I'll always be a subhuman, I just lost the genetic lottery

Subaltern Identity-building in Online Incel Discourse and Ideology

Bibliographic Data

ID4046499
AuthorsLouis Bachaud (0000-0002-1542-7336, University of Kent, corresponding author)
Year2024
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNuevo mundo mundos nuevos (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1626-0252 • E-ISSN: 1626-0252
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/nuevomundo.95206
OpenAlexW4391788923
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited31

Incels, a unique Internet community of involuntary celibate men, have increasingly come under the spotlight since the mid-2010s. These heterosexual men are united by their lack of sexual and romantic experience, and their feeling of social inadequacy and isolation. They have developed a whole subculture, with its own idiom, labels, and theories, to make sense of their shared experience. By qualitatively analyzing a corpus of online incel discourse from the past ten years, this article reveals how incel identity is constructed and maintained by producing a trope of subalternity. Incels' individual experiences of rejection and personal feelings of subalternity are strengthened and given social and structural meaning through a common use of specific jargon and theories, as well as through appropriation of scientific research. This subaltern identity is fiercely defended and worn as a paradoxical badge of honor, while different subgroups jockey for the position of "most disadvantaged." Ultimately, our analysis establishes links between the extreme self-deprecation found in incel communities and the violence that has come out of them

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Communitas · Epistemology · Feeling · Ideology · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology

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