[Linganth] Invitation to talk by Dr Catherine Tebaldi ' Granola Nazis and Neoliberal Mystics' - 4.30-6 pm (UK time), 7 June, 2023 IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, 20 Bedford Way (Room 728)

[Del Percio, Alfonso]

UCL IoE Centre for Applied Linguistics Research Seminar Series



 Granola Nazis and Neoliberal Mystics: gender, nature, tradition and the far right online


Dr Catherine Tebaldi, University of Luxembourg



4:30-6 pm (UK time) Wed 7 June, 2023, Room 728,  20 Bedford Way, London

The talk can also be attended online using this link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/2053485234


This paper draws on case studies from 12 far right female influencers to explore the enregisterment and circulation of white nationalist women's language, that is the use of the conventions of women's language for white nationalist metapolitics. It first explores how the language of love and romance manuals like John Gray's Men are From Mars Women are From Venus is enregistered by white nationalists to create a moral universe and a masculinist metapolitics centered around a return to "tradition" embodied by a return to postwar economic roles.  It then looks at the circulation and shift of this register in two new areas: granola nazis, who draw on media not around romance but organic food, farming and natural health, and neoliberal mystics, who draw on occult and spiritual traditions. Granolas deeply naturalize far-right ideas as desirable gender roles and motherhood, no longer 1950's suburbia but 1850's homesteads or a notion of an "ur-tradition" described as "ancestral living" which uses the figure of the woman as mother to link nature and white tradition. Neoliberal mystics return to the gendered cosmology of Men are From Mars Women are From Venus, translate white male supremacy and compulsory heterosexuality into the language of spiritual meaning. Both groups repeat and even deepen the gendered cosmology of the far right, while bringing it in spaces and cultural styles we previously associated with a "hippie" left.  The talk will conclude with questions about circulation and naturalization of far right beliefs.

Bio: Catherine Tebaldi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Culture and Computation lab at the university of luxembourg, department of humanities. Her work has appeared in social anthropology, international journal of the sociology of language, information communication and society, and most recently a special issue on nationalism in Gender and Language.


Dr Alfonso Del Percio
Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics
IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society
University College London
Centre for Applied Linguistics
20 Bedford Way, Room 628a
London WC1H 0AL
Co-Editor: Language, Culture and Society
https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/lcs/main
Blog: https://disruptiveinequalities.com/
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