Pansy asses and terrorists : Sensibilities of anti-environmentalist toxic speech against Extinction Rebellion Finland
Kosonen, H., & Löf, R. (2024). Pansy asses and terrorists : Sensibilities of anti-environmentalist toxic speech against Extinction Rebellion Finland. European Journal of Cultural Studies, OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241278931
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European Journal of Cultural StudiesDate
2024Copyright
© The Author(s) 2024
Hate speech against environmental activists has been on the rise globally, alongside a forceful criminalization of the climate movement in Western Europe. This article analyses anti-environmentalist speech and actions against Extinction Rebellion (XR) Finland, an environmental movement that employs non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade individuals and institutions to address the ongoing ecological emergency. The materials consist of online commenting evoked by the news coverage of XR Finland’s protests in October 2022 and May 2023, and ethnographic data from the protest sites. The data ranges from scorn and stigmatizing insults to fantasies of violence and physical assaults at the demonstration sites. The article discusses this data through the concept of toxic speech and explores the different sensibilities of such speech: (1) the ironic and dismissive sensibility, (2) the emotionally invested sensibility and (3) the punitive, resentful sensibility. This article highlights how these sensibilities and related affective practices are embedded in and compounded by gendered, class-based, ageist and ableist systems of power and argues that anti-environmentalist toxic speech contributes to environmental activism’s delegitimization and stigmatization. It suggests that toxic speech normalizes violence towards activists and can ultimately violate activists’ civil and political rights.
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SAGE PublicationsISSN Search the Publication Forum
1367-5494Keywords
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https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/243359326
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Research Council of FinlandFunding program(s)
Academy Project, AoFAdditional information about funding
The research and publication of this article received funding from University of Jyväskylä (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences), Kone Foundation [grant number: 202009043], Research Council of Finland [grant number 340650], FinnishCultural Foundation and Emil Aaltonen Foundation.License
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