Conference Program

Contemporary democratic societies are increasingly shaped by digital media ecosystems in which

political actors produce and disseminate strategic narratives capable of instrumentalizing and

redefining concepts such as democracy, rights, and participation (Gerbaudo, 2018). In dialogue with

the theme of the conference Learning for Democracy / Democracy for Learning, this contribution

examines how the public discourse of the radical right contributes to the construction of an antidemocratic imaginary through hierarchical representations of gender and the delegitimization of

subjectivities deemed “other” (Mostov, 2021).

Within a hybrid public sphere—where mainstream media and digital platforms intersect—radical

right leaders do not merely communicate programmatic content; they mobilize symbolic and

emotional repertoires that redefine the boundaries of citizenship and participation. The

methodological approach integrates political sociology, communication theory, and gender studies.

Specifically, the paper mobilizes the concept of political culture to interpret the radical right not only

as a political actor, but as a relatively coherent set of beliefs, attitudes, and norms that shape

participation and define the boundaries of the political community (Formisano,2001; Anselmi, 2023).

From an illiberal perspective, this political culture sustains a selective conception of citizenship, in

which democratic participation is symbolically and morally reserved for a culturally homogeneous

“people,” while subjectivities perceived as incompatible are marginalized (Mudde & Kaltwasser,

2018). The paper investigates how these actors instrumentalize digital spaces—Facebook and X—to

produce and amplify sexist narratives, heteronormative frames, and exclusionary representations of

gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and immigration (Puar, 2017).

Rather than interpreting these communicative practices as contingent rhetorical strategies, the study

conceptualizes them as structurally embedded mechanisms through which illiberal values and

exclusionary visions of the social order are normalized. The empirical basis consists of a corpus of

social media content and public interviews by prominent leaders of the Italian radical right. Through

qualitative content analysis conducted using NVivo, the research reconstructs recurring discursive

patterns, framing strategies, and symbolic oppositions that structure these narratives.

Particular attention is devoted to the ways in which gender equality, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights

are framed as threats to national identity, social cohesion, and the “traditional” family. In this context,

gender-based violence and minority protection policies are sometimes reinterpreted through

securitarian or culturalist lenses, producing an emotionally charged counter-narrative that opposes a

morally legitimate “us” to a “them” constructed as deviant and destabilizing (Mudde, 2020;

Serughetti, 2021).

The analysis shows how digital platforms function as privileged arenas for the production and

circulation of a regressive democratic imaginary, in which the symbolic exclusion of certain

subjectivities is presented as natural or necessary. These dynamics have concrete implications for

democratic participation: by stigmatizing feminist advocacy and LGBTQ+ visibility, radical right

discourse contributes to narrowing the conditions of possibility for inclusive citizenship (Mounk,

2018).

Understanding these discursive mechanisms is therefore a necessary step toward promoting critical

media literacy (Livingstone, 2004) and gender-sensitive educational practices capable of

strengthening the everyday dimension of democracy in contemporary European societies through an

explicitly intersectional perspective.