#TeamAlienadas: Anti-feminist ideologic work in the Spanish manosphere

Abstract

‘Manosphere’ has become a popular term used to make sense of the growth of online masculinist subcultures and the rise in misogynistic discourses in digital environments. In this emergent field of research, a twofold gap exists: first, in exploring the local Spanish manosphere, as the majority of studies on the manosphere are set in Anglo-Saxon contexts, and second, in understanding women who also inhabit these spaces. In this article, we address this gap by carrying out a digital ethnography focusing on a group of women who partake in the Spanish manosphere organised under the hashtag #TeamAlienadas. We understand #TeamAlienadas as producing an affective anti-feminist ideology that enables women to legitimise men’s claims to victimhood under feminism and construct themselves as carers of men through specific digital practices. We argue that this affective anti-feminist ideology leads to the production of specifically anti-feminist gender knowledge, underpinned by a postfeminist sense-making, which mobilises ideas of empowerment. Drawing on Foucault’s theorisation of ‘regimes of truth’, we argue that #TeamAlienadas’ development of an affective anti-feminist ideology works to produce a kind of truth, which delegitimises feminism and aims to dismantle feminist politics in ways that could lead to accentuated female subjugation to patriarchy.