No Country for Men. Negotiating Men’s Rights Activism in Digital Spaces

In the past ten years 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, a loose confederacy of online communities, focusing on issues concerning men and masculinity (Schmitz & Kazyak, 2016; Nagle, 2017; Marwick & Caplan, 2018). Moreover, most of the research on this phenomenon focus on the US context, and in rare cases on other Anglophone realities (such as Australia and Canada), while in Italy this field of studies is only starting to emerge and is limited to few works like Farci and Righetti (2019), Vingelli (2019), Cannito and Mercuri (2021), and Dordoni and Magaraggia (2021). This article attempts to investigate Italian MRAs on the Internet and their connection with the recent emergence of the manosphere. To do so, the essay analyses the content of two of the most prominent Facebook Pages dedicated to men's rights issues, called Diritti Maschili – Equità e Umanità (Men’s rights – Equity and Humanity) and Antisessismo (Antisexism). Employing the principles of critical discursive psychological approach (Edley, 2001; Wetherell & Edley, 1999), the article investigates the discursive constructions of MRA activism in digital environment and identifies a range of linguistic resources, called interpretative repertoires, that members can utilize in the course of their everyday interactions on these pages. Exploring how members can use different, and often conflicting, interpretative repertoires to make sense of their investment in anti-sexist, anti-feminist, and pro male groups, this work aims at demonstrating how difficult it is to define contemporary MRA movement in terms of a clearly defined worldview. Although the MRA is now considered an identity category in popular debates, it is possible to distinguish activists who are convincedly anti-feminist 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