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.

Natural disasters and pandemics bring new risks and dangers to women and their children. In particular, various factors stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, such as economic instability, additional stress and increased control over victims led to an increase in both prevalence and severity of intimate partner violence. Based on the findings of a study conducted by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), this article examines the main challenges during the first months of the COVID-19 crisis (March¿September 2020) and analyses institutional responses to facilitate access to support services for victims. Relying on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, the study highlights the role of European Union (EU) Member States in improving long-term responses to gender-based violence in times of crises. The study also gives particular attention to emerging promising practices and holistic approaches towards the gender-based violence crisis stemming from the pandemic, describing selected examples of initiatives adopted across the EU and identifying main areas of improvement.

This paper investigates digital discursive practices of hostility against women in UK politics through quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of Twitter data retrieved across the 3 weeks preceding the UK General Elections in December 2019. A mixed-methods approach was designed. First, we used quantitative semantic analysis to compare the large datasets of tweets about female and male MPs, with a view to detecting possible gendered patterns. We then triangulated our quantitative findings with an in-depth critical discursive analysis of the tweets mentioning female MPs. Rather than showing gendered patterns across the board, the results from the quantitative analysis brought out large inter-individual differences. Some female MPs received comments containing more lexis related to appearance, sexual history and violence, as well as more emotional or extreme language. Critical analysis of the hostile and abusive messages targeting women reveals them to be deeply embedded in a social perception of women's political activity as breaching the rules of gender performativity.

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.

On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter (Dhrodia 2018), identifying the Top 5 most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry. Taking Amnesty International's results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the Top 5 women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouTube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition (Pihlaja 2014), and, therefore, merits investigation. By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and beyond.

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 (KhosraviNik 2017a: 582). 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 (SM-CDS); an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research (KhosraviNik 2014, 2017a, 2018). 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.

Adopting a critical, multimodal perspective based on Kress and van Leeuwen¿s Visual Grammar, this study analyses how, throughout her campaign for the presidency of Trinidad and Tobago in 2010, Kamla Persad-Bissessar forged a self-image of a democratic and caring leader, able to clean up the country from its corruption scandals and foster solidarity and collaboration. The analysis focuses on the official portraits from the rally collected in the booklet Kamla 2010

The Caribbean twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago entered a new era on 24 May 2010 by electing its first woman Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar. Breaking out of the country's rigid bipolar political mold, the East Indian Persad-Bissessar won a landslide victory as the leader of the People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. Adopting a Discourse-Historical Approach, this study sets to analyze how Persad-Bissessar discursively constructed her claim to leadership in the election speeches of the 2010 We Will Rise Campaign. Both the processes of bonding with her electorate and demontage of her opponent Patrick Manning are achieved by Persad-Bissessar with careful linguistic choices, encompassing the use of the ritual picong satire and strategic switching to Trinidadian English Creole. This article investigates complexities, struggles and contradictions of the Trinbagonian political scene by integrating a detailed analysis of political discourse and the investigation of the social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded.

The Caribbean twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago entered a new era on 24 May 2010 by electing its first woman Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar. Breaking out of the country¿s rigid bipolar political mold, the East Indian Persad-Bissessar won a landslide victory as the leader of the People¿s Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. Adopting a Discourse-Historical Approach, this study sets to analyze how Persad-Bissessar discursively constructed her claim to leadership in the election speeches of the 2010 We Will Rise Campaign. Both the processes of bonding with her electorate and demontage of her opponent Patrick Manning are achieved by Persad-Bissessar with careful linguistic choices, encompassing the use of the ritual picong satire and strategic switching to Trinidadian English Creole. This article investigates complexities, struggles and contradictions of the Trinbagonian political scene by integrating a detailed analysis of political discourse and the investigation of the social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded.

This book explores the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in the Caribbean from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. Focusing on political communication in Trinidad and Tobago, it offers unique socio-political insights into one of the most complex and diverse countries of the Archipelago. Through a detailed reconstruction of Kamla Persad-Bissessar¿s 2010 victorious run for office, this book offers ample empirical evidence of the multimodal discursive strategies that held the key to the success of the first woman PM candidate and her inter-ethnic coalition bid to overcome political tribalism in the country. In parallel, it explores the implications and challenges of the postcolonial Trinbagonian national project, caught between pluralism and creolization. Through its innovative, context-dependent and interdisciplinary CDS approach, this book breaks new ground in Caribbean Studies while at the same time broadening the horizons of the Euro-American tradition of Political Discourse Studies to address the complexities of global postcoloniality.

In the history of mankind, food has always played a crucial role as a performative act and marker of ethnic, religious and national identity. In particular, the usual number of biological, social, economic, historical and ethnic dimensions, involved in any discourse on food, seem to have reached a new degree of complexity in the Caribbean. In a region heavily influenced by its colonial past, a variety of migratory fluxes from all over the world brought along a vast array of diverse social, cultural and economic practices related to food in the archipelago. In Trinidad and Tobago, the heritage of British colonial policies influenced many aspect of socio-political life and contributed to mark and reproduce an `Us vs. Them¿ division between citizens of African and East Indian ancestries. While the varied local cuisine can be regarded as the best reflection of the country¿s colonial and mercantile history, both the African and East Indian communities claim to be the only creators of the most representative national dishes. This paper aims at investigating the major role played by food in the current identity narratives of both the single Afro- and Indo-communities, as well as that of the nation as a whole. In particular, two food metaphors (`Callaloo¿ and `Pelau¿) seem to epitomise the tension between ethnic groups in Trinidad and Tobago. By means of an interdisciplinary CDA approach, I will be looking at the usage of `Callaloo¿ and `Pelau¿ as ¿mixing metaphors¿ (Khan in Cult. Anthropol. 16: 271¿302, 2001) in Trinidadian cultural and political discourses. We will see how the two metaphors entail different degrees of heterogeneity and homogeneity in the discursive construction of national identity in Trinidad and Tobago.