Debbie Ging
Biographic Data
| ID | 284828 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debbie Ging |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debbie |
| FAMILY NAME | Ging |
| SIGNATURE | GING D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dublin City University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6664-5560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 290 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Glocalizing the manosphere
Over twenty years ago, Raewyn Connell proposed that transnational business masculinities had become globally hegemonic. Notwithstanding certain limitations of global masculinity theory, we argue that masculinity influencers are now attempting to redefine hegemonic masculinity at a global scale. However, as most research on the manosphere remains centred on the Anglophone world, there is limited understanding of how neo-masculinist ideologies circ…
Once Upon a Time in the Matrix
In recent years, male-oriented financial advice podcasts have gained significant popularity in the wider manosphere ecosystem, an online community promoting male supremacist and anti-feminist views. Along with other influencer-led advice on fitness and mental health, this content purports to guarantee men ‘high status’, while endorsing harmful masculinist norms. This study applies critical narrative analysis to a total of nine podcast videos (3 p…
Beyond the manosphere
The manosphere is a loose network of anti-feminist and more broadly reactionary male-centred online spaces, influencers and communities. A range of scholars, activists, practitioners and policy makers have turned their attention to generating strategies aimed at countering the misogynistic reactionary ideologies that boys and young men influenced by the manosphere are increasingly adopting. While great work is being undertaken in this space, what…
Aesthetics of misogyny and the repulsive gaze
Like most online radical movements, the incel community heavily relies on images to express and amplify its ideology; yet its visual practices have not yet been comprehensively analysed. Using an original dataset of 31,925 images scraped from seven online spaces of the ‘incelosophere’, we implement the first large-scale, systematic analysis of incel images. Combining a codebook-guided quantitative analysis with a qualitative interpretation of rep…
Rogue readings of a flashpoint moment
Since it was released in March 2025, Netflix drama Adolescence has generated a frenzy of debate and discussion among journalists, academics, teachers, parents, conservative organisations and those who work with boys and young men to prevent sexual and gender-based violence. Notwithstanding the considerable limitations of drama to handle such a sensitive, complex and contested issue, the series touched a societal nerve, which has in turn alerted t…
L’antiféminisme d’hier à aujourd’hui. Entretien croisé avec Mélissa Blais et Debbie Ging
Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)
In a digital ecology that is increasingly conducive to social harms, misogynist ideology operates across a spectrum of primarily online actors known colloquially as 'the Manosphere'. The manosphere and its associated red pill philosophy has now been around, in its current transnational and highly networked form, for over a decade. Yet the manosphere, particularly in the context of Covid-19, influencer culture and the affordances of new social med…
Moving beyond masculine defensiveness and anxiety in the classroom
Increasing rates of gender-based and sexual abuse, coupled with a rise in misogynistic influencers online, have become a growing issue in UK and Irish schools. This paper reports on the findings of a postlockdown study in England and Ireland that piloted workshops on gender-based and sexual violence. While most student responses were positive, we found that roughly 10% of girls and 20% of boys were resistant. In this paper, we explore these criti…
A Diachronic Cross-Platforms Analysis of Violent Extremist Language in the Incel Online Ecosystem
The emergence and growth of incel subculture online has triggered a considerable body of research to date, most of which analyzing its worldview or mapping its position and connections within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a somewhat static, one-dimensional portrayal of what is—like all online subcultures and communities—a highly dynamic and multi-…
Can Toxic Masculinities Be De-Radicalised
In recent years, male supremacist and anti-women formations have become increasingly prevalent online. In particular, considerable attention has been focused on the incel (involuntary celibate) community due to a number of high-profile mass killings in the United States, Canada and, more recently, the UK. Incel ideology is a misogynistic formation, whose male proponents blame women for their lack of sexual activity. It operates in the broader vir…
Reclaiming Digital Intimacy for Youth
Online sexual abuse and violence have become an urgent global problem for women and girls, and in particular for poor women, women of colour and LGBTQ women (Ging and Siapera, 2019). Online sexual harassment and abuse is an especially urgent issue for young people, for whom digital spaces are key sites of communication, identity formation, self-expression and sexual interaction. The toxic dynamics that frequently underpin these complex entangleme…
Misogyny, Survivorship, and Believability on Digital Platforms
On 18th May 2022, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg declared “the death of #MeToo” (Goldberg, 2022). The papers in this panel examine this claim and wrestle with its potential implications. Drawing on case studies and data from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and…
Tracking the Pilling Pipeline
The manosphere is an online network of disparate formations, which are united in their antipathy toward feminism, their reliance on evolutionary psychology and their belief that Western civilization is under threat. In recent years, a growing body of scholarship on the manosphere has emerged from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Much of this work sits within internet studies but there are also significant contributions from gender studies, s…
Parents displaying family consumption in Ireland
This article considers qualitative data collected from 78 parents in an Irish study on the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. It makes a distinctive contribution in showing that the framework of family display (Finch, 2007) can be productively applied to the entire field of family consumption. It shows that consumption narratives can be viewed as a tool that is used to display family – in other words, showing how family is done – to…
Parents’ encounters with ‘the sexualisation of childhood’
This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But …
Gender Hate Online
Neologising misogyny
Web 2.0 has facilitated a particularly toxic brand of digital men’s rights activism, collectively known as the Manosphere. This amorphous network of online publics is noted for its virulent anti-feminism, extreme misogyny and synergies with the alt-right. Early manifestations of this phenomenon were confined largely to 4/Chan, Reddit and numerous alt-right forums. More recently, however, this rhetoric has become increasingly evident in Urban Dict…
Alphas, Betas, and Incels
Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill 'philosophy,' which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, h…
Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras
Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This…
Special issue on online misogyny
This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet’s anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cu…
Written in these scars are the stories I can’t explain’
Since pro-anorexia websites began to appear in the 1990s, there has been a growing body of academic work on pro-ana and thinspiration communities online. Underpinned by a range of (inter)disciplinary perspectives, most of this work focuses on websites and blogs. There is a dearth of research and, in particular, gender-aware research on pro-ana practices and discourses in the context of newer mobile social platforms such as Instagram. Using a data…
Memes, masculinity and mancession
Since it first aired in 2010 on Radió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, Irish crime drama series Love/Hate has enjoyed record audience ratings. However, while serious TV critics and the show’s producers have praised it as a complex and incisive commentary on crime in Ireland, the more participatory online cultures of the Journal.ie, Twitter and Facebook have constructed a distinctly less highbrow set of discourses a…
Cyberbullying, conflict management or just messing? Teenage girls’ understandings and experiences of gender, friendship, and conflict on Facebook in an Irish second-level school
In recent years, there have been growing concerns worldwide about young people’s safety online, much of which focuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Moral panics about sexting and cyberbullying have constructed public discourses about social media as dangerous to adolescents’ safety and relationships. In the academic literature, there are conflicting perspectives on the nature of online relationships, behaviour, and risks, …
Women, Men and News
In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who fea…
The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945–2000
The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945–2000 STEPHANIE RAINS Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007 252 pp., $65.00 (cloth), $27.50 (paper) At Mary Robinson's official inauguration in 1990, Ireland'
Alphas, Betas, and Incels
Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill 'philosophy,' which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, h…
Special issue on online misogyny
This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet’s anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cu…
Written in these scars are the stories I can’t explain’
Since pro-anorexia websites began to appear in the 1990s, there has been a growing body of academic work on pro-ana and thinspiration communities online. Underpinned by a range of (inter)disciplinary perspectives, most of this work focuses on websites and blogs. There is a dearth of research and, in particular, gender-aware research on pro-ana practices and discourses in the context of newer mobile social platforms such as Instagram. Using a data…
Women, Men and News
In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who fea…
Neologising misogyny
Web 2.0 has facilitated a particularly toxic brand of digital men’s rights activism, collectively known as the Manosphere. This amorphous network of online publics is noted for its virulent anti-feminism, extreme misogyny and synergies with the alt-right. Early manifestations of this phenomenon were confined largely to 4/Chan, Reddit and numerous alt-right forums. More recently, however, this rhetoric has become increasingly evident in Urban Dict…
Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)
In a digital ecology that is increasingly conducive to social harms, misogynist ideology operates across a spectrum of primarily online actors known colloquially as 'the Manosphere'. The manosphere and its associated red pill philosophy has now been around, in its current transnational and highly networked form, for over a decade. Yet the manosphere, particularly in the context of Covid-19, influencer culture and the affordances of new social med…
A Diachronic Cross-Platforms Analysis of Violent Extremist Language in the Incel Online Ecosystem
The emergence and growth of incel subculture online has triggered a considerable body of research to date, most of which analyzing its worldview or mapping its position and connections within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a somewhat static, one-dimensional portrayal of what is—like all online subcultures and communities—a highly dynamic and multi-…
Moving beyond masculine defensiveness and anxiety in the classroom
Increasing rates of gender-based and sexual abuse, coupled with a rise in misogynistic influencers online, have become a growing issue in UK and Irish schools. This paper reports on the findings of a postlockdown study in England and Ireland that piloted workshops on gender-based and sexual violence. While most student responses were positive, we found that roughly 10% of girls and 20% of boys were resistant. In this paper, we explore these criti…
Cyberbullying, conflict management or just messing? Teenage girls’ understandings and experiences of gender, friendship, and conflict on Facebook in an Irish second-level school
In recent years, there have been growing concerns worldwide about young people’s safety online, much of which focuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Moral panics about sexting and cyberbullying have constructed public discourses about social media as dangerous to adolescents’ safety and relationships. In the academic literature, there are conflicting perspectives on the nature of online relationships, behaviour, and risks, …
Memes, masculinity and mancession
Since it first aired in 2010 on Radió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, Irish crime drama series Love/Hate has enjoyed record audience ratings. However, while serious TV critics and the show’s producers have praised it as a complex and incisive commentary on crime in Ireland, the more participatory online cultures of the Journal.ie, Twitter and Facebook have constructed a distinctly less highbrow set of discourses a…
Aesthetics of misogyny and the repulsive gaze
Like most online radical movements, the incel community heavily relies on images to express and amplify its ideology; yet its visual practices have not yet been comprehensively analysed. Using an original dataset of 31,925 images scraped from seven online spaces of the ‘incelosophere’, we implement the first large-scale, systematic analysis of incel images. Combining a codebook-guided quantitative analysis with a qualitative interpretation of rep…
Gender Hate Online
Rogue readings of a flashpoint moment
Since it was released in March 2025, Netflix drama Adolescence has generated a frenzy of debate and discussion among journalists, academics, teachers, parents, conservative organisations and those who work with boys and young men to prevent sexual and gender-based violence. Notwithstanding the considerable limitations of drama to handle such a sensitive, complex and contested issue, the series touched a societal nerve, which has in turn alerted t…
Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras
Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This…
A ‘Manual on Masculinity’? The Consumption and Use of Mediated Images of Masculinity among Teenage Boys in Ireland
Most of the research on masculinity in Ireland stresses the influences of family, work and education in the construction of gender (Ferguson, 1998; Ferguson and Synott, 1995; Ferguson and Reynolds, 2001; McKeown et al., 1998, Owens, 2000). Although the impact of the entertainment media is regularly alluded to, there is a dearth of empirical work in this area. While it is generally agreed that mediated images play a highly influential role in youn…
The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945–2000
The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945–2000 STEPHANIE RAINS Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007 252 pp., $65.00 (cloth), $27.50 (paper) At Mary Robinson's official inauguration in 1990, Ireland'
Cyberbullying, conflict management or just messing? Teenage girls’ understandings and experiences of gender, friendship, and conflict on Facebook in an Irish second-level school
In recent years, there have been growing concerns worldwide about young people’s safety online, much of which focuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Moral panics about sexting and cyberbullying have constructed public discourses about social media as dangerous to adolescents’ safety and relationships. In the academic literature, there are conflicting perspectives on the nature of online relationships, behaviour, and risks, …
Women, Men and News
In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who fea…
Written in these scars are the stories I can’t explain’
Since pro-anorexia websites began to appear in the 1990s, there has been a growing body of academic work on pro-ana and thinspiration communities online. Underpinned by a range of (inter)disciplinary perspectives, most of this work focuses on websites and blogs. There is a dearth of research and, in particular, gender-aware research on pro-ana practices and discourses in the context of newer mobile social platforms such as Instagram. Using a data…
Memes, masculinity and mancession
Since it first aired in 2010 on Radió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, Irish crime drama series Love/Hate has enjoyed record audience ratings. However, while serious TV critics and the show’s producers have praised it as a complex and incisive commentary on crime in Ireland, the more participatory online cultures of the Journal.ie, Twitter and Facebook have constructed a distinctly less highbrow set of discourses a…
Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras
Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This…
Special issue on online misogyny
This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet’s anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cu…
Gender Hate Online
Neologising misogyny
Web 2.0 has facilitated a particularly toxic brand of digital men’s rights activism, collectively known as the Manosphere. This amorphous network of online publics is noted for its virulent anti-feminism, extreme misogyny and synergies with the alt-right. Early manifestations of this phenomenon were confined largely to 4/Chan, Reddit and numerous alt-right forums. More recently, however, this rhetoric has become increasingly evident in Urban Dict…
Alphas, Betas, and Incels
Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill 'philosophy,' which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, h…
Parents’ encounters with ‘the sexualisation of childhood’
This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But …
Tracking the Pilling Pipeline
The manosphere is an online network of disparate formations, which are united in their antipathy toward feminism, their reliance on evolutionary psychology and their belief that Western civilization is under threat. In recent years, a growing body of scholarship on the manosphere has emerged from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Much of this work sits within internet studies but there are also significant contributions from gender studies, s…
Parents displaying family consumption in Ireland
This article considers qualitative data collected from 78 parents in an Irish study on the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. It makes a distinctive contribution in showing that the framework of family display (Finch, 2007) can be productively applied to the entire field of family consumption. It shows that consumption narratives can be viewed as a tool that is used to display family – in other words, showing how family is done – to…
Can Toxic Masculinities Be De-Radicalised
In recent years, male supremacist and anti-women formations have become increasingly prevalent online. In particular, considerable attention has been focused on the incel (involuntary celibate) community due to a number of high-profile mass killings in the United States, Canada and, more recently, the UK. Incel ideology is a misogynistic formation, whose male proponents blame women for their lack of sexual activity. It operates in the broader vir…
Reclaiming Digital Intimacy for Youth
Online sexual abuse and violence have become an urgent global problem for women and girls, and in particular for poor women, women of colour and LGBTQ women (Ging and Siapera, 2019). Online sexual harassment and abuse is an especially urgent issue for young people, for whom digital spaces are key sites of communication, identity formation, self-expression and sexual interaction. The toxic dynamics that frequently underpin these complex entangleme…
Misogyny, Survivorship, and Believability on Digital Platforms
On 18th May 2022, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg declared “the death of #MeToo” (Goldberg, 2022). The papers in this panel examine this claim and wrestle with its potential implications. Drawing on case studies and data from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and…
Moving beyond masculine defensiveness and anxiety in the classroom
Increasing rates of gender-based and sexual abuse, coupled with a rise in misogynistic influencers online, have become a growing issue in UK and Irish schools. This paper reports on the findings of a postlockdown study in England and Ireland that piloted workshops on gender-based and sexual violence. While most student responses were positive, we found that roughly 10% of girls and 20% of boys were resistant. In this paper, we explore these criti…
A Diachronic Cross-Platforms Analysis of Violent Extremist Language in the Incel Online Ecosystem
The emergence and growth of incel subculture online has triggered a considerable body of research to date, most of which analyzing its worldview or mapping its position and connections within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a somewhat static, one-dimensional portrayal of what is—like all online subcultures and communities—a highly dynamic and multi-…
Aesthetics of misogyny and the repulsive gaze
Like most online radical movements, the incel community heavily relies on images to express and amplify its ideology; yet its visual practices have not yet been comprehensively analysed. Using an original dataset of 31,925 images scraped from seven online spaces of the ‘incelosophere’, we implement the first large-scale, systematic analysis of incel images. Combining a codebook-guided quantitative analysis with a qualitative interpretation of rep…
Rogue readings of a flashpoint moment
Since it was released in March 2025, Netflix drama Adolescence has generated a frenzy of debate and discussion among journalists, academics, teachers, parents, conservative organisations and those who work with boys and young men to prevent sexual and gender-based violence. Notwithstanding the considerable limitations of drama to handle such a sensitive, complex and contested issue, the series touched a societal nerve, which has in turn alerted t…
L’antiféminisme d’hier à aujourd’hui. Entretien croisé avec Mélissa Blais et Debbie Ging
Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s)
In a digital ecology that is increasingly conducive to social harms, misogynist ideology operates across a spectrum of primarily online actors known colloquially as 'the Manosphere'. The manosphere and its associated red pill philosophy has now been around, in its current transnational and highly networked form, for over a decade. Yet the manosphere, particularly in the context of Covid-19, influencer culture and the affordances of new social med…
Glocalizing the manosphere
Over twenty years ago, Raewyn Connell proposed that transnational business masculinities had become globally hegemonic. Notwithstanding certain limitations of global masculinity theory, we argue that masculinity influencers are now attempting to redefine hegemonic masculinity at a global scale. However, as most research on the manosphere remains centred on the Anglophone world, there is limited understanding of how neo-masculinist ideologies circ…
Once Upon a Time in the Matrix
In recent years, male-oriented financial advice podcasts have gained significant popularity in the wider manosphere ecosystem, an online community promoting male supremacist and anti-feminist views. Along with other influencer-led advice on fitness and mental health, this content purports to guarantee men ‘high status’, while endorsing harmful masculinist norms. This study applies critical narrative analysis to a total of nine podcast videos (3 p…
Gender, Feminism, and Media (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Irish (8 works) · Media studies (8 works)