The alt-right: reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinity

Kelly, Annie

doi:10.3898/136266217821733688

Cited by 84 publications

(59 citation statements)

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“…Donald Trump of course has the most retweets and the most diversity, which should be entirely unsurprising as research demonstrates that much of his language reinforces white identity politics common to the alt-right, albeit in more coded and moderate language (Kelly 2017, Kreis 2017, McGranahan 2019. He frequently reinforces the rectitude of white-thymotic dispositions to demonstrate how his actions and policies address the impulses of his audience.…”

Section: Legitimization and Rectitude In White-thymotic Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Ganesh

2020

Cultural Studies

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The alt-right is a growing radical right-wing network that is particularly effective at mobilizing emotion through digital communications. Introducing 'white thymos' as a framework to theorize the role of rage, anger, and indignation in alt-right communications, this study argues that emotive communication connects alt-right users and mobilizes white thymos to the benefit of populist radical right politics. By combining linguistic, computational, and interpretive techniques on data collected from Twitter, this study demonstrates that the alt-right weaponizes white thymos in three ways: visual documentation of white victimization, processes of legitimization of racialized pride, and reinforcement of the rectitude of rage and indignation. The weaponization of white thymos is then shown to be central to the culture of the alt-right and its connectivity with populist radical right politics. KEYWORDS Alt-right; populist radical right; white nationalism; social media; affect; Twitter The recent increase of research into the alt-right has uncovered much of the structure and ideology of this movement. However, how the alt-right captures the attention of its audiences and the forms of affect and emotion that it mobilizes are aspects of this movement that are not well understood. While the 'alt-right is unlike any racist movement we have ever seen. It is atomized, amorphous, predominantly online, and mostly anonymous' (Hawley 2017, p. 3), it is a product of decades of white supremacist organizing in the United States and far right ideology and narratives in Europe and North America. Moreover, the term alt-right is challenging to define, but it can be understood as an umbrella term for a set of radical right social movements active primarily (but not exclusively) in Anglophone countries. It has come to be understood in the literature as a contingent coalition of activists, usually networked online, that span online troll cultures, misogynists in the manosphere, neofascists, ultranationalists, identitarians, and white

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Section: Legitimization and Rectitude In White-thymotic Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Ganesh

2020

Cultural Studies

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“…Linked to the increasingly influential Alt-Right (a coalition of far right, traditionalist Christian, disenfranchised geeks, and pickup artists (Lyons 2017;Kelly 2017)), and part of the anti-feminist online movement called the manosphere (Ging 2017), the Men's Rights Activism (MRA) movement and The Red Pill (TRP) are online groups creating novel performances of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Hegemonic masculinity is a performance of masculinity that aims to maintain a dominant position for men typified by subordinating women and non-traditional performances of masculinity through a variety of techniques, including violence, societal structure, and discrimination (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Modeling The Red Pill

Mountford

2018

Social Sciences

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The Men's Rights Activism (MRA) movement and its sub-movement The Red Pill (TRP), has flourished online, offering support and advice to men who feel their masculinity is being challenged by societal shifts. Whilst some insightful studies have been carried out, the small samples analysed by researchers limits the scope of studies, which is small compared to the large amounts of data that TRP produces. By extracting a significant quantity of content from a prominent MRA website, ReturnOfKings.com (RoK), whose creator is one of the most prominent figures in the manosphere and who has been featured in multiple studies. Research already completed can be expanded upon with topic modelling and neural networked machine learning, computational analysis that is proposed to augment methodologies of open coding by automatically and unbiasedly analysing conceptual clusters. The successes and limitations of this computational methodology shed light on its further uses in sociological research and has answered the question: What can topic modeling demonstrate about the men's rights activism movement's prescriptive masculinity? This methodology not only proved that it could replicate the results of a previous study, but also delivered insights into an increasingly political focus within TRP, and deeper perspectives into the concepts identified within the movement.

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“…Thus, it is noteworthy that other radical groups have realized the success of the red pill. For example, the alt-right, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists have all adopted the red pill into their terminology and are adapting it into their respective ideological frames (Marwick & Lewis, 2017;Kelly, 2017). Ideological "crosspollination" between different radical groups, such as the manosphere and alt-right (Nagle, 2017), extends to the use of specific works of fiction.…”

Section: The Manosphere's Online Ecology and Antifeminist Narrative Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative warfare

Nurminen

2019

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This article studies the use of literature and narrative strategies of online antifeminist movements. These movements classified under the umbrella term the manosphere, wage ideological narrative warfare to endorse a misogynistic worldview. The case at hand concentrates on the radical faction of neomasculinity and its attempts to reinterpret the Western canon of literature. I propose that neomasculine readings of novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita are careless interpretations that ground themselves on specific traits of the texts while ignoring others. These readings attempt to evoke a sense of recognition in the community that believes in an alleged feminist conspiracy against men. Careless interpretations borrow from post-truth rhetoric and the feminist literary theory tradition of reading against the grain. When confronted over their controversial views, neomasculine figures renarrativize readings to benefit the promotion of neomasculine perspectives. This strategic use of literature is part of the narrative warfare discussed in detail.

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The alt-right: reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinity

Cited by 84 publications

References 0 publications

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Topic Modeling The Red Pill

Narrative warfare

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