“I will make a man out of you”. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of male and female identities in Manosphere podcasts

This research investigated the online phenomenon of the Manosphere through a CADS lens. The analysis was carried out on an ad-hoc corpus comprising a total of 335 transcripts of YouTube videos published from January 20th to February 20th 2025. At present, academic literature lacks a comprehensive description of the language used in this environment. This work aims to fill this academic gap and to provide an exhaustive analysis of the language of the Manosphere, to outline the masculine and feminine identities constructed through discourse and simplify the detection of Manosphere-adjacent language by compiling a specialised glossary. The first section briefly illustrates the main sub-communities of the Manosphere. Secondly, the methodology adopted for this thesis is described, starting from an account of the usefulness of CADS for gender studies. The primary CADS notions used for the analysis, the criteria followed for the creation of the Alpha Corpus, and the analytic techniques chosen are also discussed. The third chapter presents the interpretation of the data, drawing a parallel with Ben Hoerman’s Aesthetics of Fascism (2025). The fourth section compares the density of misogynistic discourse of the Alpha Corpus with the Open American National Corpus, and compiles a specialised glossary of the words of the Manosphere. In the end, the quantitative analysis revealed that gender talk appears to be slightly skewed towards women, and the qualitative side unveils a manhood with an extreme dependency on the submission of women in the form of heavily misogynistic language, and with an affinity with the cornerstones of fascism. Finally, the terminology used by Manosphere YouTubers does not overlap perfectly with that of other subcommunities, thus suggesting the existence of a standalone subcommunity, underlining the academic necessity to explore it further and the importance of engaging critically with language, to be able to understand its fashioning potential.