Guest Lecture by
Dr. Katharina Motyl (Mannheim)

Tuesday, January 21, 2:15 pm
ELP 3, Room 1.29 (No registration necessary)

This talk draws on the rhetorical and visual analysis of written posts and multimodal memes published in anti-feminist online forums such as reddit to argue that digital anti-feminism constitutes a space in which some users collectively radicalize to embrace alt-right ideologies at large (or are purposefully enticed to radicalize by alt-right activists, for instance, by redpilling).

After briefly characterizing the groups constituting the manosphere, Dr. Motyl shares three observations regarding the interconnections between digital media ecologies, anti-feminism, and the alt-right: First, the anonymity and the networked harassment that web 2.0 afford have greatly radicalized anti-feminist and anti-gender discourses. Second, anti-feminism and anti-genderism function as the ideological glue that binds the various groups constituting the alt-right together. Third, since the late aughts, anti-feminism and anti-gender politics have moved from the margins of the internet to the center of Western societies and polities – this ‘migration’ has moved the boundaries of what is sayable in parliaments and other ‘offline’ spaces of political discourse. The talk’s third part considers the rhetorical strategies, aesthetics, and affective appeals that select anti-feminist social-media posts deploy to conjure masculine and heterosexual domination and to entice individual, socially isolated users to experience empowerment by joining a (virtual, yet real) collective. The antifeminist vanguard of the alt-right, in short, succeeds in convincing users that their feelings of marginalization constitute subversive knowledge regarding the true power dynamics in Western societies, which not only oppress men, but which also privilege ethnic and racial minorities over white people, who will soon be ‘replaced’ unless they start resisting.