Trigger warning: this talk will include examples and visuals concerning gender-based hate and sexual violence, which might be triggering to some.
This presentation is based on a paper-in-progress which focuses on the rapidly emerging movement of so-called incels – a self-ascribed identity used by men in ‘involuntary celibacy’ who express gender-based hate in male separatist communities online. Once every half-hour a user in an incel forum posts – almost always supportively – about rape. Given the detrimental impact of gender-based violence on individual victims as well as society at large, and because exposure to violent content can lead to desensitisation and even radicalisation, the frequency with which sexual assault is promoted in the incel community is cause for concern.

Although the incel community is receiving increasing scholarly attention, previous research on incels has thus far been focused on defining and outlining the phenomenon and culture of incels more broadly rather than on analysing and understanding complexities related to incels’ violent discursive practices. In this piece, I address this gap by exploring the articulation of rape in one of the largest international incel forums, as a means to gain insight into the creation and spread of discursive – and by extension physical – gender-based violence. The paper is be guided by the following research questions: (RQ1) How is the rape of women articulated? (RQ2) How do incels situate themselves in these constructions? (RQ3) What role does the incel platform play in enabling the construction of violent discourses?

Dr Mathilda Åkerlund is a postdoctoral researcher with DIGSUM – Centre for Digital Social Research, and the Department of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. She is also Senior Editor with the Journal for Digital Social Research. Mathilda’s research focuses on the discourse of hate-based movements online, mixed methods involving computational and qualitative text analysis, and the role that platforms play in enabling hate.