United by victimhood : Negotiating identity in incel online communities
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In this thesis, I examine misogynist incel (‘involuntary celibacy’) online communities. These communities consist mostly of heterosexual men who have constructed an identity around their perceived lack of sexual and romantic attention from women. Incels present themselves as victims in a rigid sexual hierarchy. Most often, they see this as a result of their unattractive appearance; they believe that women are biologically hardwired to prefer conventionally attractive, traditionally masculine men as partners. Incel discussions commonly include hopeless, self-deprecating content and detailed comparisons to the ‘Alpha males’ that incels see as ideal examples of heterosexual masculinity. Despite this self-hatred, incels ultimately blame women for their situation, and dehumanising, violently misogynistic rhetoric is prevalent in incel online discussions. In this thesis, I examine how incels themselves understand inceldom, and what political implications being an incel involves to self-identified incels. My approach is discursive: I focus on the processes of meaning making, the discursive dynamics at play when the incel worldview is constructed, negotiated, and contested. In the three articles in this thesis, I employ an inductive approach, using both online discussion and interview data. Using discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, I demonstrate that for incels, the political implications of inceldom are centred around victimhood, and that the idea of victimhood affects how all other themes and topics are viewed in incel discourse. The importance of victimhood, overall, has been recognised in previous research, but I argue that the ways this victimhood works to structure incel discourse, and the political implications it has to incels themselves, are more complex than have been shown before. Focusing on the constant collective and individual renegotiations of identity in incel communities, my research shows the need to acknowledge the diversity of narratives, ideas, and experiences in these online spaces and in the offline lives of the participants. Employing Laclaudian discourse theoretical tools, I analyse victimhood as an empty signifier that holds a variety of different meanings and demands, a floating signifier that different discourses attempt to define in competing ways, and as a nodal point that structures incels’ self-understanding. Incels disagree on what ‘incel’ means in the first place, whether incels should be considered to be a political movement or not, whether political violence is justified, and what an ideal society would look like. What pulls incel discourse together despite these differences is the focus on and attachment to victimhood. This victimhood can be used to defend contradictory views and goals: in the case of violence, for example, claims of incel victimhood are used both to justify and argue against political violence. Still, victimhood manages to create temporary discursive unity, to bring together a wide set of demands and to present them as though they are uniform. At the same time, victimhood is used to differentiate from the broader manosphere and to reject masculinist and anti-feminist attempts to present all men as united against feminism. Incel victimhood as a central nodal point is used to articulate a political non-agency in a way that renders political mobilisation as ultimately useless. Incels constitute their agency through negation, as stolen by women, feminism, and society at large. In this sense, different views on the political implications of inceldom do not matter. Whatever broader goals, propositions, or solutions individual incels might have to their situation, incel attachment to victimhood and hopelessness dictates that they can never be reached. In this thesis, these findings inform a discussion on extremism and online radicalisation as concepts frequently used to analyse incels. I approach these concepts with a problematising rather than definitional view, examining the different implications these discursive framings hold. I argue that while the incel worldview, in many ways, matches common definitions of extremism, the overarching attachment to victimhood, and therefore the perceived lack of political agency, differentiates incels from other extremist communities. Moreover, defining incels as extremists carries risks of exceptionalising incel misogyny and therefore losing sight of its strong connections to mainstream structural misogyny.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Lounela, Emilia
Language: English
Topic: Gender, Feminism, and Media
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7198643073