Ghostbusters is For Boys: Understanding Geek Masculinity’s Role in the Alt-right

In 2014, Paul Feig announced he was rebooting Ghostbusters, recasting the team as four women. The news was met with an outpouring of hate directed at the studio, media, and the stars. This had real consequences to the movie’s success: an extreme gender bias in reviews prior to the release date. We examine pivotal moments in this two-year incident through a data set collected from YouTube videos and comments, blog posts, reviews, forums, and articles, with attention to the anger directed at Leslie Jones as a demonstration of the intersection of racist and sexist harassment. Ghostbusters represents a pivotal case for understanding white male entitlement as embodied in online trolling, and recalls the type of gendered harassment in geek cultural clashes.