Mainstreaming Male Supremacy: A Comparison of Men’s Rights Activists and Terrorists William Arnold (American University)
Abstract: Over the last ten years, there have been a number of terrorist attacks by alt-right and men’s rights actors, young men with misogynistic motivations. At the same time, numbers of people holding these extreme beliefs have substantially increased, in part due to social media and the popularity of men’s right influencers. This study explores the extent to which terrorists with extreme men’s rights/alt-right ideologies use the same language as the broader online men’s rights movement. This paper analyses the manifestos of men’s rights and MUU terrorists and compares that to transcripts of the popular YouTuber Andrew Tate, who is a mainstream articulation of the men’s rights movement. By performing a comparative thematic content analysis between the terrorist and ‘mainstream’ movements, this study draws out key disparities in the language that the two different groups use. This includes the specificity of the calls for violence, the use of militaristic language and ideological statements. These differences can help to illuminate the extent to which the language of extremism and terrorism is present in mainstream social media content. It suggests the language of potential terrorists may be differentiated and spotted from amongst more mainstream voices in the men’s rights space. A visual and netnographic analysis of the interaction between far-right masculinist influencers and their audiences Joshua Farrell-Molloy (Malmö University) Abstract: The ‘Right-wing Bodybuilder’ (RWBB) subculture is a digital far-right community made up of manosphere-adjacent fitness gurus and esoteric nationalists who focus on promoting alternative men’s health and nutrition advice. In recent years, RWBB has developed an established presence on Twitter, with key influencers ‘Bronze Age Pervert’ (BAP) and ‘Raw Egg Nationalist’ emerging as leading thinkers and masculinity influencers among the so-called ‘Dissident Right’. The sparse research on RWBB is restricted to ideological texts, not on the subculture’s participants. Meanwhile, research on online extremism, in general, typically hyper-fixates upon extremist content and narratives. This article will go beyond these analyses and explore how participants interact with content in extremist subcultures to establish group boundaries through their participation in com- munity rituals, alongside the banal and everyday interrelationships between the physical and online worlds that define the everyday experience in virtual communities. The presentation will address these gaps with a qualitative analysis using a combination of netnography and visual methodologies. It will examine how group dynamics, particularly in-group cohesion and in-group hierarchies, are established and maintained through the performances of rituals and practices, such as the sharing of daily life routines, which aim to construct the authenticity of participants.
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