Terms like misandry organize hate and network harassment - not of men as the term implies, but of women
While popular discourse often frames online harassment as an issue of individuals engaged in abhorrent behavior, harassing behavior is often networked in that it is coordinated and organized. When feminists and female public figures experience harassment, it often originates from members of a loose online network known as the manosphere, a set of blogs, podcasts, and forums comprised of pickup artists, men’s rights activists, anti-feminists, and fringe groups. While the particular beliefs of these groups may differ, many participants have adopted a common language. This paper explores the discourse of the manosphere and its links to online misogyny and harassment. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine the term misandry, which originates in the manosphere; trace its infiltration into more mainstream circles; and analyze its ideological and community-building functions. We pay particular attention to how this vocabulary reinforces a misogynistic ontology which paints feminism as a man-hating movement which victimizes men and boys.
Deploying visual "Asian-ness" can create racial solidarity - sometimes at the expense of cross-racial solidarity
This article examines how uses of ‘Asian-ness’ as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective racial counterpublics around #Asians4BlackLives/#Justice4AkaiGurley and #SavePeterLiang/#Justice4Liang. Specifically, Rachel Kuo looks at how Asian American racial positioning becomes deployed to produce feelings of solidarity. Approaching hashtags as both indexical signifiers of solidarity and as an indexing system that archives together an array of media objects, she tracks media objects across multiple sites to examine visual modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and investigate solidarity as discursively mediated, embodied, and affective phenomena. Kuo closely examines how #SavePeterLiang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of Liang’s racial body and how the #Asians4BlackLives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics.
Women of color remain spatially marginalized in digital feminist publics online
Using critical discourse analysis and network analysis, I address how racial justice activist hashtags #NotYourAsianSideKick and #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen circulate discourse across networked online publics within and outside Twitter. These hashtags showcase relationships between feminist online publics, demonstrate ways that hashtags circulate racial justice discourse, and exemplify the fluidity and intersectionality of racialized and feminist online publics. I draw on critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2012) as my technique in order to examine the hashtag’s discursivity. In order to analyze message spread and network relationships, I then provide a network analysis that illustrates message circulation in online feminist spheres.