The representation of gendered social actors across five manosphere communities on Reddit

This paper investigates the representation of gendered social actors in a specialised corpus 10.9 million words, collected from five Reddit communities associated with so-called ‘manosphere’: incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (male separatists), pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and group dedicated to wider discussions ‘red pill’ philosophy. Thirty-four actor terms were identified as key-key-words across manosphere corpora. Both male female are referenced using relational terms, while latter also derogatory former for kinship in-group identification. We then analysed consistent collocates ( Baker et al., 2008 ) four most frequent women, girls, men guys), establish topics, descriptions actions groups. Gendered constructed essentialist dichotomies, women although objectified passivated dating/sexual contexts, being represented violent towards holding privileged position over society. The anti-feminist ideology reflected discourse can be seen more extreme version mainstream discourse. To extent that spreads beyond forums websites, its views will re-imported into mainstream, leading radicalisation.