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Social Media, the Manosphere, and Making Masculinities Online

Submitted to Program Units
1: Men, Masculinities, and Religions Unit

How do social media and online platforms shape contemporary religious masculinities? From YouTube influencers and content creators, to podcasters and anonymous Redditors, panelists explore how message boards, advice videos, podcasts, and X.com [formerly Twitter] are sites for creating communities and discourses about masculinities, political identities and sexual practices. Panelists theorize the “online manosphere,” examining “Red pill Muslim masculinities” and “Eastern Orthodox manosphere influencers” who theorize about gender differences, create vernacular theologies of the body, and circulate advice regarding seduction, sexual dominance, and marital relations. Building on the advice genre, the panel then explores the media culture of domestic advice and YouTube influencers who offer homemaking and self-making tutorials. Moving from the work of influencers to the message boards of Reddit and the spectacle of the electoral process, panelists examine the subreddit r/Hunting and the dynamics of violence, compassion and human and animal intimacies.

Amanullah De Sondy, University College Cork, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

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Papers

  • Shaheer Afaqi,

    Islamizing the Red pill: Muslim masculinity and the Online Manosphere

    Abstract

    In *The New Arab Man,* Marcia Inhorn, a prominent scholar of Muslim masculinities, challenges common stereotypes about contemporary Middle Eastern Muslim men. Her work is significant, for it highlights the emergence of egalitarian Muslim masculinities in the Middle East. However, this paper draws attention to a starkly different form of Muslim masculinity emerging among the young Muslim men of the West. This "Red pill Muslim masculinity" combines the teachings of popular youtubers such as Rollo Tomassi with a simplistic understanding of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. It emphasizes that men and women are situated in a confrontational dynamic due to inherent and immutable evolutionary differences. Red-pill Muslim influencers view women as inferior, hypergamous, irrational, and solipsistic beings who must be controlled by an aggressive, judgemental, and manipulative Muslim masculinity. Crucially, prominent Muslim youtube influencers have begun to frame red pill ideology as “traditional” Muslim masculinity, thereby encouraging young religious men to embrace this trend. 

  • Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Northeastern University
    Robert Saler, Christian Theological Seminary

    Seduction, Post-Capitalism, and Sexual Asceticism: The Far-Right Transmutation of the “Manosphere” Among U.S. Eastern Orthodox Online

    Abstract

    The digital manosphere has been an object of scholarly analysis for several years. Crucial, but often missing, in the assessment of the manosphere is the role of religious belief and moral framings about the body. This paper intervenes by analyzing how online manosphere elements interact with both religious traditions and forms of political authority in order to produce discourses, technologies, and self-improvement regiments related to Orthodox masculinity. Drawing on three years of research, this paper offers a case study from the online Eastern Orthodox manosphere, showing that this mode of masculinist discourse unites reactionary religiosity with affective energy borrowed from, and recognizable to, participants within the manosphere. In doing so, we argue that manosphere culture, focused on social debate as a normative form of corrective instruction, helps Orthodox men craft vernacular theologies of the body that are inspired by Orthodox theology and manosphere culture but arguably at odds with both. 

  • Morgan Barbre, Yale University

    Rajiv Surendra's Home Rules: Gender and the Media Culture of Domestic Advice, Reconsidered

    Abstract

    This paper emplots the work of Rajiv Surendra, an emerging domestic advisor with a dedicated following, in the longer tradition of domestic advice. By locating his teaching in conversation with domestic advisors like Lizzie Kander of the Settlement Cook Book, the author seeks to reframe the intimate work of teaching homemaking as less stably feminine than presumed and more invested in masculinist structures of prescription and authority. In short, this paper asks, what different conceptions of masculinity, domesticity, and kinship become possible when we imagine domestic advice writing as not simply maternal and feminine but invested in systems of knowledge production that we might differently gender in their underlying paradigms? This paper argues that the Canadian actor-turned-influencer’s recognizability as a domestic advisor—and as a queer, unchaste, wealthy, Tamil man—both modulate and reinforce conclusions we have drawn about Americanization, racial formation, kinship, and gendered discipline through domestic advice writing.

  • Ruben Rosario Rodriguez, Saint Louis University

    “Politics as Public Spectacle: Contesting Masculinity or Rigged Outcome?”

    Abstract

    Employing the analysis of professional wresting developed by Roland Barthes in his influential essay, “The World of Wrestling” (1972), this paper contends that American voters, like a professional wrestling audience, are not interested in facts, but desire a public spectacle in which good triumphs over evil. Given the vagaries of the Electoral College, the influence of dark money in elections, and the increasing role of the Supreme Court plays in validating or determining election outcomes, many Americans believe the electoral process, like a professional wrestling match, is rigged. An analysis of the symbols and rituals of professional wresting provides a lens through which we can analyze the American electoral process as a rigged public spectacle intended to reinforce cultural and national narratives of American triumphalism embodied in images of masculinity, violence, and power.

  • Izzak Novak, Northwestern University

    “Feels Like Not Calling My Mother”: Hunting’s Religious-Ethical Significances for Men on the r/Hunting Subreddit

    Abstract

    Masculinized social media spaces are often associated with forms of oppression like misogyny, queer- and transphobia, and racism.  Without dispelling that reality, my net ethnography of the subreddit r/Hunting uncovers the ethical and religious heavy lifting men do in social media spaces devoted to masculinized practices.  For hunters on r/Hunting, the moment of violence, the kill, is at once the point and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized.  Even more, it triangulates them into relationships with their imagined and known male ancestors, their kin, and the totality of living things.  Indeed, this moment of violence anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies.  Hunting, then, is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Tags

#manosphere
#far right
#Sex
#digitalreligion
#masculinity
#patriarchy
#alt-right
#vernaculartheology
#SocialMedia
#body
#muscularchristianity
#virility
#sexuality
#Orthodoxy
#reddit
#hunting
#violence
#intimacy
#professionalwrestling
#domesticity #rules #masculinity #mediaculture