‘Shut up and Resign’: a Contrastive Investigation of Gender-Based Online Aggression on Twitter in Spanish vs. Greek

Abstract

Violence against Women in Politics has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of research of global relevance (Esposito and Zollo 2021). The present paper aims to contribute to this field, adopting a linguistically-anchored, doubly contrastive angle to the study of gender-based online aggression. Borrowing our conceptual tools from feminist pragmatics (Christie, 2000), language aggression and impoliteness research (Bou-Franch, 2014; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch, 2014; Culpeper, 2011) and inspired by insights from Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018), we explore how Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking Twitter users target two female politicians positioned at opposite ends of the political spectrum: the Spanish left-wing former MP, Irene Montero and the Greek right-wing MP, Niki Kerameus. The results reveal that, despite the opposing social values and ideological positionings reflected in the tweets examined, misogynistic abuse anchored in sexist representations of women emerges as a salient shared strategy in both Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking datasets.