In this presentation, we introduce current research into various online communities which are characterised by online misogyny and anti-feminism. Although these communities are loosely networked, they form in nexus on the Reddit platform. This presentation will be split into two different sections, further details of which are listed below. The first talk will examine the representation of gendered social actors in the Incel (involuntary celibate) community, while the second uses corpus approaches in tandem with appraisal theory to explore how gendered social actors are represented in The Red Pill subreddit.
Exploring the representation of the gendered 'other' in Reddit's 'Incel' community
- Frazer HeritageThis paper presents a study of the online discussion forum Reddit, specifically the r/braincels subreddit. Posters within this sub-reddit identify as involuntary celibates or 'incels'. Incels are an online imagined community of (typically heterosexual) men who wish to, but do not, have sexual relations with women, seeing women as the cause of their problems. Incels are a group who are explicitly marked for their sexuality, their lack of sexual interactions, and the ideologies which are mutually constitutive with this lack of sexual interaction. In this paper, we take a small but representative corpus of 65,000 words generated from 50 threads created and commented on by incels. We analyse word frequencies, collocations and concordance lines to explore the representation of gendered social actors. Preliminary findings show that the most frequent terms for 'women' are not pejorative and that male social actors are referred to in the corpus with only slightly lower frequencies. However, we also observe a pervasive generalisation of these gendered social actors, which is indicative of how the members of this online community create, maintain and reinforce problematic views of gender and sexuality. We also explore how women and certain men are constructed as an 'outgroup' who are partly responsible for incels failing to engage in sexual interaction. We then discuss how incels position themselves with regard to social status and social capital and argue that incels view the type of masculinity they perform as marginalised.
"Hypergamy: a woman's inability to love unconditionally like men can love (and dogs)": masculinity, femininity, and sexuality across the Reddit "manosphere"
- Alexandra KrendelOver the past five years, a number of men have committed violent acts against women in the name of sexual entitlement and misogyny, after voicing their hatred of women online. To explore this social problem, this research analyses three sub-groups of The Red Pill community, which has approximately 300,000 frequent users on the online discussion forum Reddit. The Red Pill is part of the "manosphere" -an online community for mostly white, heterosexual men whose identity is constructed in opposition to feminist ideals. This research adds to a growing body of literature (Schmitz and Kazyak 2016, Ging 2017) which has conducted thematic analyses of sections of the "manosphere", but has not yet applied a corpus linguistic approach to explore how different social actor roles are allocated to men and women. For this research, I took three sub-corpora of approximately 70,000 words each from the men going their own way, men's rights activists and Red Pill theory sections, to examine how attitudes to gender and sexuality vary across the community. The keywords and collocates of man, woman and girl were analysed to determine how each sub-community varied thematically, and then concordance lines were investigated to more qualitatively analyse these results. Although all communities generalised women as being naturally incapable of loyalty in relationships, and resented women for being social agents, each sub-section of The Red Pill conceptualised sexual relationships with women in subtly different ways.