Sprecher
Beschreibung
This paper will provide a comparative analysis of two texts from self-identified feminists that respond to the manosphere: Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women (2020) and Caitlin Moran’s What About Men? (2023). Feminist non-fiction for general audiences is one of the most significant sites of feminist activism with regard to the manosphere, with prominent feminists writing texts – aimed predominantly toward female readers – that address the operations of, threats posed by, and potential recourses regarding contemporary digital misogyny. This paper will ask what specific value there is in researching online extremism via the disciplines of literary studies and digital humanities.
Bates’ magnum opus on the manosphere breaks down the manosphere into its subgroups and therein undertakes research into each facet; Moran’s text also includes several facets of the manosphere, though it does not exclusively focus on digital misogyny. Instead, Moran places it into a wider context of contemporary masculinity, specifically focalised through the author’s perceptions.
These texts will be contextualised within the increasing corpus of texts written for general audiences that lay bare the mechanics of the manosphere with a view to raising awareness and affecting change. This paper will evaluate whether such texts constitute a cultural challenge to the manosphere by bringing it into public consciousness, since it has previously benefitted from its obscurity. This will be achieved by providing a comparative analysis of Bates and Moran’s texts, and considering the aims and efficacy of their approaches, with a particular focus on the motifs of ‘raising awareness’ and ‘activism’.
Biographical note
Dr. Shelby Judge is an Early Career Academic in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Derby, researching digital and popular feminist responses to INCELs and the Manosphere. Her doctoral project was “Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth” 2005—2022, which investigated the current trend of women writers retelling Greek myths and what this illuminates about current concerns within feminism. Shelby’s overarching research interests are in feminist and queer theory and contemporary British and North American women’s fiction.