Cosplayers and crypto-grifters: The women of the Argentine libertarian right

Please join us on Wednesday, 22 April at 14:00 for the third lecture in our hybrid lecture series on Critical Media Studies:

Prof. Verónica Pájaro: Cosplayers and crypto-grifters: The women of the Argentine libertarian right

Venue: Maison du Savoir, room 3.120 or via Webex.

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Abstract

With over 200,000 Instagram followers, @ladylemon is a cosplayer, anti-feminist influencer, and National Deputy for Javier Milei’s libertarian party La Libertad Avanza. In her official accounts, ladylemon shares short video excerpts from her violent outbursts at the National Congress, alongside bikini and AI-generated portraits in costume. The aesthetics and performance of cosplay subcultures have been appropriated and rebranded as central elements of the libertarian political aesthetic.
In this talk I wish to examine the gendered and racialized aesthetics of social media cosplay performances by women in Argentina’s far-right, using Lemoine as a central case study. I analyze how cosplay aesthetics and meme culture are strategically appropriated to produce a sexualized political persona aligned with anti-feminist, anti-abortion, and anti-vaccine discourses. While these performances depart from familiar right-wing feminine archetypes such as the “tradwife”, they nonetheless reproduce and exploit discourses of feminine submission and objectification recognizable from global far right movements. Drawing on intersectional feminism and digital ethnography, the lecture invites to explore how postmodern reactionary populism (Tebaldi, 2021) is mobilized by the women of the right in Argentina, while raising questions about researching far-right digital spaces.

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Catherine Tebaldi

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