Villainous Avatars: The Visual Semiotics of Misogyny and Free Speech in Cyberspace
Pamela Turton-Turner · eCite Digital Repository (University of Tasmania) · 2013
This paper explores a noxious relationship between the emergence of liberal free speechonline, and vitriolic sexual violence focused on women and girls. Internet forums provideinstant access to expansive audiences. They provide powerful means for anonymous userscalled trolls, to amplify sexually motivated hate speech. In some cases suicidal deaths havebeen attributed to vicious Internet denouncements of women and girls. Demands to ceasepromoting gender violence online are often met with protestations invoking democratic rightsto free speech, or that vilification of others simply voices controversial humor. In 2011 MaryAnne Franks defined this type of liberal view as cyberspace idealism. Franks has assertedthat cyberspace idealism presupposes that the Internet is the ultimate bastion guarding theprinciples of equality and free thought. In social media such as Facebook and Twitter Iexamine deeply ingrained cultural meanings of images that vilify women and girls online.Through use of visual semiotics and feminist critical discourse analysis, I argue that theintrinsic mechanism of sexual power play informing gender violence in the virtual world, isembedded in real world language. It is amplified online at the expense of a womans right todignity, privacy, and free speech. Patriarchal discourses that implicitly legitimate andnormalize misogyny on the Internet, can only thwart the possibility of a truly utopian anddemocratic space existing in cyberspace.