Frazer Heritage's monograph is the first book-length academic work that investigates language use in the online incel communities. The work specifically focuses on how incel-specific gender and racial ideologies are lexicalised around prevalent terms for gendered and racialized social actors related to incel communities. Employing a corpus-assisted critical discourse studies approach that combines traditional corpus linguistic analysis of key words, collocations, and concordance lines with a more detailed qualitative critical discourse analysis based on van Leeuwen's social actor framework, Heritage examines a primary corpus consisting of three incel-specific websites. The corpus linguistic analysis is also integrated with analysis of some significant data outside of the corpus such as mainstreamed incel memes and netnographic field notes. Heritage's analysis shows that incels are highly creative in how they employ affixes and how they draw on the discursive devices of metonymy, metaphor, and metaphtonymy to construct gendered and racialized social actors. Those linguistic constructions centre on one's perceived sexual market value, point to gender and sexuality hierarchies that are intrinsically tied to the ideologies of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity of the broader society, and ultimately constitute prejudice. Heritage points out that although incels are not necessarily a homogeneous group, the prevalent anti-feminism, misogynistic, and racist ideologies are perpetuated and normalized by those seemingly innocuous linguistic constructions.

The monograph consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 begins by identifying incels as an online community of practice based on shared language-use patterns and anti-feminist and racist ideologies. Data collection and analytical methodologies are also introduced. Chapter 2 positions the incel communities against the backdrop of the dominant ideologies within the broader manosphere and draws on the concepts of hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, in-/out-groups, essentialism, and determinism to theorize the online incel communities. Chapter 3 discusses the important ethical issues of doing research on incel communities. The discussions extend to collecting, analysing, managing online data, disseminating research findings, and protecting the researcher. Chapter 4 demonstrates different lexical terms that are used in the incel communities to present and construct male and female gendered social actors, which highlight a hierarchy of heterosexual norms surrounding one's sexual attractiveness and ability to have sex. Chapter 5 turns the analytical focus to the intersection of gender and race and examines the lexical items that construct key racial social actors as in-group or out-group members. The analysis reveals the underlying White supremacy in those linguistic constructions. Chapter 6 recaps the key findings and suggests the research may act as a starting point for different parties, such as police and policy makers, to conceive how they could address misogyny and racism issues associated with incels.

Through the analysis of incels’ linguistic constructions of gendered and racialized social actors, Heritage exposes the anti-feminism, misogynistic, and racist ideologies that are prevalent in the incel communities. This thought-provoking monograph serves as a much-needed window into the incel manosphere which exhibits a politically right-wing tendency, contributes to the linguistic research into this problematic societal phenomenon, and highlights the need for further critical research on incels.