Abstract
Online forums have provided fertile ground for the coalescence and growth of new manifestations of extreme-right communities, often referred to as the ‘Alt-Right’. The norms of these communities are policed through the othering of dissenters through intersectional categories of gender, racial and sexual deviance. Straight white men are placed as intellectually, morally and racially superior. However, these discourses become unstable when ‘insiders’ express political opposition. This chapter focuses on a case study of two white male anti-Trump protestors who were subject to an onslaught of online memes and insults and targeted for abuse both online and offline. It explores the effect the web can have on abuse; conceptions of trolling; and how shifting networks lead to flexible hierarchies of marginalisation structured in response to political needs.
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Green, A. (2019). Cucks, Fags and Useful Idiots: The Othering of Dissenting White Masculinities Online. In: Lumsden, K., Harmer, E. (eds) Online Othering. Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12633-9_3
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