Men Going Their Own Way: A New Affective Ethnography

Abstract

This thesis presents an affective ethnography of a growing internet community within the digital “manosphere” (a collective of online men’s movements). Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) is a community of men that reject marriage and espouse a lifestyle of Going One’s Own Way. A corpus of over 300 YouTube videos was analysed to examine MGTOW as a community of practice: a group who shares a common repertoire of ideas and strategies. MGTOW is crucial to investigate for the ways through which online communities operate even though their membership is largely anonymous. One of the main objectives is to describe both the discursive and embodied practices that perpetuate the community. This thesis offers a theoretical contribution with an analytic model for affective ethnography. An array of contemporary literature is consulted with the aim of building the conceptual tools necessary for analysing affect and embodiment in YouTube videos. Through this model the complex affective-discursive apprenticeships that MGTOW produce are examined. As a community, MGTOW offer metaphors and routine patterns of feeling that intersect with the epistemic claims found in their content.