The visual semiotics of digital misogyny: female leaders in the viewfinder

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of gender-based violence against women in politics (WIP) is increasingly recognized as a global phenomenon of interest. In particular, the new affordances of the Web 2.0 play a crucial role in the use of language, images, and other symbols to marginalize and exclude women as political actors. This paper illustrates the visual semiotics of misogyny against WIP on social media platforms. Two multimodal strategies are inductively identified and critically explicated as examples of semiotic violence at work: 1) image manipulation and 2) false identity attribution, both characterized by the use of image-based, user-generated content to abuse WIP. Delving into an inductive conceptualization of digital visual misogyny, this paper accounts for the long-standing, sexist and objectifying attention towards women’s bodies which now proliferates on the inherently visual digital media platforms. As such, it underscores the relevance of a semiotic and multimodal approach to social media data in order to critically analyze the complex, multimodal discursive events of the Web 2.0.

KEYWORDS:

• gender-based violence
• cyberviolence
• image-based sexual abuse
• misogyny
• gender and politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Results on online violence against WIP related to the UK context (based on data retrieved on Twitter and YouTube) were presented in other academic publications (Eleonora Esposito and Sole Alba Zollo 2021; Eleonora Esposito and Ruth Breeze 2022).

2. WONT-HATE’s data is open and FAIR and the corpus of images analysed in this paper is available on the European OpenAIRE repository Zenodo (Eleonora Esposito 2021b).

3. The original image, retrieved and identified by means of a Google Image search, is actually a promotional picture of the 2009 art film La Bella Gente (“The Beautiful People”) picturing the protagonist of the movie, a 17 years old Ukrainian sex-worker being rescued by an Italian family.

Additional information

Funding

Eleonora Esposito’s work was generously supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017) under Grant Agreement 795937.

Notes on contributors

Eleonora Esposito

Eleonora Esposito is a Researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra (Spain) and a Seconded National Expert at the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). With an MA in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in Critical Discourse Studies, Eleonora has been investigating complex intersections between language, identity, and the digitalized society in different global contexts, encompassing the EU, the Anglophone Caribbean and the Middle East. A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Alumna, Eleonora was Principal Investigator of WONT-HATE (2019-2021), a project where she explored motives, forms, and impacts of online violence against women in EU politics. Her recent publications include the edited Special Issue of the Journal of Language, Aggression and Conflict entitled Critical Perspectives on Gender, Politics and Violence (2021); and the monograph entitled Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A Critical Analysis of Political Discourse in the Caribbean (John Benjamins, 2021). E-mail: [email protected].