“Feels Like Not Calling My Mother”: Hunting’s Religious-Ethical Significances for Men on the r/Hunting Subreddit

Masculinized social media spaces are often associated with forms of oppression like misogyny, queer- and transphobia, and racism.  Without dispelling that reality, my net ethnography of the subreddit r/Hunting uncovers the ethical and religious heavy lifting men do in social media spaces devoted to masculinized practices.  For hunters on r/Hunting, the moment of violence, the kill, is at once the point and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized.  Even more, it triangulates them into relationships with their imagined and known male ancestors, their kin, and the totality of living things.  Indeed, this moment of violence anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies.  Hunting, then, is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.