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Article published In:
Critical perspectives on gender, politics and violence
Edited by Eleonora Esposito
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1] 2021
► pp. 47–75

“How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew” [*] *

A multimodal critical discursive approach to online misogyny against UK MPs on YouTube

ORCID logo | University of Navarra , Spain
ORCID logo | University of Napoli Federico II , Italy

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.

Keywords: women MPs, misogyny, YouTube, multimodality, social media, Critical Discourse Studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gendered violence in a jungle called YouTube
  • 3.Methods and data
    • 3.1A critical multimodal framework for social media data
    • 3.2Data collection and framework operationalization
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Discursive strategies of DTF violence
      • 4.1.1Strategies of body shaming
      • 4.1.2Strategies of gender stereotyping and gatekeeping
      • 4.1.3Strategies of moral degradation
      • 4.1.4Strategies of direct threatening and abuse
    • 4.2Multimodal strategies of DTF violence
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00053.esp
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