Uncertain Experts: Legitimation, Discourse, and Masculinity among “Preppers”

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Masculinities in Science and Technology

Abstract

Preppers are a growing lifestyle movement that believe a societal collapse is likely and are willing to go to great lengths to prepare. Prepper “experts” on YouTube and in small preparedness groups across the country must demonstrate a specialization in surviving a coming social collapse. But how is knowledge of such a speculative and anti-social topic made legitimate? Expertise is typically the purview of credentialed authorities, therefore, preppers and others like them who poses expertise in areas of stigmatized knowledge (Barkun, 2013), represent a category of “illegitimate” expert. Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork with doomsday preppers on YouTube and in Southern California, I explore how they evaluate and articulate claims to expert knowledge on topics like possible earthquakes, EMPs, or economic crashes which are, by their nature, future-facing, speculative, and imaginary. How, in the face of these challenges to the legitimacy of their knowledge, do expert preppers establish their authority? I argue that they do so by attaching their claims to two broad sets of cultural scripts. I find some preppers appeal to a hyper-rational script I have termed Analytical Rationality which draws legitimacy from middle-class hegemonic masculinity and focuses on planning, calculation, and proper equipment. Another group appeals to a set of scripts I have termed Brutal Realism, which draw support from hyper- and working-class masculinity and from racialized narratives around animalistic “human nature,” which focus on defending and ‘making-due’ with what one has.

Authors

• Jonathan Nathaniel Redman, California State Polytechnic Univ-Pomona

• Saverio Roscigno, University of California-Irvine