Speaker
Description
Governmental counter-radicalisation frameworks are increasingly challenged by contemporary extremist threats, which exhibit converging ideological, affective and transgressive elements across decentralised and fluid networks (Taylor et al., 2026). Against this backdrop, the manosphere serves as an exemplar of the changing extremist threat-scape, characterised as a loose constellation of inter-related but non-cohesive anti-feminist communities (Brace et al., 2024). This critical review examines the state of research on the manosphere’s ideological landscape, in relation to its implications for understanding ideologically idiosyncratic milieus.
It contends that existing scholarship remains partial and fractured due to three areas of contention: conflicting cross-disciplinary assumptions about ideology; the proliferation of uneven conceptual vocabularies used to characterise these milieus (including assemblages, networked publics, and subcultures); and the fragmentation of empirical research across ideological content, networked diffusion, and individual belief adoption. Collectively, these tensions have produced a critical lacuna, namely understanding of how ideological interpretations are articulated, contested, and rendered authoritative in the manosphere. To address this gap, this review demonstrates the need for further research into the invocation of interpretive frameworks, such as ‘the red pill’, as a social resource through which beliefs, experience, and knowledge claims are invoked, debated, and rendered collectively meaningful in ideologically mixed extremist environments.
| Institutional Affiliation | Anglia Ruskin University |
|---|