From Grievances to Threats: Family Change, Fathers’ Grievances, and Threat-Making in Men’s Rights Movement

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Explaining Movement Participation: Threats, Grievances and Emotions

Abstract

While grievances arise from concrete social changes, activists deploy cultural mechanisms to amplify these grievances into perceived threats, thereby facilitating mobilization. To examine what I name “threat-making,” I conduct a case study of the men’s rights movement in the U.S. I first demonstrate that fathers’ perceived grievances have increased since the “deinstitutionalization” of the American family in the 1970s (Cherlin, 2004), which provided a firm background for the incipient men’s rights movement. Then, using data from Reddit, I conduct an empirical analysis of how men’s rights (MR) activists reconstruct fathers’ grievances into threats to men and masculinity. Hidden Markov Modeling found four distinct states of users’ posting sequences: Fatherhood Heavy, Fatherhood Commenter, Fatherhood-MR Broker, and MR users. Topic modeling analysis found 60 topics, among which the following topics deal with fathers’ grievances: Circumcision; Divorce and Child Support; Domestic Violence; Custody Battles; Male Birth Control; and Paternity Leave. Fatherhood-MR Brokers and MR users amplified the found grievances to develop threat frames that propagate women’s alleged efforts to extort men. My study contributes to the literature on grievances, threats, and the formation of antifeminist collective identities.

Author

• Youngjin YJ Chae, Rutgers University-New Brunswick