From gender talk to gender antagonism

This article explores how discourses of gender become a vehicle for political antagonism on Spodeli, an anonymous Bulgarian Q&A forum. Drawing on over one million posts from nearly two decades of forum activity (2007–2024), it combines Structural Collocation Analysis (SCA) with a qualitative analysis of discursive shifts to trace how conversations around the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ become entangled with the logic of adversarial politicisation – a process that, as the article argues, is marked in the contemporary moment by the normalisation and mainstreaming of exclusionary narratives. The analysis maps both large-scale shifts in linguistic patterns and gradual transformation of meaning-making practices through discursive shifts. Findings reveal a progression from personal grievances around gender roles to politicised narratives, including misogynist and reactionary rhetoric, amplified by the forum’s anonymity and asynchronous structure. The study conceptualises this process as everyday extremism, showing how ostensibly innocuous anonymous digital spaces mediate the proliferation of extremist narratives in casual online discourse.