Alt-right Memes and Microspectropolitics: Posthumanising and Queering Schild & Vrienden's Memetic Activism

ABSTRACT
Sketched out against the backdrop of the far-right’s response to the Anthropocenic COVID-19 pandemic, this essay analyses Schild & Vrienden’s [Shield & Friends’] memetic activism. Part of the global far right, Schild & Vrienden (or S&V) positions itself as a Belgian Flemish alt-right youth movement out to culturally – or metapolitically – alter society (Pano 2018; Maly 2019). Digital meme-making is one of S&V’s most notorious metapolitical strategies. Arguing that digital memes that are spread and reworked by social media users have ‘making live and letting die’-powers (Lykke 2019) and are thus an important part of the far right and the alt-right’s investment in a dehumanising bio-/necropolitics, this chapter investigates S&V’s memetic activism before, during, and after the pandemic. This is done to gain a better understanding of their white supremacist and anti-LGBTQIA politics. The research presented in this essay furthermore contributes to memetic theory, Queer Death Studies (Radomska et al. 2019, 2020; MacCormack et al. 2021), and critical theory by zooming in on the affective hauntings of the ‘Kongo’ memetic assemblage, alt-right memes’ microspectropolitics, and memes’ queer(ing) potential via the posthumanising post-representational perspectives of Baradian (2007, 2010) agential realism and Deleuzoguattarian (2005) micropolitics.