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Abstract

The gang rape known as the “La Manada” case has had an unprecedented social impact in Spain. This research investigates how this case has been dealt with through Twitter by a collective symbolic coping process (Social Representation Theory). Discourse on Twitter was analyzed at two key points in time: the announcement of the judgment and the aggressors’ release from prison. In total 6,592 tweets with the hashtag #lamanada were selected and their content was analyzed by lexical analysis using Iramuteq software. The results reveal both an awareness phase about the issue along with a divergence phase that saw the emergence of various interpretations about this case, which were confronted. In this divergence phase, feminist discourses took on great significance, expressing anger, calling for social mobilizations, criticizing the victim blaming and creating a dialogue against rape culture. However, the anti-feminist and sexist discourses were also present in this space. It is concluded that discourses on Twitter are a symptom of a shift in mentality whilst at the same time serve as an active constructor of this changed knowledge. Thus, the feminist movement should continue to take this into account in order to converge and normalize the discourse against rape culture. FREE REPRINT: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SXB7M2SKVT4RFKHG95NU/full?target=10.1080/14680777.2019.1643387

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... Collective Symbolic Coping is a notion that bears upon the Social Representations theory [7]. Collective symbolic oping refers to the process in which the collective social group as a whole "gives meaning to novel situations that threaten the established social order" [8] to integrate the new phenomena into the existing bodies of knowledge [7]. The collective symbolic coping process involves four phases: (1) Awareness; (2) Divergence; (3) Convergence; and (4) Normalization. ...
... At the phase of awareness, the event that challenges the established social order is considered important for society by the public. The public is aware of its social relevance collectively [8]. At the phase of divergence, various interpretations regarding this event are generated, causing ambiguity [8]. ...
... The public is aware of its social relevance collectively [8]. At the phase of divergence, various interpretations regarding this event are generated, causing ambiguity [8]. At the phase of convergence, the group has established a new conventional interpretation of this event and it is accepted by all [7,8]. ...
Article
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The Atlanta Spa shooting evoked the Stop Asian Hate movement in the US. This study examines what primary topics were covered in Twitter discourse in #StopAsianHate and which phases of collective symbolic coping emerged from the perspective of social representations theory. 21,474 tweets in #StopAsianHate on Twitter in the first weeks from May to August were analyzed by topic modeling using MDCOR. The results of this research showed that the phases of awareness and divergence emerged in the discourse, while the phases of convergence and normalization remained unidentified. The knowledge generated in this research may contribute to identifying the main topics that appeared in #StopAsianHate on Twitter, and it may also inform the supporters of the Stop Asian Hate movement about the following actions.
... All these investigations conclude that neither the crimes themselves nor their media coverage can be understood if they are not framed within the notion of a rape culture (Idoiaga et al., 2019;Johnson & Johnson, 2021;Keller et al., 2018;Mendes et al., 2018;Phipps et al., 2018;Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018). In fact, several studies have revealed two phenomena that promote and justify the violent acts suffered by women in the discourses of the digital sphere (Horeck, 2014;Mendes et al., 2018): victim-blaming (Gravelin et al., 2019;Pinciotti & Orcutt, 2017;Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018) and revictimization (Anastasio & Costa, 2009;Norris et al., 2018;Nwabueze & Oduah, 2014;Relyea & Ullman, 2017). ...
... In modern societies, the influence of digital media on the opinions and discourses constructed by individuals is undeniable (Zaleski et al., 2016). For this reason, analyzing the social representations of violence against women in the digital sphere will allow us to identify the ideas, beliefs, and ideologies that groups have about the image of women within the framework of the culture of violence and from the perspective of Mexican society (Zaleski et al., 2016;Idoiaga et al., 2019;Valencia et al., 2013). ...
... This theory argues that in the digital sphere, the constructs, beliefs, valuations, discourses, and cultural burdens of people's opinions are replicated (Farah, 2011;Höijer, 2011). As the discourse of social networks offers us a naturalistic setting for social thinking (Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018), such networks have frequently been used for the analysis of Social Representations (SRs) (Idoiaga et al., 2019(Idoiaga et al., , 2020de Rosa et al., 2021;Zamperini et al., 2012). From this research, we conclude that social networks are becoming a field of special interest for analyzing contemporary changes. ...
Article
The digital sphere has become a space in which misogyny-laden discourses are constantly presented. In fact, in Mexico persists a rape culture that justifies violent acts against women and blames the victims of the crimes through social opinions. The present study proposed an approach based on the Theory of Social Representations. In this sense, this study aimed to analyze the discourses that emerge in the digital sphere when users give their opinion on five types of crimes against women: femicide, rape, enforced disappearance, abuse, and sexual harassment. The results revealed that there are four types of discourse (representations) framed within rape culture: disbelief of rape, blaming the victim, revictimization, and disempowering women. It is concluded that Mexican society maintains a representation that stereotypes and devalues the image of women, which allows us to understand the aggressions that women suffer in their daily lives.
... This theory explains how the group gives meaning to novel situations that threaten the established social order, as in the case of these strikes. CSC emphasizes that the social communication about a new issue -such as those that emerge in social networks like Twitter -allows people to face the challenge that this novelty poses (Idoiaga et al., 2020;Orr, Sagi, & Bar-On, 2000;Wagner, 1998). In fact, social network communication offers us a naturalistic setting, since on these platforms opinions are openly and spontaneously discussed in real time (Stubbs-Richardson, Rader, & Cosby, 2018). ...
... With great media repercussions, this case lead to a wave of feminist support and protests, not only in the streets but also (and particularly) on social networks such as Twitter. These protests generated, on the one hand, a social network for mobilization and, on the other, a social conscience about violence against women and the rape culture, which were key factors that triggered the call for the feminist strikes ( (Idoiaga et al., 2020;Campillo, 2018;García et al., 2018). Indeed, at the transnational level, social networks have been crucial to the participative and collective actions that reclaim social and political change, such as, for instance, in the uprisings of Occupy Wall Street (in 2011), the Umbrella Movement (in 2014) or the Yellow vests movement (in 2018) (Bennett, Segerberg, & Walker, 2014;Tremayne, 2014;Tye, Leong, Tan, Barney Tan, & Hooi, 2018). ...
... The first reference point for feminist cyberactivism in Spain was the World March of Women (Boix, 2006). Likewise, other important axis in which the mobilizations have been organized, replicated and spread through the internet are the struggle for the decriminalization of abortion (Fernandez & Marcos, 2015;Perez, 2014), the protests for the case of 'La Manada' mentioned above (Campillo, 2018;García et al., 2018;Idoiaga et al., 2020) and finally the 8 th March 8 protests where online and offline action were mobilized in an unprecedented way (Bernal-Triviño & Sanz-Martos, 2020;Campillo, 2018;Fernandez, 2019;Sosa et al., 2019). ...
Article
The first general women’s strikes to demand gender equality in Spain took place on 8 March 2018 and 2019. Both calls were an amazing success, becoming world references for feminism. This research investigates how the strikes were dealt with through Twitter by a Collective Symbolic Coping (CSC) process. Discourses on Twitter were analysed on both years, 4,384 tweets were selected and their content was analysed by lexical analysis. The results from 2018 indicated the CSC phases of 1) awareness; 2) divergence, where feminist demands and the role of men in the strike were debated; and 3) convergence, where the success of the strike was highlighted. However, in 2019 the feminists on Twitter were forced to cope with a great deal of trolling against them. This trolling was maintained in the awareness and divergence phases, making it difficult to reach a convergent discourse regarding the success of the strike. Moreover, the results also demonstrated that there was no reference hashtag in the strikes. It is concluded that discourse on social networks has become a key factor in feminist social mobilizations and that this feminist digital activism will be critical in the continued dissemination of the claims for gender equality in Spain.
... More specifically, the microblogging platform Twitter has been pointed out as the most sexist and (sexually) aggressive social networking site (Jane, 2017b;Mendes et al., 2018;Lewis et al., 2017). International literature has shown how Twitter is used to sexually threaten women (e.g., Frenda et al., 2019;Hardaker & McGlashan, 2016) as well as to further victimize victim-survivors of sexual violence (e.g., Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2019;Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018). In such Twitter interactions, victim-survivors are blamed for their experiences of sexual violence, and perpetrators are excused or even portrayed as the real victims. ...
... Because of the potential of hashtags to act both as metadata and interpersonal meaning-making resources, they have received broad attention from scholars from different research fields, including media studies (Sauter & Bruns, 2015), psychology (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2019) and sociology (Jelani, Rojas & David, 2017). Within linguistics, researchers have attempted to examine the categorizing, searching (Zappavigna, 2015), linguistic (Zappavigna, 2012(Zappavigna, , 2018 and pragmatic (De Cock & Pizarro Pedraza, 2018;Scott, 2015;Wikström, 2015) functions of hashtags. ...
Thesis
This thesis critically traces the linguistic resources and patterns deployed by tweeters to discuss gendered discourses and patriarchal oppression concerning sexual violence. There are two primary aims of this study: 1) to examine tweeters’ discourses and ideologies regarding sexual violence and how they contribute to the negotiation of victim-perpetrator identities, and 2) to identify the role of evaluative language in the (re)production and resistance of gendered discourses and ideologies. To do so, this thesis takes AsJ Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States as a case study. After his nomination was made public, he was accused of attempted rape by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Her allegations were followed by similar claims from two more women. The nomination became a major topic on Twitter as tweeters used different hashtags to express (dis)affiliation. Dr. Ford also became the target of verbal aggression by those who supported his nomination. However, her claims were also supported by tweeters who validated her testimony and, in turn, sparked the re-emergence of hashtag feminism. Two corpora of tweets containing the hashtags #KavanaughConfirmation and #NoKavanaughConfirmation were compiled to analyze and compare each dataset in relation to the objectives of this study. The corpora were investigated from a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach (Partington et al., 2013) which combined corpus linguistic tools with Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) (Lazar, 2005, 2018) and Appraisal Theory (2005). The findings suggest that tweeters invoked discourses relating to gender-based violence to both denounce and perpetuate rape culture and patriarchal oppression in American society. Such discourses contributed to the negotiation of the identities of victims and perpetrators, which were unstable and fluid depending on tweeters’ socio-political groups. Antifeminist and patriarchal discourses were found to contribute to the portrayal of AsJ Kavanaugh as a political victim, thus portraying Dr. Ford as a political aggressor. In contrast, discourses of veracity and feminism gave credibility to Dr. Ford’s testimony and opposed the confirmation. These discourses depicted AsJ Kavanaugh as a liar and a sexual aggressor. On the other hand, the analysis of evaluative language revealed that negative Appraisal resources predominated in both corpora to convey immoral and unethical evaluations and collective emotional distress, which further contributed to the unstable construction of victim-perpetrator identities. All in all, this thesis provides insights into tweeters’ digital practices to discuss gendered dynamics and resist/reproduce patriarchal discourses derived from rape culture. In addition, it also shows the fruitful combination of corpus linguistics methods, FCDA, and Appraisal Theory in the analysis of gender-based violence and social media data.
... Hardaker and McGlashan 2016;Mendes et al. 2018) as it has been found to be used to spread patriarchal attitudes, such as victim-blaming and slut-shaming discourses. Additionally, such discourses contribute to promoting anti-feminist discourses which victimize men and antagonize women and feminism (Idoiaga Mondragon et al. 2019;Palomino-Manjón 2022;Stubbs-Richardson et al. 2018). ...
Article
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In September 2018, American Justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during his nomination to the US Supreme Court. The sexual allegations provoked a crisis in American society concerning the rights of female American citizens and created a heated debate among X (formerly Twitter) users, who commented on the event and expressed their (dis)affiliation. Research has shown that X is one of the most sexist and abusive social media services due to the constant spread and negotiation of different discourses relating to rape culture on the platform (Mendes et al. 2018). Consequently, the objectives of this research are to examine the linguistic patterns and discourses employed by X users to denounce patriarchal oppression and negotiate the identities of the different social actors involved in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. To do so, two datasets of posts (previously known as ‘tweets’) containing the opposing hashtags #KavanaughConfirmation and #NoKavanaughConfirmation were analyzed and contrasted drawing on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis tools (i.e., keywords and concordances) (Partington et al. 2013) and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar 2005). The results revealed a high presence of keywords concerning gender and violence to construct identities of victims and perpetrators. However, not only were such identities related to sexual violence but also political and institutional violence. In addition, the analysis revealed the creation of discursive protests on X to resist patriarchal discourses and practices in American society.
... Se empleó el método Reinert usando iramuteq 7 para el análisis lexical del corpus del texto (Reinert, 1983(Reinert, , 1990. Los investigadores que han utilizado el método Reinert en el campo de las representaciones sociales (Kalampalikis, 2005;Klein & Licata, 2003;Lahlou, 1996Lahlou, , 2001 y las redes sociales (Idoiaga et al., 2019;Idoiaga et al., 2020: Reyes-Sosa et al., 2023 han demostrado la capacidad de este método para analizar información a través de las simetrías creadas entre los mundos lexicales y las representaciones compartidas. ...
Article
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Este artículo propone una aproximación multi metodológico para la Teoría de las Representaciones Sociales a un nivel de teoría y de método. A nivel teórico se propone una aproximación a la perspectiva estructural y procesual de las representaciones sociales. Además, se problematiza sobre la importancia de considerar la clase de objeto de representación (persona-objeto) previo al estudio de un objeto representacional, en este caso, el fracaso escolar. A nivel metodológico se presentan dos estudios con la finalidad de proponer y vincular formas de análisis de datos a través de los software EVOCATION e IRAMUTEQ 7 en representaciones sociales. Un estudio en que participaron 322 estudiantes (52% mujeres y 48% hombres) con una edad media de 16.5 años (DT = .84) y respondieron a un cuestionario de evocación libre de palabras. Otro estudio en que participaron 10 estudiantes (cinco mujeres y cinco hombres) con una edad media de 17 años (DT = .77) y se les aplicó una entrevista a profundidad. Los resultados muestran la importancia de realizar estudios en representaciones sociales utilizando diversas perspectivas. Así, los elementos nucleares permiten comprender la estructura del fracaso escolar a través de elementos como el apoyo económico y las consecuencias del fracaso. Los contenidos y significados permiten profundizar en la construcción del fracaso escolar. Los estudiantes presentan una perspectiva que va de lo individual a lo interpersonal. En lo individual se construye al fracaso como un auto sabotaje educativo. En el plano interpersonal el fracaso escolar es vinculado a la figura y la práctica docente.
... Obviously, supporting the cause via Twitter/X does not imply much of an effort when retweeting, although the degree of politicization can play an important role on social debate platforms like this one (Larrondo et al., 2019;Navarro & Coromina, 2020) so the value of this social support cannot be denied. SMs have led to debates in the European Parliament (Hedh, 2018;Parliament, 2018) and have forced the Spanish government to review and reform the sexual assault law, proposing one on sexual violence that introduces the concept of sexual consent in terms of "only yes means yes" (Amigo, 2021;Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2020;Redacción/Agencias, 2021) The prejudice towards certain sociodemographic groups such as immigrants is curious in itself as, in the case of "la manada", immigration as a factor that increases insecurity were higher after the peak of the SMs, indicating that cultural prejudice does not need any evidence to rear its ugly head. ...
Article
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Crimes related to sexual abuse and rape attract large social mobilizations, as happened following the assault on an 18-year-old woman at the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, Spain, by a group of men known as “la manada” (“the wolf pack” in English). Understanding how the aftermath of protests and socioeconomic factors influence the perceptions of fear of crime, safety and justice, measured as judiciary decisions, are the aims of this paper. A randomized sample collected in two periods was obtained (N=605), the first one (n1=454) performed after the judicial sentence of the case, the second (n2=151) four months later, after the social alarm had decreased. The perception of safety increased after the peak moments of the demonstrations. The trust in justice was low and fell after protesters had risen to the streets although its perception was greater among higher income earners. Hence, the perception of safety rises during social mobilizations but only improves for a short period of time whereas the effects on that of justice last for longer.
... 2 Also see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2020/12/consent-basedrape-laws-in-europe/ including a study of the dialogical relations between the feminist movement and political agents on Twitter (Larrondo et al., 2019;Núñez-Puente & Fernández Romero, 2018), and of Twitter's potential to spread social meanings attached to the case and to contribute to the active construction of change knowledge (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2019), and the relationship between digital participation and incivility (Robles et al., 2019). ...
Chapter
In this work, we explore cyberactivists’ engagement with social media through different hashtags that challenge rape culture and the perceived-to-be patriarchal Spanish legal system. To do this, we carried out ethnographic work of the hashtag landscape that emerged within the context of the heavily mediated and controversial gang-rape court case known as “the Wolf Pack” case. We identified that cyberactivists constructed an online framing of the events through hashtagging practices that addressed three salient points relevant to the case: (a) the existence and reproduction of rape culture; (b) the institutional misogyny that enables its prevalence; (c) the patriarchal justice system that fails to condemn it. A thick conversation emerged, underpinned by affective unification of those involved, resulting in a debate about the legal treatment of the rape in Spanish society, thus becoming a feminist “legal school.” We argue that by doing so, Twitter opened up a space for activists to share their knowledge, understanding, and rage about the case, thereby evincing the pedagogical effect of social media, which echoed in analog settings through the mobilization of women to take to the streets and lobby for an amendment of the Criminal Code which emerged from technical feminist circles.KeywordsSexual assaultHashtag activismCyberfeminismSpainDebate about consent
... If we focus on the virtual sphere, the accounts collected in the above sections should lead us to think that those on both extreme poles of sexism might be more active UGC creators. For example, the landmark judicial case of 'La Manada' in Spain led to a massive digital response both from feminist and anti-feminist positions (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2020). Throughout the internet, people aligned with feminist and anti-feminist perspectives, becoming more vocal on issues related to gender. ...
... An online experiment further explored that people with high socially aversive personality traits treat sexist tweets as funny and acceptable rather than rude and ignorant (Lyons et al., 2021). Mondragon et al. (2020) analyzed Twitter data on a prominent Spanish rape case to discover discourses around rape. Analyzing two separate phases of the event, they found that feminist discourses were more prevalent during the first phase when the judgment of the case was ongoing. ...
Article
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Although rape is prevalent in Bangladesh, we have limited knowledge about how the media reports rape news. This study analyzed 10,191 headlines of rape news shared on ten Bangladeshi media’s Facebook pages between 2013 and 2021. The aim was to investigate the media’s rape news-sharing behavior by exploring the frequent topics of rape news. Following a computer-assisted textual analysis of the Bangla news headlines, this study found that media outlets share rape news on social media that is more likely to contain issues related to rape victims and judicial processes of rape crime. The news headlines provide information about rape victims, indicating their age groups and relations (e.g., teenager, young lady, girl, woman, wife), along with information about judicial processes (e.g., case, arrest, complaint, remand). The analysis further explored other prevalent topics in rape news that the media emphasizes, such as the elements used in rape (e.g., the promise of love and marriage, private video), the act of raping (e.g., tying, forcing, blackmailing, confining), and the places, states, and time of rape (e.g., alone, home, field). This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of news-sharing behavior, gender-based violence, and media framing of rape issues. It also offers methodological guidance to semi-automated social media text analysis for the Bangla language.
... Recent studies show that radical activists on both sides of a divisive issue are more frequently engaging in internet political discussions, and creating their own online content (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2019;Inguanzo et al., 2021). However, the fact that radical activists are more present in online political discussions does not mean they are talking to one another. ...
Article
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In a world of polarized societies and radical voices hogging the public digital sphere, this thematic issue aims at identifying the different strategies of old and new social movements in the extremes of the political debates by focusing on the interplay between polarization, uses of the internet, and social activism. In order to disentangle these interactions, this thematic issue covers a wide range of political settings across the globe. It does so by studying: (a) how opposing activists discuss politics online and its implications for democratic theory; (b) how social media uses and online discussions foster offline protests; (c) how the media and state-led-propaganda frame disruptive and anti-government offline protests and how this situation contributes to polarization in both democratic and non-democratic regimes; and finally (d) how civil society uses digital tools to organize and mobilize around sensitive issues in non-democratic regimes.
... Recent studies show that radical activists on both sides of a divisive issue are more frequently engaging in internet political discussions, and creating their own online content (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2019;Inguanzo et al., 2021). However, the fact that radical activists are more present in online political discussions does not mean they are talking to one another. ...
Article
Full-text available
In a world of polarized societies and radical voices hogging the public digital sphere, this thematic issue aims at identifying the different strategies of old and new social movements in the extremes of the political debates by focusing on the interplay between polarization, uses of the internet, and social activism. In order to disentangle these interactions, this thematic issue covers a wide range of political settings across the globe. It does so by studying: (a) how opposing activists discuss politics online and its implications for democratic theory; (b) how social media uses and online discussions foster offline protests; (c) how the media and state-led-propaganda frame disruptive and anti-government offline protests and how this situation contributes to polarization in both democratic and non-democratic regimes; and finally (d) how civil society uses digital tools to organize and mobilize around sensitive issues in non-democratic regimes.
... The strong positive representation of feminism can be understood in relation to the current social context in Spain in which feminist movements have been greatly empowered in the last decade. As other scholars have pointed out, there have been several milestone events promoting Spanish youth's engagement with feminism, such as the great demonstrations of the feminist strikes of 8 March 2018 and 2019 (Idoiaga et al., 2021) and the large "La Manada" protests and demonstrations against the lenient sentencing of the gang rape rapists (Idoiaga et al., 2020). We should not, however, assume that feminism is positively viewed throughout Spanish society. ...
Article
The present study uses Social Representation Theory to explore students' representations of feminism with a view to informing principles for developing feminist pedagogies that can help foster egalitarian values among college students. The aim is to identify how Spanish students (n = 366) represent feminism and how these representations are shaped by participants' gender, identification with feminism, or by studying feminized or masculinized disciplines. Students from Education (n = 192), a feminized qualification, and Engineering (n = 174), a masculinized qualification, completed a free association task using the Grid Elaboration Method to collect representations of feminism. A lexical analysis was conducted using the Reinert method. The results showed that a positive representation of feminism was the broadest (75.8%), with feminist-identified students defining feminism as a struggle for freedom. Feminist women emphasized the
... Recent studies show that radical activists on both sides of a divisive issue are more frequently engaging in internet political discussions, and creating their own online content (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2019;Inguanzo et al., 2021). However, the fact that radical activists are more present in online political discussions does not mean they are talking to one another. ...
Article
Full-text available
In a world of polarized societies and radical voices hogging the public digital sphere, this thematic issue aims at identifying the different strategies of old and new social movements in the extremes of the political debates by focusing on the interplay between polarization, uses of the internet, and social activism. In order to disentangle these interactions, this thematic issue covers a wide range of political settings across the globe. It does so by studying: (a) how opposing activists discuss politics online and its implications for democratic theory; (b) how social media uses and online discussions foster offline protests; (c) how the media and state-led-propaganda frame disruptive and anti-government offline protests and how this situation contributes to polarization in both democratic and non-democratic regimes; and finally (d) how civil society uses digital tools to organize and mobilize around sensitive issues in non-democratic regimes.
... At the methodological level, the use of the Reinert method to analyze the impact of a specific hashtag is new, although it has been used previously to analyze different social movements or cases of abuse (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2020a, 2020b. In this regard we believe that it is an interesting tool as it allows analyzing a large amount of data automatically, but at the same time it makes it possible to give space to the narrative of the Tweets. ...
Article
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Background Incest remains one of the great taboos of contemporary society. Secrecy is also crucial in this type of sexual abuse against children, and many victims do not disclose their testimony. This situation changed, when in France in mid-January 2021, the #MeTooIncest movement emerged, and thousands of victims began to reveal the abuse they had suffered as children. Objective To analyze the discourse on Twitter regarding this hashtag to understand how incest abuse has been dealt with through social media debate. In so doing, we expected to identify the main elements that could explain how people have symbolically constructed and engaged with childhood sexual abuse in general and with incest abuse in particular. Participants and setting In total, 20,556 tweets with the hashtag #MeTooIncest written in French were selected by streaming API from January 14 to February 15, 2021. Methods Their content was analyzed by lexical analysis using Iramuteq software (Reinert method). Results Victims found a space for disclosure in this movement, where they felt believed, protected, and supported. This movement also embraced the victims of celebrity abusers, denouncing them and calling for their exclusion from public life. Likewise, at the societal level, this movement pushed for changes in public policies to protect children and emphasized the importance of breaking the public silence or secrecy about incest abuse. Conclusions This wave of testimonies represents a turning point as it has broken the law of silence and allowed the victims to exist in the media space without being questioned.
... If we focus on the virtual sphere, the accounts collected in the above sections should lead us to think that those on both extreme poles of sexism might be more active UGC creators. For example, the landmark judicial case of 'La Manada' in Spain led to a massive digital response both from feminist and anti-feminist positions (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2020). Throughout the internet, people aligned with feminist and anti-feminist perspectives, becoming more vocal on issues related to gender. ...
Article
Full-text available
Prior research highlights substantial beneficial effects of political user-generated content (UGC) in society, such as diversifying political viewpoints, mobilizing the electorate, and fostering citizens’ civic engagement. However, important user asymmetries exist when creating political content. Gender, age, media uses, and skills gaps have been identified as key variables predicting UGC. This study addressed the political UGC gender gap from a political perspective. We build on previous theory about feminist media studies, political polarization, and cultural backlash theory to disentangle whether hostile sexism predicts UGC creation. Drawing on online survey data from four well-established democracies, we find that those individuals holding hostile sexist views are more likely to generate political content online. Further implications for democracy and the role of women in the digital sphere are discussed.
... Moreover, in 2016, there was a turning point with regard to knowledge about MPR, and media coverage on this type of attack, due to a sexual offence that occurred on 7 July 2016, in the Spanish city of Pamplona. The sexual assault that took place caused an overwhelming response from the general population, generating a multitude of social, political and legal discussions (Fernández, 2018) and having great legal repercussions (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2020). After this event, the rate of multiple-perpetrator sexual offences reported between July 2016 and May 2019 represented 5.7% of all sex offences (Cereceda Fernández-Oruña et al., 2017). ...
... This discourse, clearly feminist and particularly manifest in class four, focuses on the patriarchal society that legitimizes image-based abuse (Eikren & Ingram-Waters, 2016;Lageson et al., 2019;McGlynn & Rackley, 2016;McGlynn et al., 2017) and was echoed significantly in this "Iveco case". However, it is also true that this must be framed within the sociohistorical context, since in Spain there has been an important feminist rise in recent years where, for example, two general feminist strikes have taken place and where the rape case of "La Manada" (gang rape recorded and disseminated in a WhatsApp group) had sensitized the public against all kinds of violence against women (Campillo, 2018;Idoiaga, et al., 2019). ...
Article
The instance of image-based abuse that ended in the victim’s suicide, known as the “Iveco case,” had an unprecedented social impact in Spain in 2019. This case provoked a great social reaction and became particularly viral on social networks such as Twitter. The present research investigates how this case has been dealt with through Twitter discourse. In particular, this study aimed to identify the main elements that could explain how people engaged with the problem of nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit images in general, and with this case in particular. In total, 1,895 tweets with the word “Iveco” written in Spain were selected by streaming API, and their content was analyzed by lexical analysis using Iramuteq software (Reinert method). This software carries out an automatic lexical classification cluster analysis that groups the most significant words and text segments according to their co-occurrence. The results revealed that, on Twitter, it was stressed that the victim was a married woman with children who had practiced sexting. However, in response to this initial description, many voices also emerged that labelled this image-based abuse as gender-based online violence. Criticism was aimed at both the passivity of the company, and the attitude of hundreds of thousands of people who share the sexting video by WhatsApp groups without permission. Consequently, several feminist mobilizations emerged, framing this case within a sexist and patriarchal society and asking for accountability. However, in contrast, countermovements such as the #NotAllMen also emerged.
Article
The social imaginary that legitimizes sexual violence is continuously reinforced by discourses that are deployed in the aftermath of physical attacks. These, in turn, nourish a specific type of collective memory from which clear social identities emerge. This article identifies the textual trajectories of social meanings associated with sexual violence and their discursive expressions in media, legal, and political discourses. The examples provided here are related to the Spanish “wolf pack case” and its social and political consequences. It concludes that the case not only generated a conceptual battle about violence but also a mnemonic dispute related to newly interpellated subjectivities.
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Introduction Although pornography has existed throughout human history, contemporary society finds itself immersed in a digital era that significantly facilitates its accessibility. This heightened ease of access particularly affects the perceptions and practices of sexuality among youngsters. In this context, the present study aimed to explore the representations of pornography among education students. Methods A total of 276 university students participated by completing a free association exercise based on the grid elaboration method (GEM). Results Future educators distance themselves from pornography, perceiving it as a medium that projects an unrealistic portrayal of reality. Moreover, participants also linked pornography to situations of violence, exploitation, and denigration of women. However, students also show a direct relationship with pornography, using it to both masturbate and learn about sex, particularly in the case of men. Educational students also recognize the influence of pornography on their own sexual life and knowledge. Finally, they report that pornography produces mixed emotions such as pleasure, disgust, fear, and guilt. Conclusions and Policy Implications This study highlights the urgent need to equip future education professionals with the necessary tools for reflective engagement with pornography and its consumption, paving the way for a more thoughtful and informed approach to educating on this subject.
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Los capítulos de este libro abordan distintos aspectos de la «cultura digital» entendida como un entorno que actúa sobre nuestra forma de estar juntos, nuestros vínculos sociales y nuestras sociabilidades —en suma, nuestra forma de vivir. La mediación de las interacciones, la difusión de contenido digital, las formas de violencia en línea, la apropiación de la escritura, la organización política en las redes sociales, la transmisión y socialización son algunos de los temas abordados en estas páginas. Y es que las Nuevas Tecnologías y las redes sociodigitales son portadoras de una revolución «mediológica» y «epistémica». Mediológica, porque la materialidad de la cultura se transforma, se refunde en el crisol técnico de la digitalización. Textos, imágenes, videos y sonidos se convierten en binary units. Comúnmente hablamos de «multimedia», pero de hecho deberíamos hablar de «uni-media», ¡ya que la tecnología es única! Y permite, en soportes diferenciados, recibir contenidos culturales previamente separados por una valla mediática hermética. Pero la revolución también es epistémica, porque las TIC nos hacen pensar y sentir diferente, «consumir» y producir cultura diferente, «estar con», hacer sociedad diferente. Contribuir a la reflexión sobre las dinámicas y desafíos de nuestras sociedades digitales desde las Ciencias Sociales ha sido el objetivo de este trabajo colectivo.
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This research investigates the conceptions of primary and secondary feminist teachers about how to teach women's history in the north of Spain. Eighty-eight teachers were asked to describe a teaching proposal for implementing women's history in their classrooms, and the content was analysed using the Reinert method. Our findings reveal a set of issues that may be of interest to address in history classes, as well as some ways in which teachers could introduce women's history in their lessons. We conclude that only teachers who defined themselves as absolutely or very feminist tend to offer teaching proposals with a critical and transformative viewpoint, following an optimal vision of women's history without any androcentric bias.
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Este artículo explora una serie de acciones reaccionarias digitales antifeministas conducidas por grupos misóginos, xenófobos, radicales antifeministas y/o partidos populistas de extrema derecha. Las principales estrategias de fascismo digital incluyen acciones de desinformación, como la manipulación de datos o la propagación de bulos sobre cuestiones de género y personajes públicos femeninos; acciones que generan un clima hostil y de confrontación, como el troleo en los debates de forma intencional, la introducción de discursos polarizados o el cultivo de discursos de odio en foros misóginos cuasi cerrados; acciones de acoso cibernético o acoso de género online, como insultos y amenazas dirigidos contra las mujeres o ataques contra webs, perfiles o servidores que producen contenido feminista, entre otras. Finalmente, se recogen una serie de iniciativas y estrategias promovidas por colectivos e instituciones para frenar el avance del fascismo digital y promover una Internet segura y libre para todas.
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Using the lens of medium theory, this content analysis explored the framing of the Steubenville rape case in newspapers and blogs before, during and immediately following the trial. Our findings indicate newspapers focused on social media’s role in documenting the rape and the trial of the two assailants. Blog posts, on the other hand, focused on rape victims’ rights and social media’s role in bringing the case to justice. Of the 78 newspaper articles and blog posts coded, medium type did not make a significant difference in the framing of perpetrators and the actual act of rape. However, there was a significant difference in how the media types framed the case in general. This is a noteworthy finding, as it appears that newspapers were colorblind in their coverage and not as prone to use race frames as indicated in previous studies. Conversely, blog posts offered a platform for discussing issues that were omitted in mainstream media such as women’s rights, rape myths and the need for rape awareness/prevention programs for parents and youth.
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Misogyny Online explores the worldwide phenomenon of gendered cyberhate as a significant discourse which has been overlooked and marginalised. The rapid growth of the internet has led to numerous opportunities and benefits; however, the architecture of the cybersphere offers users unprecedented opportunities to engage in hate speech. This book weaves together data and theory from multiple disciplines. Its data sources include a meticulously archived collection of cyberhate that I received over the course of two decades working as a journalist – has already been recognised by scholars and public figures as providing a powerful, original, and timely statement about the rapidly escalating international gendered cyberhate problem and its harms. It has also been commended for offering a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of emerging communication technologies, contemporary manifestations of hate speech, digital citizenship, internet governance, and digital divides.
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The present study assessed how individuals used the #NotOkay hashtag on Twitter to respond to Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women by their genitals. We analyzed 652 tweets which included commentary about the hashtag. Three main themes emerged: (a) users’ acknowledgment and condemnation of rape culture, (b) Donald Trump and the national state of sexual assault, and (c) engaging men and boys to end violence against women. Our findings emphasize that powerful political leaders can be salient symbols of rape culture, and Twitter is used as a public platform to organize and challenge problematic social discourse and call for action/change.
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Seventy-four community members (46 women, 28 men) read vignettes describing a plea bargain in a mock sexual assault case. We employed a within-participant design and manipulated rape victim age (6- vs. 26-year-old), type of plea bargain agreement (reduced prison sentence vs. only probation), and reason for plea bargain (save victim from reliving a traumatic experience vs. save time in court). Participants answered questions about the plea bargain agreement (e.g., was justice served). The results showed less support of plea bargaining when it (a) involved a child, (b) involved only probation, and (c) when the rationale for the plea bargain was to save time. Significant moderation revealed that plea deals involving probation in 6-year-old child cases were perceived most negatively. The results are discussed in terms of procedural justice theory in sexual assault cases, and how perceptions of the general public impact the use of plea bargaining as a legal tool.
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Social media play a significant role in the lives of many, particularly teenagers. For heavy users of social media, great significance is attributed to the messages posted in the virtual world. In the aftermath of sexual assault, victims, offenders, friends, family, the community, and virtual strangers have the ability to weigh in on the assault. Little research has explored these societal reactions on social media. The current exploratory, qualitative study examines social media responses to four highly publicized cases of teenage sexual assault: Daisy Coleman, Jane Doe, Audrie Pott, and Jada. Five major themes were identified via thematic analysis, including victim blaming/shaming, offender support, family/survivor utilization, victim support, and offender blaming. A thematic map, definitions, and examples of these themes are provided within. Consistent with commonly held rape myth beliefs, victim blaming/shaming appeared as the most common reaction on social media, with a large parallel response of offender support. Victim support emerged as a popular theme only after family members and the survivor spoke out, facts of the rape emerged, and media attention grew. The theme of offender blame was the most difficult to find amid the messages targeting the victim. The discussion highlights the significance of major trends, relationships among themes, and the potential repercussions of such social media presentations. Additional recommendations for education on the reality of sexual assault and awareness of healthy and responsible social media usage are disclosed.
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Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy,” which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, has become the dominant arena for the communication of men’s rights in Western culture. This article identifies the key categories and features of the manosphere and subsequently seeks to theorize the masculinities that characterize this discursive space. The analysis reveals that, while there are some continuities with older variants of antifeminism, many of these new toxic assemblages appear to complicate the orthodox alignment of power and dominance with hegemonic masculinity by operationalizing tropes of victimhood, “beta masculinity,” and involuntary celibacy (incels). These new hybrid masculinities provoke important questions about the different functioning of male hegemony off- and online and indicate that the technological affordances of social media are especially well suited to the amplification of new articulations of aggrieved manhood.
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Introduction to Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies entitled Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: Researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence.
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This paper examines the ways in which girls and women are using digital media platforms to challenge the rape culture they experience in their everyday lives; including street harassment, sexual assault, and the policing of the body and clothing in school settings. Focusing on three international cases, including the anti-street harassment site Hollaback!, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, and interviews with teenage Twitter activists, the paper asks: What experiences of harassment, misogyny and rape culture are girls and women responding to? How are girls and women using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? And, why are girls and women choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in such a way? Employing an approach that includes ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis, discursive textual analysis, and affect theories, we detail a range of ways that women and girls are using social media platforms to speak about, and thus make visible, experiences of rape culture. We argue that this digital mediation enables new connections previously unavailable to girls and women, allowing them to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others.
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Social media sites, according to Carrie A. Rentschler, can become both “aggregators of online misogyny” as well as key spaces for feminist education and activism. They are spaces where “rape culture,” in particular, is both performed and resisted, and where a feminist counterpublic can be formed (Michael Salter 201340. Salter, Michael. 2013. “Justice and Revenge in Online Counter-Publics: Emerging Responses to Sexual Violence in the Age of Social Media.” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 9 (3): 225–242.View all references). In this New Zealand study, we interviewed seventeen young people who were critical of rape culture about their exposure and responses to it on social media and beyond. Participants described a “matrix of sexism” in which elements of rape culture formed a taken-for-granted backdrop to their everyday lives. They readily discussed examples they had witnessed, including victim-blaming, “slut-shaming,” rape jokes, the celebration of male sexual conquest, and demeaning sexualized representations of women. While participants described this material as distressing, they also described how online spaces offered inspiration, education, and solidarity that legitimated their discomfort with rape culture. Social media provided safe spaces that served as a buffer against the negative effects of sexism, and allowed participation in a feminist counterpublic that directly contests rape culture.
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This article reports on research funded by the National Union of Students, which explored women students’ experiences of ‘lad culture’ through focus groups and interviews. We found that although laddism is only one of various potential masculinities, for our participants it dominated the social and sexual spheres of university life in problematic ways. However, their objections to laddish behaviours did not support contemporary models of ‘sexual panic’, even while oppugning the more simplistic celebrations of young women’s empowerment which have been observed in debates about sexualization. We argue that in their ability to reject ‘lad culture’, our respondents expressed a form of agency which is often invisibilized in sexualization discussions and which could be harnessed to tackle some of the issues we uncovered.
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Young feminists use social media in order to respond to rape culture and to hold accountable the purveyors of its practices and ways of thinking when mainstream news media, police and school authorities do not. This article analyzes how social networks identified with young feminists take shape via social media responses to sexual violence, and how those networks are organized around the conceptual framework of rape culture. Drawing on the concept of response-ability, the article analyzes how recent social media responses to rape culture evidence the affective and technocultural nature of current feminist network building and the ways this online criticism re-imagines the position of feminist witnesses to rape culture.
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Some aspects of the ontogenesis of social representations are discusssed through a considera- tion of specific issues raised by empirical research on the development of representations of gender through children's first year of schooling. A comparison with Vygotsky's general law of cultural development emphasises the importance of considering social identities as structures mediating between the interpsychological and the intrapsychological in individual development. The relationship of social identities to social representations is further explored, in particular through the introduction of a notion of positioning. A second theme is the examination of the figurative nucleus of children's representations of gender, in which the metaphor of sexual reproduction provides the central image. A key proposition of genetic theories is the notion that to understand something one needs to know how it is constructed. In considering social representations from this point of view I want to focus on their ontogenesis, that is the process through which children's thinking, acting and feeling come to be structured in terms of the social representations of their community. In short, how the child becomes a competent social actor. The child, of course, is born into a world already structured by social representations. Indeed, in so far as the objectification of social representations constitutes realities, these are the realities of the human world into which the child is born. Yet, the circulation of represen- tations around the child does not lead to them being either simply impressed upon the child, or simply appropriated by the child. Rather, their acquisition is the outcome of a process of development, and a focus on this process can in turn illustrate something about the structure of social representations themselves. In my own work with Barbara Lloyd (Lloyd and Duveen, 1992) I have been concerned with the development of social representations of gender, and I shall take this as my example. In doing so I am limiting the generality of the argument in an important way. For social representations of gender carry with them an imperative obligation that individuals construct a corresponding social identity (Duveen and Lloyd, 1990). We must all develop gender identities as we grow up if we are to become competent social actors -this does not mean, as we shall see, that we all need to construct the same identities, only that there is an obligation to construct an identity. In this gender is distinct from other social representations, where the identity structure is not imperative, but contractual. There is no imperative obliging us to become psychoanalysts, for example, but if we choose to do so then we must contract into a particular representational field (from this point of view the disputes occasioned by Jeffrey Masson's writings can be viewed as contractual disputes).
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Social representation theory is scrutinized for its capacity to ask new questions and to give new answers to social psychological problems. Its social constructionist implications and relationship to brute facts are investigated. It is shown that social representations result from collective symbolic coping with 'brute' facts. Consequently representations create the domesticated world of social objects which implies considering activity as part of a representation. Culture change in modern societies is shown to produce 'cognitive polyphasia' by adding alternative representations to existing ones instead of replacing them.
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In recent years, both the media and the government in the UK have been increasingly preoccupied with the problem of rape involving alcohol. For example, in order to increase low conviction rates, the government proposed, yet eventually rejected, reforms equating drunkenness with incapacity to consent to sexual intercourse. Research evidence, for example studies by Benedict (1992) or Finch and Munro (2005, 2007), suggests that conviction rates are influenced by an interplay of cultural discourses and legal arrangements. This article uses discourse analysis to identify and critically examine the major discourses which are produced around rape involving alcohol in one major daily newspaper, the Daily Mail. This conservative paper disapproves of women's binge drinking and is unsympathetic to victims of rape involving alcohol. The analysis indicates that its discourses deprecate and delegitimise victims by a) reinvigorating and refashioning old rape myths, b) re-gendering rape involving alcohol as a problem of female drinking rather than male sexual violence, and c) masquerading women's responsibilities and risks as rights. These findings open up the possibility for research into the popularity of these discourses across contemporary culture and their impact on cultural consumers, including those involved in legal decision-making processes.
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When individuals face an emotional upheaval, they naturally talk and think about it. If they are unable to talk with others but continue to think about the event, they are at greater risk for a variety of psychological and health problems. Drawing on survey data gathered from San Francisco residents after the Loma Prieta Earthquake and from Dallas residents during and after the Persian Gulf War, we found evidence to support a social stage model of coping. Immediately after an upheaval, individuals openly talk and think about the event for approximately two weeks. Following this emergency stage, individuals progress into an inhibition stage wherein they stop talking about the upheaval but continue thinking about it for approximately six weeks. Certain indicators of distress, such as hostility and dreaming, peak during the inhibition phase. After this time, people enter an adaptation phase wherein they neither talk nor think about the upheaval. Implications for theory and interventions for both broad-scale collective upheavals as well as personal traumas are discussed.
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Rape myths, which are present at both the individual and institutional/societal levels, are one way in which sexual violence has been sustained and justified throughout history. In light of an increasing accumulation of rape myth research across a variety of disciplines, this paper proposes to use a feminist lens to provide an overview of the historical origins of rape myths, to document the current manifestations of these myths in American society, and to summarize the current body of research literature. We focus on the history of several specific rape myths (i.e., “husbands cannot rape their wives,” “women enjoy rape,” “women ask to be raped,” and “women lie about being raped”) and how these particular myths permeate current legal, religious, and media institutions (despite their falsehood). The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and describes how existing evidence could be used to aid in eradicating rape myths at both the individual and institutional levels. KeywordsRape myths–Rape–Sexual assault–Review–History
Book
In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.
Article
At the end of Women’s History Month 2017, social media sites were filled with posts using the hashtag #MuslimWomensDay. Muslim women have often been framed in media as either victims of a violent faith and its believers or enablers of that violence, rarely are they given the space to tell their own stories. The #MuslimWomensDay hashtag was designed to draw attention to the stories and experiences of Muslim women. This qualitative textual analysis of approximately 300 tweets explores how Twitter users deployed the #MuslimWomensDay hashtag in their posts in order to understand the story users told of what it means to be a Muslim woman as well as what narratives of Islam they had to fight against.
Book
Mediating Misogyny is a collection of original academic essays that foregrounds the intersection of gender, technology, and media. Framed and informed by feminist theory, the book offers empirical research and nuanced theoretical analysis about the gender-based harassment women experience both online and offline. The contributors of this volume provide information on the ways feminist activists are using digital tools to combat harassment, raise awareness, and organize for social and political change across the globe. Lastly, the book provides practical resources and tips to help students, educators, institutions, and researchers stop online harassment.
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Social media has become an important aspect of contemporary culture and cultural change; it has accordingly become a valuable resource for informing feminist theory. Social media is a digitized social reality that lends itself to analysis and research. This study examines rape culture in the widely used social media platform, Twitter. We collected tweets from four days surrounding the Torrington and Steubenville Rape Trials and the Rehtaeh Parson’s story of rape, victimization, and suicide. Using qualitative content analysis, we identified three themes related to rape culture: (1) the virgin–whore binary and the just world, (2) sharing information on the sexual assault cases as subnews, and (3) rape myth debunking to support victims. Additional analysis indicated that Twitter users who engaged in victim blaming were more likely to be retweeted and have more followers than Twitter users who engaged in tweeting victim support content. The research demonstrates that rape culture is an aspect of social media and that data about rape culture can be readily accessed and studied. It also suggests that in future research, social media can be used to study how individuals and groups who are exhibiting rape culture interact with others who are engaged in victim support.
Article
Previous research has shown that rape myths are often found in the media reporting of sexual assault. These studies have utilized national newspapers, magazines and television coverage of sexual assault in their examination of sexual assault, very often using celebrity cases as a focal point of the research. In the current study, a content analysis, we utilized one local newspaper from each of the nine geographical regions designated by the Census Bureau to examine how local media report on sexual assault. We included articles from a one-year time period from January 2011 to January 2012, culminating in a total sample of 386 articles. We examined descriptive statistics and conducted a series of chi-square analyses. Initially, we found very little evidence of direct rape myth reporting by local newspapers, though a further analysis revealed that local media’s reporting on sexual assault might indirectly reinforce some of the commonly known rape myths.
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This study addresses the need for more research on news media representations of sexual assault within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It focuses on the discursive links between victim-blaming in mainstream news coverage, on the one hand, and a neoliberal ideology that backgrounds structural issues while implicitly emphasizing an ethic of ‘personal responsibility’ for risk-management, on the other. The existing research in feminist media studies points to the way that media misrepresent gendered crime by individualizing cases and focusing on victim behaviour rather than connecting sexual assault to systemic social issues based on power imbalance. Using coverage of the highly publicized 2013 Steubenville, Ohio rape as a case study, this article builds on existing research by performing a systematized, grammar-based analysis of transitivity and agency in news reports and demonstrating their often subtle connection with neoliberal notions of victimization and risk that align with the interests of perpetrators, especially when they are privileged social actors (in the Steubenville case and many other recent cases in the U.S., revenue-securing male athletes) while placing the onus on victims, whose agency is used to imply blame.
Article
Over recent years, young feminist activism has assumed prominence in mainstream media where news headlines herald the efforts of schoolgirls in fighting sexism, sexual violence and inequity. Less visible in the public eye, girls' activism plays out in social media where they can speak out about gender based injustices experienced and witnessed. Yet we know relatively little about this significant social moment wherein an increasing visibility of young feminism cohabits a stubbornly persistent postfeminist culture. Acknowledging the hiatus, this paper draws on a qualitative project with teenage feminists to explore how girls are using and producing digital feminist media, what it means for them to do so, and how their online practice connects with their offline feminism. Using a feminist poststructuralist approach, analyses identified three key constructions of digital media as a tool for feminist practice: online feminism as precarious and as knowledge-sharing; and feminism as 'doing something' on/offline. Discussing these findings, I argue that there is marked continuity between girls' practices in 'safe' digital spaces and feminisms practiced in other historical and geographical locations. But crucially, and perhaps distinctly, digital media are a key tool to connect girls with feminism and with other feminists in local and global contexts.
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This book examines how digital communications technologies have transformed modern societies, with profound effects both for everyday life, and for everyday crimes. Sexual violence, which is recognized globally as a significant human rights problem, has likewise changed in the digital age. Through an investigation into our increasingly and ever-normalised digital lives, this study analyses the rise of technology-facilitated sexual assault, ‘revenge pornography’, online sexual harassment and gender-based hate speech. Drawing on ground-breaking research into the nature and extent of technology-facilitated forms of sexual violence and harassment, the authors explore the reach of these harms, the experiences of victims, the views of service providers and law enforcement bodies, as well as the implications for law, justice and resistance. Sexual Violence in a Digital Age is compelling reading for scholars, activists, and policymakers who seek to understand how technology is implicated in sexual violence, and what needs to be done to address sexual violence in a digital age.
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The idea that women lie about rape is a long standing rape myth with little or no supporting evidence. Previous research has demonstrated a belief in high levels of false allegations among police officers, despite no evidence to suggest rape is falsely reported more than other crimes. This has implications for complainants’ willingness to report sexual violations, for the treatment of complainants within the justice system, and wider societal understandings about what constitutes rape. The data that informs this paper comes from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study that focussed on rape attrition and the institutional response to rape. Forty in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with serving police officers in a UK force who regularly deal with reported cases of rape, and explored perceptions, practices and processes around rape. The research found police officers’ estimate of false allegations varies widely from 5 to 90%. The paper will discuss how police officers make judgements about perceived veracity of complainants in rape cases. This will demonstrate that whilst significant progress has been made in how police officers and police forces respond to rape, gender stereotypes about women as deceitful, vengeful and ultimately regretful of sexual encounters, continue to pervade the thinking of some officers. It will show that police officers differentiate between ‘types’ of reports they consider to be false, and operate with a notional ‘hierarchy’ of presumed false allegations that ranges from vengeful/malicious to mistaken/confused, with a corresponding reducing level of culpability attributed to women for the supposedly false allegation. It concludes that this serves to reinforce a culture that both supports and reproduces gender inequality and its manifestation in the form of sexual violence, and that intervention, training and institutional and policy frameworks are not wholly successful in addressing sexual violence in this context.
Book
SlutWalk explores representations of the global anti-rape movement of the same name, in mainstream news and feminist blogs around the world. It reveals strategies and practices used to adapt the movement to suit local cultures and contexts and explores how social media organized, theorized and publicized this contemporary feminist campaign.
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#BringBackOurGirls shows the potential that cyber-communities have for setting the agenda for mainstream media sources around issues that are life-changing for women and girls around the world. The article examines the ways that social media communities sustained the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, bridging online and offline communities to form a united movement. The analysis is contextualized within the online community-organizing framework of Twitter Topic Networks, as theorized in a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project. This essay studies the evolution of #BringBackOurGirls to analyze the ways that online communities can educate, organize, and mobilize publics.
Book
American monetary policy is formulated by the Federal Reserve and overseen by Congress. Both policy making and oversight are deliberative processes, although the effect of this deliberation has been difficult to quantify. In this book, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey provides a systematic examination of deliberation on monetary policy from 1976 to 2008 by the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) and House and Senate banking committees. Her innovative account employs automated textual analysis software to study the verbatim transcripts of FOMC meetings and congressional hearings; these empirical data are supplemented and supported by in-depth interviews with participants in these deliberations. The automated textual analysis measures the characteristic words, phrases, and arguments of committee members; the interviews offer a way to gauge the extent to which the empirical findings accord with the participants’ personal experiences. Analyzing why and under what conditions deliberation matters for monetary policy, the author identifies several strategies of persuasion used by FOMC members, including Paul Volcker’s emphasis on policy credibility and efforts to influence economic expectations. Members of Congress, however, constrained by political considerations, show a relative passivity on the details of monetary policy. .
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L'auteur est Max Reinert , et non A. Reinert comme indiqué par erreur sur l'article publié
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The 2013 Steubenville, Ohio, rape case featured a sadly familiar story of juvenile acquaintance rape involving star football players; what captured national interest in the case, however, was how the rapists and peer witnesses alike captured video and photos of the sexual assault and disseminated them swiftly and publicly via social media sites. This qualitative textual analysis utilizes framing theory to explore how national news coverage framed new media technology in relation to the Steubenville rape case, particularly how technology was framed as witness, galvanizer, and threat during the rape and its aftermath. Implications of these frames, as well as a lack of broader sexual assault context in the media coverage, are considered.
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This article investigates the renewed feminist politics that emerge from the interface of digital platforms and activism today, examining the role of digital media in affecting the particular ways that contemporary feminist protests make meaning and are understood transnationally, nationally, and locally. I consider the political investments of digital feminisms in the context of what Angela McRobbie has termed the “undoing of feminism” in neoliberal societies, where discourses of choice, empowerment, and individualism have made feminism seem both second nature and unnecessary. Within this context, I describe a range of recent feminist protest actions that are in a sense redoing feminism for a neoliberal age. A key component of this redoing is the way recent protest actions play out central tensions within historical and contemporary feminist discourse; crucial here is the interrelationship between body politics experienced locally and feminist actions whose efficacy relies on their translocal and transnational articulation. My discussion focuses on three case studies: SlutWalk Berlin, Peaches’ “Free Pussy Riot!” video, and the Twitter campaigns #Aufschrei and #YesAllWomen. My analysis ultimately calls attention to the precarity of digital feminisms, which reflect both the oppressive nature of neoliberalism and the possibilities it offers for new subjectivities and social formations.
Article
In March 2011, The New York Times reported the serial gang rape of a schoolgirl in the small town of Cleveland, Texas. Responses to the story were swift and damning: bloggers and commentators quickly identified the patriarchal and victim-blaming aspects of The Times' coverage, resulting in an influential petition and an apology from The Times. This study employs critical textual analysis to interrogate the critical responses to The Times story. The analysis reveals that commentators recognized misogynist bias in The Times' reporter's use of sources and quotes, the lexical structures in the text, and the strategic elision of race as a “present absence” in the news article. This analysis concludes that in channeling feminist conceptual tropes, the bloggers and commentators engaged in feminist praxis, raising awareness of patriarchal frames for sexual violence as well as galvanizing progressive action. But the study also points to a continued need for vigilance and feminist activism around sexual violence and child abuse.
Article
Social movement theorists have developed several concepts to explain the role of social networking in maintaining social movements. This is particularly relevant for periods when levels of public activism are low due to backlash, hostile social contexts and structural uncertainties. As part of my study of the women's movement online and feminist blog networks in Australia, I provide a review of several of these concepts, interrogating their applicability to the study of online communities. This paper explores the relevance of the social movement theory concepts of submerged networks, abeyance structures and the related idea of counterpublics for the study of feminist blog networks. In 2009, the radio station Triple J's ‘Hottest 100 of All Time’ poll featured no solo women artists, and women played on few tracks. In response to this, several strands of discourse developed in the Australian feminist blogosphere identifying ways that the history of rock music excludes or erases women. Activists developed a cross-platform poll on Twitter, Facebook and email, and promoted it through blogs and Twitter, to counter the ‘Hottest 100 Men’ with a ‘Hottest 100 Women’. This paper shows the ways these women have used blogging networks to challenge mainstream discourses and generate new ones.
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Social media are increasingly being used as an information source, including information related to risks and crises. The current study examines how pieces of information available in social media impact perceptions of source credibility. Specifically, participants in the study were asked to view 1 of 3 mock Twitter.com pages that varied the recency with which tweets were posted and then to report on their perceived source credibility of the page owner. Data indicate that recency of tweets impacts source credibility; however, this relationship is mediated by cognitive elaboration. These data suggest many implications for theory and application, both in computer-mediated communication and crisis communication. These implications are discussed, along with limitations of the current study and directions for future research.
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This article presents the first steps towards a sociological understanding of emergent social media. This article uses Twitter, the most popular social media website, as its focus. Recently, the social media site has been prominently associated with social movements in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. Rather than rush to breathlessly describe its novel role in shaping contemporary social movements, this article takes a step back and considers Twitter in historical and broad sociological terms. This article is not intended to provide empirical evidence or a fully formed theoretical understanding of Twitter, but rather to provide a selected literature review and a set of directions for sociologists. The article makes connections specifically to Erving Goffman’s interactionist work, not only to make the claim that some existing sociological theory can be used to think critically about Twitter, but also to provide some initial thoughts on how such theoretical innovations can be developed.
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Much of the news media’s coverage of sexual violence perpetuates myths and stereotypes about rape, rapists and rape victims (Burt, 1980). This is troubling, as the news media shapes public opinion about rape (Soothill, 1991) and can affect policy-making, not to mention the running of the legal system itself (Emmers-Sommer et al., 2006: 314). The news media frequently portray rapists using monster imagery (Barnett, 2008; Mason and Monckton-Smith, 2008; Soothill et al., 1990), their victims classed either as ‘virgins’ attacked by these so-called ‘monsters’ or instead as promiscuous women who invited the rape (Benedict, 1992). These depictions can impact upon public opinion as the more frequently rape myths are used, the more accessible they become. This can be harmful to rape victims when individuals who subscribe to these myths are involved in the criminal justice system (Franiuk et al., 2008: 304–305). Through a lexical analysis of the newspaper coverage surrounding three news events gathered from three LexisNexis searches, this article assesses the use of rape myths within the British and American news media’s reporting of such violence.
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Moscovici, S. (1984). The phenomenon of social representations. In R. Farr & S. Moscovici (Eds.), Social representations (pp. 3-69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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ALCESTE - A Methodology of Textual Data Analysis and an Application: Aurélia by Gérard de Nerval. Beginning with a cross-tabulation with different all sentence fragments in rows and a selected vocabulary in columns for a specific corpus, the author presents: the methodology, including principle concepts and objectives of this form of analysis; the technique, the ALCESTE computer program of automatic classification based on resemblance or dissimilarity: and an application, the analysis of Gérard de Nerval's text Aurélia. The analysis distinguishes three types of fragments which are described and analyzed further.
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This article explores the use of new technologies and the internet in the creation of new relational spaces, or online collectives, that have arisen in Spanish online feminist praxis as an activist proposal in the particular sphere of the fight against violence against women. Its main objective is to provide an overview of some of the diverse women's communities online in Spain that are using the internet for issues of activism in relation to the fight against violence against women. This article aims to show the differences in how these collectives were created, and how they define Spanish cyberactivist praxis from different practice-based positions. It argues that these online collectives work to preserve a sense of a project of female agency in two ways: they can serve both as a concrete cyberactivist claim that strengthens political action offline, and as a conceptualization of the broad and independent feminist positions that make up online feminist praxis.