The Cultural Turn of the Far Right: Symbolic Power, Affective Politics, and Everyday Extremism

Over the past two decades, the far right has undergone a profound transformation. While electoral politics and street mobilization remain important, contemporary far-right actors increasingly rely on sophisticated cultural strategies to mobilize supporters, shape public discourse, reconfigure collective identities, and normalize exclusionary ideologies in everyday life. This “cultural turn” reflects a broader strategic reorientation in which symbolic, aesthetic, narrative, and performative practices have become central mechanisms of political intervention and ideological diffusion.

This session explores the emergence of a transnational far-right “cultural industry” composed of fashion brands, music scenes, publishing houses, lifestyle influencers, gaming communities, sports networks, think tanks, and digital media infrastructures. Through these spaces, far-right actors circulate narratives of nation, gender, heritage, and belonging while embedding reactionary values into popular culture, particularly among younger generations. Culture thus operates as a key terrain of hegemonic struggle, where ideology is aestheticized, emotionalized, and translated into everyday practices and identities.

Contributions may address domains such as fashion and aesthetics, music and soundscapes, gaming cultures, literature and intellectual production, sports and physical culture, lifestyle performances, and visual communication. Particular attention will be given to the affective dynamics through which far-right actors cultivate belonging, forge communities, and expand social influence.

Bringing together perspectives from cultural and political sociology, social movement studies, cultural and media studies, and related fields, the session welcomes empirically grounded and methodologically pluralistic contributions from both the Global North and South, including research on transnational circulations, comparison of regional specificities, and uneven cultural articulations of far-right politics.