Gender, Islam and nativism in populist radical-right posters: visualizing ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’

ABSTRACT Sayan-Cengiz and Tekin explore the visual communication strategies of Western European populist radical-right (PRR) parties in disseminating nativist, anti-migrant and Islamophobic agendas through gendered visual representations. It is widely argued that the PRR homogenizes and dichotomizes both ‘native’ and Muslim migrant cultures through an ostensibly liberal discourse of respect for women’s rights and freedoms in order to mainstream their exclusionary position towards Muslim migrant communities. However, there is a void in the literature in terms of accounting for how visual communication strategies are used in this process. The authors here argue that looking into the visual representations of Muslim migrant and ‘native’ bodies in the PRR parties’ visual communication materials is crucial for understanding the PRR’s gendered cultural constructions of both Muslim migrant ‘outsiders’ and native ‘insiders’. Focusing on the campaign posters for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the Rassemblement National (RN) in France, and the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) in the Netherlands using a social semiotic approach, their study suggests that Muslim migrants are represented as alien Others, but that there is also a significant difference between representations of migrant women as ‘victims’ and men as ‘aggressors’. On the other hand, ‘native’ women are represented as the embodiment of authentic national identities, as either reproducers or defenders of the nation. ‘Native’, heterosexual men do not often appear in the posters, pointing to the position of power that they hold in the PRR’s imagination. That is, they are the designated spectators and addressees of visual communication materials, rather than objects of representation.