Abject desires in the age of anger: incels, femcels, and the gender politics of unfuckability

This chapter questions why, in contemporary culture, involuntary celibacy is so narrowly associated with white masculinity. To this end, it explores the hyper-visible figure of the white male incel, but also draws attention to the little-known contemporary phenomenon of “femcels” – or women who are involuntarily celibate – and the ways that they are rendered illegible because of widespread assumptions that any women can find sexual partners. It situates this illegibility of the femcel in a broader context in which women’s psychic suffering, exclusions and humiliations are not countenanced as political problems – if they are made visible at all. White male ressentiment, humiliation and exclusion, on the other hand, are continually politicized and offered up as emblems of the angry zeitgeist, and white men are understood as uniquely disadvantaged and “left behind” by globalization. The chapter considers a range of media representations of both incels and femcels in relation to feminist theories of romantic suffering, white supremacy and sexual redistribution. It argues that exclusions from sex and intimacy can be considered as political problems; the risk of tying questions of sexual redistribution to misogynistic and racist notions of entitlement, it suggests, might be avoided by centring such debates on femcels.