![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-political practices, which we term evidentiary activism. Using a qualitative content analysis of 82 documents produced by feminist organizations, our analysis finds that this activism has two fundamental components. First, feminist organizations engage with existing formal evidentiary cultures by advancing and critiquing legislative and regulatory reforms to address GBOV, platform-based technological ‘solutions,’ and conventional notions of user privacy and anonymity. Second, they embrace and contribute to informal evidentiary cultures, which treat evidence as a tool of cultural and political mobilization against GBOV through strategies of publicization, moral pollution, and the cultivation of feminist digital citizenship. We contend that, akin to evidence-based advocacy that is influential in the fields of biomedicine and health, feminist organizations participate in and invent modes of digitally-oriented evidentiary activism designed to combat GBOV. Feminists’ recasting of the how, why, and what of evidence represents a noteworthy development in struggles against online violence and misogyny, and within digital culture more generally.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We use the term ‘women’ to refer to women-identifying persons. We use the acronym ‘GBOV’ to regroup a range of digitally mediated and -enabled forms of gender-based harassment and abuse targeting women, including threats, cyberstalking, account hacking, doxxing, hate speech, and non-consensual pornography. It should be noted that these forms of violence disproportionately target women from marginalized groups, at the intersections of multiple systems of oppression (on the basis of race, sexuality, class, nationality, etc.).
2 We use the term ‘feminist organizations’ to refer to feminist non-governmental organizations and digitally-based civil society networks, as well as digital rights organizations with a significant focus on GBOV.
3 We use the term ‘evidence’ to designate evidentiary artifacts produced and evaluated in a variety of ways, whether officially recognized because they satisfy juridical and regulatory thresholds of validation or informal evidentiary objects that unofficial publics may find rhetorically compelling. Inspired by the notion of ‘epistemic cultures’ (Knorr-Cetina, Citation1999; Latour & Woolgar, Citation1986), we employ the term ‘evidentiary cultures’ to designate the plurality of habitualized practices, belief-systems, norms and rules, and narrative framings that surround the production, interpretation, and dissemination of evidence of GBOV.
4 The practice turn advocates the study of what actors do as producers of expert knowledges in particular situational interactions or organizational settings, as opposed to a more formal approach concentrating on institutional or professional norms, or actors’ self-representations (Camic et al., Citation2011; Latour & Woolgar, Citation1986; Knorr-Cetina, Citation1999).
5 Social network analysis is a method that identifies and studies the structure and features of a social network, defined as a set of entities connected to each other via social interactions or institutions. Social networks are often visually represented in graph form, with a network graph being composed of points or ‘nodes’ (entities) connected to each other via lines or ‘edges’ (ties between entities) (Wasserman & Faust, Citation1994; Scott & Carrington, Citation2014)
6 We initially identified the following organizations and individuals via social network analysis: Heartmob, Take Back the Tech, Women, Action and Media, Without My Consent, Working to Halt Online Abuse, Anita Sarkeesian, Anne Theriault, Jessica Valenti, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Ellen Pao. The present analysis focuses on organizations rather than individual actors.
7 Netvizz is no longer available following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal (Hotham, Citation2018).
8 Netvizz can create a page like network, which details the network of Facebook pages connected by the likes between them.
11 The Australian feminist ‘Destroy the Joint’ collective can be highlighted as a particularly noteworthy instance of such digital activism, particularly through their ‘Counting Dead Women Australia (CDWA)’ femicide data repository campaign and project (McLean et al., Citation2019; Cullen et al., Citation2019).
12 Over a third (35.1%) of references to evidentiary formalism within our corpus concern its failures or limited effectiveness, or critiques of governments and digital corporations’ reliance upon formal regulatory and legal systems, juridical or corporate thresholds of evidence, platform-based technological solutionism, and conventional principles of privacy and anonymity to combat GBOV.
13 The full citational references to our corpus of documents from FOs are available in an appendix included in the online version of this paper and upon request to the authors.
14 In addition, digital self-regulation and self-erasure contradict feminist organizations’ aims to cultivate women’s online presence, as will be discussed in the section on feminist digital citizenship below.
15 Many of the FOs that we studied acknowledged the fact that intersecting systems of domination create socio-economic and cultural barriers to producing and reporting evidence of GBOV for certain groups of women, according to their structural positions within these systems.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Fuyuki Kurasawa
Fuyuki Kurasawa is Associate Professor and Director of the Global Digital Citizenship Lab in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minnesota, 2004), The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge, 2007), and editor of Interrogating the Social: A Critical Sociology for the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). His current research examines the ways in which digital culture is fuelling epistemic struggles and public controversies about global problems, through which expertise is being redefined and evidence becomes a disputed cultural and political artifact. [email: [email protected]].
Elisabeth Rondinelli
Elisabeth Rondinelli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Acadia University in Wolfville, Canada. [email: [email protected]].
Gulay Kilicaslan
Gulay Kilicaslan is a Ph.D. Candidate and a Doctoral Fellow at the Global Digital Citizenship Lab in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. She has conducted many projects and published many reports and books in collaboration with migrant and refugee justice networks, and grassroots organizations in the Middle East and Canada. [email: [email protected]].