Congratulations to PhD candidate Kayla Preston on a new publication in the Canadian Review of Sociology. In the article, “A soldier and a victim: Masculinity, violence, and incels celebration of December 6th”, Preston and co-authors examine how involuntarily celibate men (“incels”) celebrate Marc Lépine, who murdered 14 women at L’École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989. Drawing data from an online incel forum, the authors find that these men invoke Lépine to “situate themselves in relation to hegemonic masculinity and to justify violence against women”. Incels argue that feminists are engaged in a gender war against men, define themselves as victims of feminists, and celebrate Lépine’s act as methodical and efficient. These findings have implications for the regulation of online communities and speak to academic theories of masculinity, which the authors discuss in the full article (open source).
Kayla Preston is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto, currently working on her dissertation “An Analysis of Youth Activists in Canada and the United States”. Her areas of research interest include extremism, (de)radicalization, gender, political sociology, and race.