, Soft Repression, Far-Right, Digital Communities, NetnographyAbstract
This article examines how solidarity, typically understood as a relational resource for emancipation, can function instead as a mechanism of informal repression within far-right digital communities. Drawing on a 15-month netnographic study of Le Bastion, an online self-help network organized around a far-right influencer, the article introduces the concept of mutilated solidarity---a form of relational bonding that reproduces ideological conformity rather than enabling political subjectivation. Combined with a revised reading of Scott's infrapolitics, the study proposes the concept of inverted infrapolitics to describe horizontal, affective, and symbolic forms of control. Through discourse analysis and thematic mapping, it shows how emotions such as shame, pride, and fear are mobilized to normalize virilist, hierarchical values under the guise of fraternity. This article contributes to the critical sociology of solidarity by rethinking the affective infrastructures of ideological reproduction in far-right online spaces, and foregrounds the ambivalent role of care in contemporary political subjectivation.
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