ABSTRACT

Online harassment or trolling of journalists is a pernicious problem the world over. In this chapter, Ayesha Khan examines the gendered dimension of these technological attacks on women journalists in Pakistan. The author anchors her work within a constructivist approach through semi-structured interviews taking, alongside, theoretical considerations of the overlapping liberal feminism and post-feminist theories. She argues that the primary reason behind these women receiving more threats and abuse online than their male counterparts is that their work is either considered as the “male domain” or is seen to be challenging prevalent normative societal attitudes in a patriarchal society such as Pakistan. The post-feminist ideology speaks to women in contemporary public society where they are free, safe, empowered, acknowledged for the universality of their experiences, and not misappropriated or commodified. Through the interviews, she finds that this online blitzkrieg of abuse and threats confronts these women journalists every day irrespective of their religious/ethnic and organisational background and affiliation, respectively.