Cultural Categorizations of Men in a Notorious Online Community

This chapter applies Cultural-Linguistic theory in the study of the language and underlying conceptualizations within an online community of some notoriety, namely, the incel community. It is well known that this community has developed its own lingo which serves to enable members to express conceptualizations from their worldview. Drawing on data from a corpus compiled from online fora and message-boards associated with this community, this chapter explores patterns of language use that reflect underlying sociocultural categorizations of men. Treating the incel community as a cultural group and their specific use of linguistic resources within incel lingo as expressors of cultural conceptualizations, this chapter is, in recognition of the truly interdisciplinary nature of Cultural Linguistics, a contribution to Cultural Linguistics, Internet linguistics, and corpus linguistics.