Online Hatred of European Women Leaders: A Multimodal Corpus-Assisted Critical Analysis

PROJECTCOMPLETED (2019-2021)

Today's digital media have great potential to facilitate women's participation in political and institutional processes. However, the same media have also opened up new channels for gender-based attacks against women pursuing careers in the public space. WONT-HATE investigates the phenomenon of online misogyny, i.e. gender-based hate speech, rape threats or image-based sexual harassment directed against highly visible political and institutional figures in Europe.

Specifically, projectWONT-HATE will map rhetorical strategies and multimodal speech to characterise online hatred against women politicians in four different linguistic domains and four different political cultures within Europe: Italy, Spain, France and the UK.

WONT-HATE adopts a critical and multimodal discursiveapproachto study online hate, with a quantitative and qualitative researchof a corpus of YouTube videos and user-generated comments. The projectalso contributes to the discussionon the use of datain social networks for researchsocial, offering new critical-theoretical perspectives, as well as a transdisciplinary methodology of selection and collection of data, always taking into account the contextualisation of the new dynamics of digital interaction. Two stays at research, at the University of Vienna and at the University of Newcastle, will allow the researcher to establish a dialogue on innovative approaches to the study of social networks and political life in Europe.

WONT-HATE will also provide an open accessinstructionsof dataon the online misogynist speech, facilitating the study of its lexico-syntactic and discursive features in Italian, Spanish, French and English to foster academic researchand also to enable the development of software to solve these problems.

This projectaddresses current issues such as digital security, gender-based violence and gender equality, exploring speechas a social internshipand avoiding treating online and offline as separate and independent spheres. In this way, WONT-HATE aligns with the gender objectives of Horizon 2020 and the European Union's Strategic Commitment for Gender Equality 2016-2019.

This projecthas received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme researchand innovation, at frameworkof agreementof subsidyMarie Sklodowska-Curie no. 795937.