Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2021

This paper explores the protest claims of Pakistani women against the everyday oppression of traditional gender roles and the complex backlash they provoke as an instance of violence against women in politics. Taking the annual Aurat March (Women’s March) as a focal point, I analyze the provocative placards and slogans that have gone viral in both traditional and digital media and investigate the misogynistic counter attacks launched by conservatives, men’s rights advocates, and anti-feminists. Contesting narrow definitions of the political in mainstream research, I argue that Aurat March protesters and activists are women in politics and that counter-discourses, designed to delegitimize the protest and the women’s issues it represents, constitute a mode of discursive violence that should be included in scholarly and activist discussions of violence against women in politics.

On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter (Dhrodia 2018), identifying the “Top 5” most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry.

Taking Amnesty International’s results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the “Top 5” women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouΤube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition (Pihlaja 2014), and, therefore, merits investigation.

By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and beyond.

The present article explores the interface between online misogyny and xenophobia in the context of both socio-cultural factors which are conducive to verbal aggression against women and cyberspace’s technological affordances. The former, as will be argued, can be linked to “rape culture”, where the notions of rape and sexual violence are used not only as instruments of subjugation and domination, but also as tools to legitimize racial, ethnic, or religious hatred. In the case of the latter, anonymity, interactivity and connectivity will be discussed as factors which facilitate generating, amplifying and perpetuating hateful and aggressive content online. Applying the Media Proximization Approach (Kopytowska 2013, 2015a, 2018a, 2018b, 2020) and drawing on previous research examining online xenophobic discourses and hate speech, the article scrutinizes hate speech targeting female politicians, namely Angela Merkel, current Chancellor of Germany, and Ewa Kopacz, former Polish Prime Minister, for their pro-refugee stance and migration policy. Data-wise, the examples analyzed will be taken from the corpora comprising comments following online articles in niezalezna.pl (a Polish conservative news portal) and YouTube videos on migrants and refugees.

Violence against women in politics encompasses physical, psychological, economic, sexual and semiotic forms of violence, targeting women because their gender is seen as threatening to hegemonic political norms. Theoretical debates over these categories and empirical applications to global cases often overlook that backgrounds and lived experiences of women in politics can differ considerably. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, in this article I analyze different manifestations of online semiotic violence – violence perpetrated through words and images seeking to render women incompetent and invisible (Krook 2020, 187) – against female, religious-minority politicians. Through a qualitative discursive approach, I identify patterns and strategies of violence in an original dataset of Twitter posts that mention the usernames of seven prominent Muslim and Jewish female politicians. Results show that multiply-marginalized politicians are exposed to both sexist and racist rhetoric online. In this case, semiotic violence functions to render women incompetent using racist disloyalty tropes as well as to render women invisible by invalidating their testimonies of abuse.

This paper explores the misogynistic abuse against female Chilean politicians who openly supported a pro-choice bill that allowed the access to abortion in limited circumstances. We analysed the verbal abuse targeted at these politicians during the legislation of the abortion bill (2015–2017) and the linguistic and discursive patterns of online abuse. To that end, we collected tweets from this legislation period and created a subset with specific milestones of the parliamentary debate. Further, we undertook a corpus-assisted analysis of the data, focusing on collocations and keywords, which were then analysed in the light of van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework on the representation of social actors and legitimation strategies. Results evidence that violence against women in power can take forms other than the explicit sexual, physical, and psychological threats that are commonly identified. Violence targets these women as it is claimed that they are unsuitable to legislate for allegedly having tolerated and protected crime. Therefore, the corrective function of abuse takes the form of legal actions against their crimes.

According to news media outlets, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the newly-elected Democratic representative from New York, has stirred up conflicting feelings among Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, attracting criticism, mockery and disapproval from both parties. The overarching aim of this study is to explore the extent to which these attitudes are acts of verbal aggression often dissimulated as patronizing warnings or manifestations of an opinion (Ramirez and Andreu 2003; Wodak 2015). In particular, by analyzing a corpus of headlines regarding AOC’s political persona and activism collected from six major conservative and liberal newspapers circulating in the US, the study aims to detect linguistic markers associated with aggression and verify their level of toxicity (Musolff 2012). To this purpose, both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches are used with particular reference to Corpus Linguistics (Baker et al. 2008; Kilgariff et al. 2014) and the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2016). Findings show that biased mediatized political discourse can influence attitudes toward aggressive speech behavior, and, therefore, intensify the devious nature of aggressive acts.