Fascism, as a political movement, is deeply fixated on preserving the traditional gender order – a structure that its defenders view as both natural and perpetually under siege. This perceived fragility, in a cyclical manner, cultivates a hyper-aggressive form of masculinity, where physical violence is seen as a core component in its production. This dynamic extends beyond fascism, into the realm of militant anti-fascism, with its reliance on physical confrontation. Both fascist and anti-fascist violence thus become intertwined expressions of masculinity, enabling their respective forms of activism.
In this essay, I aim to demonstrate how the concept of masculinity can deepen our understanding of fascism and anti-fascism as political phenomena. To achieve this, I compare the Swedish Nazi street movement of the 1980s and 1990s to the militant antifascism attempts that mobilized to stop the annual torch lit marches in Lund on the 30th of November – one of Sweden’s most prominent fascist demonstrations of the era.1
Nazi Culture of Violence
As part of a project investigating anti-fascist mobilizations in Lund, I reviewed all Nazi fanzines and newspapers preserved in the archives of the Swedish Security Service. These publications are filled with descriptions of how Nazis within the movement engaged in physical violence against political opponents or minority groups; how foreign Nazis – particularly from the United States and South Africa – carried out various acts of violence and terrorism; and a rich array of illustrations and fiction that depict or encourage violent acts.
A common feature of these portrayals is that the actors – save for one illustrated shield-maiden – are clearly coded as male. The stories are of how Nazis have access to berserker rage, coded as masculine, appearing to serve as a way to, on a linguistic level, elevate fascist activists as bearers of a desired masculinity. This also produced difference in relation to groups portrayed as enemies, who are feminised, as is the case, for instance, with anti-fascists and Jews, portrayed as having an animalistic sexuality, a sexual predisposition that is out of control. The same type of feminisation can be seen with racialised migrant groups from the middle east or Sub-Saharan Africa.
Although it is tempting, as one editorial in the Nazi music magazine Nordland did, to dismiss these depictions of violence as adolescent fantasies (pojkrumsfantasier), the same movement that produced these violent imaginaries also practiced violence as a central political strategy. During the period in question, several spectacular acts of violence were carried out, including bank robberies and bombings. Individuals affiliated with the movement committed more than 20 murders, and the Nazi street movement contributed to an everyday geography of racist violence.
Moreover, the world view reproduced through printed media, as well as the vibrant white power music scene and lived culture, appears to have been connected to both everyday practices and more deliberate political actions, where the use of violence was intertwined with the production of masculinity. While written words, pictures or music do not directly determine how political movements act, and there are also portrayals of more collective forms of violence that the Swedish Nazi street movement failed to realize in practice during this period, the portrayal of a quite specific desired masculinity enabled men within the Nazi movement to enact a specific, and in this case highly violent, form of masculinity.
A Conflicted Anti-Fascist Portrayal of Violence
A comparison with some of the militant anti-fascist movement’s texts describing violence associated with the annual November 30th clashes in Lund reveals a markedly different emphasis. One fanzine (Barrikaden) from the autonomous movement stated that even though collective violence was a necessary as well as morally and strategically correct way to combat fascism and the state, the real struggle was placed in everyday life – in schools and workplaces. And even though militant anti-fascists described their violent blockades as both victories and examples of a successful way to do anti-fascism in communiques and articles in the anarchist magazine Brand, the acts of violence were described in ways that stressed the collective nature of violent action and describe violence in a nearly apologetic tone. In other words, this was a significant departure from the revelry in individual violence put forward by the Nazi milieu they fought.
This portrayal of collective violence bears many similarities to the militant anti-fascism of the interwar period, which also emphasized collectivity, discipline, and a fundamental ambivalence toward violence as a necessary evil. However, where the first movement constructed masculinity through depictions of violence, the latter appears significantly different. Here, it was not ruthless rage and violent fantasies that were valorized, but rather control and instrumental use of violence – something that can be understood as a rational, calculated, modern masculinity.
In my interviews with militant anti-fascists from southern Sweden and Copenhagen, a clear pattern about practices of violence emerge. On one hand, the informants are proud of their victories and do not shy away from describing how they used violence as a key part of their repertoire. They stressed the use of violence up to, but not beyond, a certain threshold. Bats, but not knifes, to beat Nazis until they stayed down, but to stop hitting once they did so. This was framed as a strategy of non-escalation, presenting a rational and calculated view on violence. On the other hand, our informants also spoke in terms that acknowledged the inherent destructivity of using violence as a political weapon and a conscious positioning against destructive masculinity. This points towards a desire to not conform to Nazi masculine ideals, and to problematize the connection between their practices and a reproduction of masculinity.
One way to understand this more nuanced and perhaps inclusive masculinity is to situate the militant anti-fascists within a broader autonomous movement. In Scandinavia, the new Anti-Fascist Action groups emerged in extra-parliamentary environments with strong influences from radical anarcha-feminism, and these groups were not nearly as single-gendered as interwar anti-fascism or the street Nazism they opposed.
Masculinity as a Useful Concept
I would argue that masculinity (and, by extension, gender) is a highly useful analytical concept for understanding both the Nazi street movement and contemporary militant anti-fascism. This argument is grounded in a theoretical framework where gender is a central category for analyzing all forms of collective political action. Fascism lends itself well to analysis, with masculinity as a central analytical concept, not least because of its unabashed indulgence in exaggerated, almost parodic hypermasculinity. This applies both to the modern forms of street Nazism I have examined and to interwar fascist glorifications of the muscular male body – and my understanding is that these, to a large extent, speak about historical continuity.
However, I am convinced that physical force within militant anti-fascism can also be understood through the lens of gender. Interwar anti-fascist organizations were clearly male-dominated, sometimes even explicitly single-gender in their statutes. These groups also produced a specific form of struggle-based masculinity that stressed collectivity and control.2 Contemporary forms of militant anti-fascism offer even more complex and intriguing objects of study. Furthermore, as I have briefly described above, the contemporary anti-fascists I have studied had a more conflicted understanding of violence and masculinity.
To my knowledge, systematic research on how contemporary anti-fascism produces gender is lacking. This needs to be ameliorated. By focusing on how physical force anti-fascist movements describe their uses of violence, we could get insights into the role played by masculinity, and perhaps also forms of non-conforming masculinities and femininities. This would allow fruitful comparisons with nascent street level fascism, and also showcase differences between fascism and anti-fascism.
We would thus get a better understanding of the complex ways in which gender, and masculinity in particular, influence anti-fascist movements, and how activism is made possible through a shared movement culture, sometimes extending beyond single-issue antifascist social movement organizations.
To cite this article:
Andrés Brink Pinto, ‘Masculinity: A Useful Concept to Understand Fascism and Anti-fascism,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 2 (15 October 2025).
Masculinity: A Useful Concept to Understand Fascism and Anti-fascism ©2025 by Andrés Brink Pinto is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- This was part of a project that resulted in the monograph Trettionde November – kampen om Lund 1985–2008, as well as the articles “Rethinking transformative events to understand the making of new contentious performances” in Radical Left Movements in Europe (Routledge 2018), and “Challenging Fascist Spatial Claims. The struggle over the November 30 marches in southern Sweden since the 1980s”, in Anti-fascism in the Nordic Countries: New Perspectives, Comparisons and Transnational Connections (Routledge 2019). All co-written by me and Johan Pries. ↩︎
- Cf Andrés Brink Pinto, Med Lenin på byrån – normer kring klass, genus och sexualitet i den svenska kommunistiska rörelsen 1921–1939, Lund: Pluribus 2008. ↩︎
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