Excluded. A digital ethnographic investigation on the femcel community

Excluded. A Digital Ethnographic Investigation on the Femcel Community This paper aims at exploring the bursts of anger shown on digital platforms by a community of women who feel excluded by the cultures of intimacy and sex. This sense of frustration, in the era of digital communications, is amplified by the architecture of these platforms, which reinforces and reproduces the existing hierarchies of power (Papacharissi, 2021), confining individuals in echo chambers (Bentivegna, Boccia Artieri, 2019). More specifically, a non-participant observation has been conducted to explore the kinds of gender abuses and the forms of sexualization that these users claim. The amount of academic studies dealing with women’s suffering because they feel sexually failed is poor; on the contrary, male Incels (Nagle, 2017; Ging, 2017; Bratic & Benet-Weiser, 2019), have received the attention of academics and journalists for their lack of sexual capital (Kay, 2022). Through digital ethnography (Kozinets, 2010; Sumiala, Tikka, 2020), a qualitative research approach adapting ethnographic techniques to the needs of studying an online space of discussion (Delli Paoli, 2021; Delli Paoli & D’Auria, 2021), the Reddit community for Femcel (women who are not voluntarily single) “Vindicta” (an online community only for women) is going to be studied. The community has been chosen for relevance (the group is composed by 56.561 female users); activities (interactions among members are regular), interactivity (communication among participants is substantial). Comments in the forum have been manually extracted and saved when they seemed to be significant for the community, in relation, for example, to the high number of feedbacks. A total of 1000 comments have been analyzed. The investigation (still in progress) has highlighted that Incel women, although considered ugly and “unfuckable”, complain they are not authorized to claim for an identity based on this state of abjection (Deliovsky, 2008), because the assumption is that any woman is able to seduce a man, if she really wanted it. In this way the figure of Femcel is not recognized as a legitimate identity, in contrast with what happens with male Incels.