Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WONT-HATE (Online Hate against European Women Leaders: a Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Critical Analysis)
Reporting period: 2019-03-01 to 2021-02-28
One of the main challenges of the definition of online violence against women in politics is that it stands at a very complex crossroads between well-established gendered social structures, existing patterns of gender-based violence, the game of politics ‘as we know it’ and new digital technologies as facilitators. As part of a broader continuum with other forms of (physical, sexual, psychological and economic) violence, the proliferation of cyberviolence contributes to the delegitimization of women’s political actions and their ultimate exclusion from the political arena.
WONT-HATE is one of the first EU projects fully dedicated to exploring the phenomenon by the means of an integrated, problem-oriented and discourse-based approach. With cyberviolence representing a burgeoning techno-social issue, work carried out was characterized by a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a vast number of real instantiations of violence.
Investigating cyberviolence against women in politics also entailed engaging in theoretical and methodological reflections across the fields of Gender and Politics, Critical Discourse Studies and Digital Media Studies. This resulted in a conceptualization and critical explication of the phenomenon as rooted in long-standing gendered infrastructures proper to our societal and political systems, while at the same time producing, enforcing and ‘naturalizing’ gender-based ideologies that preclude the equal participation of women in the political sphere.
With the offline-online continuum of violence as one of the most urgent challenges for the criminalization of hate speech in the EU, the exploration of the digital and socio-cultural motives, forms and impacts of gender-based cyberviolence can be regarded as the principal exploitable result of WONT-HATE. In analyzing what should be regarded as a gender, political, and digital issue at the same time, WONT-HATE tackles digital discourse for its tangible (rather than virtual) role as a gatekeeping practice and its potential to jeopardise the hard-fought progress towards gender equality in politics and beyond.
WONT-HATE is one of the first EU projects fully dedicated to exploring the phenomenon by the means of an integrated, problem-oriented and discourse-based approach. With cyberviolence representing a burgeoning techno-social issue, work carried out was characterized by a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a vast number of real instantiations of violence.
Investigating cyberviolence against women in politics also entailed engaging in theoretical and methodological reflections across the fields of Gender and Politics, Critical Discourse Studies and Digital Media Studies. This resulted in a conceptualization and critical explication of the phenomenon as rooted in long-standing gendered infrastructures proper to our societal and political systems, while at the same time producing, enforcing and ‘naturalizing’ gender-based ideologies that preclude the equal participation of women in the political sphere.
With the offline-online continuum of violence as one of the most urgent challenges for the criminalization of hate speech in the EU, the exploration of the digital and socio-cultural motives, forms and impacts of gender-based cyberviolence can be regarded as the principal exploitable result of WONT-HATE. In analyzing what should be regarded as a gender, political, and digital issue at the same time, WONT-HATE tackles digital discourse for its tangible (rather than virtual) role as a gatekeeping practice and its potential to jeopardise the hard-fought progress towards gender equality in politics and beyond.
Results show that attacks capitalize on established strategies of gender-based violence, including moral degradation, body shaming and rape threats. A vast number of interlocked discursive strategies can be identified: women in politics are not only shamed for not being pretty, thin and feminine enough, but also attacked for not being intelligent or capable enough and despised for being either too emotional or too aggressive. This paints an overall picture where gender stereotyping is still prevalent and represents a core aspect of gender-based violence also in the cybersphere. A considerable amount of linguistic creativity and irony is also at play, which contributes to the mainstreaming of cyberviolence as episodes of “hate-play” or “recreational nastiness” (Jane 2014) and to an overall normalization of violence as an integral and harmless act of digital citizenship.
Gender-based cyberviolence against women in EU politics is also characterized by the appropriation of the vast array of new, digitally native meaning-making resources such as memes, gifs and emojis. In particular, given the primacy of the visual across digital media, image-based violence has come to represent a real staple of the cybersphere, where new affordances like image modification and new trends like meme culture capitalise on long-standing, established strategies of gender-based sexism and objectification of women’s bodies.
The analysis also focused on a trans-linguistic and trans-cultural comparison of gender-based cyberviolence across different linguistic landscapes and political cultures in Europe. On the one hand, online hate emerges from this study as a culture-bound phenomenon that hooks into the background culture, symbols, narratives, myths and topoi of the respective societies in order to be successful. On the other hand, results are also characterized by a worrying uniformity in the gender-based nature of violence against those women who have a public presence and elbow for recognition in the male-dominated political arena. Many instances of gender-based cyberviolence are not only targeted violence but are also grounded in reflections on the fundamental incompatibility of women with political roles.
Theoretical implications and transdisciplinary methods represented a core reflection throughout the project. WONT-HATE caters to the need for more integrated methodologies able to account for multimodality as an intrinsic feature of the social media communication paradigm, as well as for the complex multi-directional processes of recontextualization which characterize the production and consumption of digital content. In particular, it addresses the main methodological challenges posed by the inherent non-linearity and fleeting nature of data in the participatory web.
WONT-HATE data is FAIR/O, with regulated access given the sensitive nature of data. The WONT-HATE database is expected to be useful to scholars across the field of Social Sciences (Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology) as well as associations (Amnesty International, UN Women, Interparliamentary Union) interested in investigating the phenomenon of cyberhate in general (e.g. from a linguistic, sociological or psychological perspective) or the instances of misogynous digital hostility against women in politics in the specific.
Gender-based cyberviolence against women in EU politics is also characterized by the appropriation of the vast array of new, digitally native meaning-making resources such as memes, gifs and emojis. In particular, given the primacy of the visual across digital media, image-based violence has come to represent a real staple of the cybersphere, where new affordances like image modification and new trends like meme culture capitalise on long-standing, established strategies of gender-based sexism and objectification of women’s bodies.
The analysis also focused on a trans-linguistic and trans-cultural comparison of gender-based cyberviolence across different linguistic landscapes and political cultures in Europe. On the one hand, online hate emerges from this study as a culture-bound phenomenon that hooks into the background culture, symbols, narratives, myths and topoi of the respective societies in order to be successful. On the other hand, results are also characterized by a worrying uniformity in the gender-based nature of violence against those women who have a public presence and elbow for recognition in the male-dominated political arena. Many instances of gender-based cyberviolence are not only targeted violence but are also grounded in reflections on the fundamental incompatibility of women with political roles.
Theoretical implications and transdisciplinary methods represented a core reflection throughout the project. WONT-HATE caters to the need for more integrated methodologies able to account for multimodality as an intrinsic feature of the social media communication paradigm, as well as for the complex multi-directional processes of recontextualization which characterize the production and consumption of digital content. In particular, it addresses the main methodological challenges posed by the inherent non-linearity and fleeting nature of data in the participatory web.
WONT-HATE data is FAIR/O, with regulated access given the sensitive nature of data. The WONT-HATE database is expected to be useful to scholars across the field of Social Sciences (Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology) as well as associations (Amnesty International, UN Women, Interparliamentary Union) interested in investigating the phenomenon of cyberhate in general (e.g. from a linguistic, sociological or psychological perspective) or the instances of misogynous digital hostility against women in politics in the specific.
With digital media affordances acting as a ‘force multiplier’, both in terms of sheer quantity and vitriolic quality of interactions, the ever-growing discourse of online hate has only been partially mapped. WONT-HATE contributes to the problematization of online hate as one of the biggest and most complex drawbacks of the socio-communicative revolution of the participatory web and addresses gender-based cyberviolence as a form of cyberhate that has not received enough attention, especially compared with racist or xenophobic hate speech online or cyberbullying affecting children and adolescents.
WONT-HATE contributes to the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM – CDS) approach to social media data, an emerging theoretical and methodological framework combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in Digital Media and Technology.
WONT-HATE contributes to the field of Gender and Politics, by furthering the integration of ethnographic and critical discursive inquiry in the field. Also, WONT-HATE is firmly grounded in an Intersectional paradigm and contributes to the conceptualization of the cybersphere as far from being a ‘neutral’ space. It highlights how lived experiences of Internet users can vary considerably according to their gender as well as sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, mother-tongue, age/generation, or dis/ability, among others.
Exploring discourse as social practice, and refusing to treat the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ as separate and independent realms, WONT-HATE has been characterized by a socially committed, problem-oriented, textually-based, critical approach to a current European social issue with a marked gender dimension. WONT-HATE contributed to tackling timely issues of digital security, gender-based violence and gender equality, in line with the gender-related objectives of the Horizon 2020 Programme and the European Commission Strategic Engagement for Gender Equality 2016-2019.
WONT-HATE contributes to the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM – CDS) approach to social media data, an emerging theoretical and methodological framework combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in Digital Media and Technology.
WONT-HATE contributes to the field of Gender and Politics, by furthering the integration of ethnographic and critical discursive inquiry in the field. Also, WONT-HATE is firmly grounded in an Intersectional paradigm and contributes to the conceptualization of the cybersphere as far from being a ‘neutral’ space. It highlights how lived experiences of Internet users can vary considerably according to their gender as well as sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, mother-tongue, age/generation, or dis/ability, among others.
Exploring discourse as social practice, and refusing to treat the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ as separate and independent realms, WONT-HATE has been characterized by a socially committed, problem-oriented, textually-based, critical approach to a current European social issue with a marked gender dimension. WONT-HATE contributed to tackling timely issues of digital security, gender-based violence and gender equality, in line with the gender-related objectives of the Horizon 2020 Programme and the European Commission Strategic Engagement for Gender Equality 2016-2019.