“I’ll always be a subhuman, I just lost the genetic lottery”: Subaltern Identity-building in Online Incel Discourse and Ideology

Abstract

Incels, a unique Internet community of involuntary celibate men, have increasingly come under the spotlight since the mid-2010s. These heterosexual men are united by their lack of sexual and romantic experience, and their feeling of social inadequacy and isolation. They have developed a whole subculture, with its own idiom, labels, and theories, to make sense of their shared experience. By qualitatively analyzing a corpus of online incel discourse from the past ten years, this article reveals how incel identity is constructed and maintained by producing a trope of subalternity. Incels’ individual experiences of rejection and personal feelings of subalternity are strengthened and given social and structural meaning through a common use of specific jargon and theories, as well as through appropriation of scientific research. This subaltern identity is fiercely defended and worn as a paradoxical badge of honor, while different subgroups jockey for the position of “most disadvantaged.” Ultimately, our analysis establishes links between the extreme self-deprecation found in incel communities and the violence that has come out of them.