Abstract
Adolescent men who feel isolated, displaced, or unsure how to present as masculine may attracted to online manosphere communities. One these communities, the incel community, present a hostile, hegemonic masculinity. This study explored incel communities to understand how hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated online and how members’ gender performance changes over time as its members engage with the incel community. Five highly active users with more than 1500 posts each on r/Braincels, an incel community on Reddit.com, were analyzed through the lens of Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performance. Analysis showed that the incel community perpetuated hegemonic masculinity through three main processes: (1) adoption of a shared worldview, (2) use of hyper-masculine communication to exclude non-incel perspectives, and (3) creation of strong internal bonds. Additionally, no visible change gender performance was found in the community members due to three key mechanisms: (1) restricting acceptable emotional expression to sadness or anger, (2) maintaining a hierarchy that distinguished “true” incels (“truecel”) from those deemed less authentic, and (3) an analogous ideological hierarchy used to determine membership through acceptance of the incel worldview. The findings provide a more nuanced view of the incel community and bring to light the need for positive masculine spaces online.