ABSTRACT
Recently there have been intense debates in masculinity studies about transformations in men’s behaviour and their impact on gender relations. A significant part of these debates is dedicated to trying to understand how white heterosexual masculinities are produced and buttressed in internet settings, as demonstrated by the increasing amount of knowledge about the heterogeneous nature of the so-called ‘manosphere’. Most of the research on this phenomenon focuses on the US context, and in rare cases on other anglophone realities (such as Australia and Canada). Although the last decade has witnessed the emergence of a growing number of antifeminist and men’s rights groups also on the Italian web, studies exploring this phenomenon in this country have been late to emerge. Employing the principles of a critical discursive psychological approach, the article investigates the discursive constructions of men’s rights activism (MRA) in the Italian digital environment and identifies a range of linguistic resources, called interpretative repertoires, that members can utilise in the course of their everyday interactions on these pages. Our analysis identifies three key interpretative repertoires employed by Facebook users to discuss and question men’s issues within these groups: the nice guy discourse, the liberationist rhetoric, and the hybrid style of activism. Exploring how members can use different, and often conflicting, interpretative repertoires to make sense of their investment in anti-sexist, antifeminist, and pro male groups, this work aims at demonstrating how difficult it is to define the contemporary MRA movement in terms of a clearly defined worldview. Although MRA is now considered an identity category in popular debates, it is possible to distinguish activists who are squarely antifeminist from those who are really worried about men’s issues. Focusing on such heterogeneity could be a crucial first step in bridging the divide between the men’s rights movement and feminism, which are still seen as opposing sides in the fight for gender equality.
