Incels and Ideologies
Description
This book explores how incels use language and other semiotic resources to construct ideologies of gender and race/ethnicity. The author theorises and positions incels' performances of masculinity against a backdrop of broader social sciences and linguistic literature, and discusses some of the limitations of different lenses through which incels have previously been understood, as well some of the ethical issues involved with researching a hostile community. Corpus linguistic methods and netnographic reflections are used to explore how incels construct ideologies about gender, gendered social actors, and race/ethnicity, as well as where these concepts intersect. Taking a post-structuralist critical analysis to this community reveals a number of way ideologies towards different groups based on social identities are linguistically constructed. This book will be relevant to those researching or studying language, gender, and sexuality, sociology, and criminology. Outside of academic applications, it is also written in a way that is accessible to external organisations interested in equality and the prevention of incel-ideology-motivated offline attacks.
Reviews / Votes
"This thought-provoking monograph serves as a much-needed window into the incel manosphere which exhibits a politically right-wing tendency, contributes to the linguistic research into this problematic societal phenomenon, and highlights the need for further critical research on incels." (Teng Wang, Language in Society, Vol. 154 (3), 2025)
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Frazer Heritage is a Lecturer in Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is primarily interested in how gender and sexuality are represented in different forms of media. His main area of research looks at corpus linguistic approaches to the representation of gender in videogames and in online communities. He has been examining the language used by the incel community since 2018.