Singled Out and Mocked: Intersection of (Hetero)Sexism and Ableism and Mobilization of Anti-Discourses in Online Hatred towards Hypervisibilized Youth Activists

Abstract

This article contributes to the relatively scarce research on the intersection of various anti-discourses in online hatred by focusing on online verbal attacks on publicly active, nonmature actors of diverse genders. It reveals that patterns of the discursive rejection of youth political actors are similar to the more extensively described hatred against activist women. It also documents that these violent expressions are no longer limited to the realm of extreme or far-right political circles, the typical focus of previous studies, but have penetrated mainstream civic discussions across the media sphere. Youth actors are vulnerable, the article argues, because their individual characteristics are singled out, made hypervisible and mocked as abnormal in the online sphere, or because they are associated with ideologies which the discussants reject as dangerous in their construction of imagined collective identities and mobilization of anti-discourses.