Data from several countries suggests younger men and women are increasingly diverging in their political attitudes. This session examined that divergence through the lens of incel and femcel communities, the Korean 4B movement, and “dissociative feminism” — the coping strategy of laughing at the structures rather than confronting them. We also brought in biopolitics as a framework for understanding how bodies become targets of state control, in light of recent abortion legislation in the US.
Materials
Main
- To discuss incel communities, this video on the series Adolescence — spoilers ahead (YouTube · 6 min)
- On the opposite spectrum, femcel communities and dissociative feminism — this video is not only about Fleabag but about the broader phenomenon (YouTube)
- A Guardian article explaining the 4B movement in South Korea — women collectively opting out of marriage, dating, sex, and childbearing as a radical feminist response (article · The Guardian)
- This recent research paper on why polarisation is (not) happening — read the abstract and the last paragraph: Facebook field experiment 2024 (paper · PDF)
Supplementary
- Due to the recent events in the US, we also look at this from a biopolitical perspective — the Georgia case: pregnant Georgia woman brain-dead under abortion law (article · The Guardian)
- The original 2019 BuzzFeed article that coined the term: dissociative feminism (article · BuzzFeed News)
Session structure
- Definitions
- Incel: involuntarily celibate — originally self-identifying, now reduced to misogyny in popular usage
- Femcel: also partly described as involuntarily celibate, but in pop culture now focused more on misandry
- 4B movement: boycott of heterosexual sex, dating, marriage, and childbearing
- Adolescence — the Netflix series
- Does it reflect the situation nowadays, including in Belgium?
- Do you have experience with young people becoming radicalised online?
- Fleabag and dissociative feminism
- Started with a tweet: "what I love about my friends is that 70 years ago we all would have been lobotomized"
- Giving up shouting and complaining — adopting a darkly comic, deadpan tone instead
- Dissociation as detachment: viewing your own body from the outside — not a trauma response but a coping style
- Also about privilege: works best for pretty, white, cisgender, educated women who are "tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive"
- Fleabag as "chill girl" — not hysterical, not blaming society — which makes us feel less confronted with ourselves
- Do you identify with Fleabag? Is she a femcel? What about Marianne in Normal People?
- Biopolitics and the wider landscape
- Foucault's definition: techniques for the subjugation of bodies and control of populations
- Biopower: the ability to make live and let die — whose bodies are regulated and whose are not
- The Georgia case: a pregnant woman declared brain-dead, kept on life support to carry a foetus to term
- What does this tell us about who controls women's bodies?
- Is polarisation actually happening?
- The Facebook field experiment: social media has small, contingent effects on individual users
- The study treats ordinary people as passive users — misses political activists and elites
- What can we do to counter polarisation in our own communities?
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