During recent years a subculture of people who live in “involuntarily celibacy”, so called incels, has received attention in the mainstream media. The definition of an incel has since the 1990s changed from meaning any person who is alone, to being an online-community of hateful, angry and lonely men. The popularity of the term “incel” in the current media debate can be explained by a number of mass murders and violent crimes that have been committed by men who are a part of that community. As of today, no incel-related crimes have occurred in Sweden, however the term is still heavily discussed in the media. The conversation peaked in 2021, when the Swedish psychiatrist and author Stefan Krakowski released a book based on in-depth interviews with Swedish incels. During the same time period, TV4 made a documentary on the subject of incels that contained conversations with three men who fall into the incel spectrum. The purpose of this study is therefore to do a thematic analysis on how incels were portrayed in Swedish news media during 2021, and analyze the result with help of two theories; news values- and framing theory. From this specific time period, 15 articles were selected for analysis. The results showed that there are some themes that dominate the media, for instance the perception of incels as violent or incels as sad and lonely. This study can be scientifically relevant to show a nuanced picture of how incels are portrayed and what frames that can lead to in society. It can bring new perspectives to the discussion about incels and by that further develop the research field of journalism as well as alternative subcultures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-501824 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Forsbom, Julianna, Nilsson, Saga |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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