Abstract:

This thesis offers an overview of the representational politics of the online antifeminist community known as the ‘manosphere’. It analyzes how gender and gender politics are represented in the discourse, with an eye to how traditional gender constructs, and traditional gendered norms and inequalities, are reproduced. This project—the first study to focus exclusively on the manosphere—contributes to our understanding of the community in two ways; it addresses a significant gap in the literature on the topic, and it tests the accuracy of the ‘conventional wisdom’ on the manosphere. Using mixed-methods critical discourse analysis, the study analyzed the discourse of the two primary subcultures of the community, and found that traditional gender norms and relations are reproduced therein, and that for the most part the conventional wisdom is accurate: femininity and women are disparaged, masculinity is imagined to be ‘in crisis’ (constantly under siege by feminizing forces), and feminism is represented as hypocritical and oppressive.