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Affect, identity, and conceptualizations of feminism and feminists on the antifeminist r/MensRights subreddit

University of British Columbia

This thesis explores identity, affect, and discourses within the antifeminist r/MensRights community. By focusing on the discursive and affective treatment of the ‘feminist’ within the men’s rights movement, it identifies the ways in which the feminist movement is framed within men’s rights discourses. Particular attention is paid to how members of the movement carefully construct a broad and highly skewed understanding of ‘feminism’ as a dangerous ideological force that can radicalize and corrupt those it comes in contact with. The thesis identifies the properties, roles and locations of feminists within the feminist movement, and in relation to the men’s rights movement. By exploring the ways in which affective themes and utterances are made with reference to the men’s rights movements conceptions of feminism and ‘the feminist’, it becomes possible to tease out the roles of these carefully constructed (mis)representations. This exploration then allows for this thesis to identify how this misrepresented ‘feminist’ subject serves to provide the men’s rights movement with strategies that can be used to explain the anxieties the men of these movements are facing in relation to their own masculinities.

Text

2020-10-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/76240

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/