Event overview
Swallowing the Red Pill: On Identity Work, Sexual Strategy and Social Organizing in Anti-Feminist Digital Spaces
Dr. Mikael Andehn will be presenting his research on anti-feminist digital spaces as part of the Institute of Management Studies Marketing seminar series.
Free entry, no registration required.
Abstract: Social discourse has colonized digital spaces at an impressive pace, allowing for geographically dispersed individuals to exchange opinions in spaces in which discourse can be topically specified to a previously unprecedented level. The present work delves into one of these spaces, a set of controversial anti-feminist platforms typically referred to as ‘The Red Pill’ that have garnered significant attention beyond its humble beginnings on the Internet. The present study makes use of a large number of posts from these forums, collected over the course of several years. Through the use of a narrative analysis the posts were explored in order to attain a further understanding of how the recommendations and narratives in these texts comes to form an emergent ideology. The study finds that this ideology is constituted, sustained and developed through a use of, and reference to, terminology and tropes that are generated by the contributors of the forums themselves. These users, through the sharing of narratives, prescriptive statements and commentary, collectively come to render a form of peer-to-peer ideology that is also subject to influence from the platform mechanics of the forums themselves. Once the means of the ideology formation is established the study also traces the worldview of these forums back to an ‘inversion’ of radical feminist thought. This ideology formation is based on a subversion of, and resistance against, what is viewed as a form of social oppression concerning gendered social norms and expectations. This subversion notwithstanding, the platform’s emerging frame of understanding of the social world is found to still operate within a neoliberal frame of understanding of human interactions, not only confirming it but indeed contributing to its deepening.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 May 2018 | 2:00pm - 4:00pm |
Accessibility
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