Stacys, Beckys, and Chads: the construction of femininity and hegemonic masculinity within incel rhetoric
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the discursive constructions of femininity and masculinity expressed by incels. Situated within a new wave of misogyny, incels blame feminism for disrupting a natural order whereby women and broader societal structures are organised around heterosexual, monogamous couplings. Using femmephobia as a lens, I consider how incels employ heteropatriarchal conceptions of emphasised femininity to both devalue women and describe pervasive social conditions that force them to remain celibate. Femmephobia casts feminine expressions as inherently performative and directed towards a masculine subject. Through an online ethnography of incel-identified subreddits and a deep-reading of Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, this paper situates incel discourse within contemporary work on critical femininity. It finds that incels use gendered actors to illustrate and explain their status as incels. Further, these actors all operate within heteropatriarchal understandings of gender, and operationalise femininity or hegemonic masculinity for social capital. Through the use of these actors, incels demonstrate how they view sexual access and relationships as a unique form of capital that they are denied. Taking gender as its starting point, this paper contributes to the emerging field of critical femininity through an understanding of the misogyny and femmephobia expressed by incels through the use of gendered actors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it