"30 million women rejected me" - a narrative analysis of perpetrators of gendered mass murders

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines how perpetrators of misogynistic mass murder utilise narrative and storytelling to make meaning of their violent acts towards women. This thesis is hereby an attempt to understand gendered mass violence, and its narrative resources that precede and promote such actions, as part of a wider, misogynist culture centered on a denial of the existence of patriarchal societies and oppression of women. Utilising narrative criminology and gender studies as theoretical frameworks, this thesis carries out a textual-and thematic analysis of personal accounts of three mass killers in order to understand - how they utilise narratives to justify their violent acts towards women as a group. The main findings show these perpetrators conveyed an ‘underdog’ narrative of contemporary “male oppression” and “women holding too much power”. These men constructed their masculine identity as threatened, as their expressions of sexual and romantic interest were constantly dismissed by women in unjustified means. These men also used discourses of misogyny, resembling the very contents and ideologies discussed within the manosphere, and attempted to justify their acts through their victimhood-narration of themselves as a product of their treatment and rejections by women. By engaging in such violence, these men also seemed to believe it would protect and restore their manhood. Their acts of mass harms operated as both a gendered narrative accomplishment and as an act of insurgency.