From Chads to Blackpills, a Discursive Analysis of the Incel’s Gendered Spectrum of Political Agency

ABSTRACT

The term “incel” is a portmanteau of the words “involuntary” and “celibate,” and incels as a group represent a new emergent Internet subculture. Often, they’ve been connected to viewpoints and language that promote toxic masculinity, while encouraging violence against women and minorities. Previous research has often highlighted incels’ views on women and the language used to perpetuate their antifeminist viewpoints and ideology. However, little research has been produced on how incels view themselves and other men. This research uses popular conversations from various incel message boards to qualitatively analyze the discourses incels use to convey the stratification of doing gender within their subculture. Incels use sex as a central metaphor to convey ideas about how power and resources should be distributed in society. Findings suggest that incels use a complex “interpretive repertoire” to describe a gendered spectrum of political agency.

Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of Robert Green and Allan Palombi who served as research assistants since the project’s inception.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Alana has requested that interviews and publications not use her full name.

² For reasons of confidentiality and security, we’ve decided not to identify the specific incel message boards. However, google analytics was used to find the most popular message board for the research period.

³ Each message board was sorted to show the most popular threads for that month. Different sites use different mechanics to represent popularity, some used a voting system, whereas others used frequency of comments to keep popular topics on the front page of the sites.

⁴ It’s difficult to give an exact page number for the data set because discussion threads scroll down through multiple “screens,” so viewing on a larger screen would count fewer pages, etc.

⁵ For example: sleep habits, social skills, community introductions. Though the main focus of the thread was unrelated, the threads were still analyzed as part of the total dataset.

⁶ The suffix “pill” appears frequently in incel subculture. A pill is a realization or recognition of a truth. It can be affixed to nearly any noun to denote the importance of a characteristic (e.g., Height Pill, Race Pill).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kurt Fowler

Dr Kurt Fowler is an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at Penn State Abington. His research focuses on deviant subcultures, particularly how they create and sustain culture to identify problems and address them. Recently, he has examined the subculture of incels and how they share perceived realities to bolster their ideology and how police use institutional language to absolve themselves of wrongdoing. He graduated from Rutgers University with a doctoral degree in 2019, completing a dissertation describing how sex workers use internet technology to circumvent traditional social institutions and create new resources for their community.