Fear and Loathing in the Welfare State: Affective and semantic meaning-making in Generation Identitær

Abstract: This thesis investigates affective and semantic meaning-making in online audiovisual propaganda published by the Danish nationalist youth organization, Generation Identitær. Specifically, the study uses the notion of affective investments and relations in order to account for the ways in which the organization’s propaganda operates. It follows a feminist and postcolonial tradition and centers the ways in which bodies and spaces are conjunctively (re)produced, and how belonging to space is signaled by the organization. The study draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the effort to situate and deconstruct the various performances and figures appearing in the propaganda, mapping out semantic slides and affective imageries. By showing how affective identification is distributed in the videos, the analysis illuminates the ways in which white subjects are repeatedly allowed spatial, emotional and temporal reach at the expense of racialized bodies. Consequently, some lives come to be perceived as threatening figures of death, necessitating and legitimizing different forms of violence against said lives.