“I’m not going back to the Plantation”: Metaphorical Language Use in an Antifeminist Community

Abstract

This paper explores the use and function of the sub-cultural keyword (Wierzbicka, 1996) “plantation” in the antifeminist subreddit r/MGTOW. From a Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1992) starting point, this paper combines discourse analysis and corpus-linguistics methods informed with a textual approach drawn from cultural studies to demonstrate that members of r/MGTOW engage with plantation metaphorically to i) discursively construct a narrative of perceived masculine oppression and ii) underline in- and out-group divisions. Furthermore, collocational analysis of verb use shows that members consider the plantation a physical location that one can enter or exit from; however, rather than celebrating those “leaving”, members primarily select verbs that indicate the possibility of returning to the plantation, thereby emphasizing threats to individual members to ensure cohesion. This paper contributes to the developing scholarly investigations of manosphere communities by exploring a little-studied group from a previously unexplored, metaphorical-language use perspective.