Understanding the Manosphere in SWANA Region

There’s a growing wealth of literature about the manosphere globally, analyzing its rise, discourses, roots, and the role technology plays in amplifying misogynist content online. Furthermore, increasing interest has emerged in framing the manosphere within the context of global and local anti-gender movements, where its popularity is seen as a digital manifestation of anti-feminist backlash. However, when considering its rising popularity in contexts where women’s rights remain a contested struggle, backlash theories - which generally assume that backlash follows substantive, widely-felt gains in women’s rights and freedoms - show their limitation in adequately explaining this phenomenon. In South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), research on the manosphere is still limited, with a noticeable gap in both grassroots and academic literature addressing it. This may stem partly from an underestimation of how the manosphere qualitatively and quantitatively differs from normalized misogyny in popular culture and everyday life, particularly in terms of its structured ideological messaging, monetized influencer economies, and algorithmic amplification across digital platforms. Consequently, for researchers seeking to understand this phenomenon and develop strategies to tackle its influence, especially among younger people, theoretical frameworks developed primarily within Western contexts might have limited applications. On one hand, analyzing the political economy of the manosphere, as well as the technological infrastructure that supports it, remain essential in understanding a phenomenon that’s fundamentally neoliberal in its discourse and digital in its architecture. On the other hand, relying solely on the framework of backlash theory fails to account for the limited scope of freedom and equality gained by women in SWANA, as well as the localized deployment of fear-mongering and moral panic in response to broader global shifts in gender politics, cultural productions, and social expectations. Therefore, this paper proposes the need for a contextualized and situated analytical framework which integrates feminist political economy approaches with digital research methods, to examine the specific conditions that have allowed the manosphere to take root and expand in SWANA. Ultimately, I aim to contribute to developing a framework to understand how misogynist cybercultures circulate and gain legitimacy in contexts where gender struggles are systemically constrained.