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Inceldom and involuntary singlehood in times of precarious love
Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7766-8696
Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4908-1783
Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
2022 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In recent years, a line of serious incidents of violence towards women have been committed by men who self-identify as involuntary celibates, or ‘incels’. Incels are part of what is described as a political sub-culture or online community, marked by misogyny and driven by affects like resentment, shame and revenge. The incel communities consist of men who feel they are unable to form romantic and sexual attachments with women, who blame women and feminism for this failure and – contrary to a feminist world view – describe this as a proof of a contemporary gynocentric order where men are victims and women powerful. This presentation draws the theoretical contours of a research project on involuntary celibacy and singlehood that is in its starting phase. While the emerging body of incel research and commentary is focused on the ideological distortions at play in incel men’s descriptions of themselves as victims on a mating market where women hold the power (Chang 2020; Menzie 2020; Witt 2020), we set out to take incel men’s claims about vulnerability more seriously, analysing them in light of structural transformations of the conditions of intimacy which have made intimacy an increasingly precarious matter. We situate our analysis of incelhood within research highlighting that post-industrial western societies find themselves in a state of what we call ‘precarious love’, in which, due to cultural, economic and technological changes, love and erotic bonding has become both increasingly important for people’s sense of security and well-being and increasingly characterized by insecurity (Bauman 2003; Gunnarsson et al 2018; Illouz 2012, 2019). In our presentation we aim to show why and how the incel phenomenon and broader experiences of involuntary celibacy and singlehood can be fully understood and explained only in light of these transformations of the conditions of intimacy.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022.
Keywords [en]
incels, intimacy, involuntary celibacy, involuntary singlehood, vulnerability
National Category
Gender Studies
Research subject
Gender Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-102059OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-102059DiVA, id: diva2:1708272
Conference
NORMEN 2022: Men, Masculinities, Intersectionalities: The Nordic Research Conference, Online conference, November 3-4, 2022
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2021-01130Available from: 2022-11-03 Created: 2022-11-03 Last updated: 2022-11-03Bibliographically approved

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Gunnarsson, LenaJohansson Wilén, Evelina

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CiteExportLink to record
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  • apa
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