Autore
Meroni, Giulia

Titolo
Victimisation and Masculinity in the Polarisation of Misogynist Incel Discourse: Bending van Dijk’s Ideological Square (1998)
Periodico
Textus
Anno: 2025 - Fascicolo: 1 - Pagina iniziale: 147 - Pagina finale: 170

In recent years, the incel community – a portmanteau of involuntary celibate, indicating young men who are unable to establish romantic or sexual relationships despite their efforts – has attracted scholarly interest in discourse studies due to their highly discriminatory discourses against minority groups (Pra􀄪mo 2020). A tightly-knit community, incels have developed a distinctive language within their forums, characterised by neologisms and extensive identity construction strategies (Wa􀄞niewska 2020). By framing their condition as a form of discrimination based on a supposed genetic inferiority that makes them unworthy of accessing sex, incels position their social group in opposition to most of society and, above all, to women. Their discourse is polarised, using an ‘us-vsthem’ rhetoric that, at first glance, would appear to align with van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square, which has long provided a solid framework for investigating in-group/out-group discourse dynamics. But while the ‘usvs- them’ rhetoric conventionally pitches a positive ‘us’ versus a negative ‘them’, Scotto di Carlo (2023) points out that incels seem to breach this pattern. However, I argue that, rather than breaching it, incels make a peculiar use of the ideological square by bending it through narratives of victimisation and weaponised subordinate masculinity (Halpin 2022). Using Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk 1995; 2015; Lazar 2005; Baxter 2018) on a corpus of incel forum posts (collected from incel.is and incel. net) this paper aims to investigate how this rhetorical strategy enables them to perpetuate harmful representations of women and reinforce misogynist discourse practices typical of patriarchal societies.



SICI: 1824-3967(2025)1<147:VAMITP>2.0.ZU;2-3
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.7370/117516
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.7370/117516

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