Project Synopsis

Title: Social Media Misogyny: Online Hate Against Women

With the rise of far-right nationalisms in recent years, misogyny has intensified and rapidly extended beyond the internet into the streets to enact violence offline. The internet and digital platforms have acted as a pressure cooker for misogyny, which is a threat to women around the world. Since the “gamergate” scandal of 2014, academics have increasingly researched the topic (Ging and Siapera 2019). This project adopts a critical standpoint to explore the interconnected forces at play in understanding the spread of hate online and to critically analyze how misogyny and hate toward women on social media platforms have been reinforced as they spread across various platforms and media. In order to grasp the contemporary digital cultures’ relation to the spread of hate toward women (and other marginalized communities), the project examines the myths, stereotypes, and certain normative frameworks that these forms of misogyny follow online. Therefore, this project focuses on a critique of hate and misogyny in various contexts as well as a conceptualization of methods of countering hate online based on insights from film and media studies and gender studies. The project analyzes how these fields can clarify the entangled ways in which multiple figurations of misogyny convene in the technocultural sphere.

host institution

partner organization(s)

early stage researcher

ESR9 Sama Khosravi Ooryad, PhD Candidate at University of Gothenburg

supervisor(s)

Prof. Mia Liinason, Lund University

Prof. Anna Backman Rogers, University of Gothenburg

Output

Khosravi Ooryad, S. (2023). Alt-right and authoritarian memetic alliances: global mediations of hate within the rising Farsi manosphere on Iranian social media. Media, Culture and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221147633