#Karlmennskan Raising awareness of toxic masculinity through hashtag activism in Iceland

Sammanfattning: This thesis focuses on #Karlmennskan activism and experiences of participants in the activism. #Karlmennskan is a hashtag activism that started on Twitter in Iceland in March 2018. The main focus was to bring awareness to toxic masculinity and to show how it can be harmful to both men and women. Toxic masculinity is something that has been discussed a lot in Iceland over the past year, the concept is both toxic for men and women as it is about how men often have the need to dominate others, and it also put pressure on men to behave and look in a certain way. This activism started a half a year after the #MeToo movement, as men in Iceland realized that they needed to change something among themselves. The aim of this thesis is to get a better understanding of how participants have experienced toxic masculinity and why they decided to participate in this activism. To do that, ten qualitative interviews, with men who participated in the activism, were conducted. Results from this thesis indicate that #Karlmennskan activism was important to the participants and it enabled them to be more open with their emotions. They seemed to experience social media as a potential digital platform to bring awareness and change ideas in society about men and masculinity. They also seemed to look at this activism as a continuation of other feminist social movements like #MeToo.