Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 12-1-2023

Publication Title

Democratic Theory: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Volume

10

Issue

2

Pages

67-79

Publisher Name

Berghahn Journals

Abstract

Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) have recently gained notoriety for their aggressive, often violent, misogyny, yet incels were not al- ways an antidemocratic social group. They thus pose a challenge for thinking about democracy and identity in (anonymous) digital environments: how can we create spaces for marginalized social groups while ensuring the resulting identities remain democratic? While many scholars point to technological affordances or corporate content moderation policies as providing some solutions, in this article I propose a more democratic approach. Drawing from incel wikis and archived forum posts from two early incel communities—IncelSupport and LoveShy—I argue that a community’s social norms, and the moderation practices required to sustain them, are user-directed interventions that have outsized effects in shaping group identities in democratic ways.

Comments

Author Posting © The Author(s), 2023. This article is posted here by permission of Berghahn Journals for personal use and redistribution. This article was published open access in Democratic Theory, VOL.10, ISS.2, 67-79, (December 1, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2023.100207

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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