Between Globalization and Gynocentrism: An Intercultural Perspective on the Pragmatics of Anti-Feminism in the Manosphere

Linda Gostner Scaggiante

The Internet provides unprecedented possibilities for the establishment of intercultural communities. However, digital spaces can also function as echo chambers for misogynist rhetoric. This is reflected in the manosphere, an online network united by anti-feminist ideology and the perception of male victimization by a ‘gynocentric’ society (Venäläinen 2022: 1229).

Centered around a shared philosophical model to counteract ‘feminist brainwashing’ (Ging 2019: 640), the community has developed into a transnational phenomenon spreading violent discourses beyond Anglophone borders (Ging 2019: 644–645). This includes Italy, where Anglophone core tenets (e.g., masculinity models) are shared and yet adapted to the Italian sociocultural context (e.g., Ignazzi et al. 2025; Dordoni & Maraggia 2021; De Gasperis 2021). Accordingly, my dissertation examines anti-feminist discourse of this intercultural, global community in Anglophone and Italian contexts.

Motivated by the previously acknowledged interconnectivity between local nodes of the global network, I aim to offer a holistic perspective on the pragmatic realization of anti-feminist discourse within the intercultural community. Thus, I will not only examine variations of overarching manosphere rhetoric in Anglophone vs. Italian contexts but also consider individual participants’ roles in dynamically reshaping core concepts within these spaces. Adopting Kecskés’s (2022) notion of the Socio-Cognitive Approach (SCA) as a theoretical foundation, my project analyzes how transnational core common ground is locally renegotiated through interactional discourse practices in Anglophone vs. Italian manosphere spaces. I shall argue that local manosphere hubs represent emergent common ground contexts reflecting the synchronic adaptation of community members’ common grounds in terms of communal construction and modification of prior knowledge (Kecskés 2022: 97-98).

I approach emergent common ground and potential variability between local spheres at two levels of abstraction: first, in selected texts of key manosphere bloggers discussing feminism (emergent common ground 1) and, second, through interactions between the former and blog commenters (emergent common ground 2). To trace local interactional dynamics and assess potential variability of core concepts across Italian and Anglophone communities, a tiered qualitative coding scheme is comparatively applied to key player discursive segments and utterances (stance lead) and commenter renegotiations of such (stance follow).