{"pk":1623,"title":"Hailing, Voicing, and Masturbation Abstention: NoFap’s Role in Socializing Young Men into the Right-Wing Politics of Ressentiment","subtitle":null,"abstract":"

Digital ethnographic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the far right is an invaluable resource for explaining the gradual processes of socialization through which individuals are recruited into right-wing extremism. This article examines online masturbation abstention programs in three linguistic contexts (English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) as potential sites that mobilize gender and sexual norms to draw subjects into anti-feminist and racist sociopolitical visions. NoFap (known as nōfappu or onakin in Japan) is a fairly popular trend that is understood to help men regain the focus, vitality, and energy they have lost to pornography addiction. By analyzing the ways figures of personhood are constructed through the enregisterment of disparate semiotic materials in these very different contexts, we argue that the right-wing abstemious masculine subject is produced through tensions between neoliberal generalized competition and the imagined authority of a “tradition” associated with restrictive gender and sexual norms.

","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"masturbation"},{"word":"onakin"},{"word":"masculinism"},{"word":"nofap"},{"word":"register"}],"section":"Research Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h13v5dt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Scott","middle_name":"","last_name":"Burnett","name_suffix":"","institution":"Pennsylvania State University","department":"African Studies & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies"},{"first_name":"Rodrigo","middle_name":"","last_name":"Borba","name_suffix":"","institution":"Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro","department":"Departamente De Letras Anglo-Germânicas"},{"first_name":"Mie","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hiramoto","name_suffix":"","institution":"National University of Singapore","department":"DEPARTMENT of ENGLISH, LINGUISTICS & THEATRE STUDIES"}],"date_submitted":"2023-08-14T15:51:56.310000-05:00","date_accepted":"2025-01-18T16:25:49.619000-06:00","date_published":"2025-01-18T16:30:53.337000-06:00","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jrws/article/1623/galley/31341/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jrws/article/1623/galley/31341/download/"}]}