Abstract
Using Erving Goffman’s ideas about theatre as a metaphor for social life, a dramaturgical framework is deployed to analyze content on an online neo-masculinist social movement community, The Red Pill (TRP). TRP is a subreddit, or category, on the social bookmarking site, Reddit. Neo-masculinity is defined as an ideology that is a contemporary redeployment of older, male supremacist tropes of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality such as gender essentialism, gender complementarity, and male superiority. Predatory heteromasculinity is described as a form of masculinity that is affirmatively heterosexual, sexually entitled, and focused on hunting women as sexual prey. The author describes how participants on The Red Pill use dramaturgical techniques to perform discourses of predatory heteromasculinity and neo-masculinism, and analyzes how the site functions dramaturgically for actor-adherents’ performances of the discourses. Key concepts include: TRP as a stage; re-performances for TRP audience; actors’ sincerity of belief in the part played; ideological stage setting; character creation and maintenance; and the use of costumes and props.
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Anahita, S. (2020). The Drama of Predatory Heteromasculinity Online. In: Farris, D.N., Compton, D.R., Herrera, A.P. (eds) Gender, Sexuality and Race in the Digital Age. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29855-5_10
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