Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy,” which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, has become the dominant arena for the communication of men’s rights in Western culture. This article identifies the key categories and features of the manosphere and subsequently seeks to theorize the masculinities that characterize this discursive space. The analysis reveals that, while there are some continuities with older variants of antifeminism, many of these new toxic assemblages appear to complicate the orthodox alignment of power and dominance with hegemonic masculinity by operationalizing tropes of victimhood, “beta masculinity,” and involuntary celibacy (incels). These new hybrid masculinities provoke important questions about the different functioning of male hegemony off- and online and indicate that the technological affordances of social media are especially well suited to the amplification of new articulations of aggrieved manhood.

This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet's anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cultural and gender-political factors. This collection of work is intended to lend focus and cohesion to a growing body of research in this area; to map, contextualise and take stock of current frameworks, making scholars aware of one another's work and methodologies, and hopefully forging new interdisciplinary collaborations and directions for future work. Crucially, we move beyond the Anglophone world, to include perspectives from countries which have different genderpolitical and technological landscapes. In addition to mapping the new misogyny, several contributions also address digital feminist responses, evaluating their successes, limitations and impact on the shape of digital gender politics in future.

Since pro-anorexia websites began to appear in the 1990s, there has been a growing body of academic work on pro-ana and thinspiration communities online. Underpinned by a range of (inter)disciplinary perspectives, most of this work focuses on websites and blogs. There is a dearth of research and, in particular, gender-aware research on pro-ana practices and discourses in the context of newer mobile social platforms such as Instagram. Using a dataset of 7560 images, this study employs content analysis to ask whether, to what extent and how pro-ana identities and discourses manifest themselves on a more open, image-based platform such as Instagram. We demonstrate that, by mainstreaming pro-ana, Instagram has rendered visible pro-ana sensibilities such as abstinence and self-discipline in the broader context of distressed girls’ lives and Western culture more generally. We conclude that this increased visibility may in fact be a positive development.

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