Talk:
“Antiheroes of the Manosphere: Popular Culture, Digital Masculinities, and the Appeal of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate” (co-authored with Hande Eslen-Ziya)
by
Ateş Altınordu
Sabancı University, Turkey
ates.altinordu@sabanciuniv.edu
Date and Room Info
Wednesday, January 28, 2026, 12:30 p.m.
A-130
Abstract
This study examines the growing prominence of the antihero figure in digital masculinity cultures with a focus on Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, two highly influential figures in the contemporary manosphere. While previous research has analyzed manospheric ideology, platforms, and communities, little attention has been paid to the cultural forms through which charismatic manfluencers channel grievance, mobilize affect, and legitimize norm violation. Through a systematic analysis of Peterson’s and Tate’s digital performances, the study shows that both figures adopt the narrative and affective logic of the modern antihero—marked by moral ambiguity, masculine grievance, and norm defiance—to craft compelling public personas. Through the sensitizing lens of the Dark Triad, we demonstrate that Peterson projects a character as an embattled intellectual truth-teller, while Tate embodies the hypermasculine renegade. Their performances draw on familiar cultural templates that allow male audiences to reinterpret humiliation, marginalization, and resentment as sources of insight and develop strategies of resistance. Moreover, through narrative legibility and psychological identification, these antihero scripts facilitate the uptake of anti-gender and misogynistic ideas. The study thus situates manospheric politics within the broader repertoire of narrative genres and shows how the pleasures of antihero identification—once confined to fictional media—now shape the emotional, ideological, and cultural dynamics of contemporary digital masculinities.
Short Bio
Ateş Altınordu is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sabancı University, Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University in 2010 and was Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2019. His work focuses on religion and politics and the cultural aspects of contemporary politics. Altınordu’s articles have been published in the Annual Review of Sociology, Politics and Society, Qualitative Sociology, Sociology of Religion, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. He is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, a member of the international advisory board of Cultural Sociology, and a faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) at Yale University.