The gendered performance of scholarship on the far right – in the field, academia, and the home

In organizing this ECPR panel on the methodological and ethical challenges in researching anti-gender and far-right mobilizations, we particularly seek to respond to the relatively limited focus on the impact of researching illiberal, or even hostile forms of mobilization on individual scholars. In this paper, we highlight one aspect of this emerging area of inquiry, by critically engaging with the gendered performance (Butler, 1988) and emotional labour (Hochschild, 1979) that are inherent to conducting research on the far right ecosystem, which gathers inter alia political parties and social movements, paramilitary organizations, loosely organized networks, and subcultures and individuals (Baele et al., 2020; Norocel 2022; Vandiver 2020). We draw on Hochschild’s (1979) seminal work to highlight the ways in which researching the far right demands different types of emotional performance of the individual scholar, both in terms of performing emotion that is incongruent with the internal experience of the researcher, as well as the strategic suppression of emotions in different contexts. At the same time, we explore how the expectations around emotion work are inherently shaped by the researcher’s performed gender identity (Butler, 1988). Concretely, we explore the ways in which our gendered identities (mid-career white cis male of Eastern European extraction, and an early career white cis female scholar from Western Europe) shape our interactions with three different environments. First, we investigate the emotional labour related to engagement with the field of study, in terms of gaining access to certain actors and environments, navigating issues of personal safety of the researcher, and in terms of interacting with illiberal, hostile and violent actors and content. Second, we explore the emotional labour required in our interactions with the professional environment of academia, in terms of norms and expectations with regards to (emotionless and detached) researcher professionalism, navigating the financial precarity and insecurity of early-career academia, and in receiving limited support from institutions in the face of threats and harassment. Finally, we engage with the question of how to navigate emotional performance in the private sphere, responding both to the need to share emotions and experiences, whilst simultaneously seeking to avoid distress and concern, and maintaining a boundary between work and life.