Understanding discursive constructions of violence in online incel communities

Understanding how involuntarily celibates (“incels”) discuss violence online is essential for preventing violence. Guided by relational dialectics theory (RDT), we analyze online incel communities to illuminate how discourses animate meanings about violence. We identify three discourses, six dialogically contractive discursive practices, one form of diachronic separation, and three forms of synchronic interplay. We advance RDT by: (a) theorizing meta-discourses as recursive organizing logics across distal and proximal links, (b) conceptualizing discourses as agentic forces operating across extended utterance chains, (c) examining how triadic interplay contributes to resistance and the premature meaning finalization, (d) reconceptualizing the carnivalesque as a site of durable discursive closure, and (e) introducing dialogic “elasticity” to account for variation in the susceptibility of semantic objects to transformation.