Politicize and popularize: The theoretical discourse on feminicide in Italian feminist blogs

Abstract

The concept of feminicide (‘femminicidio’) has been recently introduced to the Italian socio-political context and since 2012 a prolific theoretical debate on the topic has begun, both on traditional media and on the Internet. This article aims at analysing the current online discussion on feminicide and, in particular, the synergy of dialogue and activism which has appeared within the domain of feminist blogs. Drawing from the theoretical and methodological framework of Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), my objective is to investigate the bloggers’ ability to promote existing theories on sexist murders for a larger readership (popularization) and to redefine the notion of feminicide with new socially relevant meanings capable of extending the discursive perimeter of existing feminist theories on the phenomenon (politicization).

Rape Culture, Revictimization, and Social Representations: Images and Discourses on Sexual and Violent Crimes in the Digital Sphere in Mexico

“…Femicide, represented in blue, was represented by two nuclei. The first spoke about a network of people (network, know, people, person, need) and the other about the fact that strangers cannot be trusted (stranger, trust, many, expose, thing) (Gillespie et al, 2013; Jeffries, 2013; Mandolini, 2017).…”

“…In the case of femicide and forced disappearance, crimes generally considered more serious or that have no way back, there is less of this discourse of blaming with direct aggression, but what instead emerges is a much more perverse discourse where female victims are represented as people who could disappear or be killed because they could not protect themselves (Akhmedshina, 2020; Jeffries, 2013; Mandolini, 2017; Tiscareño-García & Miranda-Villanueva, 2020). In this discourse, women are completely disempowered, and they are represented as being at the mercy of the protection of men (McMahon & Kahn, 2018).…”

“…Given this, academia has carried out a wide variety of research based on social networks that have highlighted various forms of violence suffered by women, which are rooted in patriarchy and sexism (Douglas et al, 2019;Dragiewicz et al, 2018;Idoiaga et al, 2020;Scott, 2008;Varela, 2008). Most of the researched forms of violence against women in both traditional mass media and social media are related to crimes of femicide (Gillespie et al, 2013;Jeffries, 2013;Mandolini, 2017;Tiscareño-García & Miranda-Villanueva, 2020), sexual assault (Layman, 2020;Schwark, 2017;Wellman et al, 2017), sexual harassment (Easteal et al, 2015;Waterhouse-Watson, 2009), or rape (Belair-Gagnon et al, 2014;Harp et al, 2018;Horvath & Brown, 2009).…”

Modern Protest Communication In Russia And Germany: Important Issues In Research Methodology

“…Blogging as a form of political participation, advantages and disadvantages of blogging have also been repeatedly studied by experts in media linguistics, journalism, media psychology, sociology, and political science, who have expressed diametrically opposite points of view, from Dan Gilmore's hymn to blog journalism as a counteraction to the «gatekeeping» of official media to accusations of «shifting» responsibility for constructing the agenda and worldview to an incompetent user following the «collective mind» (Asmolov & Asmolov, 2011). The new format also has its own requirements for the virtual personality derived from its content and (Bazhenova & Ivanova, 2012;Herring, 2004); to the research of gatekeeping phenomenon, sociolinguistic, communicative and pragmatic characteristics and evolution of this genre (Mandolini, 2017;Steele, 2018).…”