Description
How do the dual mechanisms of social media image circulation and invisibility mobilise offline political violence? This paper conceptualises the ‘digital aesthetics of fascism’ to examine the role former President Donald Trump’s Twitter images play in cultivating an imagined ‘American’ identity based on gendered and racial hierarchy, exclusion and ultimately violence. We find that Trump’s images are extremely homogenous – more white, more masculine, older age demographic – which tracks with the limited existing research on Trump’s broader social media platforms. However, we go a step further to theorise how those categories not widely shown – women, racialised groups, young people – perpetuates a semiotic violence making significant proportions of the United States body politic invisible, not part of the idealised ‘America’, and therefore more vulnerable to violence offline. We argue that this matrix of hyper(in)visibility cultivates an increased legitimization of far-right politics by reaffirming particular hierarchical power relations as the ‘norm’, providing a pathway to offline violence like the 6 January 2021 riots. In doing so we highlight the need for an IR discipline that can effectively examine what online violence makes possible beyond the digital context in an era of right wing populism.
