Beyond Antifeminist Discourses: Analyzing How Material and Social Factors Shape Online Resistance to Feminist Politics

Abstract:Online platforms present new challenges to feminist politics since they provide antifeminist groups with additional possibilities to come together and advocate their claims towards wider publics. This article argues that new analytical perspectives are needed to understand how antifeminist discourses are successfully produced and promulgated online. In particular, it suggests that in addition to analyzing the content of antifeminist discourses we need to pay attention to how the design and governance of online platforms, as well as the resources among antifeminist activists, shape online resistance to feminist politics. Two analytical dimensions are introduced that help to specify how the design and governance of online platforms, as well as the social composition of antifeminist groups, enable these to come together online and influence mainstream publics. To demonstrate the usefulness of this analytical approach, a study of an influential antifeminist blogosphere in the Swedish context is used as an illustrative case.


Introduction
To understand why, how, and when feminist activism can succeed in influencing the political agenda and enacting change, we also need to understand its adversaries. While much previous research on feminist politics has, for good reasons, focused on "successful" cases of gender equality policy adoption, several gender and politics scholars have recently pointed to the importance of also explicitly analyzing the opposition against gender equality (e.g., Bergqvist, Bjarnegård, and Zetterberg 2013;Roggeband 2018;Verloo 2018). The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing focus on opposition in research within the field of gender and politics by suggesting a novel framework for analyzing a rapidly growing form of opposition to feminist politics, namely online antifeminist activism.
During the 2000s, we have witnessed how resistance to feminist politics has thrived in online public venues. These venues offer a new type of public space where traditional gatekeeping functions are lacking, and where it is possible to interact and share political ideas anonymously and with those who are geographically far away. In particular, there has been a rapid growth of a broad array of different, more or less interconnected interest groups advocating antifeminism and men's rights that, collectively, are usually referred to as the "manosphere" (Ging 2019). While different parts of the manosphere have started to receive attention from the research community, the few existing studies of contemporary online antifeminism tend to focus their analyses primarily on the content of antifeminist discourses (e.g., Blais and Dupuis-Déri 2012;Farrell et al. 2019;Ging 2019;Gotell and Dutton 2016;Jones, Trott and Wright 2020;Marwick and Caplan 2018;Schmitz and Kazyak 2016;Van Valkenburgh 2018). This research has been crucial in providing us with a detailed understanding of how contemporary antifeminist discourses are structured. However, given the great proliferation of antifeminist activism online, we need to pay more analytical attention to the role of the design and governance of online platforms in enabling these discourses to be produced and spread to larger audiences. In addition, we need to take a closer look at who the antifeminist activists are and how their resources enable them to use online platforms to come together and influence mainstream publics. Therefore, this article contributes with additional analytical tools that allow for a systematic analysis of how the governance and design of online platforms, as well as the resources available to antifeminist activists, enable online resistance to feminist politics. In other words, I suggest that a more institutional and actororiented perspective should be applied in research on contemporary antifeminist activism as a complement to the discourse analytical perspective that has dominated this research so far. Such a research focus will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of how contemporary antifeminist discourses can be spread to wider audiences and travel into the mainstream.
An important theoretical starting point for this approach is that the design and governance of online platforms shape the political discourse expressed through them by allowing for certain "possibilities for action" (Evans et al. 2017, 36). In other words, the affordances of online platforms mediate online political activism by enabling certain actions while constraining others (e.g., Bossetta 2018;Boyd 2010; see also Forestal 2021). In relation to the production and dissemination of antifeminist discourses online, we therefore need to pay closer attention to how the design and governance of specific online platforms are conducive to antifeminist activism. In this article, it is suggested that such an analysis can be undertaken by focusing on two different, but interrelated, analytical dimensions. First, we need to examine which functional aspects of affordances are available to antifeminist activism on specific online platforms. This means that we need to analyze which technological functions as well as platform guidelines and rules enable antifeminist constituencies to come together and promulgate antifeminist discourses to wider publics. Second, since whether and how these functional aspects are perceived to allow for online political activism will depend on the resources and capacities among their users, we also need to investigate which relational aspects of affordances of online platforms are available to antifeminist activists. This means that we need to pay closer attention to how the social composition of contemporary antifeminist movements and looser political communities enable their use of online platforms. Taken together, these analytical dimensions allow for a dynamic analysis of how the functional and relational aspects of affordances of (specific) online platforms shape the production and dissemination of antifeminist discourses.
To demonstrate the usefulness of this analytical approach, a study of an influential antifeminist blogosphere that began to emerge in Sweden in the mid-2000s will be used as an illustrative case. Blogs 1 were early pinpointed for changing the structure of how political communication works by providing a new forum for nonmedia elites to influence public debates (e.g., Woodly 2008), and it was also one of the first digital platforms used to produce and disseminate antifeminist discourses (Marwick and Caplan 2018). While online discussion forums such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, as well as mainstream and alternative social media platforms, have been increasingly employed for antifeminist activism, blogs and other types of websites still play a central part in online resistance to feminist politics (e.g., Ging 2019; Marwick and Caplan 2018;Nagle 2015). The mobilization of antifeminism on Swedish political blogs moreover presents a particularly interesting case in relation to online resistance to feminist politics since it is situated within a context that has been characterized by a strong consensus around gender equality policies in the dominant public spheres (Dahlerup 2011). What is more, there has been no antifeminist mobilization up until the 2000s similar to what has been seen in other contexts, such as the United States (SOU 2014:6 2014). Nevertheless, a growing antifeminist blogosphere started to form in the mid-2000s, and its claims also received considerable attention in the more mainstream public spheres. Through a social network analysis (SNA) of hyperlinks in blog rolls, as well as qualitative content analyses of blog posts and comments, this study explores how the functional and relational aspects of affordances of blogs enabled the blogosphere to emerge and become an influential platform for spreading antifeminist claims in the Swedish context. By introducing a novel analytical approach to the study of online resistance to feminist politics, and illustrating this with a case study of successful online antifeminist activism in an unfavorable setting, this article intends to make an analytical contribution to the study of opposition to gender equality policy and feminist politics.

Previous Research on Antifeminism Activism
In contrast to contemporary studies of online antifeminist activism, early research on antifeminist mobilizations (that followed the so-called "second wave" of feminism in the 1970s and early 1980s) often focused on the social composition of groups that formed and supported antifeminist movements to explain how this resistance to feminist politics could become so influential. In particular, the anti-abortion and anti-Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) mobilizations in the U.S. context have been investigated in order to understand the underlying rationales behind these mobilizations as well as their social basis (e.g., Burris 1983;Chafetz and Dworkin 1987;Himmelstein 1986;Marshall 1991). This research demonstrates that the main activists in antifeminist movements were upper-and middle-class housewives, who mobilized primarily through neighborhood and religious networks (Chafetz and Dworkin 1987;Himmelstein 1986;Marshall 1991). The main supporters of the antifeminist movements were white, middle-aged men from business or professional backgrounds (Burris 1983). In addition, antifeminist movements have historically primarily been economically supported by vested interest groups, whose members perceived their interests, economic and otherwise, to be threatened by the demands of feminist women's movements (Chafetz and Dworkin 1987).
Scholars working on contemporary antifeminist activism have stressed that there has been an increased engagement in opposition to gender equality policy in the European as well as the U.S. context since the mid-2000s (Kimmel 2013;Kováts and Põim 2015;Kuhar and Paternotte 2017;Verloo 2018). The current rise in opposition to feminist politics (or anti-"gender ideology") in Central and Eastern Europe in particular has been linked to the severe social consequences of the current economic system, which progressive politics has been unable to appropriately respond to (e.g., Kováts and Põim 2015). Taken together, this research has shown that contemporary resistance to feminist politics involves a wide range of different groups and individual actors with various levels of resources and types of organizational structures. This includes powerful and well-established actors such as conservative institutes and farright and religious organizations, existing men's rights and father's rights groups, as well as more newly established civil initiatives, campaigns, and political parties.
Since a large part of contemporary antifeminist activism has moved online, it has been argued that we need to pay more attention to how online platforms enable the promulgation and radicalization of antifeminist discourses (Ging 2019). While research on online antifeminist political communities and movements has grown in recent years, there is, however, still little focus on the social composition of such antifeminist groups or how social and material factors interact in shaping their emergence. Instead, the main focus of more recent research on online antifeminism has been on analyzing the content of Beyond Antifeminist Discourses antifeminist discourses produced within online communities (e.g., Farrell et al. 2019;Ging 2019;Gotell and Dutton 2016;Jones, Trott and Wright 2020;Marwick and Caplan 2018;Nagle 2015;Schmitz and Kazyak 2016;Van Valkenburgh 2018). This research has increased our knowledge of key aspects of contemporary antifeminist activism, including how antifeminist discourses produced and disseminated online are used to support the superiority of men (e.g., Schmitz and Kazyak 2016), how certain terms (such as misandry) are used to create a sense of community across different subgroups in the manosphere (e.g., Marwick and Caplan 2018), and how specific types of masculinities are constructed and performed as hegemonic (e.g., Jones, Trott and Wright 2020). While these studies have sometimes highlighted how online platforms have implied a great advantage for men's rights activists and other groups to promote antifeminist claims, they have not systematically studied how antifeminist groups have used online platforms to come together and spread antifeminist discourses, or how these activities have been facilitated by the social composition of such groups. There are nevertheless some notable exceptions, such as Massanari (2017), who demonstrates how Reddit's governance and design enable certain kinds of "toxic technocultures" and thereby provide fertile ground for antifeminist activism (see also Ging 2019 and Salter 2018 for discussions on how platform design may enhance antifeminist and misogynist organizing). Massanari's study thus makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how platform affordances allow for certain types of discourses to form within specific online forums, which the argument in this article builds on.
In sum, prior research highlights that online platforms seem to enable antifeminist and misogynistic activism in several ways. However, we are still lacking analytical tools that allow for a systematic analysis of how the design and governance of online platforms can be used to produce and spread antifeminist discourses to wider audiences, and how these processes are related to the social composition of contemporary antifeminist movements mobilizing online. As previous research has shown, antifeminist movements mainly mobilize in reaction to feminist achievements for the preservation and/or restoration of societal norms and structures that give additional privileges to men as a social group, sometimes with violent means, including harassment and intimidation. Including social and material factors in the analysis, such as the social position of the activists and the technological functions of the platforms, is crucial, not least since contemporary antifeminist men's rights movements often express a strong perceived marginalization in the discourses they produce: men are described as victims of feminism and feminized societieshence the contemporary antifeminist current often referred to as masculinism (Blais and Dupuis-Déri 2012). However, this perceived marginalization often stands in stark contrast to the actual privileged position these groups have in relation to the groups they oppose, such as feminist movements or anti-racist movements. This does not mean that all individuals participating in such movements always hold a privileged position vis-à-vis all individuals in feminist movements. However, they (often male, white, cis-gendered, and heterosexual) enjoy a structural privilege as a social group in relation to groups in movements they oppose (such as women or people of color) whose members have been structurally marginalized historically (Blais and Dupuis-Déri 2012;Kimmel 2013). What is more, their relatively privileged position may provide antifeminist activists with more resources that are crucial when mobilizing politically, not least in online settings. Hence, while existing research often focuses on how different masculinities are produced and negotiated through contemporary antifeminist discourses, we need additional tools that enable an analysis of how the affordances of online platforms enable certain actors to produce and disseminate such discourses to wider audiences and to harass and attack their (alleged) opponents.

Understanding Online Resistance to Feminist Politics: Two Analytical Dimensions
In this section, I will suggest novel analytical tools that allow for a systematic examination of how antifeminist discourses are produced and spread through online platforms, hence increasing our understanding of contemporary resistance to feminist politics. This analytical perspective is grounded in affordance theory (Gibson 1977). The concept of affordances is useful since it points to how both the material and the social matters for how physical properties, or design, of objects or settings (for example, different digital media platforms) are perceived and used (Nagy and Neff 2015). Hence, it provides an opportunity to analyze the dynamic link between the materiality of digital media platforms and the social context within which they are understood and used (Davis and Chouinard 2016;Lievrouw 2014). These two interrelated aspects of affordances-the material and the social-thus offer a way to analytically distinguish between the physical properties and policies of online platforms and the social context within which these properties are perceived and understood. Hence, the functional aspects of affordances will here refer to the technical design and governance of online platforms while the relational aspects will refer to whether and how potential users perceive these functional aspects. When applying these analytical dimensions to online antifeminist activism, this means that we first need to analyze which functional aspects of affordances are available to antifeminist activism on specific online platforms by looking at how these are governed and designed. However, whether and how potential users perceive these functional aspects to allow for online political activism will depend on the resources and capacities among them. Therefore, we also need to analyze how the social composition of antifeminist movements relates to their use of specific online platforms, hence which relational aspects of affordances are available to antifeminist activists. In the Beyond Antifeminist Discourses following, these two aspects of affordances will be explained in more detail and related to relevant online platforms for antifeminist mobilization, as well as to antifeminist constituencies.
The First Dimension: Which Functional Aspects of Affordances Are Available to Antifeminist Activism on Specific Online Platforms?
The first analytical dimension directs our focus towards how the design and governance of online platforms can be used for the purpose of producing and disseminating antifeminist discourses. In other words, it focuses on which functional aspects of affordances are available to antifeminist activism on specific online platforms. This includes the platforms' inbuilt technical features, such as buttons and scroll bars, and regulatory features, such as a rule that a user has to register before entering the site, which are visible to users through their external interfaces (Van Dijk 2013, 31). It also includes the policies that regulate what type of content and activities are allowed, which often are expressed in their community guidelines or terms of service agreements (Van Dijk 2013, 38). Online platforms are also managed through the algorithms that curate what is visible and the protocols that steer the users in specific ways, as well as through the daily work of moderating harmful or illegal content (Bucher 2012;Gillespie 2018;Van Dijk 2013). This section will focus on the functional aspects of a specific set of affordances that have been highlighted as beneficial to online antifeminist activism, i.e., visibility, association, metavoicing, and anonymity (e.g., Ging 2019; Holm 2019; Massanari 2017). However, in contrast to previous studies I will systematically describe how each of these affordances can allow for the production and dissemination of antifeminist discourses, and how they can be studied by identifying how the technical and regulatory features of different online platforms underpin them. While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the technical and regulatory features of all kinds of platforms, I will focus on the most relevant affordances on platforms that have been highlighted as central to the promulgation of antifeminist discourses online, hence blogs, online discussion forums, and social media platforms.
First, the affordance of visibility is offered by online platforms through the possibility to self-publish posts, comments, status updates, etc., that are instantly available to the general public or all others who have access to one's profile (Treem and Leonardi 2013). This immediate access to public venues for political opinion building can be compared with the previous situation, where one had to go through traditional gatekeepers, such as opinion editors in traditional media, to be able to reach out with similar opinion pieces to a large audience. The affordance of visibility therefore presents a great possibility to (antifeminist) opinion builders with the right kinds of resources, who perceive themselves as marginalized from mainstream media platforms, to influence the dominant public spheres, such as mainstream media (Kübler 2017;Woodly 2008). Different platforms afford different kinds of visibility through how the network structure is designed, as well as the amount and type of self-published content that is allowed. For example, in contrast to Facebook, the network structure of which builds on already existing relationships ("friends"), Twitter offers more of a public "town hall" setting since both profiles and tweets are public by default and thereby visible to anyone (Van Dijk 2013). Twitter's more open networking features have been argued to facilitate antifeminist and misogynistic activities since it enables mass targeting and abuse of individual users (e.g., Salter 2018; Lawson 2018). On the other hand, Twitter offers more restricted self-publication with a limit on the number of characters that can be inserted. Other online platforms, such as blogs, offer more or completely unrestricted self-publication. This allows for other type of activities such as the formulation of theories that underpin antifeminist ideas and the publication of antifeminist manifestos (Holm 2019). Moreover, it has been argued that the type of content that is allowed to be visible on specific online platforms depending on their content policies and (lack of) content moderation can have important implications for the spread and dissemination of antifeminist discourses and misogynistic harassment (Massanari 2017). Last, a central technical feature of online platforms regarding the affordance of visibility are the algorithms that structures what is visible (to specific users), for example in Facebook's news feed, Twitters "Top Tweets," or at Reddit's /r/all/ (Bucher 2012). Massanari (2017) has, for example, shown how the algorithm that curates Reddit's /r/all/, which is the pages that you view first as a nonlogged-in user, has worked to an advantage for antifeminist and misogynistic discourses within the forum. We hence need to further analyze how such policies and features differ between platforms, whether it concerns different types of blog-platforms, online forums, or social media platforms, and how this affects the discursive room of maneuver for antifeminist groups.
Second, the enhanced possibility for association through online platforms has been pointed out as a crucial affordance in relation to the formation of online communities in general (e.g., Boyd 2010; Treem and Leonardi 2013) as well as for antifeminist groups in particular, which have historically been described as quite geographically dispersed (Himmelstein 1986). Through many of the inbuilt technical features that enable association, such as the insertion of links to blogs and websites of like-minded individuals and organizations, hyperlinks in posts and comments, and metadata tags such as the hashtag (#), a rapid spread and transnational homogenization of contemporary antifeminist rhetoric has been enabled (Ging 2019; see also Daniels 2009 for a similar argument concerning how websites are used for linking together white supremacy groups globally). In relation to the affordance of association, we thus need to systematically examine how such functions enable antifeminist groups to come together around antifeminist discourses on specific online platforms. To further exemplify, blogs present particular possibilities of interacting and connecting over widespread geographical areas with previously unknown others. The possibility of creating a profile including a blog roll with links to other blogs on the first page, as well as hyperlinking to other blogs in the blog posts, provides an in-text reference system that makes it possible to form a community of like-minded others (Kübler 2017). Moreover, the incorporation of comments after blog posts makes it possible both to develop argumentation and writing and to enhance a dialogue between the bloggers and their readers, as well as to enhance the network itself through the daily communication in the comment sections.
Third, through a wide range of different technical enablers such as retweeting, "liking," "up-voting," or commenting on posts made by others, online platforms provide possibilities to amplify the voices of others, i.e., the affordance of metavoicing (Majchrzak et al. 2013). Recognition is a crucial activity to the emergence of political movements since it confirms the importance of the voices of others internally as well externally (Boyd, Golder, and Lotan 2010), which also have been shown to be true for antifeminist groups. For example, the up-voting (or down-voting) of content has been shown to be one of the critical factors of Reddit's karma system that underpin antifeminist activities (Massanari 2017). In addition, inbuilt technical functions that enable metavoicing, such as mentions (@) on Twitter, can be used as part of antifeminist efforts to silence feminist voices by flooding the platform with posts that target individual feminists with abuse and harassment (Lawson 2018). Regarding blogs, hyperlinking to other blogs, either in blog rolls or in blog posts, or reciprocal linking, is a way to recognize the participation of others in the debate and to show that this is considered meaningful. Conversely, refraining from linking can be understood as a sign of nonrecognition, or even "an act of silencing through inaction" (Rogers and Marres 2000, 157). Hence, we need to analyze how technical functions that allow for metavoicing on different types of online platforms are used in the emergence of antifeminist movements as well as to silence opposing voices.
Last, the possibility of varying degrees of anonymity online, for example by using avatars or other types of pseudonyms, presents a new way to voice political opinions in public without having to reveal one's actual identity and thus be identified with these opinions personally. In particular, this can be of value to antifeminists who operate in contexts where antifeminist opinions are perceived as stigmatized or otherwise excluded or marginalized in the dominant public spheres (such as the Swedish one). Moreover, through the use of pseudonyms, a new identity can be created that others in the network can relate to without having to reveal their factual identity. The affordance of anonymity can thereby facilitate the dissemination of antifeminist discourses, both between like-minded individuals and to wider audiences. The possibility of a higher degree of anonymity has also been demonstrated to increase the level of impolite posts in online political discussions (Halpern and Gibbs 2013) as well as extremist and hate speech (Citron and Norton 2011). It is moreover important to consider how the possibility of anonymity varies between different platforms. It is, for example, offered by (the free version of) the blog platform WordPress.com, which has been widely used within the Swedish antifeminist blogosphere. We thus need to analyze how the varying degree of anonymity and/or pseudonymity afforded by different platforms can facilitate the production and dissemination of antifeminist discourses, and whether it provides means for attacking opponents in more hostile ways.
Taken together, the functional aspects of affordances helps to formulate some of the analytical starting points in the analysis of how the material factors of online platforms shape online resistance to feminist politics. It points to the fact that we need to analyze how the governance and design of online platforms enable certain kinds of activism, and how such possibilities may vary among different online platforms. We should also examine how the different affordances provided by specific online platforms can be used in combination to start and then escalate antifeminist activities and attacks. An illustrative example of this is how the antifeminist and misogynist abuse campaign #gamergate initially started through a blog post, then continued to be staged on the discussions forums of 4chan and 8chan, to eventually be played out mainly on the much more public platform of Twitter, where the hashtag #gamergate was inserted in tweets by thousands of users in support of the campaign, and to attack any critics with floods of abuse and threats (Salter 2018).

The Second Dimension: Which Relational Aspects of Affordances Are Available to Antifeminist Activists on Specific Online Platforms?
The previous section pointed to how online platforms through their design and governance allow for certain kinds of political activism. However, to what extent these functional aspects of affordances are perceived as allowing for certain "possibilities for action" (Evans et al. 2017, 36) in addition depends on the resources and capacities among potential activists. The second analytical dimension therefore directs our focus towards the social composition of contemporary antifeminist groups. In other words, it asks what kinds of resources are available to antifeminist activists and how these resources are related to the use of specific online platforms in the production and dissemination of antifeminist discourses. Theoretically, this dimension builds on the relational aspects of affordances, which highlight the importance of considering the perceptions among potential users when analyzing whether and how certain activities are physically enabled by online platforms. Many scholars have pointed to the importance of analyzing social aspects of the use and invention of the physical properties and policies of digital media technologies (e.g., Hartson 2003;Hutchby 2001;Nagy and Neff 2015;Norman 1999). Building on these previous conceptualizations of the social aspects of platform affordances, the relational aspects of affordances are here understood as enabling Beyond Antifeminist Discourses (certain) users to perceive the functional aspects of affordances (as an invitation to political activism).
Feminist political theorists have made important contributions in pointing out how structurally conditioned social positions are directly related to the capacity to effectively engage in public discussions (e.g. , Fraser 1990;Hayward 2004;Young 2000). Hence, the social position of the users, which may depend on their gender, education, professional background, wealth, personal networks, and connections, generates specific capacities in relation to participation in online public discussions. These include the ability to communicate in a certain style in order to generate respect and recognition from others, as well as the perception of oneself as an appropriate and even important participant in public debates. In addition to the capacities that are crucial for participating effectively in public debates in general, it is clear that the affordances of digital media platforms demand specific capacities from potential users. Digital media platforms have since their early days carried clear gendered and raced connotations by being strongly related to a white, middle-class, and heterosexual masculinity. As Salter (2018, 249) puts it: "computers were for boys and men" while "[f]emininity and computing was positioned as antithetical to one another across multiple domains." The white male dominance in the domain of computers and networked technology has furthermore been described as directly related to the emergence and expansion of white supremacist and antifeminist online networks, groups which were very early adopters of internet technologies for political organization and advocacy (Daniels 2009;Salter 2018). Moreover, much research on digital inequalities has demonstrated how the social position of potential users still is directly related to whether and how specific online platforms are used (e.g., Anderson 2017; Dalton 2017; Hargittai and Litt 2011; Schradie 2012).
A useful starting point for analyzing which relational aspects of affordances are available to antifeminist activists on specific online platforms is therefore to first examine which capacities have been demonstrated as related to the use of such platforms for political opinion building and activism. To exemplify, even though blogs were initially seen as a forum for more equal participation in public debates due to their lower thresholds for access, more recent research has shown the opposite to be the case. Schradie (2012) finds that blogging is part of a productive framework that demands more resources than the mere consumption of online content, and that there still is an overrepresentation of those with higher levels of education among those who produce blog content. Moreover, maintaining a political blog also demands a considerable amount of time, and since it is often a voluntary activity, this can pose significant constraints on who can "afford to blog." This trend is also strongly reinforced if we move from simply maintaining a blog to maintaining a widely read political blog. Hindman (2009, 128) shows that political blogging has given a new voice not to the average citizen but rather to societal elites composed of "well educated white male professionals," who in this way have been given a new type of political influence.
The functional aspects of affordances of digital platforms for political blogging thus seem to demand certain capacities from users for them to be able to use blogs for (influential) political activism. To understand which relational aspects of affordances are available to antifeminist activists on specific online platforms, we thus need to know more about the resources that antifeminist activists have access to through their social position(s). This means that we need to examine the characteristics of the antifeminist activists and investigate the social composition of contemporary antifeminist movements mobilizing online. This can naturally be challenging in contexts where many or most activists are anonymous or using pseudonyms, which is often the case with online environments. Also, within the Swedish antifeminist blogosphere, most bloggers were fully anonymous or using pseudonyms. However, various types of self-representations were still available on the blogs, which were useful to identify the social basis for these bloggers' antifeminist activism. For example, such information could be identified in the "about"-pages, where the bloggers provided basic information about themselves and why they had decided to start to blog (about antifeminism). This information could also be found in various blog posts where the bloggers described in more detail their reasons for engaging in the antifeminist cause (and how this was linked to their social position), or in news articles about some of the more public activists. These descriptions and self-representations were then analyzed as well as how these representations were related to the motivations for the activists' antifeminist advocacy. In the next section, the usefulness of applying these two analytical dimensions will be discussed in more detail by using a case study of antifeminist mobilization on Swedish political blogs. 2 Note that this study is presented to illustrate the usefulness of the new analytical dimensions presented above in the author's previous research rather than to demonstrate new empirical findings.

An Illustrative Case: Antifeminist Mobilization on Swedish Political Blogs
The purpose of this section is twofold: first, it will serve to exemplify in more detail how we can examine how the functional and relational aspects of platform affordances are used in the emergence of antifeminist movements and serve to produce and spread antifeminist discourses to wider audiences; and second, it illustrates which kind of additional knowledge such studies can contribute in relation to resistance to feminist politics. Hence, it discusses the added value of this analytical approach for the research field that studies opposition to gender equality and feminist politics.
In relation to antifeminist mobilization on online platforms, the Swedish context provides a particularly interesting setting since such explicit resistance to feminist politics has been very rare historically (SOU 2014(SOU :6 2014. To the contrary, Sweden has had a recent history of a strong consensus around gender-equal policies in the dominant public spheres. Women's party groups, feminist organizations, men's consciousness-raising groups, and male politicians have all cooperated in pushing policies that, for example, have encouraged female labor participation and the strengthening of men in their role as fathers (Bergman and Hobson 2002;Dahlerup 2011). Moreover, most parliamentary parties declared themselves feminist in the 1990s or in the beginning of the 2000s (Dahlerup 2011). Sweden can thus be described as a particularly unfavorable setting for the emergence of antifeminist resistance to feminist politics.
In the mid-2000s, however, there was a backlash against feminism in the various Swedish public spheres. The backlash was partly expressed in several online hate campaigns against alleged feminist Swedish authors, journalists, and researchers. Parallel with this development, a number of antifeminist Swedish bloggers started to form a growing antifeminist community online. Several of the bloggers were also frequently given space in mainstream news media, which enabled them to spread their antifeminist ideas to wider audiences (e.g., Billing et al. 2009;Ström 2008aStröm , 2008b. Their main claim was that feminism in Sweden had gone "too far" and that feminism had become an omnipotent ideology with control over the mainstream media and the state. They further claimed that, due to the omnipotence of feminism, Swedish men had become the main targets of attacks and discrimination in society, and that this was being neglected and silenced in the mainstream media. The claims of the Swedish antifeminists were hence very much in line with the contemporary antifeminist current that mainly focuses on men as victims of feminism and feminized societies and that is often referred to as masculinism. Masculinism has been described as a growing antifeminist current, providing an ideological base for many contemporary antifeminist groups and organizations in Europe and Northern America (Blais and Dupuis-Déri 2012;Kimmel 2013;Marwick and Caplan 2018;Schmitz and Kazyak 2016).
To understand how antifeminist discourses had been successfully produced and spread in the Swedish setting, I uncover how the affordances of blogs have been used by the antifeminist activists, as well as the types of resources these activists possessed. The first step was to identify and classify antifeminist blogs that were part of the online political community that the blogosphere constituted. 3 This was done partly through a media search that helped me to identify some of the more public bloggers, and partly through Google searches where words and concepts typical for the Swedish antifeminist discourse were inserted (some of which had been invented by the bloggers themselves). A "snowball method" was then used whereby additional blogs were identified in the blog-rolls (the lists of links to other blogs, commonly found in the sidebars of the blogs) of the already included blogs. All in all, sixty-two blogs that could be characterized as antifeminist were identified.
Building on this initial identification of antifeminist blogs, the second step was to identify particularly influential actors in the network, since these could provide us with more information about how blogs had been used to build an antifeminist constituency and to spread antifeminist discourses. Influential actors in the network were identified through an SNA (see Hanneman and Riddle 2005). The SNA built mainly on the links to other blogs provided in the blog rolls on the antifeminist blogs. In the context of blogospheres, where relations consist of hyperlinks, in-links rather than out-links are arguably a sign of both prestige and influence since these direct potential readers to particular blogs. Influence was therefore defined as a blog's centrality in terms of many in-links, rather than out-links, in the blog-rolls. The SNA enabled the identification of a group of thirty very interlinked blogs that hence were assessed as the most central in the network in terms of their influence in relation to other blogs. A strategic selection of blog material that could provide information on how blogs had been used to produce and spread antifeminist discourses was then collected from these blogs. This included the very first blog posts published on each blog, the bloggers' profile/"about"-pages, and statements that concerned the bloggers' reasons for anonymity/pseudonymity. Last, material was generated through a participant observation of the bloggers advocacy strategies, which also included interactions with the bloggers. 4 The blog material was analyzed through a qualitative content analysis (Vaismoradi, Turunen, and Bondas 2013) in three distinct but interlinked parts. This analysis primarily focused on what was expressed explicitly (manifest) in the source material, by posing simple questions to the material. The first part focused on following how the blogosphere had emerged by analyzing (i) the bloggers' motivations for starting to blog and (ii) how and to what extent they were inspired by other antifeminist bloggers ideologically as well as practically. In the second part of the analysis the mainly self-described characteristics of the bloggers were analyzed in relation to how they motivated their antifeminist advocacy (on political blogs). Third, the extent to which anonymity was used within the blogosphere as well as the bloggers' motivations for their use of anonymity were analyzed.
The first part of the analysis demonstrates how the functional aspects of the affordances of blogs had been used to spread ideological content and to expand the network itself, with a particular focus on the affordances of visibility, metavoicing, and association. It is shown how there was a rapid increase in antifeminist blogs following the start of one of the largest and most central blogs in the network (Genusnytt) in early 2009. By using Genusnytt as his main platform for antifeminist advocacy, its founder, Pär Ström, could produce and disseminate antifeminist ideas to a large audience without having to go through the usual gatekeepers in the mainstream news media. Many of the bloggers claimed to have been inspired by Genusnytt and other earlier blogs and the (antifeminist) arguments presented on these. They also discussed how important it had been to practice one's arguments in the comment sections of these earlier blogs. One example of this is how one of the larger antifeminist blogs, Genusdebatten, created a "Backstage blog" where a commenter could be invited to practice their blogging before exposing themselves to a broader audience. Hyperlinking to other antifeminist blogs in one's blog posts and encouraging new bloggers by commenting cheerfully on their first posts were other common ways to expand and tighten the blog network.
The second part of the analysis focused on the relational aspects of affordances and demonstrates that the antifeminist bloggers can be described as quite well resourced, according to their self-descriptions. This stands in stark contrast with the idea of socioeconomic marginalization as constituting the main social basis for antifeminist activism (among men), which has been highly influential both in the popular understanding of antifeminist sentiments and mobilizations in Sweden (e.g., Boëthius 2008;Sveland 2013;Thente 2014; see also Strid 2018 for a similar argument) as well as in more research-based reports on antifeminism in the Scandinavian context (Nordfjell and Tordsson 2013). Many of the antifeminist bloggers state that they hold university degrees within the natural sciences and that they are employed in high-status occupations, such as engineers, doctors, researchers, and journalists. None of the bloggers claimed to be unemployed. Most of the bloggers, moreover, identified as men, but there were also a few women among the core bloggers. 5 What is more, the bloggers' position as mostly highly educated, white, heterosexual, middle-aged men was in fact frequently used as their main motivation for antifeminist blogging. The usual perception was that they, as a privileged group, were unfairly lacking a voice in the public debate on gender equality and that they therefore were entitled to raise their voices in these debates. Hence, many of the persons behind the antifeminist blogs shared characteristics with the group that previous research has pointed out as dominating among influential political bloggers, that is, they were highly educated white men. This part of the analysis thus illustrates that it can be important to analyze the social position of (antifeminist) internet activists to increase our understanding of their (successful) use of specific online platforms for producing and spreading political ideas.
The last part of the analysis focused on the extent to which the affordance of anonymity was used within the blogosphere and what motivated the bloggers' use of anonymity/pseudonymity. The analysis showed that about twothirds of the thirty most central bloggers were anonymous and that they often used pseudonyms. Some of these anonymous blogs were also among those most linked to in the blog rolls. When analyzing the bloggers' motivations for being more or less anonymous, it appeared that the possibility of being highly visible and active in the public debate without running the risk of being identified facilitated antifeminist activism in three main ways (in the Swedish context). First, it was frequently stated among the bloggers that it significantly reduced the individual cost of engaging in the antifeminist cause in a context where it was perceived as a social stigma to be identified as antifeminist. Second, the possibility to use a pseudonym when maintaining one's own blog, as well as when commenting on other blogs, enabled the bloggers to build a unique blog persona that they could use to advocate antifeminist claims both within and outside the blog network. Third, the analysis shows how anonymity allows for the possibility of confronting opponents without having to meet them face-to-face, which seems to open up for a more reactive and hostile advocacy strategy. Hence, while many of the antifeminist bloggers claimed that the harshness of debates on gender equality was one of their main reasons for anonymity, their own use of anonymity in attacking (alleged) feminist opponents on their blogs was often perceived as very uncomfortable by their targets (including myself).
To sum up, the Swedish case of online antifeminist resistance illustrates the usefulness of a focus on the functional and relational aspects of affordances of online platforms to increase our understanding of how online platforms can enable antifeminist groups to come together and promulgate discourses vis-àvis wider audiences, even in more unfavorable settings for antifeminism such as the Swedish one. First, a focus on the functional aspects demonstrates how the technical and regulatory features of blogs facilitated the mobilization of antifeminism in the Swedish context, by offering alternative public venues where antifeminist activists could come together (mainly) anonymously and advocate claims that were perceived as stigmatized in the Swedish context. Second, the analysis of the relational aspects of affordances demonstrated that not only could the antifeminist activists-in contrast to popular understandings of antifeminist constituencies in the Scandinavian context at that point in time-be described as quite well resourced, these resources were also in line with those that have been pointed out as important to become a successful political blogger (e.g., Hindman 2009; Schradie 2012). In conclusion, the case study of online antifeminism in the Swedish context illustrates the usefulness of also including material and social aspects in our analysis of online resistance to feminist politics, in addition to discourse analytical perspectives.

Conclusion
This article has sought to contribute to the emerging research agenda on opposition to gender equality and feminist politics, by introducing new analytical perspectives for studying online antifeminist resistance. More specifically, the article suggests that we should analyze how the design and governance of online platforms, in combination with the resources among antifeminist activists, enable online resistance to feminist politics. To enable such an analysis, two separate, but interrelated, analytical dimensions are introduced: the functional and relational aspects of platform affordances. A focus on the functional aspects of affordances helps us to specify which technical functions as well as platform rules and regulations allow for (or constrain) antifeminist constituencies to come together and produce antifeminist discourses, and to spread antifeminist claims to wider audiences. Moreover, the relational aspects of affordances help us to identify the resources that are available to antifeminist activists and how these resources enable them to use specific online platforms for their political advocacy. This type of analytical focus is important for at least two reasons. First, the governance and design of specific online platforms shape how these can be used and by whom. Hence, their technical and regulatory features have consequences for which types of discourses can be produced and disseminated on and through them. Second, antifeminist constituencies by definition mobilize in reaction to feminist achievements to reproduce or restore unequal power structures and have been demonstrated to be constituted mainly by privileged groups historically. We therefore need to pay much closer attention to the resources that are available to antifeminist activists and how these resources can be used when these groups mobilize online.
To illustrate the added value of this analytical approach for research on contemporary resistance to feminist politics, a case study of antifeminist mobilization on Swedish political blogs was briefly discussed. The study demonstrates how an analytical focus on the functional and relational aspects of affordances can illuminate how the technical and regulatory features of online platforms in combination with the resources held by the activists can enable antifeminist constituencies to emerge even in more unfavorable contexts, such as the Swedish one. The study moreover exemplifies that a variety of methods can complement discourse analysis when analyzing how online platforms enable antifeminist activism, including SNA, participant observation, and qualitative content analysis focusing on what is manifest in the source material. Initially, the SNA of in-links in blog rolls helped to identify the structure of the blog network and its most central actors. In the next step, a qualitative content analysis of blog posts and participant observation of interactions among core bloggers allowed for an analysis of how other technical and regulatory features of blogs (and WordPress.com in particular), such as hyperlinking in blog posts and comments as well as anonymity, enabled the antifeminist bloggers to come together and exchange ideas as well as disseminating these to wider publics. In addition, an analysis of the bloggers (self-described) characteristics showed how these were very much in line with the group that previous research has pointed out as dominating among influential political bloggers, that is, they were highly educated white men.
This illustrates how online platforms may present great challenges to contemporary feminist activism, and that an expanded analytical focus that includes social and material factors can be crucial in order to understand and counteract online resistance to feminist politics. A limitation of the study was, however, that it only focused on the affordances of a single platform (blogs) in a single context, a research strategy that risks overlooking how the affordances of various types of online platforms are used in combination for different purposes in antifeminist campaigns (e.g., Salter 2018). Moreover, while blogs and websites still play an important role in online antifeminist activism, more empirical analyses that focus on the role of platform affordances and the resources among the activists are needed of other types of platforms that more recently have been successfully used in the production and dissemination of antifeminist discourses. This includes mainstream social media platforms (in particular Twitter) and online forums such as Reddit and 4chan, but also alternative social media platforms such as Gab and Telegram. Notes 1. Blogs are here understood as a specific type of website. While websites usually are described as more static and blogs as more frequently updated, the line between them is often blurred since websites too are often updated on a regular basis. 2. The empirical material the case study is based on was collected as a part of the author's dissertation project (Holm 2019). 3. A blog was classified as antifeminist when the main purpose of the blog was to advocate antifeminism, i.e., claims that were in line with the masculinist current (e.g., Blais and Dupuis-Déri, 2012;Kimmel, 2013;Marwick and Caplan, 2018;Schmitz and Kazyak, 2016). The primary way to classify a blog was to use the blog's "about"-page, in which the content and purpose of a blog often is described. For the blogs that did not have an "about"-page, the first and/or last ten blog posts were analyzed to see if the content mainly corresponded to making antifeminist claims. In addition, it was assessed if the blogs contained particular posts and links with antifeminist ideas, such as specific antifeminist manifestos. 4. This part of generating material for the study was partly inspired by methods of digital ethnography, and in particular by netnography (Kozinets 2015). Partly, this generation of blog material meant that I observed the interaction between the bloggers in the blog texts and comment sections, which could be described as a kind of participant observation. Moreover, an earlier version of this text was uploaded to the website of an academic conference, and thereafter found online in April 2013 by one of the antifeminist bloggers. My text was then quickly disseminated in the blogosphere and generated a large response among the other bloggers. Through the events that unfolded I was given a unique first-hand insight in how blogs are used in order to compete with (alleged) feminist adversaries, and how anonymity is used in this process. The material collected in this part of the study consists mainly of the blog posts including commentaries that were written about my conference paper as well as anonymous emails to the author. 5. Approximately seven of the thirty most central bloggers were women, and among the ten most influential bloggers, there were four women.