Performative male vulnerability and right-wing privilege: Vladimir Putin, Jordan Peterson and Rasmus Paludan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the strategic function of public displays of vulnerability by three powerful male figures: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Canadian psychologist and conservative social media personality Jordan Peterson, and Swedish and Danish politician and Islamophobe Rasmus Paludan. Each is associated with ideologies that are championing ‘traditional’ masculinity, which means their shows of vulnerability may initially appear at odds with the conservative or right-wing values they promulgate. We examine what is meant to be invoked in the audience by these figures’ strategic borrowing of ‘feminine’ traits in their performances of masculinity.Theoretically, the article is rooted in theories of identification in psychoanalysis and critical theory as they relate to processes of leadership and group identification, as well as treating the masculinist logic of gendered nationalism as underlying contemporary forms of right-wing politics. We find that the three men’s strategic borrowing of vulnerability in fact represents a manipulative component of right-wing Weltanschauung, where its performance can solidify dominance over groups of followers, without extending compassion to those othered by this very ideology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".