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Introduction

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Incels and Ideologies

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality ((PSLGS))

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Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to involuntary celibates (incels) and the wider network of loosely-connected anti-feminist communities known as the ‘manosphere’. It highlights where incels fit within the broader manosphere and the importance of both gender and race/ethnicity to this community. Throughout this introductory chapter, I draw attention to the importance of language for identity construction within the community, and as such argue that detailed and accurate linguistic analyses of incel communication, particularly from the perspective of investigating how they construct gendered and racialised social actors, is needed. I provide information on the linguistic data used for this book and describe corpus-assisted (critical) discourse-studies (CADS), a combination of methodologies from corpus linguistics and discourse studies which have been applied to the data. This chapter also sign posts readers to what content is covered throughout the book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note, language comes in a variety of communicative modes—e.g., spoken, written, and gestural.

  2. 2.

    I take a broad definition of what constitutes a ‘text’, meaning that texts can be any communicative act in any communicative mode. For example, an advertisement may be considered a multimodal ‘text’, even if there are no words.

  3. 3.

    Similar to Lawson (2023, pp. 2–3), the terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’ are capitalised throughout this book, with the exception of direct quotes (and the use of the terms as colours in contexts not related to race/ethnicity).

  4. 4.

    A common metaphor for the social goals of feminism in the ‘Western’ world at a given point is the ‘wave’ metaphor. The goal of first-wave feminism was to achieve the right to vote. The goals of second-wave feminism included, but were not limited to, achieving workplace equality, more visibility of women in the media, access to equal education, and access to birth control. And one of the primary goals of third-wave feminism is/was to show that gender is socially constructed and fluid. Others have begun to argue that there is a fourth wave emerging which has the goal of moving feminist ideologies and activism into online contexts (see Rivers, 2017).

  5. 5.

    For more information about the attack perpetrated by Rodger, see Hoffman et al. (2020). For more information about the one carried out by Minassian, see O’Donnell and Shor (2022). For more information about Davison’s mass shooting, see Sparks et al. (2022).

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  1. Department of Languages, Information, and Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Frazer Heritage

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Heritage, F. (2023). Introduction. In: Incels and Ideologies. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40184-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40184-8_1

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