From Intimate Relationship Failure to Social Issues: A Thematic Analysis of Incel Discourse on YouTube

Abstract

This study examines the online commentary discourse surrounding the "Incel" phenomenon as a sociological field, exploring how frustrations in intimate relationships are transformed into interpretations of self-identity, gender relations, and social order. Drawing on a corpus of 24,648 top-level comments from ten popular YouTube videos related to the incel discourse and employing a computer-assisted thematic analysis method (MDCOR), four recurring thematic areas are identified: cognitive shifts and self-repositioning following romantic setbacks, competing explanatory frameworks for relationship dilemmas, controversies over gender roles and economic obligations in dating, and multidimensional social attributions of the incel phenomenon. Through the theoretical lens of emotional capitalism, the analysis further elucidates the mechanisms by which private emotional experiences are externalized, narrated, and reconstructed into public discourse under contemporary platform conditions. A core finding of this study is that intimate relationship frustration does not necessarily produce a single response pattern; rather, similar experiences are channeled through divergent interpretive paths—ranging from self-doubt and withdrawal to self-correction and growth. This challenges the prevailing tendency in existing literature to treat incel discourse as a homogeneous and internally consistent ideology. Instead, the study argues that the incel discourse on YouTube functions as a heterogeneous discursive field in which contemporary anxieties concerning intimacy, masculinity, and social legitimacy are continuously defined, contested, and re-narrated.