ABSTRACT
Today's digital media were initially saluted for their strong potential to strengthen women's participation in political and institutional processes, allowing them to bypass gendered framing in traditional media and achieve a greater degree of visibility and engagement. Regrettably, the “digital revolution” has also opened up new channels for attacks against women advancing their way in a public sphere traditionally associated with power, authority and hegemonic masculinity.
This chapter critically investigates the emerging techno-social phenomenon of gender-based cyberviolence. In illustrating the magnitude, trends and patterns of this burgeoning issue, it specifically focuses on how it affects the lives and political careers of women.
This chapter aims at mapping the phenomenon across its various forms and instantiations, which capitalise on established strategies of gender-based violence (gender-stereotyping, moral degradation, body shaming and rape threats, among others) as well as on the vast array of digitally native meaning-making resources, including new affordances and trends like image manipulation and false identity attribution.
This chapter also engages in reflections informed by a “continuum thinking”, able to problematise cyberviolence as a complex political, digital and gender issue and to acknowledge digital discourses for their tangible role as a gatekeeping practice and their potential to jeopardise the hard-fought progress towards gender equality in politics and beyond.
