Mediated Misogynoir

To be considered innocent is to be viewed as vulnerable to harm and worthy of protection from harm. An innocent person’s pain is recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. Mediated Misogynoir: Erasing Black Women’s and Girls’ Innocence in the Public Imagination interrogates contemporary media culture to illuminate the ways the intersections of anti-blackness and misogyny, i.e., misogynoir, converge to obscure public perceptions of Black women and girls as people with any claim to innocence. When pained images of Black female bodies appear on media devices, the socio-political responses are telling, not only in their lack of urgency, but also in their inability to be read empathetically. By examining viral videos, memes, and recent film and television, Kalima Young makes a striking case for the need to create a new Black feminist media studies framework broad enough to hold the complexity and agency of Black women and girls in a digital age invested in framing them as inherently adulterated and impure.

Mediating Misogyny is a collection of original academic essays that foregrounds the intersection of gender, technology, and media. Framed and informed by feminist theory, the book offers empirical research and nuanced theoretical analysis about the gender-based harassment women experience both online and offline. The contributors of this volume provide information on the ways feminist activists are using digital tools to combat harassment, raise awareness, and organize for social and political change across the globe. Lastly, the book provides practical resources and tips to help students, educators, institutions, and researchers stop online harassment.

While there has been an increase of Black women faculty in higher education institutions, the academy writ large continues to exploit, discriminate, and uphold institutionalized gendered racism through its policies and practices. Black women have navigated, negotiated, and learned how to thrive from their respective standpoints and epistemologies, traversing the academy in ways that counter typical narratives of success and advancement. This edited volume bridges together foundational and contemporary intergenerational, interdisciplinary voices to elucidate Black feminist epistemologies and praxis. Chapter authors highlight relevant research, methodologies, and theoretical or conceptual frameworks; share experiences as doctoral students, current faculty, and academic administrators; and offer lessons learned and strategies to influence systemic and institutional change for and with Black women.

Given users’ heavy reliance of modern communication technologies such as mobile and tablet devices, laptops, computers, and social media networks, workplace cyberbullying and online harassment have become escalating problems around the world. Organizations of all sizes and sectors (public and private) may encounter workplace cyberbullying within and outside the boundaries of physical offices. Workplace cyberbullying affects the entire company, as victims suffer from psychological trauma and mental health issues that can lead to anxiety and depression, which, in turn, can cause absenteeism, job turnover, and retaliation. Thus, businesses must develop effective strategies to prevent and resolve such issues from becoming too large to manage. The Handbook of Research on Cyberbullying and Online Harassment in the Workplace provides in-depth research that explores the theoretical and practical measures of managing bullying behaviors within an organization as well as the intervention strategies that should be employed. The book takes a look at bullying behavior across a variety of industries, including government and educational institutions, and examines social and legislative issues, policies and legal cases, the impact of online harassment and disruption of business processes and organizational culture, and prevention techniques. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as sexual abuse and trolling, this book is ideally designed for business managers and executives, human resource managers, practitioners, policymakers, academicians, researchers, and students.

Critical Perspectives on Cybersecurity offers a new approach to understanding cybersecurity in international relations. As a counterpoint to existing work, which focuses largely on the security of states, private actors, and infrastructure, chapter authors examine how women and communities across the Global South understand "cybersecurity," including what threats and forms of resistance are most important to them. Bringing together contributions from a globally diverse range of authors, Anwar Mhajne and Alexis Henshaw provide a human security perspective on cybersecurity that pays attention to the interplay of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and other social hierarchies, especially regarding cybersecurity in the Global South.

Greta Thunberg. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anita Sarkeesian. Emma Gonzalez. When women are vocal about political and social issues, too-often they are flogged with attacks via social networking sites, comment sections, discussion boards, email, and direct message. Rather than targeting their ideas, the abuse targets their identities, pummeling them with rape threats, attacks on their appearance and presumed sexual behavior, and a cacophony of misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, and homophobic stereotypes and epithets. Like street harassment and sexual harassment in the workplace, digital harassment rejects women's implicit claims to be taken seriously as interlocutors, colleagues, and peers. Sarah Sobieraj shows that this online abuse is more than interpersonal bullying--it is a visceral response to the threat of equality in digital conversations and arenas that men would prefer to control. Thus identity-based attacks are particularly severe for those women who are seen as most out of line, such as those from racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups or who work in domains dominated by men, such as gaming, technology, politics, and sports. Feminists and women who don't conform to traditional gender norms are also frequently targeted. Drawing on interviews with over fifty women who have been on the receiving end of identity-based abuse online, Credible Threat explains why all of us should be concerned about the hostile climate women navigate online. This toxicity comes with economic, professional, and psychological costs for those targeted, but it also exacts societal-level costs that are rarely recognized: it erodes our civil liberties, diminishes our public discourse, thins the knowledge available to inform policy and electoral decision-making, and teaches all women that activism and public service are unappealing, high-risk endeavors to be avoided. Sobieraj traces these underexplored effects, showing that when identity-based attacks succeed in constraining women's use of digital publics, there are democratic consequences that cannot be ignored.

Why women’s voices are outnumbered online and what we can do about it, by a New York Times comment moderator. If you’ve read the comments posted by readers of online news sites, you may have noticed the absence of women’s voices. Men are by far the most prolific commenters on politics and public affairs. When women do comment, they are often attacked or dismissed more than men are. In fact, the comment forums on news sites replicate conditions of the offline and social media worlds, where women are routinely interrupted, threatened, demeaned, and called wrong, unruly, disgusting, and out of place. In Digital Suffragists, Marie Tessier—a veteran journalist and a New York Times comment moderator for more than a decade—investigates why women’s voices are outnumbered online and what we can do about it. The suffragists of the early twentieth century were jailed for trying to vote. Can a twenty-first century democracy be functional when half of the population is not fully represented in a primary form of political communication? Tessier shows that for online comments, it’s a design problem: the linear blog comment formula was based on deeply gender-biased assumptions. Technologies designed with a broad range of end users in mind, she points out, are more successful and beneficial than those that reflect the designer’s own habits of mind. Tessier outlines benchmarks for a more democratic media, all of which stem from one fundamental idea: media must adopt gender and racial representation as key performance indicators. Equal speaking time for women is a measure of democracy.

Women and families within the criminal justice system (CJS) are increasingly the focus of research and this book considers the timely issues concerning experiences of punishment, abuse and justice. With insights from frontline practice and from the lived experiences of women, the collection examines prison experiences in a post-COVID-19 world, domestic violence and the successes and failures of family support. A companion to the first edited collection, Critical Reflections on Women, Family, Crime and Justice, the book sheds new light on the challenges and experiences of women and families who encounter the CJS. Accessible to both academics and practitioners and with real-world policy recommendations, this collection demonstrates how positive change can be achieved.