1,720,974 research outputs found
Self-help and masculinity: speech acts in an online men’s group
No full textThis study investigates the interactional norms of a manosphere discussion forum known as The Red Pill (TRP), and asks whether it can be conceptualised as a self-help group. 2104 posts and comments from regular users and high-status users in the community were analysed qualitatively to determine how the community is characterised by certain speech acts, and how these speech acts correspond to face-enhancement and face-threat as well as to certain impression management strategies.Since personal disclosure, advice-giving, and face-enhancement are key characteristics of TRP, it could be argued that TRP shares some functional characteristics with self-help communities. However, much of the advice given is unsolicited, a disproportionately high rate of face-enhancement is directed towards high-status users, and speech acts such as elaborating, and some advice-giving and personal disclosure seem to be used for self-promotion purposes. Furthermore, the prevalence of unhedged face-threats sets TRP apart from traditional supportive communities
The men and women, guys and girls of the ‘manosphere’ : A corpus-assisted discourse approach
No full textThis study investigates how the lemmas woman, girl, man and guy are used to discursively represent and construct gender identities in an anti-feminist forum on the discussion website Reddit. The lemmas were analysed using corpus-assisted social actor analysis and appraisal theory. Similarities and differences within three sub-communities of the TRP subreddit were considered: Men’s Rights (activists who believe that men are systemically disadvantaged in society), Men Going Their Own Way (who abstain from relationships with women), and Red Pill Theory (primarily pick-up artists). The corpus was characterised by bare assertions about gendered behaviour, although the masculine gender role was less well-defined than the feminine one. Women and girls were dehumanised and sexually objectified, negatively judged for morality and veracity, and constructed as desiring hostile behaviour from male social actors. Conversely, men were constructed as victims of female social actors and external institutions and, as a result, as unhappy and insecure. © The Author(s) 2020
Review of conversational humour and (im)politeness. Valeria Sinkeviciute, John Benjamins publishing company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2019 (e-book), ISBN: 9789027262110
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Keywords of the manosphere
No full textThis paper examines language used in five of the largest manosphere communities on Reddit (r/TheRedPill, r/braincels, r/MensRights, r/seduction, and r/MGTOW) to identify idiosyncratic language use within these communities. To do so, a novel methodology which combines key-key-word analysis with notions from set theory was used to identify and compare keywords between corpora and to find keywords that are used uniquely within - and thus are distinctive to - these five separate communities. The paper achieves the following: it (i) presents a novel method for identifying what we term 'complement keywords' (keywords that are not shared between multiple different corpora when compared against the same reference corpus), and (ii) explores idiosyncratic language use in five separate manosphere communities. The analysis first examines interdiscursive relationships between communities emerging from the complement keywords identified before discussing community-specific preoccupations emergent in the idiosyncratic language use found in these five communities.</p
Role of science fiction in conceptualising the reproductive future: a linguistic and literary perspective
No full textIn this paper, we explore how members of the public invoke science fiction tropes and references in response to the topic of complete ectogenesis (where the entire development of a fetus takes place outside of the human body in an artificial womb environment) and, to a lesser extent, genome editing. This paper addresses a critical research gap as fiction is central to how the public make sense of new technologies. This research is timely, as human clinical trials of artificial placenta and womb technology are expected to start within the next few years. We argue that gauging public opinion on this technology is a critical early step in understanding how the public might respond to such new technologies, should they become available in the near future and be presented in a particular fashion. Using corpus linguistic techniques, we analysed a large dataset of 15 548 YouTube comments (382 057 words) made in response to a video that depicts a fictional artificial womb facility, which went viral in December 2022 when some viewers believed it to be real. We identified several statistically significant trends, as commenters associated the video with science fiction, horror and dystopian fiction, while also making specific reference to Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Star Wars (Clone Wars). These observations reveal how popular science fiction narratives serve as a key point of reference and that they stand as a powerful warning in the public imagination, and as a potential barrier to public acceptance of new reproductive technologies - despite the potential benefits for social justice and reproductive rights. Our findings therefore have implications for how scientific developments are communicated to the general public
The Reddit manosphere as a text and place
No full textThis chapter presents a three-part analysis of manosphere language on Reddit, a content aggregation site. The manosphere is an anti-feminist network of websites whose users believe that society is biased in favour of women, and its members often express hostile sentiments towards women and feminists. The chapter demonstrates how a number of foundational concepts in CDS (such as different types of critique) and Androutsopoulous’ (2013) notion of treating computer-mediated communication as both “text” (i.e. analysing linguistic features) and “place” (i.e. considering its social functions) can be applied to the analysis of manosphere data. Firstly, “text” is investigated by undertaking a corpus-based analysis of approximately 11 million words of manosphere data and a corpus-assisted discourse study using a much smaller dataset. This enabled the analysis of four gendered social actor terms and an investigation of how sexism and anti-feminism are expressed in this community. Secondly, “place” is investigated by undertaking a qualitative analysis informed by concepts from the field of pragmatics in order to establish how manosphere users relate to one other. This combination of methods allows the results of each study to be triangulated and for both linguistic representations of gender and social facets of the Reddit manosphere to be investigated
From sexism to misogyny
No full textThis chapter focuses on the sexist beliefs which can lead to misogynist acts such as discrimination or violence offline. I utilise Manne’s distinction between sexism (the discriminatory beliefs that individuals hold about women) and misogyny (the enforcement of sexist beliefs using tactics which aim to silence its victims) to discuss the sexist beliefs that are cemented in communities such as the manosphere, a loose network of anti-feminist websites united in the belief that men are a disadvantaged group in society on both a personal and societal level. As past literature details, sub-communities of the manosphere apply these beliefs differently. For instance, pick-up artists use formulaic tactics to convince women to sleep with them whereas incels (involuntary celibates) are upset that women do not want to sleep with them. One notable incel is Elliot Rodger who murdered six people and injured 14 in Isla Vista, California, after publishing an online manifesto in which he argued that women rejecting him caused his attack. Other incels such as Alek Minassian in Canada have since committed similar attacks in his name. I will use examples from my research on Reddit’s Red Pill community, a forum in which multiple sub-communities of the manosphere are present, to demonstrate that sexist beliefs are central to the manosphere community, as members believe that women are inherently incapable of monogamy, and that women are dehumanised as both animals and objects. I will then discuss how Reddit’s community guidelines are applied to the Red Pill community, as it was quarantined in October 2018, meaning that it does not come up on search engines, and the community can only be viewed after clicking through a content warning page, but the subreddit is not banned. On the other hand, the community which held the same beliefs as Elliot Rodger (r/incels) was banned in November 2017, following an online petition. I will conclude by showing that although online hate speech legislation would not consider the language of the Red Pill to be hate speech (as it occurs in an echo chamber), it can be argued that these beliefs are being applied to women offline
The representation of gendered social actors across five manosphere communities on Reddit
Full text linkThis paper investigates the representation of gendered social actors in a specialised corpus of 10.9 million words collected from five Reddit communities associated with the so-called manosphere: incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (male separatists), pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and a group dedicated to wider discussions of ‘red pill’ philosophy. 34 gendered social actor terms were identified as key-key-words across the manosphere corpora. Both male and female social actors are referenced using relational terms, while the latter are also referenced using derogatory terms and the former are referenced using terms for kinship and in-group identification. We then analyse the consistent collocates (Baker et al., 2008) of the four most frequent gendered social actor terms (women, girls, men and guys), to establish the topics, descriptions, and actions associated with the social actors across the five groups. Gendered social actors were constructed in essentialist dichotomies, with women and girls, although objectified and passivated in dating/sexual contexts, being represented as violent towards male social actors and as holding a privileged position over men in wider society. The anti-feminist ideology reflected in manosphere discourse can be seen as a more extreme version of mainstream discourse, into which it may be re-imported
The Language of Gender-Based Separatism: A Comparative Analysis
No full textThis Element shows how two social movements, lesbian separatism and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), reflect the changing and complex (anti-)feminist ideologies of their time. The authors outline the historical and political background of those discourses and how they are influencing contemporary gender relations. The materials analysed comprise ten manifestos, which are examined with a combination of data-led discourse analysis and theory-led argumentation analysis. The manifestos are similar in that both sets of authors construct homogenous in-groups and out-groups as well as dichotomies between them. There are some differences though in how this is linguistically realised and who is classified as an out-group. Both groups cast social actors in particular roles and establish ethical norms, but strategic planning and utopias are more prominent among lesbian separatists. Freedom, advantage and authority are central in each group's argumentation, but lesbian separatists also stress humanitarianism while MGTOW focus on financial matters
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