Affects of racialisation: misogynistic incels’ affective constructions of race and ethnicity

The ‘blackpilled’ misogynistic incel (involuntarily celibate) subculture, a subset of the manosphere, subscribes to a biologically deterministic worldview. The blackpill ideology positions men who they perceive as not fitting into traditional and hegemonic ideals of masculinity as low-value, subhuman and condemned to a life without sex or relationships. This belief system is a part of a collaboratively constructed narrative that has been intensified over the last decade through collective participation in pseudonymous online incel forums. The form of masculinity that is lionised within these communities is a White and fascist masculinity (Johanssen, 2022). This is exemplified by popular incel rhetorics such as the ‘Just Be White Theory’, which forum members use to exploit concerns around racism and desirability politics by dehumanising and devaluing non-White men as inherently less successful with women (Gheorghe, 2023). The internalisation and naturalisation of blackpill logics around race is an affective process, a process named by Tamar Blickstein (2019) as ‘affects of racialisation’. By theorising these digital spaces as affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015) and thinking through feminist affect theory (Ahmed, 2004), this paper aims to understand the affective tensions and emotional textualities that construct race and amplify White supremacy within a community that has previously self-reported half of their members as being non-White (Speckhard et al., 2021). Through conducting an affective-discursive analysis (Wetherell, 2012) on forum data from a prominent ‘blackpilled’ misogynistic incel forum, this paper examines the affective conceptualisations of race and ethnicity. With the construction of regressive racial hierarchies, overt vitriolic hate speech and body fascism, White incels secure a sense of racial superiority while denigrating and stereotyping their non-White peers. Racialised incels earn their belonging in the community by bolstering their victimhood and participating in hateful constructions of their own racialised bodies.