Special issue on online misogyny

Abstract

This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet's anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cultural and gender-political factors. This collection of work is intended to lend focus and cohesion to a growing body of research in this area; to map, contextualise and take stock of current frameworks, making scholars aware of one another's work and methodologies, and hopefully forging new interdisciplinary collaborations and directions for future work. Crucially, we move beyond the Anglophone world, to include perspectives from countries which have different genderpolitical and technological landscapes. In addition to mapping the new misogyny, several contributions also address digital feminist responses, evaluating their successes, limitations and impact on the shape of digital gender politics in future.

Sporting Women and Social Media: Sexualization, Misogyny, and Gender-Based Violence in Online Spaces

“…This study provides an insight into how women athletes can experience virtual violence, specifically gender-based virtual violence while in their place of work. Gendered cyber-hate is recognised to be a pervasive problem which continues to pose significant challenges to the safety of women engaging in online spaces (Ging & Siapera;Rodríguez-Dariasa & Aguilera-Ávila, 2018;Megarry, 2014). Women athletes in this study were the targets of several forms of violent, misogynistic and sexist abuse perpetrated by (primarily male) fans or followers of their sport.…”

“…Currently, a variety of terms have been adopted in research to describe the phenomenon of violence targeting females in virtual environments including: e-bile, cyberviolence, gendered cyberhate, technology-facilitated (sexual) violence, electronic aggression, online abuse, hate speech, networked harassment, cyberbullying, cyberharassment, online violence against women, and online misogyny (Bennett, Guran, Ramos & Margolin, 2011;Ging & Siapera, 2018;Henry & Powell, 2018;Jane, 2016Jane, , 2014aJane, , 2014b). More often than not such violence is experienced by women online because of their gender.…”

“…The evolution of the Internet has proven to create an outlet for GBV now recognised as a global pandemic directly related to the scale of violence experienced by women and girls in virtual spaces (Ging & Siapera, 2018). There is growing concern about the disproportionate levels of gender-based violence experienced by women in online spaces, proving to be a significant social problem (Rodríguez-Dariasa & Aguilera-Ávila, 2018).…”

“…Academic scholars are increasingly raising concern about the disproportionate levels of gender-based violence experienced by women in virtual spaces suggesting this to be a global pandemic (Ging & Siapera, 2018). Jane (2018) believes that gendered abuse and threats online cause "embodied" rather than "virtual" harm and that the behaviours present in virtual interactions can map onto more familiar forms of offline violence against women and girls.…”

Narrative warfare

“…However, members of the manosphere are "brought together by a common language that orients them in opposition to the discourse and rhetoric of feminism" (Marwick & Caplan, 2018, p. 553) and most groups are more or less antifeminist. Recent inquiries have attempted to map out the extent and activity of manosphere movements (Ging, 2017;Ging & Siapera, 2018) as well as their relation to other online radicals (Nagle, 2017;Marwick & Lewis, 2017). Furthermore, scholars have researched discourses of sexual violence (Gotell & Dutton, 2016) and nostalgic, racialised gender melancholy in the manosphere (Saresma, 2017) as well as the deliberate use of rape threats (Jane, 2017) and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy (Zuckerberg, 2018) as communication strategies in the manosphere.…”