High-Value Men and Alt-Right Women
Di Yoong, Critical Social Personality Psychology
Nga Than, Sociology
Recent scholarship has examined the rise of the alt-right, and contextualized its development with the rise of social media, and algorithmic Internet (Stern 2019, Daniels 2018). Little is known about the role of women in such a movement, and how they form an identity as alt-right women who mainly connect to other members through the Internet. As such, our project is interested in understanding the banal everydayness of creating and maintaining the identity of the alt-right women, as well as the role of social media in fostering, policing, and supporting such growth. We explore this with the dataset from the sub-reddit, RedPillWomen, and examine their expressions of identities and consider how it engages with structures of power and oppression. We are also exploring how might the discussion in a self-moderated platform compare to a platform like YouTube. We utilize unsupervised machine learning methods to discover latent relationships between words in the corpus. We will explore how women who self-claimed to be a part of the alt-right or red-pill define themselves in relation to men and how they relate to social gains that were brought forth by feminism and affirmative action policies. We will also explore how the desires and ideologies of the alt-right or red-pilled women grew out of normative structures of power and oppression, and consider how their disillusions and distrust of feminist gains might be a result of white privilege (e.g. gains by black feminist might be perceived as encroaching on their rights as white women). We will also discuss the role of social media platforms in hosting and enabling ideological discussions of such groups.
Image taken from Diverse Stock Photos, Flickr