A ‘lifetime of indentured servitude:’ rights, labor, and gender anxieties in a dead men’s rights newsgroup

Abstract

Abstract This article challenges a narrow, teleological approach to ‘platform death’ by looking at discursive continuity of a ‘dead’ men’s rights Usenet newsgroup. Using a data set of 1250 posts spanning 1994 − 2002, I track three thematic trends in the data: the ‘special treatment’ women and minorities receive that deny men their rights, the inverse relationship between men’s rights and responsibilities, and men’s anxieties around gendered roles in the family and at work. However, the ‘prelife’ and ‘afterlife’ of these themes in the men’s rights movement indicates the ways in which discourses persist across time and media formats despite ‘platform death.’ This has implications for how we understand and contextualize the contemporary men’s rights movement and highlights the limitations of platform-focused responses to online misogyny and extremism.