Staying with the Uncomfortable: Researching Bullying and Gender in 2026

Across these two years, this PARTICIPATE blog has been a comfort space for me to sit with the progress I made, the milestones I reached, and the opportunities this network created for us – doctoral candidates – to learn, exchange, and thrive in our projects. This time, however, I realised that what I wanted to sit with was the uncomfortable.

It is indeed uncomfortable to pursue a PhD, to do research in general, and especially to research online bullying and gender in this specific historical and political moment, where familiar patterns of authoritarianism and fascism are emerging across many contexts, including Europe.

What is uncomfortable is to experience a persistent tension between the demand to focus on academic work and the feeling that the world beyond the quiet space of my university´s desk is fracturing. Yet this discomfort also generates a sense of urgency to remain present, attentive, and ethically engaged with the ways political movements materialise in human relations, including bullying dynamics.

Researching bullying while far-right political movements are rising, consolidating, and thriving on division is deeply uncomfortable, as we witness the erosion of rights and freedoms, the silencing of critical research, the instrumentalization of differences to produce fear, hatred, and violence. All of these shapes of power circulate and contribute in creating the ground in which bullying takes place.

How political forces entangle in bullying dynamics

Political forces, past and present, leave traces in societies and in processes of subjects formation.

They contribute to the formation of norms, social hierarchies and imaginaries, shaping – alongside other human and non-human forces – how young people relate to one another, how they come to understand themselves, and how they perceive others.

Political narratives that normalise, legitimise and celebrate exclusion, humiliation, and domination do not stop at the level of institutions or leaders. They resonate across media, digital platforms, peer cultures, and everyday interactions. In doing so, they fold into the discursive, affective, and relational practices through which bullying takes shape.

It is deeply uncomfortable to see that, in this historical moment, bullying is also openly performed at the highest political levels. Public humiliation, mockery, intimidation, and the systematic marginalisation of minoritised communities or individuals have become normalised political strategies, contributing in modelling forms of interaction based on aggression and domination.

The president of the United States of America – Donald Trump – is a useful example.[1]

Trump does not merely represent a political position; he embodies and amplifies a constellation of forces that many of us within the PARTICIPATE network are critically engaging with in our research. Misogyny, sexism, patriarchy,[2] racism, xenophobia,[3][4]  homophobia, transphobia,[5] nationalism, white suprematism, islamophobia,[6] classism, and Christian religious conservatism, forces that co-exist and act on subjects also in bullying dynamics among young people.

Paul Horton (2021) offers an interesting example with a study looking at the role of political language. Horton shows how Donald Trump’s 2016 election rhetoric, especially slogans like “build that wall”, helped create and legitimize processes of othering of Mexican nationals. These messages travelled into schools, where students repeated the same language to harass and exclude peers, often along racial and ethnic lines.

These circulating movements and narratives are not obviously confined to the United States. They travel, translate, sediment and emerge differently into the complex fabrics of other contexts.

In Italy, for example, where I had the privilege of conducting part of my fieldwork, I got to observe this sedimentation and its entanglement with the socio-cultural-political-historical fabric of the different geographical contexts I have walked in as researcher. And it was particularly interesting especially since the focus of my research is gender policing and negotiations.

When engaging with these dynamics, it was useful for me to think with the work of Italian sociologist Alessandro Orsini (2025 a, 2025b) who develops the concept of “satellite state”: a state whose foreign and security policies are largely controlled by a foreign power. Orsini identifies Italy as a satellite state of the United States of America, highlighting implications not only for policy-making but also for media narratives shaped by political power. Building on this concept, I extend the notion of satellite status to the circulation of ideological positions, particularly gendered narratives.

The Trump administration – including other actors and lobbies that play a key role in shaping media spaces, including social media – became the bearers of what is framed as acceptable and speakable in other societies governed by far-right political forces. These discourses have been translated, sedimented, and reworked within the contemporary Italian context, especially under Giorgia Meloni’s government. When combined with a deeply rooted patriarchal system that had already been consolidated under Silvio Berlusconi’s governments, these dynamics have increasingly positioned feminism, queer lives, and non-normative gendered expressions as ideological threats. This has concrete implications for how gender and sexuality are or are not approached – or actively avoided – in the Italian society, shaping what became acceptable and accepted, and what not.

In my study, I bring into discussion the recent proposal to introduce sex education in Italian schools, which was blocked by right-wing parties. During this debate, the deputy Rossano Sasso stated that the successful blockage was a victory that bore the “clear mark of God, the Homeland and Family”. He further declared that

“With this law we say enough to gender ideology, to the woke bubble, it will no longer be allowed to political activists to do political propaganda in schools”, adding that left parties bring “drag queen and porn actors to talk with children about “sexual fluidity, surrogacy, and sexual confusion”[7].

This kind of narratives circulate widely through media and public discourse, resonating in everyday contexts and shaping how young people come to police one another’s bodies and expression of their gendered self. I registered, in particular, a strong policing to gendered expressions deviating from the norms prescribed by the very tradition invoked by the deputy – namely, catholic religion, the traditional family, and a sense of heteronormative patriotic belonging.

Why staying with the discomfort matters

Staying with this discomfort means acknowledging that researching bullying and gender today entails confronting how everyday act of exclusion and violence are cultivated even within broader political spaces. It means recognising that what young people enact and endure cannot be separated from the worlds they are growing up in.

Staying with the uncomfortable demands attentiveness to how power circulates, how harm becomes normalised, and how possibilities for care and resistance might still emerge within and against these conditions.

 

For readers interested in deeper engagement, the scientific publications listed below offer thorough analyses of Trumpism and Giorgia Meloni´s gender views and their impact. The analysis presented here is also informed by my forthcoming monograph.

 

Giorgia Scuderi

 

References:

Bingaman, J., & Caplan, S. E. (2023). Cyberbully-in-chief: exploring Donald Trump’s aggressive communication behavior on Twitter. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 31(4), 342–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2022.2047683

Björkdahl, A., & Cognini, S. (2025). Anti-genderism in 280 characters: A study of Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni’s online discourse. Party Politics, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688251339629

Butler, J. (2024). Who’s afraid of gender? (First edition.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Horton, P. (2021). Building walls: Trump election rhetoric, bullying, and harassment in US schools. Confero, 7–32. https://doi.org/10.3384/confero.2001-4562.210901

Indelicato, M. E., & Magalhães Lopes, M. (2024). Understanding populist far-right anti-immigration and anti-gender stances beyond the paradigm of gender as ‘a symbolic glue’: Giorgia Meloni’s modern motherhood, neo-Catholicism, and reproductive racism. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 31(1), 6–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068241230819

Khan, M. H., Qazalbash, F., Adnan, H. M., Yaqin, L. N., & Khuhro, R. A. (2021). Trump and Muslims: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Selected Tweets. SAGE Open, 11(1), Article 21582440211004172. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211004172

Lasio D., Girei E., de Oliveira J. M., Piras L. , Serri F., Employing women’s rights as a racist weapon: The case of Giorgia Meloni in Italy’s radical right, Women’s Studies International Forum, Volume 114, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2025.103237.

Lopez G. (2020). Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020. Vox. August 13.

Marron, M. B., & Bloomsbury, publisher. (2020). Misogyny and media in the age of Trump (M. B. Marron, Ed.). Lexington Books. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781666996234

Orsini A., (2025), Gaza Meloni. La politica estera di uno Stato satellite, Piemme

Orsini A., (2025), Casa Bianca-Italia. La corruzione dell’informazione di uno Stato satellite, PaperFIRST

Piazza, J., & Van Doren, N. (2022). It’s About Hate: Approval of Donald Trump, Racism, Xenophobia and Support for Political Violence. American Politics Research, 51(3), 299-314. https://doi-org.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk/10.1177/1532673X221131561 (Original work published 2023)

Scrinzi F., Populist Radical Right Frames of Gender and Sexuality in France and Italy: Targeting Feminists and Other Enemies of the People, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxaf056

Smokowski, P. R., & Evans, C. B. R. (2019). Cyberbullying: Playground politics (and worse) in cyberspace. In Bullying and victimization across the lifespan (pp. 107–121). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-20293-4

Wojczewski T., (2025) Fascism and Foreign Policy: Trumpism and the Politics of National Decline and Rebirth, Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 5, Issue 3, ksaf099, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf099

 

[1] Prior to this article, several scholars had already argued that Trump’s behaviour and communicative strategies can be understood as forms of bullying. (Smokowski & Evans, 2019; Bingaman, & Caplan, 2023)

[2] Marron, M. B., & Bloomsbury, publisher. (2020)

[3] Piazza, J., & Van Doren, N. (2022)

[4] Lopez G. (2020)

[5] In chapter 4 of Who Is Afraid of Gender, Judith Butler examines the multiple efforts undertaken during the first Trump administration to roll back and undermine the rights of LGBTQI+ communities.

[6] Khan et al. (2021); and the extensive literature referenced in the article.

[7] Translated from Italian to English by the author of this post.