Beyond the manosphere: rethinking online misogyny within digital capitalism

This article proposes an analytical and ethical reorientation for research on online misogyny, grounded in a socialist ethics that refuses to separate moral inquiry from the material conditions under which research takes place. The dominant focus on direct engagement with manosphere communities has produced indispensable empirical knowledge but has left underanalyzed the structures that generate both the phenomenon and the conditions of its study. A research ethics adequate to online misogyny cannot be reduced to protocols for managing the researcher-participant encounter, since that encounter is already shaped by platform architectures that profit from hostility and by institutional arrangements that distribute its costs unevenly. The article situates online misogyny within the political economy of platforms, the labor regimes that sustain them, and the colonial extractions on which digital capitalism rests. It argues that the manosphere is not the source of online misogyny but one of its effects, and that perpetrator-focused research travels readily into security frames that reproduce the separation of the economic from the political that feminist political economy has long contested. Researching online misogyny ethically therefore means studying it as a structural phenomenon of digital capitalism, and from positions that have something to teach us about how it works.