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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. 100–126

Incongruous and illegitimate

Antisemitic and Islamophobic semiotic violence against women in politics in the United Kingdom

ORCID logo | Rutgers University

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.

Keywords: gender and politics, violence against women, social media, British politics
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Semiotic violence against women in politics
  • 3.Antisemitism and Islamophobia in the United Kingdom
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Gathering data
    • 4.2Procedure of analysis
    • 4.3Theoretical framework
    • 4.4Limitations
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Overview
    • 5.2Rendering women incompetent
    • 5.3Rendering women invisible
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00055.kup
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Esposito, Eleonora
2021. Introduction. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Esposito, Eleonora & Sole Alba Zollo
2021. “How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew”*. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1 ► pp. 47 ff. DOI logo
Kopytowska, Monika
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Rasulo, Margaret
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