The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication. The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at (...) the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies ; an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research. Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels. (shrink)

For the past thirty years, Critical Discourse Studies has been consolidating as a form of linguistically-oriented, critical social research which is characterized by a deep interest in actual social issues and forms of inequality, such as racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and sexism, both in terms of the asymmetries between participants in discourse events and their unequal capacity to control how texts are produced, distributed and consumed. In parallel, since its coinage in Kimberlé Crenshaw's African American feminist critique of race and sex (...) discrimination, intersectionality has been increasingly taken up on a global scale by scholars and practitioners alike, becoming a major feminist way of conceptualizing the relation between several forms of discrimination and oppression, to be analysed as simultaneous and multiplicative experiences. This Special Issue aims to enquire into the potential convergence between the critical discursive and intersectional approaches as theory, method and practice for the exploration of the crossroads of inequalities and oppression. This may contribute to the development of a critical research framework that enables the acknowledgment of the profound ways in which discursively, institutionally and/or structurally constructed sociocultural categorizations interact and produce different kinds of societal inequalities and unjust social relations. These, in turn, can be analysed in terms of the mutual and intertwined processes of resistance and transformation that arise out of them. Bringing together diverse contributions with a shared critical discursive and intersectional outlook, this Special Issue hopes to offer new theoretical and methodological insights for thinking through diversity in the light of present and future dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and inequality. The six contributions operationalize the intersectional approach as theory, method and/or practice and incorporate it with a CDS perspective, providing a flavour of what a critical and intersectional discursive engagement with different and dynamic identity and power configurations on a global scale can achieve. (shrink)

On June 29, 2019, Carola Rackete docked the rescue ship Sea-Watch 3 on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, in defiance of a ban imposed by Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. The migrants rescued by the Sea-Watch 3 had been blocked at sea for the previous two weeks, making it to international headlines and sparking a heated debate around sovereignty and humanitarianism in the face of the European migration crisis. On her arrival, Rackete was arrested for refusing to obey a military (...) vessel and aiding illegal immigration.This paper investigates social media and international news discourses around the Sea-Watch 3 docking, to be regarded as a critical incident capable of catalysing attention and generating a significant media resonance. Results show how both social and traditional media contributed to the proliferation of misogynous attacks against Captain Rackete, at the intersection between right-wing populist discourses of Italian ‘sovranism’ and European anti-immigrationism. By triangulating the role of the media, intersectional hostility and populist ideology, this paper sheds light on how these three factors feed into each other in the discursive construction of the ‘Fortress Europe’ of present times. (shrink)

This paper proposes the concept of digital mirroring to explore and contextualise post-Arab Spring digital feminism in the Levant within a critical discourse framework. Digital mirroring illustrates the way in which contemporary Arab feminist groups articulate their digital presence orienting toward the vertical dimension of their sociopolitical contexts and toward the horizontal dimension characterised by the digital practices of other feminist movements in the region. We observed this phenomenon through the analysis of a multimodal corpus of Facebook and Instagram posts (...) published by thirty-two institutionalised and non-institutionalised feminist groups in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria between 2011 and 2019. The analysis of the linguistic and the visual strategies of MENA feminist groups is grounded in contemporary sociolinguistic studies on Arabic diglossia and multimodality. Findings reveal the complex interplay of digital self-representation, local resistance, and transregional networking of Levantine women. We argue that a simultaneous analysis of the vertical and the horizontal contextual dimensions of digital mirroring is necessary to comprehend social media discursive strategies and their transregional breadth as a central component of contemporary Arab feminism and emancipatory discourses at large. (shrink)