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.
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 language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Media, Crime and Racism |
| Editors | Monish Bhatia, Scott Poynting, Waqas Tufail |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Pages | 117-138 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-319-71776-0 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-319-71775-3 |
| Publication status | Published - May 2018 |
Publication series
| Name | Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Palgrave |