The Object of Subordination Is Immaterial: Discursive Constructions of Masculinity in a Far-Right Online Forum

Abstract

This chapter analyses responses to a mass shooting in which a 29-year-old male security guard, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a terrorist attack/hate crime inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States, by members of a white supremacist online forum called Stormfront. Texts related to the killings were collected and analysed using a methodological approach which combines corpus linguistics with CDA. The study entailed the use of frequency, keyword, and concordance analyses in order to investigate language patterns and discursive constructions within the texts. It is argued that hegemonic masculinity sustains itself through subordination and that white supremacist forum members employ subordination of various out-groups as a performance which constructs their own identity, thus merging the theories of gender performance (Butler, Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990) and hegemonic masculinity (Connell, Masculinities. University of California Press, 1995).