Vocal, visible and vulnerable: female politicians at the intersection of Islamophobia, sexism and liberal multiculturalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT To understand the burdens of “representing diversity” in multicultural democracies, this paper empirically explores Twitter posts about two female Muslim Canadian politicians, Iqra Khalid and Maryam Monsef. Using a mixed method approach, the study reveals that the majority of the most retweeted posts referring to the two members of Parliament were negative in tone. Khalid received more abusive tweets than Monsef, even though she is less prominent, due to the former’s introduction of an anti-Islamophobia bill. When we examined all the tweets using digital methods, however, we found that the tweets are mostly neutral and that only a small fraction counted as abusive language. This analysis thus reveals that toxicity in the online chatter is manifested mainly in the most retweeted posts, main topics, and recurrent hashtags which audiences often engage with, and that the “long tail,” which comprises the majority of tweets, are mainly neutral. This highlights the disproportionate effects of social media amplification of certain attacks and raises questions regarding the status of individual voices. It also supports findings of intersectional discrimination: so-called visible minority women are attacked, regardless of their political prominence, especially if they seek to redress discrimination.