2025

Coufal, Linda; Saresma, Tuija; Kosonen, Heidi

Incels are a group of people who mobilize around their inability to form romantic and/or sexual relationships. Their mobilization has been linked to online misogyny and violent acts of terrorism. This articleexplores discourses around gender equality and sexual rights on the extremist forum incels.is. We approach these discourses through aframework of misogynist extremism,whichseeks to highlight the role of misogyny in extremism, terrorism and violence. By applying computationally-assisted discourse analysis usingaword2vec model, we study discourses surrounding words related to gender-diverse identities, non-heterosexual sexualities and feminism, with the hypothesis that these individuals and/or social movements are framed as a threat to the cisgenderist hetero-patriarchal gender order. Our data supports this hypothesis by revealing the use of slurs and pejorative terms, hinting at dehumanization, othering and scapegoating. In the discussion, we explorehow gender is imagined as a tradition that discriminates between insiders and outsiders, which can be used as symbolic glue for all conservative movements. The article brings together different theories ongender, gender order, the farright, anti-feminism and anti-gender mobilization, discourses and rhetorical tools to help understand how a hetero-patriarchal and cisgenderist understanding of gender can be formulated into an extremist worldview.