A feminist geopolitics of bullying discourses? White innocence and figure-effects of bullying in climate politics

Abstract

This paper examines discourses of bullying in international climate politics. Drawing on two cases, first the (social) media coverage which surrounded climate activist Greta Thunberg’s visits to the UK in 2019, and second Thunberg’s interactions with former US President Donald Trump, alongside a theoretical framework inspired by feminist geopolitics, the paper argues that discourses of bullying can be conceptualised as a series of figurations (the ‘bully’, the ‘bullied’, and the ‘anti-bully’) which reproduce individuated relations of power. Overall, the paper argues that individuating bullying discourses perpetuate a politics of white innocence which preserves petro-masculine power in international climate politics. To contest these unequal power dynamics, the paper argues for an anti-bullying politics grounded in collective, intersectional challenges to climate injustice.

Keywords:

• Bullying
• climate change
• feminist
• figuration
• geopolitics

Introduction

In a 2019 column written for The Guardian (July 19^th) describing the treatment of activist Greta Thunberg, commentator Aditya Chakrabortty (2019) notes that ‘something extraordinary has happened in our politics … a bunch of grown men have began bullying a schoolgirl’. Chakrabortty’s claims reflect a chorus of commentaries on the bullying of Greta Thunberg and other climate activists (Cillizza 2019; Nelson and Vertigan 2019; Sales 2019; LeBlanc 2020). Bullying as a term is not infrequently used in climate change debates, for example accusations that science teachers are being bullied by US climate sceptic groups (Turrentine 2018), or charges that climate sceptics are being bullied by those on the ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming side of the argument’ (Martz 2019). However, despite these examples, bullying discourses remain underexplored in critical scholarship on climate geopolitics.

Drawing on feminist geopolitics (Sharp 2021) and Castañeda’s (2002) analysis of figuration, this paper traces bullying discourses (what Ringrose and Renold (2010, 573) term ‘bully discourses’) in international climate politics and contends that these discourses can be partially interpreted as a series of contested ‘figure-effects’ (developing Spivak’s ([1987] 2002, 204) conception of the ‘subject-effect’). The paper proceeds in four sections. Firstly, there is an overview of academic accounts on the concept of ‘bullying’ and of feminist geopolitics as a theoretical framework to conceptualise bully discourses. Secondly, the paper introduces the empirical case of Greta Thunberg in international climate politics, particularly (social) media coverage of her visits to the UK in 2019 and her interactions with Donald Trump. Thirdly, the paper charts three ‘figure-effects’ of how Greta Thunberg is (partially) understood in international climate politics: ‘bully’, ‘bullied’, and ‘anti-bully’. The paper argues that these figure-effects, especially those of ‘bully’ and ‘bullied’, work through individuating logics of white innocence to uphold petro-masculine power structures (Daggett 2018). The paper concludes with an argument that, because bullying discourses draw on individuated relations of power, a politics of anti-bullying should be grounded in intersectional, collective solidarities against climate injustice.

A feminist geopolitics of bullying discourses?

Whilst international concern about ‘bullying’ has been prominent in a variety of spheres since at least the 1990s (Walton 2005), it is in education that the concept has gained most traction (Cornell and Limber 2015). Olweus (1994, 1173, original emphasis) defines bullying in the following sense: ‘A student is being bullied or victimized when … exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other students.’ Bullying behaviours can be attributed to both individuals and groups and include physical violence and harassment, verbal insults, and psychological bullying (Berger 2007; Hymel and Swearer 2015). Fundamentally, bullying is characterised by an imbalance of power between the ‘bully’ and the ‘bullied’ (Foreman 2015). A substantial literature also explores ‘cyberbullying’ in digital contexts, with disagreement as to the extent to which cyberbullying differs from ‘conventional’ bullying (Li, Craig, and Johnson 2015; Deschamps and McNutt 2016; Olweus and Limber 2018). Cyberbullying encompasses a range of different behaviours, including intimidation, stalking, impersonation, and sharing video recordings and images of violent assaults (Brydolf-Horwitz 2022). Ash, Kitchin, and Leszczynski (2018) note the ambiguities of ‘digital’ spaces, with a range of aesthetic, material and sociotechnical phenomena intertwined with computing systems. Bork-Hüffer, Mahlknecht, and Kaufmann (2021) demonstrate these ambiguities with their study of an Austrian school context, noting that bullying practices stretch across entangled physical (e.g. school grounds), material (smartphones), and digital (social media platforms, messaging apps) spaces.

Walton and Niblett (2013) contend that psychological accounts of (cyber)bullying are underpinned by a positivist philosophy, framed by its emphasis on empirical measurement and rational behaviour. Ringrose (2008) argues that psychological models of bullying rely on a conception of power as a quality possessed by individuals. Such an account risks replicating categories of ‘bully’, ‘bullied’, ‘victim’ and ‘bystander’ which do not encapsulate the messy realities of bullying (Galitz and Robert 2014; Ringrose and Rawlings 2015). This conceptualisation of bullying has also been critiqued for its emphasis on individual responsibility at the expense of structural inequalities in bullying dynamics (Zine 2006; Meyer 2016). For example, in his analysis of the IGB (It Gets Better), anti-homophobic bullying campaign in the US, Meyer (2017) investigates intersections between heteronormativity, neoliberalism and classism. Gay men presented (in campaign videos) as ‘successful’ are associated with higher levels of income and educational attainment, ‘moving to the city’ from their hometowns, and property ownership. This reading excludes low-income LGBTQI + individuals who lack opportunities to pursue ‘success’ according to these metrics (Meyer 2017). Reflecting on an antiracist feminism course in women’s studies, Ringrose (2007) recounts experiences of black students whose learning needs were marginalised by defensive reactions of white students in the classroom, rendering the role of whiteness in racist bullying as ‘invisible’ or relegating it to the status of an isolated, individual act.

Whilst there is relatively little geopolitical scholarship that directly addresses bully discourses, there is a political geographic literature on related forms of violence. For example, in her account of different terrorisms, Pain (2014) argues that both global and everyday terrorisms (domestic violence) are characterised by gendered politics of fear, disrupting a binary which suggests that one form of violence is ‘public’ and ‘national’/’international’ in scale, whilst the other is ‘private’ and experienced in the ‘home’. Feminist geographers have also drawn attention to the violences of academia (Valentine 1998; Tolia-Kelly 2017), highlighting the marginalisation and harassment reproduced in academic spaces. A growing body of scholarship also highlights schools as sites of geopolitical contestation (Nguyen 2020; Lizotte and Nguyen 2020). Alongside these studies, scholars have produced a substantial body of work critiquing the violences of climate geopolitics (Dalby 2002; Nixon 2011; Chaturvedi and Doyle 2015; Boyce et al. 2020). Kaijser and Kronsell (2014) argue that climate change scholars could draw productively from an intersectional feminist framework, emphasising that social groups are differentially affected in terms of vulnerabilities, responsibilities and decision-making capacities in the context of the violences of climate change. An intersectional approach would entail transformative responses to climate injustice which centre marginalised climate-changed lives (Hathaway 2020).

Building on feminist climate change scholarship, this paper proposes a feminist geopolitical analysis of bullying discourses in international climate politics. Feminist geopolitics postulates that geopolitical phenomena are not only restricted to the national or international scales, but also circulate at the scales of the body, the home, and the intimate (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Williams and Massaro 2013). As such, feminist geopolitics calls for a more situated account of geopolitical knowledges (drawing on Harraway (1988)). Dixon (2014) expands on this conception to explore how ‘estranged phenomena’, e.g. flesh and bones, travel within assemblages that cross international boundaries. Dixon (2015) clarifies that this approach does not dismiss the ‘the body’ or ‘subject’, but rather emphasises its material constitution. Hyndman (2019) contends that whilst Dixon’s (2015) critique of individuated subjectivity opens up important space for discussion of ‘material states’ in feminist geopolitics, she cannot relinquish the political struggles and opportunities for resistance that the individual subject and body impute. Drawing on forensics as an analytic, Sharp (2021) proposes a feminist geopolitics which recognises the (re)formation of bodies and subjects from fleshy materialities (individual speaking bodies, injured bodies, body parts), whilst also engaging with the ways in which these bodies are oriented in geopolitical representations which render these materialities meaningful.

Drawing inspiration from feminist geopolitical theorisations of subjectivity, this paper argues that the subject positions (re)constituted in bullying discourses in international climate politics can be conceptualised as geopolitical figures. Castañeda (2002) argues that embedded within the idea that children are ‘the citizens of tomorrow’, or that they ‘grow up’ to be adults, is the notion of childhood as potentiality. Childhood is inherently tied to futurity, to emergence into uncertain futures (de Waal 2021). This assumption allows for an analysis of how the ‘child’ is figured, with figuration an on-going process. Figuration in this sense is material and discursive: ‘figures’ are context-specific configurations of knowledges, practices and power embedded in trajectories of potentiality (Castañeda 2002, 3-4). Here, ‘figures’ are similar to ‘subjects’ as formulated in feminist geopolitical scholarship: assemblages of material (digital technologies, bodily materials, etc.) and discursive (tropes, images and textual representations) phenomena related to individual and collective bodies. These configurations produce what Spivak terms ([1987] 2002, 204) ‘subject-effects’: specific ‘knottings’ of discourses, materialities, and ideologies which produce the effect of a coherent, sovereign ‘subject’. Cautiously bringing together Castañeda’s (2002) and Spivak’s ([1987] 2002) theorisations, I argue that a feminist geopolitics of bully discourses in international climate politics can be conceptualised as a contested geopolitics of figuration. The ‘bully’, ‘bullied’ and ‘anti-bully’ are conceptualised as figure-effects – always in a state of emergence and characterised by configurations of material, discursive, and affective components. In using the term ‘effect’, my intention is not to suggest that figurations of bullying do not carry influence; rather, as Castañeda (2002) argues, these figures are both ‘effects’ of such configurations and are themselves constitutive of them.

In adopting this conceptual approach, I argue that bullying discourses in international climate politics are partially characterised by two features. First is a politics of individuation, following the critique of Ringrose and Renold (2010), which reduces complex social relations to binaries between individuated subjects (whether these are individual persons or individual groups). These binaries could be between ‘bully’ and ‘bullied’, ‘bully’ and ‘bystander’. Individuating bully discourses, through a performative logic of white innocence, can obfuscate the petro-masculine power which underpins climate injustice. In addition, through a focus on the individual person of Greta Thunberg, casting her in opposition to particular others (subjects that she is argued to ‘impose’ behaviours onto, or subjects that she is being ‘manipulated’ by), bully discourses carry the performative effect of undermining collective political possibilities: they cut through socially interconnected opportunities for solidarity (Butler 2020). Second is that bully discourses curtail political agency. Whether Greta Thunberg is constructed as a ‘bully’ that constrains the ability of others to engage in polluting behaviours, or whether she is ‘bullied’ through personal attacks by individuals such as Donald Trump or accusations that she is being ‘manipulated’, the agential possibilities of the subject of bullying are reduced.

Whilst figuration provides a useful framework through which to explore bully discourses, it also risks reconstituting individuating categories. The paper’s focus on Greta Thunberg also reconstitutes unequal power relations underpinning climate activism. As Rafaely (2021) notes, the voices of indigenous climate activists and climate activists of colour are marginalised in international climate politics. An egregious example of this relates to representation of Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. Nakate was one of five climate activists invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, 2020. The Associated Press (AP), as part of a report on climate activism at the conference, presented a photograph to caption the article; however, whilst the other four (white) climate activists were in this image, Nakate had been cropped (for what the AP claimed were compositional reasons) (Evelyn 2020). Nakate accused the AP of racism and erasure of African activists in the climate debate (Barnes 2021). As Najafi (2020) argues, the exclusion of Nakate and simultaneous presence of Greta Thunberg (one of the activists in the AP photograph) reinforces an exclusionary whiteness in contemporary climate activism. Whereas Thunberg is privileged to speak about the global implications of climate change, Nakate is denied this agency and challenged on her specific responsibility to speak for ‘African voices’ in climate politics (Barnes 2021). Thunberg’s activism is predicated upon the action of indigenous climate activists and climate activists of colour and yet they are said to be ‘following in her footsteps’ (Najafi 2020). This paper, with its focus on bullying discourses related to Greta Thunberg, is embedded within these unequal structures of climate injustice. The aim of the paper is not to elevate the individual figure of Greta Thunberg, but rather, through an empirical analysis of bullying discourses in the context of Thunberg’s activism, to emphasise that bullying discourses performatively reconstitute broader structures of petro-masculine power. I also do not claim that bullying discourses are the only way to interpret the specific relations discussed around the figure of Greta Thunberg; this paper focuses on bullying discourses as this is a frequent lens through which these relations have been interpreted. Specifically, in proposing a geopolitics of figuration, what this analysis tries to do is elaborate on the specific intersectional dynamics of bully discourses and their political effects. An intersectional approach, centred on the inseparability of different forms of marginalisation and which aims to contest the gendered, racialised, aged injustices of climate change (Hathaway 2020), provides a strong foundation for a politics of anti-bullying in climate change politics.

Greta Thunberg in international climate politics

Following the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming of 1.5 °C, there has been a significant upsurge in climate justice activism (Ebrey, Hall, and Willis 2020; Bevan, Colley, and Workman 2020). Inspired by movements such as Fridays for the Future and Extinction Rebellion, an estimated 1.4 million people participated in a climate strike on March 5^th, 2019 (Boulianne, Lalancette, and Ilkiw 2020). In September 2019, an estimated 7.6 million people participated in a Global Climate Strike (Martiskainen et al. 2020). A significant factor behind the current impetus in climate activism is the organising of Greta Thunberg; on August 20^th (2018), ahead of the Swedish national election, Thunberg sat outside the Swedish Parliament holding a placard that read ‘Skolstrejk för Klimatet’ (School Strike for the Climate) (Olesen 2020). Thunberg continued to strike every day and her actions spurred the development of an international movement. She was subsequently named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019 (BBC 2019). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thunberg has continued to push for transformative climate policies, particularly in light of the UN Conference of Parties in Glasgow (November, 2021), further underscoring the reality of climate breakdown.

A highly influential activist, Greta Thunberg has been described as a global ‘icon’ and ‘hero’ (Olesen 2020). She has also been subject to a range of critiques, from claims about the supposed alarmism of her arguments to misogynistic, ageist, ableist attacks on her personal integrity and appearance (Park, Liu, and Kaye 2021). This paper explores how bully discourses are formulated around Greta Thunberg as a climate activist in these critiques. The paper focuses on two empirical contexts. First, figure-effects of ‘bully’ and ‘bullied’ are explored in the empirical context of UK (social) media coverage of Greta Thunberg, particularly that which surrounded her UK visits in 2019. The second context, investigating the figure-effect of the ‘anti-bully’, draws specifically on Thunberg’s Twitter exchanges with Donald Trump. Textual examples for this second case are not only from 2019, but spread between 2019 and 2021. Together, these examples help to shine a light on bullying discourses in international climate politics and the political possibilities that such discourses foreclose.

Greta Thunberg as ‘bully’

A figure-effect of Greta Thunberg as ‘bully’ draws upon the discursive trope of Greta Thunberg as a leader judging how individuals should behave in their everyday lives. It is also comprised of compositions of Thunberg’s bodily materiality, the femininity of her ‘pigtails’, co-assembled with aged, gendered discourses of abjection. In an illustrative example, former Conservative MP Neil Hamilton tweeted (July 25^th, 2019, cited in Mosalski 2019), alongside an image of Thunberg with red eyes:

Have you done anything this week that Greta might disapprove of?

It’s shaping up to be the hottest day of the year.

Please remember: no electric fans. DEFINITELY no air conditioning.

Greta has spoken.

In Hamilton’s image Thunberg is cast as a monstrous figure, with imagery associated with demonic figures implying that she is a threat to polluting practices. The use of red eyes, together with the question addressed to Hamilton’s audience (‘have you done anything this week that Greta might disapprove of?’), characterises Greta Thunberg as a threatening figure to be feared. Using the phrase ‘Greta has spoken’, Thunberg is further cast as an authoritarian figure deciding on the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, pushing or dictating particular behaviours onto others. To an extent, this example mirrors what Hinsliff (2019) terms the ‘toxic libertarian’: ‘people who combine burning desire to do what the hell they like with fury at the very idea of being nagged, nannied or told what to do, especially by women.’ A similar phenomenon can also be observed in opposition to COVID-19 public health measures in some European countries; as Bialasiewicz and Eckes (2021) argue, alongside claims that fundamental rights are violated by these measures, claims to individual ‘sovereignty’ are also invoked by dissenters. In asserting ‘individual sovereignty’ without acknowledging the collective polities which enable individual autonomy to exist, this logic can affect the wellbeing of diverse populations when individual behaviours have a detrimental effect on public health (Bialasiewicz and Eckes 2021). Bialasiewicz and Muehlenhoff (2020) note that, whilst conventionally far-right political claims would be supportive of stronger state surveillance and a nationalist ‘we’, some far-right (and left-wing) responses to COVID-19 regulations focus on ‘individual rights’ and ‘bodily autonomy’. These neoliberal conceptions of personal responsibility – the right to care for self, to be selectively responsible at the expense of collective safety – situate a masculinist individual subject as counter to the collective solidarity required for a pandemic response (Bialasiewicz and Muehlenhoff 2020).

In the sense that this subject feels a threat to its ‘individual sovereignty’ from rules imposed by elites, these reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic echo some responses to Greta Thunberg’s activism. I argue that these two discursive moves – the construct of Greta Thunberg as a bullying authority figure, and the (often masculine) subject threatened by calls for collective climate action – performatively constitute an innocent ‘us’ or ‘I’ that climate activism threatens. These discursive tropes engage in a kind of scalar obfuscation: the focus on Thunberg as an individual ‘bully’ detracts from the transnational, collective character of climate activism on the one hand, and the identification of individual subjects threatened by this activism detracts from transnational petro-masculine political structures which resist climate action, on the other. The figure-effect of Greta Thunberg as ‘bully’ also assembles affective and material components in its articulation. These components constitute Thunberg on the basis of gendered tropes that manifest around aspects of her corporeal materiality (her ‘pigtails’). In a second example, from The Daily Express (April 28^th, 2019), political commentator Nick Ferrari writes (as part of a discussion of Thunberg’s interactions with UK Members of Parliament (MPs) in April 2019):

Our cowardly MPs are paralysed by a 16 year old’s pigtails, says NICK FERRARI

Rather than making the case that, the UK has taken this issue far more seriously than virtually any other nation, our pitiful politicians nodded in submission

The phrase ‘nodded in submission’ reiterates the notion of Greta Thunberg as an authoritative figure to whom others are compliant or seeking favour. MPs are described as having ‘prostrated’ themselves to ‘court favour’ with ‘Greta the Great’, ‘Princess of the eco-activists’. Ferrari also refers to Thunberg as a ‘teacher’ judging students (MPs) for late homework. Thunberg’s hairstyle (her ‘pigtails’) is one of a number of characteristics that have come to define her image. She is strongly associated with the yellow raincoat she wore during school strikes in August 2018; this dress choice has been included on murals of Thunberg around the world, including in Bristol and Istanbul (Olesen 2020). As a consequence, the raincoat, through iterative re-articulations, becomes a performative component of Greta Thunberg as a figure-effect. In a similar way, I argue that references to pigtails materially constitute the youthful, innocent femininity of Greta Thunberg. In their study of heteronormativity in a school context, Ringrose and Renold (2010) note the ‘normative cruelties’ regulating subject positions of an aggressive masculinity counterposed against innocent, unassuming femininities. Within this frame, ‘the girl’ is framed as compassionate, conformist and uncompetitive (Ringrose and Renold 2010). However, as Ringrose and Renold (2010) note, when girls are accused of ‘bullying’, they assume the subject position of gender deviants. In contrast to young masculinities in this school context, where construction as the aggressive bully is a symbol of strength and competitive affirmation, for girls the subject position of bully is one of abjection (Ringrose 2008).

In the case of Greta Thunberg, it is illustrative that her pigtails are associated with both her age and femininity: Ferrari identifies a ‘16 year old’s pigtails’ and a ‘pigtailed teen’. Dagbovie-Williams (2013) notes that in representations of young African American females (and in young females more generally), pigtails can signify an infantilised, sexualised imagery, a youthfulness that coexists with representations of sexual maturity. In the specific case Greta Thunberg, it could be that representations of her pigtails not only speak to histories of sexualised white femininity, but also co-constitute Thunberg as a risky subject with too much agency. Here, Thunberg’s pigtails construct her as gender deviant and abject: innocent ‘pigtails’ highlight that Greta Thunberg is different to that which she is expected to be (according to heteronormative prescriptions of feminine innocence). Ferrari’s use of ‘paralysed’ to describe the agency of pigtails indicates the performative force of this material and discursive construction: that this assumption detracts from the ‘reality’ of Thunberg. Ferrari describes MPs as ‘cowardly’, ‘pitiful’, and ‘craven’, implying not only that UK politicians are attention-seeking and fearful of Thunberg, but also that they lack courage to oppose her. Greta Thunberg’s youthful innocence, illustrated by the corporeal agency of her pigtails, becomes a form of gendered deviancy against the heteronormative frameworks these writers use to position girlhood. Configurations of corporeal materialities (the performative power of Thunberg’s pigtails) and discursive tropes of feminine girl-ness co-constitute the figure-effect of Greta Thunberg as ‘bully’. I argue that this figuration, because of the implication of deference, fear or even ‘submission’ for those subjected to Greta Thunberg’s actions, performatively confers (white) innocence upon those subjects affected by this subjection and the popular everyday practices that they engage in. The next section further develops this argument, detailing how a figure-effect of Greta Thunberg as ‘bullied’ is constituted in context-specific moments of international climate politics.

Greta Thunberg as ‘bullied’

Whilst a figure-effect of ‘bully’ can construct Greta Thunberg’s girlhood as abject in relation to what is expected of heteronormative femininity, these characteristics are also a part of a figure-effect of ‘bullied’. Thunberg has been dismissed as young, naïve, and ignorant (Mkono, Hughes, and Echentille 2020). This discourse draws on Greta Thunberg’s childhood as a means to differentiate her – in terms of maturity, education, reasonableness of her views, etc. – from an older generation or ‘adults’. Generational difference frames an unequal power relation whereby Greta Thunberg is bullied, manipulated, or controlled by ‘adults’. In a piece for The Times (April 28^th, 2019), political commentator Neil Oliver writes:

Children need our love and attention, not manipulation. The little Swedish girl has Aspergers, a form of autism. I am sure she is motivated by heartfelt anxiety about the world her parents have told her about … The adults should have a care.

Oliver repeats common descriptions of Thunberg: that she is a ‘little Swedish girl’ with Aspergers Syndrome. He also reiterates the trope of Greta Thunberg as innocent (‘she is motivated by heartfelt anxiety about the world’). In this case the invocation of innocence does not cast Thunberg as deviant, but rather highlights her vulnerability and victimhood: she is subject to ‘manipulation’ by adults who ‘should have a care’. Greta Thunberg is no longer the figure promoting environmental change, but is denied this agency by older subjects (including her ‘parents’). It could be that the invocation of Thunberg’s ‘Swedishness’ speaks to the whiteness of her ‘innocence’. Nordic whiteness is a contested phenomenon which shapes global cultures in complex ways (Lundström and Teitelbaum 2017). In an analysis of the Norwegian noir show Occupied, Mrozewicz (2020) highlights a white ecology in which eco-exceptionalist national discourses construct wintery Norwegian landscapes as pristine. A white ecology is also inflected by constructs of white Norwegian masculinities as ‘brave’, ‘rugged’ and ‘intrepid’, drawing upon famous explorers and a concept of white ‘innocence’: a Nordic exceptionalism based on ‘tolerance’, a ‘democratic welfare state’, and, in the specific case of Norway, a more ethical form of oil extraction. In the case of Greta Thunberg, the whiteness of her ‘innocence’ intersects with aged, gendered, nationalised and ableist figure-effects of ‘bully’ and ‘bullied’. As ‘bully’, Greta Thunberg’s innocence is constructed as a form of deviant abjection: something that contradicts the ‘normative cruelties’ expected in bullying discourses (Ringrose and Renold 2010). As ‘bullied’, Greta Thunberg’s innocence does not contradict the heteronormative framework through which this figuration is oriented; rather, she is allied with the writers of these texts (and the populist conception of everyday publics that they claim to represent (Kojola 2019)) as ‘innocent’ and, by virtue of her Swedish (white) girlhood, is being ‘manipulated’ by environmentalist ‘adults’. In another example, written for The Spectator Australia (May 4^th, 2019), columnist Helen Dale writes of Thunberg’s visit to the UK that ‘Greta’s parents are exploiting her, as is Extinction Rebellion’. Thunberg is described as a ‘human shield’ for a ‘climate cult’. Whether she is being ‘exploited’, or is being used as a ‘human shield’, Thunberg is victimised and denied political agency. Whether ‘the bully’ identified refers to specific individuals, or an abstracted ‘climate cult’, a figure-effect of Greta Thunberg as ‘bullied’ harnesses a trope of innocence which associates Greta Thunberg with everyday actors also being threatened, albeit in a different way, by environmental ‘elites’.

I argue that one performative effect of such bully discourses is to reaffirm the white innocence of petro-masculine power. As Inwood (2018) describes, there are at least three means through which white innocence is historically and geographically constituted. First, white innocence positions racism in historic contexts, dissociating racist subjugation from present-day activities. Secondly, white innocence is transcendent, constructing a geographical logic in which racism is always taking place ‘somewhere else’, independent of one’s vicinity. Finally, white innocence implies not only that whites do not need to take responsibility for the political and socioeconomic economic structures which maintain existing power hierarchies, but also that they can continue to benefit from these structures whilst ‘decrying racism’. Pulido (2016) argues that these logics are intertwined with racial capitalism, reducing racism to ‘individual’ acts that are exceptions to a liberal norm. As Wekker (2016) argues in her analysis of racism in the Netherlands, the conception of the country as ‘tolerant’ and ‘open-minded’ obscures Dutch histories of colonialism and racist subjugation. Constructs of white innocence in the Netherlands vary, but often involve denials of racism and a reluctance to talk about social difference (particularly race and ethnicity) (Wekker 2016). In general, white innocence connotes a hiddenness of whiteness, a dislocation of white privilege and supremacy from their sociopolitical and socioeconomic contexts.

Constructs of white innocence are arguably implicated in figure-effects of Greta Thunberg as ‘bully’ and ‘bullied’. On the one hand, Greta Thunberg is isolated as a bullying individual who, partly as a consequence of the ‘normative cruelties’ of her youthful femininity, threatens the individual liberties of unnamed constituencies (a fearful ‘we’ or ‘I’ that Thunberg dictates to). On the other hand, Greta Thunberg is represented as subject to manipulation by environmental elites. Each of these configurations dislocates critique away from petro-masculine power. Daggett (2018, 25) contends that authoritarian movements in the West coalesce around a combination of ‘climate denial, racism and misogyny’ in which fossil-fueled extractivisms uphold ‘white patriarchal rule’. In their analysis of gendered nationalisms in the context of climate skepticism and COVID-19, Agius, Bergman Rosamond, and Kinnvall (2020) argue that toxic masculinities, underpinned by ontological insecurity and appeals to victimhood (particularly amongst white men attracted by a populist message), underpin attacks on Greta Thunberg. These discourses draw on longer-term concerns about the threat that environmentalism poses to (white) masculinist capitalism (Malm and The Zetkin Collective 2021). Anshelm and Hultman (2014), reflecting on apocalyptic climate change discourses in Sweden from 2006-2009, note the (predominantly male) climate skeptics who, portraying themselves as marginalised dissidents, opposed the encroachment of climate regulations on ‘industrial society’. In an American context, McCright and Dunlap (2011) identify a ‘white male effect’ in which white conservative males are more likely to be skeptical of climate science and downplay the severity of climate-related risks. McCright and Dunlap (2011) argue that this effect reflects a dismissal of knowledge claims that would threaten these individuals’ privileged status in US society. In her account of two representations of Greta Thunberg in Alberta, Canada, one a defaced mural and another depicting Thunberg as subjected to sexual violence, Keller (2021) identifies how the transnational girlhood Thunberg embodies is challenged in the context of an anxious Albertan petro-masculinity (with Alberta’s ‘tar sands’ a significant source for oil extraction). Greta Thunberg, as a transnational climate activist, thus represents a direct challenge to power structures of petro-masculine extractivism (Keller 2021). Constructed as ‘innocent’ in the context of bully discourses, white petro-masculine elites (e.g. fossil fuel companies, climate skeptical think tanks, and nationalist politicians such as Donald Trump) can be presented as both threatened by powerful climate activists on the one hand, and as innocent and unassuming on the other (echoing the hiddenness of white power and privilege). To conclude the paper, I discuss how these discourses are contested, documenting a figure-effect of Greta Thunberg as ‘anti-bully’.

Greta Thunberg as ‘anti-bully’

Ryalls and Mazzarella (2021) note that Greta Thunberg’s girlhood is key to her agency: she is working to instill hope in young people and confront the inaction of ‘adults’. In response to ableist attacks, Thunberg stated (in a tweet on August 31^st, 2019): ‘When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go … I have Aspergers and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And – given the right circumstances – being different is a superpower.’ Her difference, that which performs Greta Thunberg as ‘abject’ or ‘vulnerable’ in figure-effects of ‘bully and ‘bullied’, is reclaimed as a strength, ‘a superpower’. As Olesen (2020) notes, for Thunberg’s supporters Aspergers reinforces the ‘hero ecology’ surrounding her (Schmitt 2019): it demonstrates her personal resilience, a positive resource for climate action. Greta Thunberg’s emergence as a global figure is part of broader cultural economies of ‘girl heroes’ (Taft 2020). Drawing comparisons with fictional figures such as Pippi Longstocking, Thunberg’s status can also be situated in Swedish cultures of heroism (Witoszek and Mueller 2021). As Taft (2020) argues, girls have historically played significant roles in social movements, for example the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its links to the US Civil Rights Movement, but current discourses place individual girls as leaders in a broader field of youth activism. Such discourses of the individual girl hero could reinforce neoliberal narratives of individual responsibility at the expense of collective solidarity. In the case of Greta Thunberg, her status as a ‘girl hero’ embodies particular privilege. Whilst her Aspergers is characterised as a superpower, constructed in terms of characteristics such as high intelligence (Matthews 2019), the ways in which this intersects with her European whiteness ensure that Thunberg is regularly foregrounded in climate activism in a way that indigenous climate activists and climate activists of colour are not (Najafi 2020).

The figure-effect of ‘anti-bully’ is situated in these moments of agency from Thunberg: specific examples of fight-back in bully discourses. The term ‘anti-bully’ captures that Greta Thunberg is ‘standing up to’ bullies, that she is ‘anti’ bullying in a direct sense. I argue that Thunberg’s framing of the anti-bully is framed by ironic subversion. Ridanpää (2019, 732-3) defines irony as ‘the comprehending of words in the opposite way from that in which they are articulated’. Humour and irony are bodily as much as they are representational; they are embodied in the corporeal (e.g. laughter) responses of subjects of ironic subversion (Fluri 2019). To explore the anti-bully as a figure-effect saturated with irony, this section documents a number of Thunberg’s Twitter exchanges with Donald Trump. After an earlier tweet (September 24^th, 2019a) in which Trump described Thunberg as a ‘very happy young girl’ with a ‘wonderful future’ after her speech to the UN Climate Action Summit, he issued another attack when she was named Time Person of the Year (December 12^th, 2019b):

Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!

In the aftermath of the 2020 US election, Thunberg tweeted (November 5^th, 2020):

So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill, Donald, Chill!

On January 20^th, 2021, as Trump left the White House after his election defeat, Thunberg tweeted: ‘he seems like a very happy old man looking forward to a bright and wonderful future’. In these tweets, Trump touches on ageist and ableist tropes to attack Greta Thunberg. First is his sarcastic reference to her as a ‘young girl’. As Bergmann and Ossewaarde (2020) note, ageism is a significant component of attacks on Greta Thunberg. Fridays for the Future activists have been cast as naïve, truant ‘pupils’ who should be in the classroom. In a study of 3300 comments from 11 YouTube videos featuring Greta Thunberg, the authors found that ageism, sexism and ableism were all prominent forms of discrimination (Park, Liu, and Kaye 2021). Trump also repeats ableist tropes as part of his vilification of Thunberg, including the notion that she has an ‘Anger Management’ problem and should ‘chill’, mocking associations of Aspergers with a lack of emotional awareness and control. Thunberg’s tweets mirror Trump’s in structure. In light of Trump’s impulsive personality and thin skin, she rearticulates the phrase ‘Anger Management Problem’ in response to Trump’s reaction to electoral defeat. This is especially interesting in light of the aggressive attitude Trump embodies in his performances of violent masculinity, what Gökariksel and Smith (2016, 79) term his ‘fascist body politics’. With a history of climate denial, Trump has worked to associate himself with a rugged conception of the white, male coal miner (Kojola 2019). Referring to Trump’s emotional sensitiveness (‘Anger Management’), particularly when he has lost in a competitive environment (the US election), Thunberg employs ironic subversion to challenge Trump’s white masculinity directly. She also highlights the immaturity of Trump as an ‘old man’, inverting the notion that increased age confers greater maturity. This is emphasised in Thunberg’s appeals to scientific knowledge; Thunberg repeatedly calls for politicians to ‘listen to the science’ on climate change (Skilbeck 2020). The notion that Thunberg has ‘done her homework’ on climate science highlights the maturity of young climate activists against the uninformed immaturity of older detractors, including Donald Trump. With these discursive maneuvers, Thunberg contests Trump’s bullying taunts directly, subverting his embodiment of an aggressive white masculinity with counter-claims of emotional sensitiveness, immaturity in old age, and defeat in competition.

This irony also plays out in the ways in which Melania Trump’s anti-bullying campaign, Be Best, was debated after Donald Trump’s comments about Greta Thunberg being named Time Person of the Year (Behrmann 2019). Melania Trump had earlier voiced her opposition to a joke about Barron Trump from Professor Pamela Karlan (based at Stanford Law School) during an impeachment hearing on December 4^th (Smith 2019), citing Barron Trump as a child who ‘deserves privacy’ and ‘should be kept out of politics’ (Trump 2019c). On December 13^th, 2019, the White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham stated that ‘the President and First Lady often communicate differently – as most married couples do. Their son is not an activist who travels the globe giving speeches.’ These exchanges arguably reiterate heteronormative tropes of the ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ as responsible for parenting, particularly as Melania Trump is expected to ‘stand up for’ Barron Trump. Speaking through the Press Secretary, Melania Trump also exercises political agency to differentiate herself from Donald Trump (highlighting their different ‘communication styles’). Whereas Donald Trump uses the trope of innocence to patronise Greta Thunberg (that she is a ‘very happy young girl’), Melania Trump downplays Thunberg’s innocence as a ‘child’, highlighting instead her identity as an ‘activist’ who travels to ‘give speeches’, something which is argued to make Thunberg a more acceptable target for these kinds of attacks. However, the fact that Melania Trump emphasises a different subject position for Thunberg (‘activist’ rather than ‘child’), one argued to increase the legitimacy for Donald Trump’s attacks, and her silence with regard to the content of Donald Trump’s tweets, suggests that although she does establish difference in ‘communication styles’, the aggressive white masculinity of Donald Trump is ultimately unchallenged in these exchanges.

The irony embedded in Greta Thunberg’s tweets, on the other hand, suggests a direct approach of ‘standing up to’ the bully. Thunberg exerts her own considerable influence as part of this relation; the ‘anti-bully’, as a figure-effect (comprised of affective, discursive, material phenomena), reflects an individuated power relation: one subject contesting bully discourses in opposition to another subject. This approach allows Thunberg to challenge Trump’s performances of white nationalist masculinity directly. By responding to Trump in particular, Thunberg can use this platform to highlight the petro-masculine structures that Trump represents, something which is more difficult for figure-effects of ‘bully’ and ‘bullied’ where these structures are obfuscated by a logic of white innocence. However, as a politics of individuation, while the figure of the anti-bully could have productive effects, inspiring others to take action against climate injustice, it could arguably obscure the broader social relationships that make climate justice possible. Although Greta Thunberg is clear that she is part of a global movement and advocates for a diversity of voices for climate justice, the emphasis on Greta Thunberg’s opposition to Trump as an individual could possibly overshadow the collective solidarities (across intersections of gender, race, age, disability) which enable this opposition to take place in the first instance. As such, it is crucial that a politics of anti-bullying includes individual subjects resisting bullying practices on the one hand, but also recognises that these acts of resistance are fundamentally enabled by, and situated within, wider collectivities of intersectional solidarity.

Conclusion

This paper has explored bully discourses in international climate politics. Drawing on feminist geopolitics as a theoretical framework (developed through Castañeda’s (2002) conceptualisation of figuration), and the empirical contexts of UK (social) media coverage of Greta Thunberg and Twitter interactions between Thunberg and Donald Trump, the paper has charted three figure-effects through which bully discourses are contested: ‘bully’, ‘bullied’, and ‘anti-bully’. I have argued that, through the dislocating effects of white innocence, as well as Thunberg’s critiques of Trump’s aggressive white masculinity, individuating bullying discourses, as a geopolitics of figuration, do not fundamentally challenge structures of petro-masculine power which underpin climate injustice.

The paper therefore concludes that a politics of anti-bullying must be grounded in collective, intersectional solidarities to counter individuating, neoliberal bully discourses in international climate politics. As Butler (2020, 200) notes, the obligations of nonviolence which bind human beings (and the ecosystems of which they are a part) across ‘zones of geopolitical violence’ are fundamentally social. A politics of anti-bullying should (and continue to) be based on collective solidarities of climate justice activism: social movements which include the crucial work of Greta Thunberg and Fridays for the Future and are co-constituted with intersectional challenges to racialised, gendered, aged, ableist violence. In challenging the categories of ‘bully’, ‘bystander’ and ‘bullied’ in this way, the paper does not present an argument to ‘move past’ bullying practices in climate change politics. Rather, it presents a challenge to the discursive framing of bullying as an individual problem to be responded to by individually responsible subjects. As such, any politics of anti-bullying, as a challenge to petro-masculine power, must be grounded in shared, intersectional calls for climate justice.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three peer reviewers for their instructive suggestions for improvement of the paper. I would also like to thank Dr Sarah Budasz and Dr John Morris for their support during this paper’s evolution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Telford

Andrew Telford is an Assistant Professor in European Studies (with a focus on climate change and conflict) at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the politics of climate change and security, with a particular focus on climate change, racialisation and national identity.