Cohort: SOMET 37°
Topic of the thesis: Gender wars: the misogyny strikes back. Understanding the epidemic of NoFap on Reddit.
Abstract: The project aims to understand how the growing practice of abstention from masturbation and pornography, known as NoFap, is constructed and negotiated in (mainly) homosocial Reddit subcultures and what are the meanings attached to it. The NoFap communities constitute a peculiar environment in which members, mainly white hetero cis-men but not solely, gather to explain their discomfort and shame over masturbating and pornography consumption by sharing intimate personal experiences and feelings concerning this historically highly sanctioned, stigmatized and contradictory practice. Masturbation has, in fact, a secular history of fluctuation between being framed as a sign of strong masculinity and as a de-masked weakness, often linked to the risk and fear of the feminization of society. The literature on the analyzed topic has retrieved heterosexist, patriarchal and misogynistic discourses promoted by NoFap communities that are often associated with openly anti-feminist spaces, rubricated under the umbrella term "manosphere". While the NoFap communities behave more as a self-help group than as a political, polarised collective, some authors have retrieved common traits with the manosphere. In particular to more radicalized anti-feminist communities like Incels, MGTOW and PickUp Artists, who often praise NoFap practices. As I hypothesized, misogyny may have leaked into mainstream content and self-defined pro-equity digital environments, such as the NoFap movement, with the risk of spreading and normalizing the language of gender discrimination, abuse and violence. In this realm, the context of gender-political post-feminism, a climate of backlash against feminism, the rhetoric of masculinity in crisis, the emergence of particular toxic technocultures and of anti-feminist online spaces, will be deemed essential to investigate these peculiar digital enclaves. Therefore, studying these communities may deepen our knowledge on the doing of gender relations today, shed light on how the language of misogyny has become established within geeky homosocial online contexts constituting a sort of lingua franca and to what extent the boundaries of radicalized anti-feminist spaces are porous and dangerous. The research adopts a mixed methods approach, deploying computational social sciences (CSS) tools such as topic modeling and social/semantic network analysis of NoFap subreddits' posts and comments threads, and a digital ethnography of NoFap Reddit communities.
Research interests: Gender and Sexuality Studies, Digital Sociology, Computational Social
Sciences, Feminist (Critical) Media Studies, Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities.
Graduated from: University of Verona (BA); Ca' Foscari University of Venezia (MA).
Degrees obtained: BA in Communication; MA in Social Sciences and Public Policies.
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