Disentangling Antifeminist Paradoxes: Alternative Organizing in Antifeminist Online Spaces

Abstract

In this study, we revisit alternative feminist organizing in order to identify the dialectical tensions, paradoxical discourses, and agentic qualities of women’s participation in an online antifeminist space. We engage in text mining, semantic network analysis, and the constant comparative method to identify dialogical tensions and the paradoxical organizing strategies of Red Pill Women, an online community on the social networking platform, Reddit. Through analyzing Red Pill Women as an antifeminist space constituted through postfeminist logics, we identify three paradoxical tensions, begin to disentangle postfeminism from antifeminism, and build on alternative organizing theory with recent work on hidden and invisible organizations to further theorize gendered (in)visibility and (anti)feminist organizing practices.

Constituting affective identities: Understanding the communicative construction of identity in online men’s rights spaces

“…Finally, while our study draws on the feminist theorizing of affect to investigate the contradictory identities of TRP, the use of affect in a study on MRAs reveals developing insights into the ongoing constructions and reproductions of the hegemony of men. Whereas feminist approaches to affect have highlighted the use of alternative logics to reduce, resist, and eliminate the dualities and inequalities that exist (Zembylas and Chubbuck, 2009), an affective approach to TRP's identity reveals a reliance on inequalities and differences as communicative through discourse and alternative logics (Eddington, 2020;Jarvis and Eddington, 2021). Our study illustrates the potential of affect not merely to constitute an identity of TRP but as a resource to critique the embedded nuance and contradictory logics within the social identities of masculinity and men (Pullen et al, 2017).…”

“…Imbricated within the victimhood contradiction is the entanglement of sexual activity throughout every conversation within TRP (Eddington, 2020;Jarvis & Eddington, 2021). TRP members frequently engaged in discussions and conversations about men's declining status within society and how their societal status has created oppressive conditions for men.…”

“…Cluster analyses arranged nodes "into groups such that there is a higher density of edges within groups than between them" (Clauset et al, 2004: 1). The textual clusters represent broader themes, with each cluster containing structurally similar nodes within the network (Eddington, 2018(Eddington, , 2020Jarvis and Eddington, 2021). Each cluster is thematically organized around topics of conversation with TRP; however, it is vital to return to the original text body to interpret the clusters.…”

Expertise, Knowledge, and Resilience in #AcademicTwitter: Enacting Resilience-Craft in a Community of Practice

“…Lambert (2017, p. 3) describes text mining as "one strategy for analyzing textual data archives that are too large to read and code by hand, and for identifying patterns within textual data that cannot be easily found using other methods." A key assumption of text mining is that meaning can be found from the analysis (and the frequencies) of words, phrases, and concepts into conceptual hierarchies (Jarvis & Eddington, 2020Sowa, 1984). Meaning, as Leydesdorff and Welbers (2011, p. 474) contend, "is generated when different bits of information are related at the systems level, and thus positioned in a vector space."…”

“…Clustering analyses are helpful in that they create "cliques" of word pairs that more frequently occur together, which demonstrate underlying group structures. Group structures can exhibit thematic qualities as they recur and revolve around central topics or concepts; however, to interpret the clusters, we utilized thematic analyses to contextualize specific topics and concepts in the three largest clusters of the Twitter data (Eddington, 2020;Jarvis & Eddington, 2020).…”