The Unpopular Men of Popular Feminism: Heteropessimistic feminisms in the era of the manosphere

Abstract

The Unpopular Men of Popular Feminism: Heteropessimistic feminisms in the era of the manosphere The latest battles between popular feminism and popular misogyny in Western culture have been characterised, since 2018, by spectacular expressions of misogyny enjoying institutional backing at the highest levels, and the emergence of popular feminisms that incorporate increasingly right-wing ideas and express a prevailing heteropessimism. Renewed attempts, including by feminists, to define “woman” solely in reproductive terms aligned with opposition to what is called “gender ideology” have gained traction across several continents (see Butler, 2024). Allied with “strong man” (and sometimes, strong woman) politics, and part of a broad network of “reactionary digital politics,” misogyny currently exerts considerable influence over the terrain of popular culture (see Butler, 2024; Cappelle, 2024; Finlayson, 2021; 2022; Kay, 2024). This thesis examines how popular feminism is contributing to this changing context and how it too has changed in recent decades. This thesis examines the representational politics of a range of cultural phenomena, including online masculinist communities known as the “manosphere,” transphobic feminists, and histories of Western radical feminisms. It evaluates how the rightward cultural shift I sketched above is imbricated with the emergence of two distinct modes of popular feminism, which I call “orthodox” and “dissident.” While orthodox feminism represents men as patriarchal threats to the realisation of a feminist social order and dissident feminism represents men as natural threats to women, both feminisms draw conclusions about “man” as a social category by citing examples from the manosphere. This shared field of reference, I argue, is both symptomatic of, and has a limiting impact on, the affects towards men—and therefore, the politics— that are readily intelligible in and as “feminism.”