Fight with words: misogynist extremism on an incel discussion forum
Author(s):
Incels are a group of people who mobilize around their inability to form romantic and/or sexual relationships. Their mobilization has been linked to online misogyny and violent acts of terrorism. This article explores discourses around gender equality and sexual rights on the extremist forum incels.is. We approach these discourses through a framework of misogynist extremism, which seeks to highlight the role of misogyny in extremism, terrorism and violence. By applying computationally-assisted discourse analysis usingaword2vec model, we study discourses surrounding words related to gender-diverse identities, non-heterosexual sexualities and feminism, with the hypothesis that these individuals and/or social movements are framed as a threat to the cis genderist hetero-patriarchal gender order. Our data supports this hypothesis by revealing the use of slurs and pejorative terms, hinting at dehumanization, othering and scapegoating. In the discussion, we explore how gender is imagined as a tradition that discriminates between insiders and outsiders, which can be used as symbolic glue for all conservative movements. The article brings together different theories on gender, gender order, the far right, anti-feminism and anti-gender mobilization, discourses and rhetorical tools to help understand how a hetero-patriarchal and cis genderist understanding of gender can be formulated into an extremist worldview.