themselves and are accepted as one of the ‘people’ who are battling against that elite. Empathetic bonding: Many of these threads focused on posited social insufficiency and life failures of all 4chan users, be they anon or femanon. Ordinarily, describing yourself as pathetic or a failure would lower your social position, but as failing within wider, mainstream, society is the normal construct of a 4chan user, it actually operates here to gather subcultural capital and formsocial bonds. Other users create bonds despite their gender – using 4chan’s offence discourse to turn gendered insults back on the poster who used them, and gains respect for doing so and showing knowledge of the way the site works. GETTING BY THROUGH FITTING IN Certainly, 4chan is home to a disturbing amount of hate speech, including extreme expressions of racism and misogyny, some of which may even amount to incitement to violence. It can be a dangerous place, one not to be visited lightly – albeit its influence is felt beyond the bounds of its own pages and reaches the cultural zeitgeist. But despite its reputation as a femalehostile space, posters assuming a female identity have used a variety of strategies to claim space for themselves and their concerns. Why would women choose to use 4chan? Through my research I have seen that 4chan offers enough to female users to make the experience of hostility worth it, which is why they employ these strategies to fit in there. Women can hold views that might be seen as reprehensible in the mainstream – they can be anti-feminist, racist – and here they are able to discuss issues that are important to them, to carve out their own spaces, and to bond with fellow femanon and anon users. It is patronising and naïve to say these users just hate themselves – they have all kinds of reasons to be there, as uncomfortable as it might be to consider them. Dr Judith Fathallah is an Outreach and Research Associate in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology. The paper ‘Getting by’ on 4chan: Feminine self-presentation and capital-claiming in antifeminist webspace, by Dr Judith Fathallah, is published in the journal First Monday. j.fathallah@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 23
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