Everyday extremism? Belonging, ideology, and online-offline identification in incel online communities

Incel ("involuntary celibacy") online communities are often contextualised as extremist milieus of radical misogyny. Violent rhetoric and dehumanisation of women are a core feature of these online communities, and incel ideology has been connected to several violent attacks. However, much of the interaction on these online forums is mundane and not explicitly violent, and to many participants, the feeling of community seems to be an important element keeping people engaged even when ideological views might differ. Drawing from my research on incel communities using interview and online discussion forum data, I explore how the elements of belonging, everyday online spaces, and ideology intertwine. I present findings from interviews with current and former incels on how they experience online discourse and negotiate their offline worldview and identity regarding incelness. These semi-structured interviews, conducted in Finnish and English with former and current incels from diverse backgrounds, offer rich insights into how online material and identification affects offline life, what they see as significant in their participation in incel communities, and how organic disengagement happens. Results suggest that for many, everyday community practices and belonging play an important role in participation and identification, which makes leaving incel identity behind more difficult if an alternative community and social connections do not exist. Many former incels struggle with misogynist ideas, further reinforced by misogynist mainstream cultural narratives, well after leaving incel identity and community behind, which demonstrates the ‘stickiness’ of hostile ideology and the insufficiency of individualist therapy approaches. I also question different viewpoints in defining violent extremism, and consider the pitfalls in exceptionalising incel misogyny as separate from the mainstream. Like "political violence", and maybe even more than it, "violent extremism" is a contested and vague term used to describe very different phenomena, both inside and outside of academia. Incel misogyny can rightly be defined as a more extreme formulation of mainstream structural misogyny. But the diversity of these broad online communities makes drawing the line between "extreme" and "normal" difficult: most incels do not commit violence, and many produce content not significantly different from mainstream misogynist and sexist articulations in media, politics, and culture. How do we, then, define whether incel communities can and should be regarded as violent extremist or not, and is this consistent with how we define dehumanisation and violence against women more broadly?