In recent years, scholars and commentators have increasingly pointed to the central role of gender discourses – particularly masculinities and antifeminism – in the mobilization strategies of right-wing and far-right movements. While this phenomenon is often analyzed with reference to digital media and contemporary political actors, its historical roots remain insufficiently explored. This project therefore situates current developments within a longer genealogy, focusing on a formative phase of the New Right characterized by ideological reorientation, international networking, and experimentation with new cultural and media strategies in response to the societal transformations of the post-1968 period.

The New Right of the 1970s did not operate through openly extremist publications, but rather through a heterogeneous field of journals, magazines, and intellectual platforms that positioned themselves as critical, alternative, and metapolitical. Within these periodicals, masculinity functioned as a key structuring category: as an implicit norm, as an object of crisis narratives, and as a resource for political self-fashioning. The project asks how different masculine ideals – ranging from soldierly models to intellectualized, elitist, or individualized forms – were articulated, combined, or placed in tension with one another. It further investigates how these constructions related to broader social changes, including feminist movements, decolonization debates, and shifting conceptions of authority, nation, and violence.

Methodologically, the project combines approaches from contemporary history, gender history, and media studies with perspectives from visual and design history. Rather than limiting the analysis to textual discourse, it treats periodicals as multimodal objects in which language, imagery, layout, and graphic design jointly produce meaning. By drawing on visual discourse analysis, visual rhetoric, and visual history, the project develops a framework for analyzing how masculinity is not only argued but also seen through recurring visual motifs, gazes, bodies, and aesthetic conventions. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between visual strategies and ideological positioning, as well as to processes of appropriation and differentiation vis-à-vis liberal mainstream media and left-wing alternative publications.

The comparative perspective between West Germany and German-speaking Switzerland allows the project to identify both shared reference frames and significant divergences. While New Right actors in both contexts drew on transnational discourses, their constructions of masculinity were shaped by distinct historical experiences, political cultures, and collective memories, most notably differing relationships to National Socialism, war, and political consensus. By tracing these continuities and ruptures, the project contributes to a more differentiated understanding of right-wing masculinities as historically contingent, relational, and strategically deployed.

Overall, the dissertation aims to address a significant gap in the historical study of right-wing movements by systematically integrating gender – and masculinity in particular – as an analytical category. In doing so, it sheds light on the cultural and visual dimensions of right-wing counter-media and offers insights into the longer-term conditions that have enabled the New Right to present itself as intellectually sophisticated, culturally resonant, and politically adaptable.