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Misogynistic Men Online: How the Red Pill Helped Elect Trump

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Abstract

Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was a shock for feminist scholars, yet it was no surprise to his legion of supporters in alt-right digital spaces. In this essay, we analyze one of the online forums that helped propel Trump to electoral victory. Drawing on social movement concepts and an analysis of 1,762 posts, we show how leaders of the forum the “Red Pill” were able to move a community of adherents from understanding men’s rights as a personal philosophy to political action. This transition was no small endeavor. The Red Pill forum was explicitly apolitical until the summer before the 2016 election. During the election, forum leaders linked the forum’s neoliberal, misogynistic collective identity of alpha masculinity to Trump’s public persona and framed his political ascendance as an opportunity to effectively push back against feminism and get a “real” man into the White House. We argue that while previous research shows the importance of alt-right virtual spaces in creating and maintaining racist collective identities, we know very little about how men conceptualize gender in ways that inform their personal and political action-and this is to our detriment. We conclude the essay by arguing that feminists need to understand how men cultivate extreme personal and political identities in online forums so that we can better understand how new technologies are used to move individuals from the armchair to the streets.

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... Within a right-wing extremist ecosystem, WSA has extensive membership overlap with related groups such as antigovernment militias, anti-Muslim groups, neo-Confederates, and Trumpists (Eddington 2018, Squire 2018. White supremacist activists use their digital social networks to perform vital movement functions such as collective identity formation (Caren et al. 2012, Dignam & Rohlinger 2019, Koster & Houtman 2008, frame alignment (Adams & Roscigno 2005, Törnberg & Törnberg 2021, fundraising (Keatinge et al. 2019, Squire 2021, and coordinating offline events such as lone-actor terrorism (Hofmann 2018;Müller & Schwarz 2021, 2023, bloc voting for right-wing political candidates (Dignam & Rohlinger 2019), and political violence like UTR and the January 6, 2021, insurrection (Karell et al. 2023, Squire 2018. ...
... Within a right-wing extremist ecosystem, WSA has extensive membership overlap with related groups such as antigovernment militias, anti-Muslim groups, neo-Confederates, and Trumpists (Eddington 2018, Squire 2018. White supremacist activists use their digital social networks to perform vital movement functions such as collective identity formation (Caren et al. 2012, Dignam & Rohlinger 2019, Koster & Houtman 2008, frame alignment (Adams & Roscigno 2005, Törnberg & Törnberg 2021, fundraising (Keatinge et al. 2019, Squire 2021, and coordinating offline events such as lone-actor terrorism (Hofmann 2018;Müller & Schwarz 2021, 2023, bloc voting for right-wing political candidates (Dignam & Rohlinger 2019), and political violence like UTR and the January 6, 2021, insurrection (Karell et al. 2023, Squire 2018. ...
... Algorithmic radicalization occurs when search engine algorithms and social media platforms, defining features of Web 2.0, maximize user engagement and profit by recommending extremist content to the general public (Benkler et al. 2018). For more than a decade leading up to the 2017 UTR event, algorithms on major search engines and social media platforms guided users to WSA content: Google (Daniels 2009), Reddit (Dignam & Rohlinger 2019), Facebook (Müller & Schwarz 2021), Twitter (Graham 2016, Müller & Schwarz 2023, and YouTube (Yesilada & Lewandowsky 2021). These algorithms pushed WSA ideology, frames, jargon, and iconography to a significantly larger, more international audience than WSA activists-a small segment of the US population-could have reached through their own efforts (Bail 2016, Graham 2016. ...
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Despite a centuries-long history of violent mobilization, white supremacist activism (WSA) has received relatively little sociological attention outside a small, specialized subfield. Disciplinary interest began to change after Trump's 2016 election; the 2017 violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia; and the January 6, 2021, insurrection. In recognition, this review article focuses on what has been learned about contemporary WSA since the 1980s. We categorize studies by their unit of analysis—individual or micro, meso, and macro levels—to highlight analytic commonalities and distinctions and to underscore the central role that threat plays in the ebb and flow of WSA. As part of our discussion, we also point to unresolved and understudied issues. We conclude by identifying issues that future research should address.
... By watching visual memes and reading content on 8-chan, in his own words, he "learned so much (…) and it completely changed my view of the world." He explained that these online spaces made him a "red piller", a label which, in the language of global and transnational online far-right groups, identifies those who have decided to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth instead of remaining in a state of ignorance (Dignam and Rohlinger, 2019). The violent acts of the shooter and his reference to the perceived "funny" memes as an incentive motivating him to support far-right politics suggest the need to further investigate the relationship between memes and online images and far-right and extremist mobilization (Askanius, 2021). ...
... To contextualize Image 3, white Czech citizens are portrayed as truthful, authentic critical, patriotic citizens who do not behave like sheep and can see "what is really happening," i.e. as the "red pillrs" (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019). According to the official narrative of Angry Mothers, these are the chosen people who understand that mainstream media are full of lies and, thus, look for alternative media to find the information elites try to hide. ...
... Merkel, who both served as a placeholder for the entire European Union. As it has been pointed out before (Graff and Korolczuk, 2022), the attacks on feminism and multiculturalism are just an unsophisticated critique of a neoliberal political project that exploits gender for profit and ironically creates a popular misogyny as a backlash to popular feminism and to a state that has become increasingly feminized (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019). ...
Article
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This article is based on a case study of online media practices of the Czech far-right group Angry Mothers, the biggest far-right Facebook group in the Czech political context in 2018. We show how the group used visual storytelling to translate the narratives of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which has become one of the most dominant narratives in European and US far-right discourses over recent years. The conspiracy theory was introduced in the book Le Grande Replacement by Renaud Camus in 2011 and claims that powerful Jewish elites use their financial resources to promote ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual + (LGBTQIA+) and gender ideologies’ and multiculturalism to destroy the white race, which will eventually die out. Based on theories of translation and visual storytelling, we demonstrate how the main tropes of its anti-Semitic narrative were diffused through the use of images stigmatising LGBTQIA+ people and other minorities in online communications of the Czech far-right group Angry Mothers.
... Across a range of countries such as Austria (Löffler 2020), France (Geva 2020), Turkey (Eksi and Wood 2019), the United Kingdom (Starck 2020), and the United States (Dignam and Rohlinger 2019;Dignam et al. 2021), populist leaders and their supporters have leveraged gender to generate support. Especially in popular critiques, many of these politicians are characterized as performing purely regressive masculinities that help reproduce inequitable gender orders (Pascoe 2017). ...
... Scholarship on the gendered contours of populism has generally focused on how populist politicians do gender or how such politicians are portrayed in news and popular media (e.g., Hakola et al. 2021;Löffler 2020;Norocel and Pettersson 2022;Pascoe 2017;Smirnova 2018;Snipes and Mudde 2018;Starck 2020). With few exceptions (Dignam and Rohlinger 2019;Dignam et al. 2021;Geva 2020), significantly less attention has been granted to how members of the public assess populists' genders. Although populist politicians' public gender performances deserve scholarly attention, we cannot understand whether and how these performances legitimate populists' access to state power and the continued reproduction of inequitable gender orders without considering how members of the public evaluate such politicians' ways of doing gender. ...
... In Dignam et al.'s (2021) interviews with Trump supporters, interviewees stressed that Trump was an ideal candidate because he exuded a masculine ability to control, or resist the control of, others in a highly divisive political climate. Whether it be his unwillingness to self-censor racist or misogynist remarks, his presumed managerial business acumen, or his desire to "fight" anyone who dared challenge him; in each case, Trump was a desirable candidate to his supporters because he was not exuding a hybrid masculinity (Dignam and Rohlinger 2019;Dignam et al. 2021). Similarly, Vescio and Schermerhorn (2021) found that Americans who associated masculinity with toughness, status, and a lack of feminine practices were more likely to view Trump favorablyincluding how he responded to the pandemic (Schermerhorn and Vescio 2023). ...
Article
How right-wing populist politicians do gender has gained increasing attention. Far less consideration has been granted to how citizens assess such politicians’ genders. Using 78 interviews and 662 self-administered questionnaires completed by American adults who were voluntarily producing personal protective equipment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyze respondents’ descriptions of then-President Donald Trump’s responses to the pandemic. Drawing on the emerging caring masculinities literature, we argue that respondents linked the legitimacy of Trump’s authority to whether he sought to care for them by protecting their well-being or dominate them for his own benefit. Supporters described Trump as an effective leader who strategically cared about and for Americans despite nefarious attempts to undermine him. Critics portrayed Trump as an irrational authoritarian seeking to consolidate and expand his power—regardless of the impacts on Americans. These results provide preliminary evidence that perceived acts of care by right-wing populists can be especially important to how members of the public evaluate such politicians’ genders and their claims to power. While right-wing populists are often described as cultivating especially aggressive, tough masculinities, our results suggest populists’ abilities to be perceived as caring can also be significant to legitimating their access to state power.
... Another example is Red Pill Women (RPW). As the analog of the Manosphere subculture The Red Pill [24], most of the users in this community do not believe in gender equality, and they discuss house-wife duties, or supporting their alpha men [24,58]. Even though there are previous studies on RPW and femcels [16,38,44,48,53,58,91,99], there have not been any large-scale studies focusing on them. ...
... Another example is Red Pill Women (RPW). As the analog of the Manosphere subculture The Red Pill [24], most of the users in this community do not believe in gender equality, and they discuss house-wife duties, or supporting their alpha men [24,58]. Even though there are previous studies on RPW and femcels [16,38,44,48,53,58,91,99], there have not been any large-scale studies focusing on them. ...
... We see RPW sharing their experiences and giving each other advice in the emotions and relationships topics, with posts mentioning the term "plate," a term used by TRP to define "using women only for sex" [24], e.g.: ...
Preprint
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The Internet has been instrumental in connecting under-represented and vulnerable groups of people. Platforms built to foster social interaction and engagement have enabled historically disenfranchised groups to have a voice. One such vulnerable group is women. In this paper, we explore the diversity in online women's ideological spaces using a multi-dimensional approach. We perform a large-scale, data-driven analysis of over 6M Reddit comments and submissions from 14 subreddits. We elicit a diverse taxonomy of online women's ideological spaces, ranging from counterparts to the so-called Manosphere to Gender-Critical Feminism. We then perform content analysis, finding meaningful differences across topics and communities. Finally, we shed light on two platforms, ovarit.com and thepinkpill.co, where two toxic communities of online women's ideological spaces (Gender-Critical Feminism and Femcels) migrated after their ban on Reddit.
... They hypothesize that leaders of r/TRP helped elect Donald Trump in 2016 by mobilizing members into political action, despite the forum's previous apolitical tendencies. Dignam and Rohlinger (2019) analyzed 1762 posts from the two most popular r/TRP discussion threads, selecting the highest rated posts from October 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. They found that prior to 2016, TRP was understood as a personal philosophy that must be hidden from the public. ...
... Users who wished to be seen as alpha males could only express their support for Donald Trump, as the endorsement of any other politician was associated with beta masculinity. Dignam and Rohlinger (2019) argue that this political shift was made possible by the structure of subreddits, where dissonant ideas can be downvoted, and moderators can control the code of conduct. This latter argument is reminiscent of Papadamou et al's findings about YouTube's radicalizing potential (2020). ...
Chapter
This overview of 25 of the most cited studies conducted about the manosphere draws on scholarly sources published between 2016 and 2021. The manosphere is a collection of loosely connected anti-feminist networks and communities present across a variety of digital media platforms. The manosphere gained public attention after a series of violent attacks against women, such as the Isla Vista shooting in 2014 that killed 14 or the Toronto van attack in 2018 that killed 10. These attacks prompted growing media coverage of the manosphere in the Western world, as well as a renewed academic interest in contemporary anti-feminist movements. Heeding the call for more in-depth investigation into who participates in the manosphere and their reasons for doing so, many scholars—especially masculinity scholars—have begun to study organized antifeminism online. As a result, the social theories produced about the manosphere often explain men’s participation in these movements by their inability to live up to dominant norms of masculinity. This critical overview presents the most cited articles in the social sciences about the manosphere. In a second part, this paper explores women’s groups, an understudied population of the manosphere. Drawing on ten media articles about women’s manosphere groups, this chapter ultimately argues that if we wish to effectively counter manosphere cyberhate groups, we need to develop an understanding of these communities that reaches beyond issues of masculinity.
... The rise of social media has encouraged the formation of homogenous social networks that reflect social boundaries of the physical world, which are often delineated along the lines of ideology, race, and gender (Robinson et al. 2015). Misogynistic ideologies can be found in deeply gendered networks, such as the manosphere, that reinforce the notion that men are systematically oppressed, and that this oppression is created by women (Dignam and Rohlinger 2019;Ribeiro et al. 2020). Within the manosphere lies a group of extremists known as Incels (i.e., involuntary celibates) who express hatred toward women for perceived sexual rejection and engage in what Pete Simi and Steven Windisch (2020) call "violent talk" by calling for the sexual assault of women as well as retributive acts of mass violence against the general public (Ging 2019;Hoffman, Ware, and Shapiro 2020;Ribeiro et al. 2020;Scaptura and Boyle 2020). ...
... Past research has demonstrated ways that group members use identity talk to change their self-or group-conceptualizations over time (Dignam and Rohlinger 2019;Ybema 2010). Consistent with Ebaugh's (1988) definition of role exit, which emphasizes the need to develop present identities in relation to past identities, some of this work has indicated group members draw "temporal contrasts" that forge a transition between "legacies inherited from a common past and plans made for a new future" (Ybema 2010:493). ...
Article
Role exit is a complex process that can be especially complicated for extremists, whose identities are stigmatized. Such stigmatization often leads extremists to seek refuge in “free spaces” where they may insulate themselves from the mainstream and celebrate their ideology amongst likeminded individuals. Yet, stigma may also push those who desire to exit an extremist role to seek out their own free spaces where they can disengage from extremist ideology with others who wish to disengage. In this study, we analyze posts obtained from two Incel digital forums: a forum of active Incels and a forum of exiting Incels. We compared the ways that active and exiting Incels use free spaces to situate themselves inside or outside of this extremist community. Our analysis demonstrates that free spaces, which social movement scholars argue foster commitment among extremists, may offer exiting extremists insulation from active extremists while also keeping them tethered to hostile ideology.
... Misogyny, anti-feminism, and both modern and traditional sexism were featured prominently in the elections, with Trump voters showing greater antagonism towards women (Creedon 2022;Elder, Greene, and Lizotte 2021;Knuckey 2019;Shook et al. 2020). Even online forums cultivated an extreme misogynistic collective identity to support Trump by pushing against feminism and getting a "real" man into presidency (Dignam and Rohlinger 2019), with Trump further escalating this sentiment by making sexist statements that Clinton was playing the "woman card" (Elder, Greene, and Lizotte 2021). ...
Article
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Despite increasing scholarly attention to backlash against feminism, little is known about anti-feminist movements in East Asia. This study examines the 2022 South Korean presidential election campaign, in which the political parties sought to capitalize on political resistance to the perceived advance of feminism. This embrace of male grievance as a political force was arguably led by former People Power Party (PPP) chairman Lee Jun-seok, leading commenters to argue that support for Lee is rooted in misogyny. We examine this claim empirically by drawing on a novel survey to estimate the association between misogynistic attitudes, measured through devaluation, perception of women as manipulative, and distrust, and support for Lee. We find that misogynistic attitudes are positively correlated with support for Lee, but not with presidential vote choice. We interpret this as suggesting that the association between misogyny and support for Lee is a manifestation of the desire for symbolic representation. We discuss the implications of how this association can further influence the gender divide, both in Korea and beyond, and conclude with recommendations for further research.
... This awareness is referred to as taking the red pill. The concept takes its name from a scene in the film The Matrix in which the protagonist has to decide whether to accept the truth (red pill) or to continue living in unreality (blue pill) (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999, 29:38;Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019). ...
Article
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Social media platforms have become spaces for the viralisation of hate speech and misinformation. Paradoxically, tools that were once used for activism and conversation on behalf of vulnerable communities, nowadays work to gather and reproduce analogous worldviews on polarising issues. This research analyses the behaviour of the protagonists of the conversation around #feminazis on Instagram, as well as the characteristics of the content and the degree of interaction they generate. For this purpose, computational and qualitative social science methods have been applied to a sample of 9,300 posts published between 2021 and 2023. The results show disorderly participation by anonymous accounts, women and self-described feminists, social organisations, and pseudo-media. Content opposed to elective termination of pregnancy, and misogynistic messages lead the conversation, but there are also publications that attack other progressive ideologies. Disinformative content is linked to decontextualisation and manipulation of information to go viral, transnationalising hate speech towards feminism and their supporters, framed as a homogeneous group. It is concluded that this space, created by the platform itself, contributes to the enlargement and institutionalisation of the manosphere.
... En primer lugar, conviene llevar a cabo una introducción sobre este fenómeno y sus características. Originalmente, el término redpilled surgió en la denominada manosfera (o machosfera): espacios en línea constituidos en torno a discursos antifeministas, misóginos y reaccionarios (Nagle, 2017;Ging, 2017;Mountford, 2018;Dignam y Rohlinger, 2019; Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Dentro de este contexto, «tomar la pastilla roja» alude a la experiencia en la que el usuario descubre la supuesta auténtica naturaleza del feminismo como estrategia sexual y de dominio de los hombres. ...
Article
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Redpilled es un término con el que las comunidades en línea del espectro reaccionario identifican su posición política: aunque pueden agruparse dentro del espectro de la extrema derecha, los estudios de estos espacios destacan su carácter heterogéneo e indefinido. El presente trabajo aspira a contribuir al estudio de estas comunidades en línea considerándolas como espacios de construcción y resignificación de conceptos para la confrontación ideológica. Para ello, se argumentará que constituyen comunidades discursivas que emplean el lenguaje para conseguir objetivos ideológicos y que la doctrina kantiana del esquematismo puede contribuir a explicar el modo en que dicho lenguaje mantiene su coherencia, pese a la heterogeneidad del grupo y lo impreciso de los conceptos que se manejan.
... La caracterización del antifeminismo como un contra-movimiento de mayor sofisticación cognitiva y argumental, obliga a rastrear la manera en que esa sofisticación se produce, sobre todo en ambientes socio digitales, pues es ahí donde actualmente se da una buena parte de los contactos e intercambios entre personas, principalmente hombres, que comparten contenido y puntos de vista antifeministas (Salter y Bridgett, 2012;Light, 2013;Nagle, 2015;Chess y Shaw 2015;Engler, 2017;Jane, 2018;Dignam y Rohlinger, 2019;Johanssen 2022). Por dichas razones, este artículo elabora un análisis sobre los modos retóricos bajo los que se genera en plataformas como YouTube una mirada "objetiva" contra el feminismo. ...
Article
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Los actuales debates de género en redes socio-digitales han detonado la emergencia de posturas antifeministas que, a diferencia de expresiones misóginas, sexistas y/o machistas, se caracterizan por una mayor sofisticación argumental y cognitiva. Bajo dicho contexto, este artículo, por medio de una perspectiva teórico-metodológica que incluye dos modelos cualitativos de análisis, explora las maneras en que cuatro youtubers varones articulan una retórica “objetiva” antifeminista para convencer a sus seguidores, en nombre de la evidencia, sobre la supuesta falacia que representa el feminismo. Esta retórica no es producto de una fidelidad a la realidad social como defienden los youtubers en sus contenidos, sino de un ensamble entre elementos discursivos y tecnológicos que les posibilita adjudicarse una especie de autoridad empírica, mediante la cual rechazan los saberes y experiencias de sujetos feministas debido a su falta de “objetividad”. A partir de ello, se concluye que la autoridad empírica que se arrogan los youtubers les posibilita articular ideologías masculinas a través del valor de la prueba, apelando a la racionalidad y la objetividad que implica “ser hombre”, en contraste con la representación que crean en sus canales de las mujeres feministas como irracionales, carentes de “objetividad” y portadoras de un discurso falso.
... Die Redpill gilt als wichtiger Marker intellektueller Überlegenheit gegenüber der unwissenden ("bluepilled") Mehrheit (Kelly 2021). Die sogenannten "Redpiller" der Manosphere, welche insbesondere auf der Social Media Seite Reddit aktiv sind, konzentrieren sich zentral auf diese verschwörungstheoretischen Narrative und sind häufig offen politisch rechts (Dignam und Rohlinger 2019). Zusätzlich zur roten und blauen Pille haben sich mittlerweile auch eine Reihe andersfarbiger Symboliken, insbesondere die mit Incels assoziierte Blackpill, herausgebildet (Glace et al. 2021). ...
... At the same time, this new type of inclusion affords a wide range of possibilities whereby actors can exercise intersectional violence against politicians, feminist activists and individual women alike. Moreover, there are a number of studies that have shown how these inequalities benefit groups on the extreme right and other types of organised racist movements, but also violent parts of men's rights movements, who have been successful in their use of online platforms to mobilize and influence mainstream political agendas (Daniels, 2009;Dignam & Rohlinger 2019;Holm, 2019;Koehler 2014). ...
Article
In order to hinder attacks on democratic norms and processes in digital public venues, designing strategies of exclusion is a pressing concern. Nevertheless, we lack systematic studies of how digital public venues should be governed to protect – rather than undermine – democratic values through exclusion. The purpose of this contribution is to offer a systematic theorization of the concept of democratic exclusion in the context of digital public venues. I will in particular draw on two strands of literature within democratic theory which have contributed greatly to the normative theorization of democratic exclusion, but have done so in relation to other types of political settings: the works within feminist political theory on exclusion of dominant groups within parliaments (e.g. Dovi 2009; Murray 2014) and the literature on hate speech regulation and democratic self-defence against (primarily) antidemocratic parties (e.g. Müller 2016; Invernizzi Accetti and Zuckerman 2017; Malkopoulou and Kirshner 2019). First, I will analyze if and how these previous contributions can be applied to the specific context of digital public venues, where special conditions of access and visibility apply. I will then assess to what extent the platforms’ existing governing strategies and policies concerning the exclusion of problematic content or accounts are compatible with the relevant exclusion principles formulated in these works. Building on this analysis, in its final parts the study will move on to carve out more specific suggestions for how exclusion on digital venues should be governed, and what principles should guide this governance.
... Following its adoption throughout the manosphere, the redpill became a core component of far-right participatory culture (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019). In such communities, far-right denizens position themselves against sheep-like "normies" who must be "redpilled." ...
Preprint
How do people come to believe far-right, extremist, and conspiratorial ideasthey encounter online? This paper examines how participants in primarily US-based far-right online communities describe their adoption of “redpill” beliefsand the role of disinformation in these accounts. Applying the sociotechnicaltheory of media effects, we conduct qualitative content analysis of “redpillingnarratives” gathered from Reddit, Gab, and Discord. While many users frameredpilling as a moment of conversion, others portray redpilling as a process,something achieved incrementally through years of community participationand “doing your own research.” In both cases, disinformation presented asevidence and the capacity to determine the veracity of presented evidence playimportant roles in redpilling oneself and others. By framing their beliefs as therational and logical results of fully considering a plethora of evidence, redpilladherents can justify holding and promoting otherwise indefensible prejudices.The community’s creation, promotion, and repetition of far-rightdisinformation, much of which is historical or “scientific” in nature, play acrucial role in the adoption of far-right beliefs.
... While the internet origins of the term are contested, 1 the Red Pill as worldview was birthed in the digital "manosphere" and could initially be found among pick-up artist forums, Men's Rights Activist communities, and incel-oriented platforms, crystallizing online in 2011-2012 (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019;Ging, 2017;Marwick & Caplan, 2018). Examples include The TradCon site Masculine by Design, which features a Red Pill tab, along with Bible studies and Christian pick-up artistry. ...
Chapter
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Redpilling is the claimed practice of “waking men up” to the realities of power, namely the alleged perniciousness of feminism in contemporary society. Taken from the movie The Matrix, the Redpill worldview has roots in masculine internet spaces (the manosphere) but eventually expanded to refer to any spread of “radical” right wing awakening. I argue that Redpilling is a cultural form of subjective transformation mostly based on traditional types of truth production (revelation, now to one’s authentic masculine self). Redpilling is a digitally networked campaign of awakening in which revelation is experienced as a passage to a new mode of existence—not just changing your mind but changing your life. Examining a series of cases (lifestyle products, digital artifacts, gurus), I argue that the Redpill-induced subjective transformation instrumentalizes information but its cultural practice is one of initiation and mobilization for action. This paper argues that Redpilling invokes and re-enacts archaic patriarchal pacts, a gendered rite of passage that now revives older initiations to restore patriarchal order. In this way, it is a legacy of fascist war bands (ancient Männerbunde and modern squadrismo) on a new terrain in a longer-standing war on women.
... While the body of literature exploring shitposting remains somewhat limited, the vast majority of this research has focused on the use of this rhetorical device by online neo-fascist movements like the alt-right (Aspray, 2019;Hodge & Hallgrimsdottir, 2020;Munn, 2019) and conservative movements in the lead up to various elections, especially the 2016 US election and the "Brexit" vote in the UK that same year (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019;Griffin, 2016;Southern, 2022). Here, scholars have argued that conservative and neo-fascist social media users shitpost by making large amounts of nonsensical posts to fluster and confuse unsuspecting internet users towards nefarious ends (Biggs, 2016;Rauf, 2021). ...
Article
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In response to the growing ubiquity of social media, critical media literacy scholars have increasingly called for the examination of online practices and their embedded pedagogies and curricula. In response, I use this paper to reimagine shitposting, a discursive social media practice, as a form of public pedagogy aligned (at times) with critical media literacy education. I begin by engaging extant research to both define shitposting and position the prac-tice beyond the neofascist ends of the alt-right movement that most scholars focus on. Examining this alignment through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possi-ble range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argu-ment, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy edu-cation, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.
... The relationship between social media use and subsequent offline social behavior is ambiguous (Caren, Andrews, and Lu 2020;Haidt and Bail 2022;Zhuravskaya, Petrova, and Enikolopov 2020). Some studies have found that social media influence social attitudes (e.g., Bond et al. 2012;Dignam and Rohlinger 2019). For example, social media users express more polarized views after being exposed to tweets from politicians with opposing ideologies (Bail et al. 2018) and regard members of different ethnic communities more negatively after deactivating their Facebook accounts (Asimovic et al. 2021). ...
Article
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Does activity on hard-right social media lead to hard-right civil unrest? If so, why? We created a spatial panel dataset comprising hard-right social media use and incidents of unrest across the United States from January 2020 through January 2021. Using spatial regression analyses with core-based statistical area (CBSA) and month fixed effects, we find that greater CBSA-level hard-right social media activity in a given month is associated with an increase in subsequent unrest. The results of robustness checks, placebo tests, alternative analytical approaches, and sensitivity analyses support this finding. To examine why hard-right social media activity predicts unrest, we draw on an original dataset of users’ shared content and status in the online community. Analyses of these data suggest that hard-right social media shift users’ perceptions of norms, increasing the likelihood they will participate in contentious events they once considered taboo. Our study sheds new light on social media’s offline effects, as well as the consequences of increasingly common hard-right platforms.
... The increasing attention focused on the manosphere has been accompanied by a growth of its virtual spaces as well as a migration of users towards its more radical sub-communities and an increase in overtly toxic and violent content (Ribeiro et al., 2020). Studies have shown how some groups and platforms of the manosphere have also become increasingly connected with online communities of the Alt-Right (Anti-Defamation, 2018;Leidig, 2021;Mamié et al., 2021)and been involved in the rise of right-wing populism (Dignam and Rohlinger, 2019). ...
Article
In recent years, there have been a growing number of online and offline attacks linked to a loosely connected network of misogynist and antifeminist online communities called ‘the manosphere’. Since 2016, the ideas spread among and by groups of the manosphere have also become more closely aligned with those of other Far-Right online networks. In this commentary, I explore the role of what I term ‘evidence-based misogyny’ for mobilization and radicalization into the antifeminist and misogynist subcultures of the manosphere. Evidence-based misogyny is a discursive strategy, whereby members of the manosphere refer to (and misinterpret) knowledge in the form of statistics, studies, news items and pop-culture and mimic accepted methods of knowledge presentation to support their essentializing, polarizing views about gender relations in society. Evidence-based misogyny is a core aspect for manosphere-related mobilization as it provides a false sense of authority and forges a collective identity, which is framed as a supposed ‘alternative’ to mainstream gender knowledge. Due to its core function to justify and confirm the misogynist sentiments of users, evidence-based misogyny serves as connector between the manosphere and both mainstream conservative as well as other Far-Right and conspiratorial discourses.
... e guidano le azioni degli attori coinvolti. Tale approccio ha permesso di far capire come certe pratiche di mascolinità -nate spesso all'ombra dell'anonimato di piattaforme come 4chan o Reddit -sono talmente interrelate alle più ampie strutture sistemiche, da esser riuscite a definire una presa di posizione ideologica condivisa (Brown 2019) in grado di condizionare il corso della vita sociale e politica di una comunità (Dignam, and Rohlinger 2019). ...
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Marco Crepaldi is a social psychologist who runs channels on YouTube and Twitch, where he talks about male issues, such as body shaming, violence against men, social isolation, and feminism. In June 2020 he made some controversial statements on the social difficulties experienced by straight white males, which caused a large, polarized debate on social media. This article reconstructs the main lines of Crepaldi's argument and proposes a discourse analysis of the interactions related to the case in a particularly active
... While large subreddits dedicated to general political news are relatively diverse in terms of the views expressed (Duguay, 2022), smaller subreddits dedicated to special interests tend toward ideological homogenization. Notably, many smaller subreddits have garnered attention for their misogynistic and anti-feminist positions (Daly & Reed, 2022;Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019;Ging, 2019;Marwick & Caplan, 2018;Massanari, 2017). This is particularly true of subreddits connected to the social movement known as "the Manosphere" (Ging, 2019). ...
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This article examines a case of internet posts discussing social issues affecting men and masculinity. Analysis of 500 posts containing masculine coded language on the subreddit r/unpopularopinion suggests that masculinity, especially when intersected with straightness and whiteness, is discursively constructed in an imagined social hierarchy where the plight of straight white men is invisible. By framing opinions as “unpopular,” these posts suggest that while the poster’s view may be objectively true, it is disvalued in mainstream discourses. Three key findings emerged from this analysis: First, regardless of the particular social issue discussed, efforts to reduce social inequality were negatively evaluated on average. Second, negative posts were more popular on the site; thus, amplifying the visibility of grievances. Third, masculine coded language is structured on Reddit, such that certain issues are bundled together to generate salient, interlocking themes indicating a robust meaning system. Overall, these findings suggest that criticisms of social equality are embedded within a discourse of threatened masculinity, straightness, and whiteness. This research extends past work on internet discursive practices related to masculinity and gender by showing the pervasiveness and intersectional nature of masculinity threat in digital forms.
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This study examines the motivations and strategies of women participating in the Red Pill Women’s subreddit, a community that espouses traditional gender roles while navigating the gendered expectations of neoliberal capitalism. Red pill adherents subscribe to the beliefs that biology determines how men and women act, and that men are naturally dominant over women. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of approximately 2,000 subreddit comments, this research examines how participants negotiate their identities within the framework of hegemonic femininity. The findings reveal that, while these women endorse traditional femininities, they actively engage in strategic negotiations to attain femininity premiums, such as social status, financial security, and access to “high-value” partners. Red Pill women selectively adapt Red Pill ideologies to minimize their loss of agency within the Red Pill framework. These gender negotiations are influenced by neoliberal pressures, emphasizing individual responsibility and self-optimization within patriarchal structures.
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The Internet serves as a dynamic and expansive space where numerous groups seek to exchange and disseminate their views. Some of those groups aim to promote hateful ideologies, bigotry, conspiracy theories while externalizing their anger. To achieve this, a spectrum of online platforms is utilized, ranging from mainstream social networks to underground forums. Notably, imageboards stand out as fertile ground where these ideologies flourish, due to anonymity, community engagement, and a plethora of hateful content. This study endeavors to examine the prevalence of bigotry in these spaces within the Brazilian context. Natural language processing algorithms provide the possibility to explore discursive features of massive text sets, extracting latent information and patterns in a relatively simple and automated way. This study shows how prejudice forms the basis of the different discourses found in Brazilian imageboards. Notably, these discourses not only echo historically rooted hateful ideologies but also assimilate conspiratorial perspectives and instances of bigotry emanating from non-Brazilian imageboards.
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Male supremacist online communities have been linked to a number of negative outcomes over the last decade, including alt-right mobilizations, digitally-mediated campaigns of harassment against prominent feminist figures, and incidents of mass violence. These digital spaces are aligned in their commitment to narratives of male victimization at the hands of women and feminism, but are somewhat heterogenous in their topical foci and applications of male supremacist ideologies. Such variation reflects both differences in how groups conceive of the problems of facing men, and potentially contributes to the different types of harm wrought by these communities.
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The exploration of culture wars encompasses a diverse array of disciplines, spanning from historiography to political science, and from hegemony studies to globalisation studies. This chapter delves into this extensive literature, aiming to contextualise the emergence of culture wars. We delineate three distinct dimensions of this context: firstly, the theoretical backdrop, which encompasses a range of theoretical frameworks including cultural studies, sociology, political theory, and political science, with a particular focus on concepts such as cultural hegemony, ideology, cleavage, and identity politics. Secondly, the geographical context, which pertains to the evolution of public and political discourse on gender issues in Italy, from the inception of the Republic to the contemporary era, traversing the lengthy tenure of Berlusconi. Lastly, the communicative-media context is explored, characterised by transformative processes in discourse and public debate such as platformisation, fragmentation, polarisation, information disorders, and emotionalisation.
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The first quarter of the 21st century is witnessing an efflorescence of right-wing populism that is flourishing in a period of heightened precarity, global trauma, anxiety and gross inequalities. One branch of right-wing populism, neoconservatism, aims to restore patriarchy; entry into organizations would help it achieve those ends. This paper uses an extreme case study of a profession in which chauvinism flourishes to examine organizations’ receptivity, at ‘shop-floor’ level, to neoconservative political ideologies and the restoration of patriarchy as an entry-route. Using Judith Butler’s work and psychoanalytical theory for theoretical inspiration we develop a theory of ‘chauvinizing’, i.e. the performative constitution of chauvinism. This incorporates a contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ chauvinism and the conscious and unconscious allure of misogynistic practices to practitioners. We argue that chauvinizing practices may offer neoconservatism both a means of entry into organizations and opposition to its infiltration. This paper contributes to political organization studies an understanding of how organizations may be permeated by unwelcome political activities, and a warning for organizations of the need for both wariness and strategies of resistance.
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Recent far-right and religious fundamentalist coalitions in Europe and the U.S. seek populist support through "anti-gender" rhetoric. These coalitions are in alignment with the manosphere in endorsement of biological essentialism and antifeminist, anti-LGBTQ stances. Based upon an examination of the data gathered for projects examining two manosphere communities (Red Pill and Incel), a clear picture emerges wherein they casually disparage lesbians and conflate lesbians with feminists, unearthing 1970s and 1980s political lesbian writings and discussing them out of context. Ironically, the dissatisfaction with gender relations that drove lesbian separatists at the time drives the manosphere, especially Incel, to be even more misogynistic and violent in service of their feelings of entitlement to women's bodies. This can be understood as part of a backlash against feminist and LGBTQ rights that is empowering fascists using anti-gender rhetoric in their rise to power.
Article
In addition to immigration grievances, research shows that radical right voters grieve societal developments regarding gender equality and sexual freedom. Adding to research treating these grievances separately, this article advances a joint understanding of these grievances. I analyse interviews with voters of the German radical right Alternative für Deutschland for perceptions about discrimination and (dis)advantages of natives versus immigrants, men versus women and cis‐hetero versus LGBTQI+ people. I find similar argumentations about these social groups: Most interviewees do not perceive existing structural discrimination. They further perceive zero‐sum dynamics between advances for outgroups and losses for ingroups. In doing so, they consider different ingroup and outgroup characteristics, resulting in perceptions of different material and symbolic (dis)advantages for different groups and a hitherto under‐researched perception of legal (dis)advantages. Additionally, some interviewees jointly refer to various social groups in an expression of ‘multidimensional’ grievances, and some refer to the intersections between several ingroup and outgroup identities in determining a person's (dis)advantages. The parallels in argumentation and the perceptions of multidimensional and intersectional grievances highlight the importance of jointly studying different kinds of cultural grievances.
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This chapter provides broader contextualsation of the incel community. It explores how incels use ‘pill’ metaphors, particularly in relation to other communities within the manosphere. Furthermore, the differences between ‘red’, ‘blue’, and ‘black’ pill philosophies are explored and incels are discussed in relation to these philosophies. This chapter highlights how incels conform to ideals of hegemonic masculinity, and as such I also explore this concept and related theories of masculinity. In a similar vein, I argue that incels view themselves as non-normative because they are unable to conform to hegemonic masculine norms, and as such as explore previous research into normativities. Incels view themselves as nonnormative due to both essentialist and deterministic thinking. I discuss these concepts and highlight how sometimes this kind of thinking is contradictory. The chapter discusses extensive academic work on masculinity, the alt-right, and cognate topics as they relate to the incel community.
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This chapter explores how incels construct gendered social actors. It takes named gendered social actors and explores how these terms are used at a more qualitative level. I argue that there are a greater number of lexical items denoting male social actors and they are constructed in more complex ways than female social actors, and so explore more of these references. I focus on how male social actors are constructed in a hierarchy based around orientations towards hegemonic masculine norms. I also note the importance of gendered relationships and discuss how male and female social actors are discussed in relation to each other.
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Misogyny is a significant but unspoken presence in organization studies, in terms of people’s experiences of work and as a theorised concept. In this essay we argue that our community should dare to name misogyny for its unique insight into the enduring patriarchal power relations that condition so many organizations and so much of our organization theory. We develop this argument in two ways: first, we suggest that misogyny provides a unique descriptive linguistic label for experiences of gendered hatred, violence, and social policing; and second, a philosophical understanding of misogyny enables analysis, understanding, and challenges to the physical or symbolic violence that women experience in and around organizations as sites for the reproduction of patriarchy. Drawing on recent developments in feminist analytic philosophy, we follow the movement away from understanding misogyny-as-individual-emotions to misogyny-as-affective-practice. This allows us to frame two related concepts, organized and organizational misogyny, demonstrating the potential that misogyny brings to understanding individual experiences, collective affect, and influential social forces. Despite the discomfort produced by hate-based concepts such as misogyny, we conclude that their exclusion from organization studies has two effects: the continuing reproduction of violent hostility, and acceptance of a partial account of multiple forms of oppression and inequality. Our research agenda, founded on this need for naming such experiences, the significance of affect, and aggregated oppressions, demonstrates the potential contribution of misogyny to addressing these issues and finding some hope for change.
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Involuntary celibates, known as incels, have gained media attention due to violent incidents involving members of their community. Previous studies have examined their violent norms, radical ideologies, and views on women, but none have explored why incels may disengage from the online incel community. This study utilizes a media content analysis framework to analyze data from an open-access forum (n = 237) and understand the values of former incels. Inductive media content analysis reveals four main themes: (1) leaving inceldom, (2) social interactions of incels, (3) self-conception of incels, and (4) the incel philosophy. These findings shed light on the dynamics within the incel community for those who abandon the incel lifestyle. Future research should investigate the reasons for incels leaving their community and explore strategies to support them in this process. Intervention approaches could be developed to assist incels during their transition.
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Among the latest concepts to burgeon from reactionary and right‐wing networks is the metaphor of the “red pill.” The term is deployed in a variety of ways – functioning as a noun, verb, and adjective – and its meaning has gradually expanded to encompass a wide ideological spectrum ranging from mainstream conservatism to far‐right extremist radicalization. In its broadest sense, the phrase “red‐pilled” is used to designate an individual who has developed a right‐of‐center oppositional consciousness against myriad dominant cultural values that undergird the project of liberal democracy, particularly with respect to gender and racial equality. As a verb, “red‐pilling” is used to denote processes of political and ideological persuasion through which red‐pilled individuals strive to awaken others into viewing the world through an alternative epistemic lens. The term is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix , in which the protagonist is confronted with the choice to either blissfully accept his taken‐for‐granted understanding of reality – to take the “blue pill” – or to confront unpleasant, uncomfortable truths about the nature of his reality – to take the “red pill.”
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While radical right parties commonly advance conservative gender positions, research on radical right voters’ gender attitudes remains inconclusive. To understand radical right voters’ gender attitudes, I first analyze previous research for frames that antifeminist actors commonly use to advance their arguments. I then draw on interviews with eastern German radical right voters to analyze whether and how these voters apply antifeminist frames to argue about feminist policy. I demonstrate that they use antifeminist frames to oppose mostly third-wave and recently salient feminist issues, but also support certain feminist policies, sometimes for instrumental reasons. Further, voters include particularities of their context in their arguments. Eastern Germany constitutes an atypical context, allowing for insights into voters’ (anti)feminism in a post-socialist context marked by atheism and relatively advanced gender norms. The study contributes to understanding complexities and nuances in radical right voters’ gender attitudes, and thereby to understanding cultural grievances beyond anti-immigration attitudes.
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This dissertation outlines continuity and change in Swedish radical nationalism – a political ideology predominantly focused on connecting an imagined people with a distinct territory. The study focuses on how religion has been understood within the landscape of Swedish radical nationalism between 1988 and 2020. The landscape is termed radical-nationalist since its central articulation is nationalism. It is radical because of its actors’ urge to return nationalism to its roots, without compromising with other political ideologies, and because it is seen as a radical solution to the problems of national degeneration. The Swedish radical-nationalist landscape consists of ideological formations that are culture-oriented, race-oriented, and identity-oriented. These formations animate the actors moving across the landscape. Three such actors are analyzed in the dissertation, each having its own history and distinct position in relation to the ideological formations: the political party Sweden Democrats, the national socialist organization Nordic Resistance Movement, and the online influencer The Golden One. The study builds on a theoretical shift, usually labeled critical religion theory, which departs from religion as an analytical category to instead focus on the various definitions of, and ideas about, religion among the actors themselves. Religion is analyzed as a political concept within Swedish radical nationalism. The terminology of political concepts is borrowed from the theory of ideological morphology, where such concepts are located on an axis between center and periphery of a political ideology, from core concepts via adjacent concepts to peripheral concepts. In Swedish radical nationalism, the concept of religion is a demarcation against them, external enemies as well as internal traitors. Religion functions as an essential exclusionary mechanism aimed at imagined Others who are assumed to, in varying degrees, be superstitious, conspiratorial, fanatical, or divisive. However, the concept of religion also construes us, an imagined people, through ideas of a shared collective unconscious and a Volksgeist that via paganism and Christianity travels from a distant, and often forgotten, past. In conclusion, religion is recurrently one of the adjacent concepts that temporarily stabilizes the core of Swedish radical nationalism: people and territory. Like other concepts that are adjacent to the core – such as culture, race, and identity – the concept of religion stipulates who belongs to the people and the territory, and who should be excluded, disadvantaged, or eliminated.
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Libro resultante de las intervenciones seleccionadas y presentadas en las distintas mesas científicas durante el II Congreso Internacional sobre Masculinidades e Igualdad: Educación para la Igualdad y Co(educación), realizado entre los día 20 y 22 de octubre de 2022, organizado por el Observatorio de las Masculinidades y el Grupo de Investigación Economía, Cultura y Género (ECULGE), con la colaboración de la Unidad de Igualdad y el Centro Interdisciplinar de Estudios de Género de la Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche (UMH) y el Ayuntamiento de Elche.
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Citizens’ perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal views of gender roles. Using panel survey data, we show that whites with higher levels of hostile sexism, racial resentment, perceptions of discrimination against whites, and who were more favorable towards Donald Trump evaluated the alt-right movement more positively. We find no evidence that self-placed ideology informed these evaluations. On the whole, latent cultural conservatism appears to inform evaluations of the relatively unknown — at the time — alt-right movement.
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El activismo en el ámbito de la igualdad articulado por hombres desde lo que se ha venido a denominar como “movimiento de hombres por la igualdad” es un fenómeno relativamente reciente a la par que errático y minoritario, tanto a nivel global como específicamente en España. En este contexto, dentro de la investigación “Resistencias juveniles al orden de género desde los feminismos” (UJI-A2020-13), se exploran de forma preliminar los relatos de chicos cis jóvenes y personas no binarias socializadas como hombres (entre 18-24 años) que conforman una parte de la muestra estructural. Se pretenden analizar los porqués del cuestionamiento del modelo tradicional de masculinidad, así como sus formas de activismo o niveles de conocimiento sobre el mismo (en relación con los hombres proigualitarios). Además, se profundiza en la cuestión de la relación con el feminismo, las autoidentificaciones, etc. A modo de conclusión, se puede apuntar que los hombres jóvenes no participan activamente del movimiento de hombres por la igualdad, sino que sus procesos son más personales y bastante individualizados sin que tomen presencia o fuerza en el ámbito grupal o comunitario. En otros términos, la autorreflexión y el cuestionamiento de los mandatos de masculinidad suelen producirse de manera aislada y como consecuencia de diversas cuestiones que apuntan a ser relevantes: el nivel de estudios, la socialización familiar igualitaria y el encuentro y relación con mujeres feministas en sus entornos más cercanos. La posición de privilegio de la masculinidad y las particularidades en la constitución de esta, sin duda, condiciona las formas de articular las respuestas al orden de género de forma visible y activa y más en un contexto de incertidumbres identitarias que afectan especialmente a los varones que ponen en cuestión el modelo tradicional. En nuestra muestra, además hay que tener presente que son jóvenes acechados por la intensificación de esas incertidumbres respecto a sus devenires biográficos.
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Social movements are shaped by gender systems and they also are a source of social change in gender. Some social movements directly attempt to change gender relations; these movements, along with other women's movements, have been the focus of considerable scholarship. Scholars also examine the gendered nature of other social movements and the impact of systemic inequalities of gender on the opportunities, constraints, and forms of social movements in general. Increasingly, this work takes an intersectional approach, examining gender in conjunction with race, class, and other inequalities.
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Mass media refer to means of communication that reach a relatively large number of people. Mass media include eight mediums: radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, recordings, movies, and digital media such as social media, gaming, and blogging. Mass media are relevant to the study of social movements because they carry movement ideas to a broader audience and give activists leverage in institutional and political processes. More specifically, mass media are important to movements because they provide social movements an opportunity to shape public understandings of social and political problems, as well as a chance to mobilize a broader public to action. This entry briefly reviews the venues available to differentially resourced movement groups, outlines how sociologists study the movement–media relationship, and highlights unresolved issues with which sociologists must contend.
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The manosphere is a fragmented group of digital communities promoting misogynist discourses. The main focus of these communities is the construction of man’s identity with reactionary gender traits and roles based on the critique of feminism and its transformative influence on society, and a victimization storytelling. Various ramifications, or subcultures, can be identified within the discursive and ideological foundations that configure these channels of reactionary masculinity, especially new emerging communities labelled Red Pill, incels and PUA, which have gathered scholars’ and media attention. However, this very diversity seems to introduce some confusion, becoming a fuzzy convergence of reactionary and antifeminist statements and attitudes. Thus, this calls for a necessary systematic clarification of the characteristics they feature. With this purpose, this article examines the traits of masculine identities found in the digital manosphere subcultures, classifying them according to the discourses they promote, the philosophy of life they adopt, the organization they have, the performance they exhibit, and the type of violence they perform against women.
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In April 2020, amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, fringe political activists, conspiracy theorists, and far-right subcultures joined together to protest stay at home orders and social distancing decrees. Largely sharing information and organizing strategies on social media, these protestors adopted the Twitter hashtag #OpenAmericaNow to activate and mobilize supporters across the United States. In this study, we examine the online organizing of #OpenAmericaNow through analysis of 17,965 tweets to understand how fringe and conspiracy subcultures organized through oppositional consciousness raising. Our findings reveal multi-level discourses, which bridge identification on the micro-level with anti-elitist and post-truth logics on the macro-level. Theoretically, our study advances theorizing on postmodern organizing and conceptualizes alt-civic engagement, while also engaging in innovative methodological strategies useful for interrogating paradoxical and multi-level discourses.
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“Safe spaces” emerged as an important activist tactic in the late twentieth-century United States with the rise of feminist, queer, and anti-racist movements. However, the term’s ambiguity, while denoting its wide applicability across movements, has led “safe space” to become overused but undertheorized. In both theory and praxis, “safe space” has been treated as a closed concept, erasing the context-specific relational work required to construct and maintain its material and symbolic boundaries. The emergence of online communities promising safety for marginalized groups calls for renewed investigations into the construction of these activist spaces. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the cultivation of safe space within Girl Army, a Philadelphia-based feminist Facebook group. Through participant observation and interviews with Girl Army members, I trace the group’s technical and discursive enforcement of safety and the role this space plays in members’ activism and everyday lives.
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In a significant shift over the last ten years, Australian men's rights activists have partnered with academics and health groups to rearticulate notions of injured masculinity via the vocabulary and practice of health promotion. This shift has given rise to a hybrid form of men's rights/health activism (MRHA) in which health statistics and theories of social causation legitimate ongoing attacks on feminism and women's services. This successful strategy has attracted support for misogynist sentiments that, when formulated in explicitly ideological terms, have come to imperil the mainstream acceptability of the men's rights movement. This article discusses the shifts in Australian MRHA discourse and strategy from men's "rights" to men's "needs" and suggests reasons for concern about the role of MRHAs in Australian men's health policy.
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Although grounded theory and qualitative content analysis are similar in some respects, they differ as well; yet the differences between the two have rarely been made clear in the literature. The purpose of this article was to clarify ambiguities and reduce confusion about grounded theory and qualitative content analysis by identifying similarities and differences in the two based on a literature review and critical reflection on the authors’ own research. Six areas of difference emerged: (a) background and philosophical base, (b) unique characteristics of each method, (c) goals and rationale of each method, (d) data analysis process, (e) outcomes of the research, and (f) evaluation of trustworthiness. This article provides knowledge that can assist researchers and students in the selection of appropriate research methods for their inquiries. Copyright 2014: Ji Young Cho, Eun-Hee Lee, and Nova Southeastern University.
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The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of "shadow mobilization" to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk and intensifying knowledge-based conflict. Second, we introduce a new methodological approach for collecting systematic data on members of this difficult-to-reach population. Findings from comparative analysis of expert activists in the environmental justice movement in Louisiana and the alternative agriculture movement in Washington reveal both important commonalities and fine-grained differences, suggesting that shadow mobilizations are strategic collective responses to cumulative risk in contemporary society.
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Although there is a growing consensus that Internet communication technology (ICT) affects collective action in the twenty-first century, we know very little about what keeps individuals involved in ICT-based organizations over time. Our paper addresses this lacuna by examining whether individuals stay involved in two organizations that use ICT to structure interaction differently over a two-year period. We draw on interview and participant observation data with 38 supporters of MoveOn.org, which structures interaction hierarchically, and the Florida Tea Party Movement, which structures interaction horizontally, to assess how individuals think about each organization's use of ICT and how this shapes individual efficacy and voice - two factors that we find critical to keeping individuals engaged in organizations over time. We show that how a group uses ICT to structure interaction affects the kinds of efficacy and voice individuals are likely to experience. Organizations that use ICT to hierarchically structure interactions are effective at mobilizing people or money quickly and at achieving short-term goals, but very ineffective at creating a community of activists on the ground. The opposite is true of groups that use ICT horizontally. They are effective at creating a political community, but the conflicts that arise among supporters narrow group membership, hinder mobilization, and undercut organizational political clout over time. We conclude with a discussion of our results for understanding ICT and activism in the digital age.
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O conceito de masculinidade hegemônica tem influenciado os estudos de gênero em vários campos acadêmicos, mas ao mesmo tempo tem atraído um sério criticismo. Os autores traçam a origem do conceito a uma convergência de ideias no início dos anos 1980 e mapeiam as formas através das quais o conceito foi aplicado quando os estudos sobre homens e masculinidades se expandiram. Avaliando as principais críticas, os autores defendem o conceito de masculinidade como fundamental, uma vez que, na maioria das pesquisas que o opera, seu uso não é reificador nem essencialista. Entretanto, as críticas aos modelos assentados em características de gênero e às tipologias rígidas são sólidas. O tratamento do sujeito em pesquisas sobre masculinidades hegemônicas pode ser melhorado com a ajuda dos recentes modelos psicológicos, mesmo que os limites à flexibilidade discursiva devam ser reconhecidos. O conceito de masculinidade hegemônica não equivale a um modelo de reprodução social; precisam ser reconhecidas as lutas sociais nas quais masculinidades subordinadas influenciam formas dominantes. Por fim, os autores revisam o que foi confirmado por formulações iniciais (a ideia de masculinidades múltiplas, o conceito de hegemonia e a ênfase na transformação) e o que precisa ser descartado (tratamento unidimensional da hierarquia e concepções de características de gênero). Os autores sugerem a reformulação do conceito em quatro áreas: um modelo mais complexo da hierarquia de gênero, enfatizando a agência das mulheres; o reconhecimento explícito da geografia das masculinidades, enfatizando a interseccionalidade entre os níveis local, regional e global; um tratamento mais específico da encorporação1 em contextos de privilégio e poder; e uma maior ênfase na dinâmica da masculinidade hegemônica, reconhecendo as contradições internas e as possibilidades de movimento em direção à democracia de gênero.
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This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.
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Drawing upon participant observation and interviews with white power movement (WPM) activists, this article explains how members materialize, communicate, and sustain white power identities under highly antagonistic social conditions. We emphasize the role of the movement's free spaces in movement persistence. In particular, we contrast the social ties and cultural practices that various types of free spaces in the movement both enable and inhibit. WPM members construct two main types of free space. “Indigenous-prefigurative” spaces involve small, local networks where political socialization, boundary marking, and other cultural practices allow members to participate in relationships that “prefigure” Aryan dominance. These practices are collapsed into otherwise benign, everyday activities in settings such as family homes, Bible study groups, informal parties, and crashpads, where members perform them in relative safety from social controls. “Transmovement-prefigurative spaces” offer opportunities to draw otherwise unconnected local actors and networks into broader webs of white power culture. Intentional Aryan communities, music festivals, and cyberspace connect individuals to extra-local movement networks which help reinforce solidarity and commitment to the WPM. These free spaces contribute to the persistence of white power activism by creating a bi-leveled infrastructure of spaces that support distinct kinds of network ties and practices to sustain collective identity.
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HE DEVELOPMENT OF gender relations in the modern era is never free from the influence of nations and nationalism (McClintock 1993); nations reflect the impact of gender strug­ gles as well. In this article I examine the white women's suffrage movement from 1848 to 1918 and conclude that a core within the suf­ frage leadership practiced a nationalism based on exclusive citizenship that was conditioned on whiteness. I see these politics as nationalist­ embedded within the women's experience and conceptions of America­ as well as "racist." This nationalism was realized through an alliance between white American women and men that subordinated gender con­ flict-even as suffrage leaders sought to improve their position as women. In the process, these leaders advanced the cause of women's suffrage while furthering the exclusion and oppression of nonwhite women and men. Aldon Morris observes that "social scientists have tended to underempha­ size the political consciousness of dominant groups" (1992, 363). In this article I attempt to explain some of the unmarked political consciousness of the dominant American group-what I term its nationalism-and how gender struggles both affected and reflected that nationalism. I begin with a brief review of literature on the relationships between white and nonwhite women, then offer a conception of national identity that undergirds the gender argument, before presenting a historical case. I focus on the mainstream of the suffrage movement and the leaders of its core organizations: the trend within the movement that was most success­ ful in achieving the explicit political goals of suffrage. 1
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Using both content and critical discourse analysis, this article traces the emergence of and changes in the ways feminism has been discursively constructed in 998 British and American news articles between 1968 and 1982 – which I define as the ‘height’ of the Second Feminist Wave, and 2008 – marking 40 years after feminism began gaining momentum in both nations. In analysing the British Times, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, and Guardian newspapers, as well as the American New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, I argue that not only has there been an erasure of feminist activism from these newspapers over time, but that discourses of feminism have become both de-politicized and de-radicalized since the 1960s, and can now largely be considered neoliberal in nature – a problematic construction for those seeking collective social change.
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Although the 1960 student sit-ins were not nearly as uncoordinated as contemporaneous nad subsequent accounts suggested, their repeated characterization in participants' accounts as "spontaneous" merits explanation. Analysis of campus newspaper articles and letters to the editor, speeches, and organizational and personal correspondence shows the emergence of a coherent and compelling narrative of the sit-ins, in which spontaneity denoted not a lack of prior coordination but independence from adult leadership, urgency, local initiative, and action by moral imperative rather than bureaucratic planning. Narratives of the sit-ins, told by many tellers, in more and less public settings, and in which spontaneity was a central theme, helped to constitute "student activist" as a new collective identity and to make high risk activism attractive. It was the storied character of representations of the sit-ins that compelled participation. This case suggests the more general importance of narrative-as distinct from collective action "frames"-in accounting for mobilization that takes place before the consolidation of movement organizations.
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This study compares the resource mobilization dilemmas of the antisuffrage movement which was most active between 1912 and 1918 and the anti-Equal Rights Amendment movement of 1972–82. I argue that the problems confronted by both countermovements were caused in part by their predominantly female constituencies and their opposition to feminism. Using historical documents, I identify common rhetorical, tactical, and organizational solutions to these dilemmas. I also identify differences between them which help to explain their divergent outcomes. These findings suggest that both countermovements adopted rhetorical strategies sharply differentiating opponents from proponents of women's rights, but their exaggeration of traditional feminine traits created additional mobilization dilemmas which were more effectively resolved by Phyllis Schlafly's leadership of the national campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment.
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This article describes political discourse on domestic violence that obscures men's violence while placing the burden of responsibility on women. This perspective, which the author calls patriarchal resistance, challenges a feminist construction of the problem. Using a qualitative analysis of men's and political magazines, the author describes two main discursive strategies used in the resistance discourse: degendering the problem and gendering the blame. These strategies play a central role in resisting any attempts to situate social problems within a partiarchal framework. It is argued that this is a political countermovement to the feminist constructions of domestic violence as opposed to a serious concern about women's violence and male victims. Three major implications this resistance discourse has are the normalization of intimate violence, the diversion of attention from men's responsibility and cultural and structural factors that foster violence, and the distortion of women's violence.
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This article examines two disputes within sex and gender movements, using them to think through inclusion/exclusion processes, the place of such explosions in the construction of collective identity, and the gendered nature of social movements. Literatures on collective identity emphasize the ways boundary negotiation reinforces the solidarity necessary for collective action and note benefits of solid boundaries, yet downplay the role of internal conflict in the making of collective identities. The cases examined here both involved the explicit expulsion of some “members”: the North American Man/Boy Love Association from the International Lesbian and Gay Association, and transsexuals from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. An incongruence between practical participation and symbolic exclusion suggests that internal movement debates are best understood as public communications, depending heavily on the communicative environment. Finally, these stories raise questions about the gendered nature of collective identity construction in social movements more generally.
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Leadership has proven a difficult concept to define, with the proliferation of definitions of leadership being more notable than any individual definition. This article takes a different approach to understanding leadership dynamics by identifying and studying “leading tasks.” Specifically, tasks associated with leadership in existing research are enumerated. Using data on two “strategic voting” mobilizations in 2000 and 2004, the empirical salience of various leading tasks to key organizers is traced and explained. The data suggest that although leadership was not evident in strategic voting, organizers did identify, prioritize, and take action on specific leading tasks.
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Accordingto the mass media, a postfeminist era emerged in the 1990s. The first objective is to develop a definition of the postfeminist perspective. Based on an informal content analysis of popular articles, the authors identify four postfeminist claims: (1) overall support for the women’s movement has dramatically eroded because some women (2) are increasingly antifeminist, (3) believe the movement is irrelevant, and (4) have adopted a “no, but..”.version of feminism. The second objective is to determine the extent of empirical support for these claims. Usingexistingpublic opinion data, the authors find little support for the four postfeminist claims. Implications of the unsubstantiated post-feminist argument are discussed.
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This article uses social movement and organization theory to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the 1960s. This case delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continue in nonreceptive political climates through social movement abeyance structures. Five characteristics of movement abeyance structures are identified and elaborated: temporality, purposive commitment, exclusiveness, centralization, and culture. Thus, social movement abeyance structures provide organizational and ideological bridges between different upsurges of activism by the same challenging group.
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In considering how terrorist movements use the Internet, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we must move beyond predominantly descriptive overviews of the contents of websites to examine in more detail the notion of virtual communities of support and the functions of these for their members. Virtual communities in support of terrorist movements are real social spaces where people interact on a regular basis to disseminate their views, share their knowledge, and encourage each other to become increasingly supportive of movements that use terrorism to achieve their goals. Taken from a larger body of comparative qualitative research investigating the content and function of discourses created in virtual communities in support of terrorism, this article presents a thematic analysis of “Stormfront,” a virtual community of the radical right.
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The article examines the role of collective identification processes in the politicization of Russian migrants in Germany. Building on the assumption that politicized collective identity (PCI) is a dual identity, the authors predicted and found that dual identification as both Russian and German was positively related to politicization among members of the Russian minority in Germany. This relationship held up even when the influences of several sociodemographic variables, past political activity, and other forms of collective identification were statistically controlled. In addition, perceived maltreatment of Russian migrants in Germany moderated the relationship between dual identification and politicization in keeping with the theoretical assumption that the development of PCI presupposes high awareness of shared grievances. Finally, dual identification was unrelated to acceptance of political violence, but positively related to self-restriction to peaceful political means. The constructive role of politicization driven by dual identification in social integration is discussed.
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Strategic voting, which was frequently described as “Nader trading,” emerged during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election as a way for voters to redefine their participation in the American electoral process. As a movement that emerged online, strategic voting not only presents potential political ramifications, but raises important issues for social movement scholars. In particular, movements that emerge online, which we refer to as “e-movements,” may challenge movement theories based on offline, pre-Internet forms of activism. In this paper, we use detailed data on the forms of strategic voting and the creators of the movement to address the literature on social movement leadership. We find that biography plays a strong role in the generation of strategic voting leaders, but in ways that differ from previous expectations about movement leadership processes. Further, we find that specific characteristics of leaders’ backgrounds also shape the forms of strategic voting implemented by leaders. We suggest a new institutionalist interpretation of this finding, arguing that scripts for appropriate forms of action generate diverse approaches to strategic voting.
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In recent years, the right has become a powerful force in many parts of the world. This review focuses primarily on the United States, with comparisons to rightist movements elsewhere. Our focus is movements, not political parties or intellectual trends. The article begins with terms and definitions and distinguishes conservative from right-wing movements. We then review changing theoretical orientations and the major findings on ideologies and characteristics of these movements. We also survey contextual factors that influence rightist mobilization and strategies used by rightist movements. We pay particular attention to New Right and New Christian Right conservative movements and to right-wing skinhead and white supremacist movements. A final section examines methodological and ethical concerns that arise in studies of the right. The conclusion recommends directions for future research.