Luise Bendfeldt: Tales of Lonely Young Men: Analysing Portrayals of Misogynistic Incel Violence

Abstract

This thesis examines portrayals of misogynistic incel violence and its implications for understandings of misogyny, violence and security. To do so it asks the question of what meaning is ascribed to misogynistic incel violence, and how? Rather than investigating misogynistic incels’ own stories of their violence, this thesis turns to public portrayals of misogynistic incel violence, i.e. within news media and at policy-making levels, to explore how these portrayals affect understandings of wider gendered violence and what the potential implications may be to understandings of security, threat and national identity. This thesis thus investigates the manner in which misogynistic incel violence is politicised and securitised, or not. With that it examines how understandings of this gendered violence are both reliant on and reproductive of certain power dynamics in broader society. The papers that form this thesis identify particular narratives (such as isolated loners, boys being left behind and a backlash against feminism) and show how these work to obscure the misogyny at the heart of misogynistic incel violence. Two of the papers address portrayals of misogynistic violence in the US, the third turns to Sweden to investigate how an assumed gender-equal context may impact the portrayal of explicitly gendered violence. These qualitative studies draw on data from interviews and document analysis in order to provide an in-depth analysis of the portrayals of misogynistic incel violence.  

Ultimately, the papers argue that such portrayals perpetuate the conditions that make misogyny possible. Rather than recognising the structural nature of misogyny, the portrayal of misogynistic incel violence focuses on the stories of the individual perpetrators. Misogynistic incel violence is thus contained and exceptionalised. This thesis shows what is at stake when misogynistic violence is not recognised for what it is.