Incels (involuntary celibates) are an online community united by a shared inability to form intimate relationships. This study is the first to focus solely on incels’ self-referential uses of ‘subhuman’. Compiling the first dedicated corpus of ‘subhuman’ incel posts, the Subhuman Corpus, we use move analysis to explore how forum users employ derogatory self-referential uses of ‘subhuman’ to perform incel identities. Two moves are typical of the corpus: Referencing Women and Describing Appearance/Genetics , reflecting the community’s fixation on romantic rejection by women and its belief in genetic determinism. Among the atypical moves, expressions of users’ troubled psychological states emerge as grounds for further study. We conclude that the ‘subhuman’ identity is upheld through labelling, the hierarchical categorization of social groups, and an emphasis on incel victimhood. Moreover, in applying ‘subhuman’ to both the in-group (incels) and an out-group (women), incels treat physical, social and moral attributes as criteria of ‘subhumanity’. Finally, we evaluate the efficacy and suitability of an automated move-coding tool in novel application of move analysis to an incel forum. Automation presented practical and conceptual challenges, notably, a partial shift in focus from linguistic function to lexical form: some moves lend themselves readily to cue-based identification, while others require human analysis.
This article examines the discursive construction of maranza through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of 36 crime-news headlines and their accompanying visual material, published by 27 Italian news outlets between 2025 and 2026. Thirty-four available static images were included in a descriptive inventory, while 10 images were subjected to close multimodal analysis. The findings show how the label operates as an already intelligible classificatory noun through which heterogeneous episodes are organised around youth deviance and public security. Verbal collectivisation, the recurrent visual de-individualisation of alleged aggressors and the salience of law-enforcement actors contribute to this construction. Explicit reference to ethnic background occurs in only one headline, while several images representing alleged aggressors activate racialised meanings through bodily, sartorial and spatial markers. This asymmetry suggests a multimodal division of discursive labour, although the pattern is not uniform across the corpus. The headline–image configurations also provide restricted social contextualisation, partly reflecting the condensed and event-oriented conventions of crime reporting. By integrating MCDA with the moral panic framework, the study shows how verbal and visual resources can reconfigure a historically established label as a recognisable contemporary folk devil across geographically dispersed news contexts.
