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In April 2024, the Swedish Riksdag enacted a new gender identity law, making the process of legal gender affirmation independent of the need for a medical diagnosis (RFSL, 2024a; Tanaka and Jönsson, 2024). The passage of the bill might give the impression of ‘business as usual’: the Scandinavian champion of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and other gender and sexuality non-conforming (LGBTQ+) individuals moving to allow for gender self-determination, despite having a government supported by the populist radical-right Sweden Democrats. However, appearances can be deceiving. The charged debate leading up to the bill’s passage and changing attitudes to LGBTQ+ rights show that Sweden is not immune to the global trend of the increasing politicisation of and weakening support for LGBTQ+ rights (Ayoub and Page, 2020; Velasco, 2023).

Unlike in Norway and Denmark, where less restrictive gender self-identification bills stirred little to no attention when enacted a decade ago (Equal Rights Trust, 2014; Amnesty International, 2016), the Swedish bill attracted widespread opposition (Noterius, 2024; Tanaka, 2024; Tanaka et al, 2024). We show that the main arguments voiced by opponents of the bill reflect broader discourses about trans rights elsewhere (Hunklinger and Ferch, 2020; Turnbull-Dugarte and McMillan, 2023; Wurthmann, 2024). We also present evidence that support for further expansion of LGBTQ+ rights is weakening in Sweden (Ahlbom, 2019). Once a leading champion of LGBTQ+ causes, Sweden is gradually sliding down international rankings of LGBTQ+ rights protection (European Commission, 2019; Ahlbom and Karlsson, 2023; Equaldex, 2024; Grahn, 2024; ILGA Europe, 2024).

Election violence is increasingly taking place online. However, we still do not know much about how such attacks affect the representation of politically marginalized groups such as women. This article develops and applies strategies for analyzing (gendered) exposure to and impacts of online attacks against political candidates. It focuses on the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia and combines manual analysis of Tunisian candidates’ public Facebook pages with candidate interviews. We find no gendered patterns in exposure to online election violence in the Facebook data and a low general exposure to attacks. The interview data nevertheless suggests gendered perceptions and impacts of attacks, as well as a perception among the candidates that online election violence is widespread and problematic. These discrepancies highlight that we need a combination of methods and materials to capture the multifaceted nature of online election violence, and in particular those that directly link candidate exposure to impact.

Despite a recent boom in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in many developing countries, there is limited research on how social media is being used in political campaigns in emerging democracies. In these contexts, the introduction of electoral gender quotas often forms part of the constitutional reform. This paper investigates the gendered use of social media among political candidates during the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia, which recently adopted an ambitious gender quota system. We have mapped the use of Facebook among a random sample of 400 men and women candidates and carried out interviews with 19 men and women candidates who ran in these elections. The results demonstrate how patriarchal structures interact with political-institutional features - the electoral gender quota system, the electoral system (a closed-list proportional-representation system), and the fragmented party system - in shaping the gendered use of social media among political candidates in Tunisia. We show that men are more likely to use Facebook for campaign purposes since they are more often placed at the top of the candidate lists. Hence, rather than having an equalizing effect, the study suggests that social media become a new tool for already privileged candidates in Tunisia.

Antifeminist groups have made extensive use of online platforms to mobilise and spread their political ideas. Existing studies of online antifeminism tend to focus their analyses primarily on how masculinities are constructed through antifeminist discourses. This article takes a different approach by exploring how the social position of antifeminist political players is related to their effective use of online platforms. Through an empirical study of an influential antifeminist blogosphere that emerged in Sweden in the mid-2000s, it is shown how the mostly anonymous antifeminist bloggers are, in fact, well-resourced activists who, due to their educational resources and communicative skills, could effectively use political blogs to promote their cause. Consequently, despite their claims of being marginalised and victimised, these predominantly male antifeminist activists actually occupy a privileged position in relation to historically marginalised groups, a position that affords them new possibilities to attack feminist achievements and actors through online platforms.

Online platforms present new challenges to feminist politics since they provide antifeminist groups with additional possibilities to come together and advocate their claims towards wider publics. This article argues that new analytical perspectives are needed to understand how antifeminist discourses are successfully produced and promulgated online. In particular, it suggests that in addition to analyzing the content of antifeminist discourses we need to pay attention to how the design and governance of online platforms, as well as the resources among antifeminist activists, shape online resistance to feminist politics. Two analytical dimensions are introduced that help to specify how the design and governance of online platforms, as well as the social composition of antifeminist groups, enable these to come together online and influence mainstream publics. To demonstrate the usefulness of this analytical approach, a study of an influential antifeminist blogosphere in the Swedish context is used as an illustrative case.

This thesis explores how online platforms mediate the reproduction of privilege, by employing the concept of counterpublics. The term, which has been central to the feminist critique of mainstream public sphere theory, denotes the alternative publics that emerge in response to various exclusions by dominant publics with the goal of targeting and influencing the same. Because the emergence of counterpublics has traditionally been understood as offering the possibility for historically marginalized groups to come together and challenge dominant public discourses, empirical research has often focused on “good” or “progressive” counterpublics. However, the recent rise of racist, antifeminist and climate change denying counter-discourses online, formed by groups that claim to be marginalized from mainstream publics, raises new issues of how we can understand and analyze power and privilege in the public spheres. This thesis therefore sheds light on how privilege is reproduced in the context of online counterpublic dynamics. A revitalized power perspective on the public spheres is developed and subsequently used to analyze the reproduction of privilege in three empirical case studies. First, the rationales behind the broader inclusion of (certain) counterpublics in the dominant public sphere through comment sections is investigated by means of interviews with Swedish mainstream news media editors. Second, the formation of an antifeminist counterpublic on Swedish political blogs is analyzed, with a specific focus on how the privileged position of the antifeminist net-activists facilitated its emergence. Last, it is explored how self-identified white feminists were enabled by Twitter’s architecture to reproduce asymmetrical power relations within the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen; a counterpublic initiated by women of color to question their exclusion from mainstream feminism and online feminist platforms. The thesis demonstrates that while online platforms have provided historically marginalized groups with new possibilities to form counterpublics, these venues at the same time pose new challenges to their inclusion. In particular, online platforms provide privileged groups with new possibilities to influence dominant public discourses directly as well as more indirectly through competition with structurally marginalized groups in the emergence of counterpublics.