The Racialisation of Rape: A Far-Right Tool for Boundary-Creation Across Borders

Far-right parties and movements have increasingly come to incorporate ideas of gender equality into their political agendas. While seemingly out of concern for women's rights and safety, these issues are in reality seldom more than a veil to further the stigmatisation of Muslim men. With a starting point in the US far right, the situatedness of women in far-right nation-building, and the related concepts of boundaries and borders, this paper illustrates how in contemporary far-right discourse, rape is racialised as a tool for international community building. I analyse a large, longitudinal dataset of digital texts about international constructions of immigrant-perpetrated rape in Sweden through a mixed-methods discursive approach with computational as well as qualitative text analysis. The analysis shows how longstanding and persistent the immigrant rape narrative is, and that the international far right uses a wide variety of strategies, sources and examples to construct the threat of immigrant-perpetrated rape in Sweden. Furthermore, I illustrate how the articulation of immigrant-perpetrated rape follows many of the same discursive patterns as have been identified elsewhere, but that distinctions between the Swedish case and the international far right actors reporting on it are suppressed in favour of homogenising descriptions.