The Politics of Online Islamophobia and Misogyny

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

Based on a critical auto-ethnography documenting my experiences of online hate, this chapter will examine the challenges and burdens that women of colour are made to carry when they engage within online spaces to disseminate research and educate audiences around anti-racist/ colonial politics. The chapter is informed by a selection of online materials across a variety of platforms including Internet forums, YouTube, news comments sections, Twitter and Facebook, collected from 2013 to 2016. This forms what I will refer to throughout this chapter as the corpus, that is, the totality of the linguistic online material that has been documented throughout the aforementioned time period.

A discourse analysis of the corpus will enable me to critically examine the logics of Islamophobia—its circulation and manifestation online—as well as the gender dimension involved in the abuse. It will facilitate an exploration of the way in which individuals, actions and language combine to produce meaning through a system of signifying practices (Hall 1992: 275–331). This account situates itself conceptually within critical race and postcolonial feminist frameworks, as a means to unpick and unravel the complex and textured intersection between Islamophobia/racism, gender and online spaces. The chapter will go onto to conclude that the Islamophobic (and more broadly racial) harassment of women of colour online can be seen as the shift from the democratic to the demagogic, and as the replaying of the wider gendered and racialised nature of citizenship.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedia, Crime and Racism
EditorsMonish Bhatia, Scott Poynting, Waqas Tufail
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages117-138
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-319-71776-0
ISBN (Print)978-3-319-71775-3
Publication statusPublished - May 2018

Publication series

NamePalgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
PublisherPalgrave

Cite this