Online Misogyny Targeting Feminist Activism: A nita S arkeesian and Gamergate

Abstract

In October 2014, a controversy surrounding video games erupted in the online world. Female game critics and reviewers, particularly Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, were subject to numerous hostile and sexually degrading responses to their critiques of the gaming world that used the hashtag #gamergate. Chris Kluwe, a retired National Football League player, wrote a column excoriating the gamergaters for their misogynistic treatment of female critics. This chapter explores Twitter responses in relation to gamergate in the context of online misogyny. First, it documents the types of aggression Sarkeesian has received from a sample of tweets she received following the death of Nintendo's executive Satoru Iwata. Second, it compares two samples of tweets to Sarkeesian and Chris Kluwe to test how people responded to a male and female critic. Results are discussed from various theoretical perspectives.

“Kick the XX out of your life”: An analysis of the manosphere’s discursive constructions of gender on Twitter

“…Twitter necessitates the absence of the body on which such violence is to be enacted. Yet the abuse experienced by Sarkeesian was graphic and concrete and included photographs showing men ejaculating onto an image of her face (Burgess et al., 2017). The invocation of the material body in the virtual space suggests that symbolic violence does not satisfy the manosphere’s need to subjugate the female body.…”