The visual semiotics of digital misogyny: female leaders in the viewfinder

Abstract

ABSTRACT The proliferation of gender-based violence against women in politics (WIP) is increasingly recognized as a global phenomenon of interest. In particular, the new affordances of the Web 2.0 play a crucial role in the use of language, images, and other symbols to marginalize and exclude women as political actors. This paper illustrates the visual semiotics of misogyny against WIP on social media platforms. Two multimodal strategies are inductively identified and critically explicated as examples of semiotic violence at work: 1) image manipulation and 2) false identity attribution, both characterized by the use of image-based, user-generated content to abuse WIP. Delving into an inductive conceptualization of digital visual misogyny, this paper accounts for the long-standing, sexist and objectifying attention towards women’s bodies which now proliferates on the inherently visual digital media platforms. As such, it underscores the relevance of a semiotic and multimodal approach to social media data in order to critically analyze the complex, multimodal discursive events of the Web 2.0.