Making the maranza: youth, class and masculinities in the digital politics of exclusion

This article examines how the figure of the maranza, a recurring and controversial character in Italian digital discourse, operates as a symbolic category through which youth, class and masculinity are negotiated. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, the term maranza circulates primarily as a stereotype attributed to others rather than as a self-claimed identity, functioning as a discursive label through which youth deviance, class excess and racialised otherness are condensed. Using a reflexive thematic analysis of Reddit threads and related digital materials, the paper explores how meanings associated with maranza emerge from everyday talk and online humour, functioning as a folk-devil figure that marks the boundaries of respectability, taste and belonging. The maranza is framed as a stigmatised embodiment of working-class masculinity, while the anti-maranza represents its symbolic opposite: a self-appointed guardian of order, taste and civic virtue. Together, these figures reveal how digital publics police identity and class through humour and moralisation. They illuminate how moral hierarchies and gendered distinctions are reproduced through everyday language, irony and affective performances of superiority.