“Giacomino uno di noi”. Italian literature and masculinity practices in Forum dei Brutti

Abstract

This paper analyzes the connection between collective imagination about Italian literature and masculinities online. I analyzed Forum dei Brutti, the most popular forum in the Italian incelosphere, which exhibits varied ways of doing gender. The main aim was to examine the discourses of the Forum dei Brutti and incelosphere by exploring the threads and comments in the community. The purpose of the paper is the analysis of the remarkable quantity of material about the Italian author Giacomo Leopardi in the process of defining forms of male identities and the proliferation of masculinity practices: the observation showed that he is often used as archetype of incel and as a medium to confirm specific discourses of the manosphere. Furthermore, the purpose was to contribute to a multidisciplinary approach to discursive repertories of the manosphere and incelosphere, in order to understand the complexity of the still not explored Italian phenomenon.

Keywords: manosphere, incel, doing gender, literature, forum.