WONT-HATE · Online Hate against European Women Leaders: a Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Critical Analysis

Online Hate against European Women Leaders: a Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Critical Analysis

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.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union