Exploring Language Aggression against Women [1 ed.] 9789027266859, 9789027242747

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Exploring Language Aggression against Women

Benjamins Current Topics issn 1874-0081 Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of special issues of various journals have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim of finding new audiences for topically interesting material, bringing such material to a wider readership in book format. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/bct

Volume 86 Exploring Language Aggression against Women Edited by Patricia Bou-Franch These materials were previously published in Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2:2 (2014).

Exploring Language Aggression against Women Edited by

Patricia Bou-Franch University of Valencia

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/bct.86 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016016125 (print) / 2016025566 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 4274 7 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6685 9 (e-book)

© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Introduction ‘Did he really rape these bitches?’: Aggression, women, language Patricia Bou-Franch

1

Rape is rape (except when it’s not): The media, recontextualisation and violence against women Frederick Attenborough

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De-authorizing rape narrators: Stance, taboo and privatizing the public secret Shonna Trinch

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Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

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The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse: The term ‘woman’ in Spanish contemporary newspapers José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda

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Public/Private language aggression against women: Tweeting rage and intimate partner violence Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele

107

Addressing women in the Greek parliament: Institutionalized confrontation or sexist aggression? Marianthi Georgalidou

127

Contributors to this volume

155

Index

157

Introduction

‘Did he really rape these bitches?’ Aggression, women, language Patricia Bou-Franch

1. Introduction Did he really rape these bitches? Thus reacted a comedian when asked about the numerous rape allegations made against another even more famous actor and comedian.1 The expression of disbelief and the name calling directed at the accusers (victims) in this comment are but another small drop in the ocean of like-minded attitudes that one finds when looking into language aggression against women. I have chosen to open this chapter with this quotation because it shows how widespread and unquestioned are the kind of assumptions that severely discriminate and disadvantage women in contemporary Western societies. These assumptions seem to be firmly ingrained in the ordinary, and are voiced shamelessly in public media. The opening question thus sums up many of the concerns and preoccupations that underlie the studies presented in Exploring Language Aggression against Women. This introductory chapter aims to begin to interrogate the interconnections between aggression, language, and women, tapping into how these interconnections are brought into existence, reflected, and negotiated in and through discourse across a range of varied mediated and non-mediated contexts. In so doing, the discussion engages with major themes investigated within the field of language, gender, and sexuality (Ehrlich, Meyerhoff, and Holmes 2014). A second, related, aim is to introduce the different chapters in this book highlighting how they approach the topic under scrutiny. This chapter, therefore, is organized as follows. The next section questions and revises the relationship between aggression and gender, violence and women, which lies at the very heart of the general topic of this book and of a feminist 1.  http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bill-cosby-and-his-enablers/422448/ doi 10.1075/bct.86.001int 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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linguistics (Section 2). This relationship is constructed, negotiated and challenged in discourse and, so, in Section 3, the focus is on discourse-analytic approaches to the study of language aggression against women. This section reflects on language as an active part of social life and revises prior work on language and gender concerned with violence, aggression and, more generally, different forms of sexism. Section 4 explains the organization of the book and comments on the different objectives, methods and contexts under scrutiny before bringing together some conclusions, in Section 5, and making explicit the active and activist objectives regarding the studies of aggression, women and language in this volume. 2. Preliminary reflections on aggression, women and language This section aims to bring together some reflections on aggression, women and language. Violence has always existed and will probably always exist. However, there is no universal agreement on what counts as violence or how it should be dealt with in society. Surprising though it may sound, violence — whether a notion or a reality — is open to interpretation and has fuzzy boundaries. What counts as violence in each historical period and each culture is relative, and also relative is the place it occupies in different societies, and the punishment(s) that it receives, if any (Christie 1998, Coates and Wade 2007, Muehlenhard and Kimes 1999, O’Connor 1995). The chapters in this book view aggression and violence as socially constructed, as processes that carry a historical baggage of extreme tolerance when inflicted on women. Despite bland social attitudes towards aggression against women, such violence has important material and ideological consequences for the victims that suffer it, and for the societies in which the violence takes place. For repeated patterns of aggression against women are indexical of the ways in which societies are structured and ideologically constituted. Thus, violence is considered to be a multi-faceted phenomenon, which varies in its degree of explicitness (Garver 1958), ranges from physical assault to psychological coercion, and involves individual and institutional agents; violence is, therefore, personal and structural, individual and social, private and public. These forms of violence are represented in Galtung’s (1990) triangular model, which comprises direct, structural and cultural forms of violence. These refer, respectively, to the use of physical force; the violence inherent in the attitudes and beliefs learnt since childhood, and the violence that permeates the symbolic sphere of existence (e.g., ideology or religion). These three types of violence are interconnected in the sense that when violence starts at one point of the triangle, it is transmitted to the other ends. Thus, the model predicts that the physical violence



‘Did he really rape these bitches?’: Aggression, women, language

inflicted on women, for instance, will develop into a cultural, institutionalized form of violence. Indeed, violence affects (and permeates) every aspect of women’s lives, not only as far as their bodies and personal safety are concerned, but also as regards their experience of freedom and their sense of identity. In many family or sentimental relationships, women are likely to experience all forms of violence described thus far. Yet, physical violence is the most conspicuous way of attacking a woman and has historically been the only form to be recognized as such and, consequently, the first form of violence to be criminalized in Western societies. However, even when identified and acknowledged, physical violence has traditionally been considered as belonging to the private arrangement between the sexes, and consequently, has not been open to public scrutiny or subjected to legal action. Feminist action in Western societies, especially since/during the second half of the 20th century, resulted in legal changes and started processes of transformation of popular opinion so that, physical and non-physical forms of violence have become, in many Western countries, legally recognized and punishable, and socially i.e. publicly, condemned. Of course, individuals and societies vary in the extent to which they castigate violence on legal and social levels. However, and despite the efforts to change the status quo, violence is still a pervasive and global problem intimately connected to women and traditional gendered ideologies. Power and ideology are, in fact, at the heart of aggressions against women, for particular ideologies, sets of values, and beliefs shared by social groups and expressed through discourse construct, reproduce, perpetuate and/or resist gender inequalities (Christie 1998; Muehlenhard and Kimes 1999; O’Connor 1995). A critical approach to language aggression against women needs to investigate, therefore, the interplay between discourse, power, and ideologies across social groups and institutions (van Dijk 1996). In sum, as a social construction, violence is inflicted, sustained, and challenged — negotiated — in and through discourse. Therefore, language plays a crucial role when it comes to the study of aggression and women. Exploring the interconnections between aggression, women, and language involves dealing with various themes of interest to the field of language, gender, and sexuality (Ehrlich, Meyerhoff, and Holmes 2014), among others, performativity, the force of social structures, and the discursive construction of realities. Research into language, gender, and sexuality, or feminist linguistics, has been consistently informed by feminist thinking (Bucholtz 2003, 2014). Thus, one of its central tenets lies in the view that gendered identities are not fixed, homogeneous and unchangeable but dynamic, plural, and process-oriented, and in a permanent state of change (e.g. Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Ehrlich and Meyerhoff 2014; Litosseliti and Sunderland 2002). This perspective stems from

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Butler’s (1990) revolutionary view that identity is not a given, an essence which dictates the actions of individuals. Rather, gender and sexuality are discussed in terms of repeated linguistic and non-linguistic performances so that what individuals do ultimately derives into who they are (Cameron 2001). The notion of performativity, in turn, goes back to one of the most influential philosophers of the language in recent times, John Austin, who questioned the relationship between language and action and concluded that when we speak, we do things with words: we actually make changes in the world through our use of language (Austin 1962). These powerful thoughts lay the foundations for the connections between language and gender, linguistic actions and feminist activism, and, ultimately, how we use language to perform gendered identities and ideologies. It is important, however, to bear in mind that such linguistic performances of gender and sexuality, do not take place in a vacuum. Rather, as Butler (1990) cautioned, gendered identities are brought into existence through language used within specific socio-cultural settings with particular norms, which regulate and constrain how identities are understood and evaluated (see also Ehrlich 2008, 2014). Consequently, studies of language and gender need to examine not just how individuals perform their gendered identities, but should also investigate “from what range of culturally intelligible possibilities … they [are ]drawing their way of doing/talking about X,” that is, the cultural repertoire or frames available to perform, discuss, understand and assess gendered identities (Cameron 2001, 174). Further, linguistic actions and communication are not one-way processes, but rather involve both production and interpretation. This takes us to a further consideration regarding language and gender, namely, that gendered identities and ideologies are not simply performed, but crucially negotiated at the level of interaction. This means that particular, culturally-constrained gendered performances and enactments are confirmed, challenged, recast and/or resisted in communication with others. The view of gender and sexuality as social constructions, or coconstructions, which emerge and are negotiated locally, in discourse, is pervasive in the chapters in this book (cf. Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Cameron 2001; De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006). 3. Contextualizing discourse-analytic research on language aggression against women This section briefly provides some highlights on extant research into language aggression against women. This review will necessarily be incomplete; I do not intend to be comprehensive but to tap into scholarly insights that form the basis



‘Did he really rape these bitches?’: Aggression, women, language

for the studies in the chapters that follow. The focus, thus, will be mainly — but not exclusively — on themes related to the topics dealt with in this book, i.e. discourses of and about rape and sexual assault, domestic violence and sexism within institutional settings, and more specifically, legal, parliamentary practices, and both traditional (newspapers) and social media practices. Scholarly research has explored language aggression against women from different angles. The discourses of victims and perpetrators, for instance, have been extensively examined in narratives elicited through ethnographic interviews (e.g., Adams, Towns, and Gavey 1995; Anderson and Umberson 2001; Boonzaier 2008; Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt 2009; Hydén 1999, 2005; Jackson 2001; Towns and Adams 2000; Wood 2001, 2004). Victims of intimate partner abuse have reported, among other things, to find it very difficult to identify the abuse and to recognize themselves as victims. When trying to leave an abusive relationship they claim to find little support and to have to face numerous problems. And they further report to continue to feel vulnerable after putting an end to the relationship, because the abuse does not always stop, and they feel isolated and face serious economic problems (Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt 2009; Hydén 1999, 2005). For their part, findings regarding male perpetrators show that they justify the aggressions in several ways, which vary from minimizing the frequency, seriousness, and consequences of the violence they inflict, denying the abuse or placing the blame on the women or other external factors (Adams, Towns, and Gavey 1995; Boonzaier 2008; Eisikovits and Buchbinder 1997). Another prominent focus of research into language aggression against women addresses the (mis)representation of sexual aggression across contexts and social practices. For, as Coates and Wade argue, “the problem of violence is inextricably linked to the problem of representation” (2007, 511). The press, literature, and texts of popular culture like films and music are sites where gender inequalities are reproduced and violence is ideologically represented (see Bengoechea 2006; Christie 1998; Fernández Díaz 2004; Lledó 2010; Wheeler 2009, among others). Bengoechea (2006), for instance, argues for the existence of a conceptual network underlying collective ideologies which naturalizes the violence and aggression against women. For this author, hegemonic cultural texts and practices play a key role in this process, as they pave the way for such naturalization. She illustrates her views drawing on different kinds of cultural artifacts, which range from poems, billboards and paintings to films. Wheeler (2009), too, examined movies containing scenes of intimate partner violence and underlined the ways in which the violence was visually and linguistically minimized to make it less explicit and more palatable to a viewing audience. Another strand of research into language aggression against women has further examined unelicited discourses in a range of high-stakes legal contexts like

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sexual abuse trials, victims’ applications for protective orders or police interrogations to suspects of abuse (see Coates and Wade 2004, 2007; Ehrlich 2001, 2007, 2008; Matoesian 2001, Trinch 2003, 2007, 2010; Stokoe 2010, among others). These studies reveal the saliency of language in representing and reshaping the violence, too often to the detriment of women. This is the case, for example, of studies of rape trials, which show that defense lawyers resort to a range of questioning techniques that activate negative presuppositions about the identity of claimants, and restrict their response options in such a way that the facts reported by claimants are distorted to the benefit of the accused (Ehrlich 2001, 2008; Matoesian 2001). Another important area relates to the petition of restraining orders. Trinch, for instance, found differences in the narratives of Latina victims of abuse and the reports of said abuse in the official petitions of protection. In particular, the present tense indicating habitual actions found in the narratives was systematically replaced by the past tense signalling a once-off behaviour of perpetrators in the official documents. Further, the changes from direct quotes in the interviews to indirect reports in the affidavits were found to neutralise the victims’ emotions and alter women’s assessments of themselves and of their abusers. Trinch argues that the deletion of emotionally loaded direct quotes of the violence helps paralegals construct the battered woman as a legitimate survivor within the legal system (Trinch 2003, 2007). Additionally, an analysis of the legal judgments in convictions of sexual abuse revealed that, in explaining and justifying their sentences, judges resort to psychological attributions that reflect, coincidentally, the arguments used by male perpetrators described above, i.e. concealing the violence as well as victims’ resistance, minimizing abusers’ responsibility, and blaming victims (Coates and Wade 2004). These findings motivated further research into language and gendered aggressions in the socio-legal and political settings. Coates and Wade (2007) examined five accounts of violence from different social actors — a perpetrator, a psychiatrist, a judge, a government minister, and a therapist — and found that the accounts revealed the four arguments described above, which they called “discursive operations”. The authors underline the pervasiveness of such discourses across institutional settings. As we will see, the chapters in this book also reveal the prevalence of such discourses, and they further uncover their migration onto the online world. Internet technologies brought about the emergence of new spaces for communication and reconfiguration of familiar communicative practices (Herring 2013). Internet communication was hailed for bringing about a ‘demotic’ turn which endowed citizens with the possibility of participating and voicing their opinions in the public sphere, and therefore had a great democratizing potential (Turner 2010). That such views were excessively optimistic was soon confirmed by research into gender and online discourse (e.g. Herring 1994, 1996; Pérez-Sabater



‘Did he really rape these bitches?’: Aggression, women, language

2015. See Herring 2014 for a review). After all, whether online or offline, “language is instrumental in establishing categories of difference” and “relations of inequality” (Thurlow and Mroczek 2011, xxvii); these are precisely the type of relations pervading language aggression against women (see also Attenborough 2014c). In this respect, Bou-Franch (2013) constitutes, to my knowledge, the first investigation of the public, online discourses of domestic abuse. She set out to examine online responses to a news story on intimate partner violence published in a British broadsheet, in order to find out whether the gendered discourses of violence were sustained in the new media. The study revealed that some users sustained such discourses employing indirect, sometimes very subtle, forms of sexism like humor, irony, presuppositions, and comparisons; these are precisely the forms of linguistic sexism considered to be more difficult to identify and resist (Mills 2008). However, the study further unveiled that other users indeed questioned, contested and resisted the offending comments and contributed to build abuse-challenging ideologies and discourses. The author called for further research into language aggression against women in the online media, as a means of gaining insights into the social, public discourses and ideologies surrounding the violence. Several chapters in this book turn to examine precisely online aggression, thus revealing new insights into the societal and public dimensions of language aggression against women. 4. Organization of Exploring Language Aggression against Women This section explains the general organization of this book and introduces each chapter, thus providing an account of what lies ahead. As should be obvious by now, the book is premised on the belief that language is “a reflexive instrument to examine violence” in a society (O’Connor 1995, 310). Patterned ways of speaking to and about women matter, for language plays an important role in constructing reality (Cameron 2001; Fairclough 2003). The chapters in this book investigate language aggression against women by exploring how language contributes to, and constructs, the violence, and by identifying the linguistic means for the creation of inequality and discrimination. The main topics deal with discursive accounts and retellings of, as well as reactions to, rape and sexual assault (Chapters by Attenborough and Trinch), newspaper reports of intimate partner violence (Santaemilia and Maruenda), online responses to public service advertising against domestic abuse (Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich), and verbal abuse in the contexts of petitions of Civil Protection Orders, Twitter (Anderson and Cermele), and Parliament (Georgalidou). Exploring Language Aggression against Women, therefore, brings together research into old and new communicative contexts.

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In chapter two, Frederick Attenborough examines media recontextualisations of reports of violence against women in order to analyze the particular meanings of violence entextualized in each new recontextualisation. The author draws from a corpus that includes the police transcripts of the statements that led to the charges of rape and sexual molestation made against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, in 2010, as well as the mediated reports constructed, recontextualised, by journalists after the witness statements were leaked online during the trial. Through a mediated stylistic analysis of the data (Attenborough 2013, 2014b), Attenborough unveils how the violence against women reported by the two witnesses is minimized, and even eliminated, in the recontextualised reports, thus discrediting the women to the benefit of the accused. He further argues that it is essential to understand that these differences are rhetorically consequential in that they serve clear instrumental purposes. This chapter, thus reinforces the points made by scholars like Ehrlich (2001) and Matoesian (2001) in relation to the linguistic manipulation of defense lawyers in trials of sexual abuse. However, Attenborough here expands the range of supporting and discrediting linguistic means used in his data and signals journalists as further agents of this type of linguistic manipulation. Shonna Trinch examines reviewers’ uptake of Jessica Stern’s (2010) book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror in chapter three. A prestigious and well-known antiterrorist expert, Jessica Stern breaks the silence about her own and her sister’s rape, which occurred when they were teenagers. Trinch argues that Stern’s reputation provides a unique narrator who cannot be discredited, as is usually the case in situations of sexual assault (cf. Ehrlich 2001; Attenborough). Hers is, therefore, the story of an uncontroversial case of rape. This paper investigates how reviewers position themselves toward breaking or sustaining the silence about rape in 47 online reviews of Stern’s book, produced by both professional journalists and lay reviewers. Adopting the analytical framework of stance (Jaffe 2009), Trinch shows the ways in which reviews are stylized to either authorize or de-authorize Stern as a narrator and her narrative, and how these alignments map onto public/private stances toward rape in contemporary Western culture. In chapter four, Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich investigate whether the patriarchal strategies and processes identified by previous research in women abusers’ talk as well as in other institutional discourses related to crimes of violence against women are invoked online. They analyze a corpus of 460 unsolicited digital comments sent in response to four public service advertisements against women abuse posted on YouTube in Spain. Bou-Franch and GarcésConejos Blitvich adopt a feminist, critical discourse analysis perspective (Bucholtz 2003; van Dijk 2006). However, unlike previous critical approaches which focus mainly on elite discourses and the top-down processes of ideological hegemony,



‘Did he really rape these bitches?’: Aggression, women, language

the authors examine gender ideologies and social identity processes at the micro level of citizen interactions on the web. This study unveils the pervasiveness of discursive strategies that minimize abuse, deny its existence, and blame the victim (see Coates and Wade 2007). The authors also show how such discourse devices relate to social identity and gender ideology through sophisticated processes of positive in-group presentation and negative out-group descriptions in which the formation of groups constantly fluctuates both within a comment and from comment to comment. In the next chapter, José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda investigate the representation of gender-based violence in the Spanish press. More specifically, chapter five explores the uses and co-texts of the phrase mujer maltratada (“battered woman” in English) in a sizeable corpus of newspaper articles on violence against women by intimate partners, published in major Spanish dailies over a five year period. The authors apply a complex methodology which combines the quantitative approach of corpus linguistics (Baker, Gabrielatos, Khosravinik, and Krzyzanowski 2008) with the qualitative methods of critical discourse analysis and, in particular, Appraisal theory or the framework for Evaluation of news discourse developed by Martin and White (2005). In this way, Santaemilia and Maruenda identify how the media express affect towards battered women thus showing how violence against women is represented in contemporary Spanish press. The authors discuss their findings in relation to expectations about gender, sexuality, and power. Chapter six explores two different contexts. Kristin Anderson and Jill Cermele examine the realizations of language aggression against women in two data sets in which women challenge male privilege in society. The data consist of a corpus of tweets sent in response to a post by the founder of Feminist Frequency exposing how a particular videogaming industry had failed to incorporate female characters in their most recent video games. The tweets contained verbal aggression including threats of rape and other forms of violence. The second data set included 130 civil protection order petitions, which contain reports of intimate partner abuse. Adopting a multidisciplinary methodology, which draws from impoliteness and research on linguistic sexism (Culpeper 2011; Mills 2008), the authors examine the language realizations of aggression against women in the two data sets. The linguistic patterns were classified as primarily direct or indirect forms of sexism. Their findings were further discussed in terms of discursive gender constructions and the legitimization of violence through the reproduction of gendered stereotypes that underline incompetence and weakness as salient in gender identity representations. In the last contribution to this book, chapter seven, Marianthi Georgalidou explores the highly adversarial communication of the Greek parliamentary system

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through an examination of official proceedings and of mediatized video-clips and reports. Her analysis draws on impoliteness and linguistic sexism (Culpeper 2011; Mills 2008) and is further informed by Conversation Analysis and critical approaches to discourse. Georgalidou argues that the rhetoric of political combat is expected in the context of the Greek Parliament. However, her study reveals that male politicians resort to gendered linguistic aggressions when addressing female MPs that go beyond such expectations. Female politicians are portrayed as incompetent, irrational individuals in need of supervision and control. Moreover, male politicians are also shown to make jokes and insinuations about female politicians’ sexuality and to resort to language aggressions and insults when criticized by women. This, the author argues, goes beyond the expected form of conflict characteristic of the social and political organization under scrutiny. 5. Conclusion In their seminal work on identity, Bucholtz and Hall (2005) argue that identity partly emerges in discourse through the temporary roles and orientations assumed by participants. This view contributes to our understanding of the synergies between this collection and its authors, and between linguistics and feminism. The authors of the chapters in Exploring Language Aggression against Women take a feminist orientation while this book provides them with the possibility of going beyond their academic identity as scholars and taking on the role of reporters of language-based discriminations, of denouncers of gender inequalities, which are here subjected to systematic analysis. At a time of great confusion regarding feminism (e.g. Mills 1995; Scharff 2012), this book underlines the pervasiveness of language aggression against women and the need to continue doing feminist work, both linguistic and non-linguistic, by not only looking critically into the realizations of language aggression but by also addressing the basis for such aggression. Feminism has taken on a multiplicity of meanings and is seen variously, as “old-fashioned, modern, prejudiced, vital, dogmatic, complex and/or many other things besides” (Attenborough 2014a, 147). Research into why young women repudiate feminism, for instance, highlights that they either “regard it as valuable, but anachronistic, or as radical and ideological” (Scharff 2012, 2). Whatever the view, this book proves that contemporary societies, even in the ‘developed west’, are in need of the values advocated by feminism, and that this is far from anachronistic. For this reason, the studies in this collection do not only seek to do feminist linguistics by analyzing language aggression against women, but seek to also develop an activist approach against the many facets of contemporary gender inequality.



‘Did he really rape these bitches?’: Aggression, women, language

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Dr José Santaemilia for his insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter and for his constant support of my work on gender, language and sexuality. My thanks also go to the editors of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Maria Sifianou, for their encouragement, support and continuous help. My most sincere thanks also go to all contributors to this book and to John Benjamins, and in particular, to Isja Conen, for choosing to publish this work in their Benjamins Current Contents series. And, last but not least, I wish to thank Joaquín Primo Pacheco for his help with the index. Needless to say, any mistakes are my responsibility.

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Patricia Bou-Franch Bou-Franch, Patricia. 2013. “Domestic Violence and Public Participation in the Media: The Case of Citizen Journalism.” Gender and Language 7: 275–302. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and Interaction: A Socio-Cultural Linguistic Approach. Discourse Studies 7 (4/5): 585–614. Bucholtz, Mary. 2003. “Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender: Discourse Analysis in Language and Gender Studies.” In The Handbook of Language and Gender, edited by Janet Holmes, and Miriam Meyerhoff, 43–68. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bucholtz, Mary. 2014. The feminist foundations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research. In The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes, 23–47. Chichester: Wiley. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah. 2001. Working with Spoken Discourse. London. Sage. Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2010. Introduction. Self-Mediation: New Media and Citizenship. Critical Discourse Studies 7 (4): 227–232. Christie, Christine. 1998. “Rewriting Rights: A Relevance Theoretical Analysis of Press Constructions of Sexual Harassment and the Responses of Readers.” Language and Literature 7 (3):214–234. Coates, Linda, and Allan Wade. 2004. “ ‘Telling it like it isn’t’: Obscuring Perpetrator Responsibility for Violent Crime.” Discourse and Society 15: 499–526. Coates, Linda, and Allan Wade. 2007. “Language and Violence: Analysis of Four Discursive Operations.” Journal of Family Violence 22: 511–522. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg (eds). 2006. Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ehrlich, Susan. 2001. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge. Ehrlich, Susan. 2007. Legal Discourse and the Cultural Intelligibility of Gendered Meanings. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11, 452–477. Ehrlich, Susan. 2008. Sexual Assault Trials, Discursive Identities and Institutional Change. In Analysing Identities in Discourse, ed. by Rosana Dolón, and Julia Todolí, 159–177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ehrlich, Susan 2014. Language, Gender, and Sexual Violence: Legal Perspectives. In The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes, 452–470. Chichester: Wiley. Ehrlich, Susan and Miriam Meyerhoff. 2014. Introduction: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. In The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes, 1–20. Chichester: Wiley. Ehrlich, Susan, Meyerhoff, Miriam and Janet Holmes. (eds). 2014. The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Chichester: Wiley Eisikovits, Zvi, and Eli Buchbinder. 1997. “Talking Violent: A Phenomenological Study of Metaphors Battering Men Use.” Violence against Women 3 (5): 482–498. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fernández Díaz, Natalia. 2004 La Violencia Sexual y su Representación en la Prensa. Barcelona: Anthropos. Galtung, John. 1990. “Cultural Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 27 (3): 291–305.



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Garver, Newton. 1958. “What Violence Is.” The Nation 209 (June 24, 1968). Herring, Susan C. 1994. “Politeness in Computer Culture: Why Women Thank and Men Flame.” In Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. by Mary Bucholtz, Anita C. Liang, Laurel A. Sutton, and Caitlin Hines, 278–294. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Herring, Susan C. 1996. “Two Variants of an Electronic Message Schema.” In Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. by Susan C. Herring, 81–106. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Herring, Susan C. 2013. “Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, Emergent.” In Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, ed. by Debora Tannen, and Anne M. Trester, 1–25. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Herring, Susan C., and Sharon Stoerger. 2014. “Gender and (A)nonymity in ComputerMediated Communication.” In The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Ed. by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes, 567–586. Chichester: Wiley. Hydén, Margareta. 1999. “ ‘The World of the Fearful’: Battered Women’s Narratives of Leaving Abusive Husbands.” Feminism & Psychology 9 (4): 449–69. Hydén, Margareta. 2005. ‘I Must have been an Idiot to Let it Go on’: Agency and Positioning in Battered Women’s Narratives of Leaving. Feminism & Psychology 15 (2): 169–88. Jackson, Sue. 2001. “ ‘Happily Never After’: Young Women’s Stories of Abuse in Hetero-Sexual Love Relationships.” Feminism & Psychology 11 (3): 305–21. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. “Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance”. In Stance, ed. by Alexandra Jaffe, 3–28. New York: Oxford University Press. Litosseliti, Lia, and Jane Sunderland. (eds). 2002. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Lledó, Eulàlia. 2010. “La representación de la violencia de género en los medios de comunicación.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Gender Violence: Contexts, Discourses and Representations. Valencia, November 2010. Martin, James, and Peter White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Matoesian, Gregory M. 2001. Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Rape Trial. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Sara. 1995. Feminist Stylistics. London. Routledge. Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and Sexism. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Muehlenhard, Charlene L., and Kimes, Leigh A. 1999. “The Social Construction of Violence: The Case of Sexual and Domestic Violence.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3 (3): 234–245. O’Connor, Patricia. 1995. “Discourse of Violence.” Discourse and Society 6: 309–318. Pérez-Sabater, Carmen. 2015. “The Rhetoric of Online Support Groups: A Sociopragmatic Analysis of English and Spanish.” Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 28 (2): 465–485. Scharff, Christina. 2012. Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World. Farnham. Ashgate. Stokoe, Elizabeth. 2010. “ ‘I’m not gonna Hit a Lady’: Conversation Analysis, Membership Categorization and Men’s Denials of Violence towards Women. Discourse and Society 21 (1): 59–82. Thurlow, Crispin, and Kristine Mroczek. 2011. “Introduction: Fresh Perspectives on New Media Sociolinguistics.” In Digital Discourse: Language in the Media, ed. by Crispin Thurlow, and Kristine Mroczek, xix–xliv. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Patricia Bou-Franch Towns, Alison, and Peter Adams. 2000. “ ‘If I Really Loved him Enough, he would Be Okay’: Women’s Accounts of Male Partner Violence.” Violence Against Women 6 (6): 558–85. Trinch, Shonna. 2003. Latina’s Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Trinch, Shonna. 2007. “Deconstructing the ‘Stakes’ in High Stakes Gatekeeping Interviews: Battered Women and Narration.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1895–1918. Trinch, Shonna. 2010. Disappearing Discourse: Performative Texts and Identity in Legal Contexts. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 7 (2/3): 207–229. Turner, Graeme. 2010. Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn. London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun A. 1996. “Discourse, Power and Access.” In Texts and Practices. Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis ed. by Carmen Caldas-Coulthard, and Malcolm Coulthard, 84–104. London: Routledge. van Dijk, Teun A. 2006 “Ideology and Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2): 115–140. Wheeler, David. 2009. “Violent Images?: The Representation of Gender Violence in Contemporary British and American Cinema. Plenary Speech for the Gentext Meeting, Valencia 2009. Wood, Julia T. 2001. “The Normalization of Violence in Heterosexual Romantic Relationships: Women’s Narratives of Love and Violence.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 18 (2): 239–62. Wood, Julia T. 2004. “Monsters and Victims: Male Felons’ Accounts of Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 21 (5): 555–76.

Rape is rape (except when it’s not) The media, recontextualisation and violence against women Frederick Attenborough

This chapter contributes to a body of research in which media reports of violence against women are analyzed for the ways they gloss precisely what it is that constitutes ‘violence against women’ in the event under report. To catch this glossing in flight, as it were, mediated reports of violence are conceptualised as recontextualisations; that is, reports that may differ in rhetorically consequential ways from those provided by victims of, or witnesses to, that violence. A mediated stylistic analysis of press reportage of the charges of rape made against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in 2010, subsequently shows that and how Assange’s allegedly violent actions were recontextualised such that their status as violent was readably downgraded, mitigated or even deleted. The chapter ends by calling for more attention to be paid to the various techniques of recontextualisation via which reports of violence against women are presented in the media. Keywords: rape, violence against women, media, recontextualisation, mediated stylistics

1. Introduction This chapter contributes to a growing body of research in which media texts that take violence against women as their topic are analyzed for the ways they gloss, repackage, minimize, delete, and so on, precisely what it is that constitutes violence against women in the particular event under report (e.g. Attenborough 2013; Clark 1992; Kettrey 2013; Worthington 2008). As this chapter makes clear, one way of understanding and illuminating how such texts present particular versions of violence and/or complaints of violence to large audiences is to treat them as recontextualisations. This concept starts from the simple idea that a description of an event produced in one context is never the same as a description produced doi 10.1075/bct.86.01att 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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in some other context (see Caldas-Coulthard 2003). As soon as, for example, an incident of alleged violence is reported in a newspaper article it is already recontextualised in the discourse and images of that article. To focus on the issue of recontextualisation is thus to focus on the ways in which mediated descriptions of an incident of violence may differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from descriptions originally provided by, for instance, the victims of, or witnesses to, that particular incident. This chapter studies mediated reportage of the charges of rape and sexual molestation made against Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the organization Wikileaks, in late 2010. This event was rich with recontextualising possibilities: during the appeal hearing in which Assange’s lawyers challenged the warrant for his arrest, transcripts of the witness statements that had led to the warrant being issued were leaked online. Media commentators took this opportunity to build their own recontextualised descriptions of what actually happened as the (apparently) factual starting points for their own, subsequent evaluations of the (un)fairness and/or (il)legitimacy of the allegations. An analysis of media reports in which those witness statements were passed-on to the public reveals the textual practices through which Assange’s allegedly violent actions were often recontextualised such that their status as violent was readably downgraded, mitigated or even deleted. The chapter ends with a call for more attention to be paid to the ways in which reports of violence against women are recontextualised in and through the media. 2. Recontextualising violence against women Research in which third party recontextualisations of violence against women have been charted is extensive, ranging across sites such as trial judgments (Coates and Wade 2004; Ehrlich 2002), men’s magazines (Berns 2001; Kettrey 2013), newspaper headlines (Clark 1992), newspaper articles (Alat 2006), TV news (Worthington 2008), readers’ responses to newspaper articles and online articles (Bou-Franch 2013; Christie 1998), medical and legal reports (Coates and Wade 2007), the blogosphere (Harp et al. 2014) and police interrogations (Stokoe 2010). As extensive as that literature undoubtedly is, however, there is little danger of subsequent studies simply rehearsing the same, well-worn analytic findings. As with any live social issue, to study third party recontextualisations of this kind is to be involved in a collective and continuous process of finding, mapping and understanding where, when, how and to what ends, endlessly inventive techniques of recontextualisation are deployed in unique, locally specific textual, visual and spoken contexts. Indeed, in an era of the new media this process assumes heightened importance. In part, this is because social media, YouTube, blogs, 24 hour rolling news, and so on,



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have increased the means available for recontextualising activities: never before have so many opportunities for so many re-tellings of events like violence against women been available to so many people. In another part, however, it is because those same technologies increase the amount of material readily available: never before have so many leaks of what would hitherto have remained secret information been available to so many people for so many potential retellings. Perhaps most importantly, however, it is because of the rhetorical properties of third-party recontextualisations (see Attenborough 2013). In settings where people write or speak for themselves, they formulate their descriptions to and for one another, either turn-by-turn, or line-by-line, in an unfolding interaction. In any mediated report about those descriptions, however, a journalist reformulates points of view on behalf of the original interactants. As a result, only that which a journalist decides is relevant to understanding someone’s talk or text will appear in the report. This process of recontextualisation changes entirely what it means to handle what was, was not, or might have been rape (or whatever). When people talk or write about their own experiences in ways that we, as analysts, might unflinchingly characterize as, say, indicative of rape, we are accepting the trajectory of their story and their description. But in any subsequent newspaper article about that story, how they sought to shape it, pushing the reader in a certain direction, is relatively unimportant. Participants do, of course, retain some control over the reportage: if their words are to be represented, then a journalist is limited to choosing among direct, indirect or free indirect modes of recontextualisation (see Wales 2011). But there is more to the media than the reportage of talk and text: from lexical, syntactical and rhetorical details, through to the graphology of the page/screen upon which they appear, both will be recontextualised as part of a journalist’s story of what actually happened (Attenborough 2014). In this way, people can lose control of their words and actions, whilst all the while appearing to their respective audiences as if still in control of them. As we shall see, this is one of the ways in which women’s descriptions of violence/sexism/misogyny end up getting recontextualised as anything but those things such that an audience may then hear/read their accounts as the accounts of liars, fantasists, prick-teasers or whatever (e.g. Coates and Wade 2004; Ehrlich 2002). As much of the research described above suggests, there is a tendency for recontextualisations of violence against women to present us with something less than, or not quite readable as, violence. Coates and Wade (2004; 2007) provide a useful way to get to grips with the basic narrative forms adopted in such accounts, identifying four “discursive operations” via which processes of downplaying, mitigating and minimising violence are effected: first, there is the concealment of violence; second, the obfuscating of perpetrators’ responsibility; third, the concealment of victims’ resistance; and fourth, the blaming of victims. This chapter

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seeks to show that and how one of those themes — the concealment of violence, as a perpetrator focused outcome — was instantiated in and through mediated recontextualisations of the charges of rape and sexual molestation made against Julian Assange in late 2010. In this sense, it is a response to Coates and Wades’s suggestion that “more research is needed to assess the extent to which the[se] fourdiscursive-operations appear in professional, academic and public discourse and to assess the influence of these operations where they do appear” (2007, 521). But this is with one terminological caveat. In what follows, Coates and Wades’ “discursive operations” are treated as discursive outcomes. Strictly speaking, the concealment of violence is what we — as competent social members — are able to identify precisely as the concealment of violence once various recontextualising operations have already taken place. It is important to be clear about this distinction: the aim here is not just to identify that these outcomes are readably there in the text, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to understand how they were brought into being via various discursive, rhetorical, and performative operations. 3. Mediated stylistics To catch the process of recontextualisation “in flight” (Garfinkel 1967, 79), this chapter utilises mediated stylistics, an approach to textual analysis that brings the analytic toolkit of stylistics to bear on specifically mediated texts (see Attenborough 2011a, 2013, 2014). As a broadly ethnomethodological approach, mediated stylistics is influenced by discursive psychology (henceforth DP; Attenborough 2011b), the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK; Ashmore 1993; Attenborough 2012) and membership categorization analysis (MCA; Jayyusi 1984). What unites these approaches is their rejection of a particularly widespread understanding of language in which words-in-here-on-a-page name things-out-there-in-the-world. Because this understanding assumes a natural link between descriptions and the events so described it also assumes a non-linguistic sense of the world as the final arbiter of the in/accuracy of descriptions. For DP, SSK and MCA, however, there can be no socially meaningful sense of the non-linguistic without the founding, constitutive force of language. Although language might not be all there is in the world, it is, nevertheless, all there is in the world that allows for the world to become accountable and knowable to ourselves and others. And once you reject — as these approaches reject — the possibility of some non-linguistic arbiter of accuracy, it follows that all descriptions (whether those we decide to treat as accurate or those we do not) have to be understood as the products of particular, locally specific contexts. The issue is no longer whether mediated texts transmit in/accurate information, but how they act as “vehicles for action” (Stivers and Sidnell 2013, 3),



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where such actions might include defending someone, accusing someone, confessing to something, or any number of other things besides. It is here that we see how an ethnomethodological approach to language opens the possibility for a mediated stylistics; that is, for analytical tools traditionally associated with stylistics to be adopted for use within media studies. A journalist writing a news article about ‘real events’ and a novelist constructing a believably-real-yet-imaginary-world may well be working with different materials, but they are both engaged in essentially the same kind of literary task: building descriptive vehicles with the potential to pull off a certain set of contextually specific actions such as detailing, characterizing, informing, confessing, defending, accusing, and so on, in what constitutes an infinitely extendable list of other such social actions. So what does this mean in practice? Traditionally, stylistics has treated literature — whether institutionally sanctioned Literature or more popular noncanonical forms of literary writing — as its primary focus (Simpson 2004, 3). Mediated stylistics, however, in taking seriously the idea that journalists are the “professional storytellers of our age” (Bell 1991, 147), orients towards the types of creativity and innovation in language-use that are required in and for the construction of mediated stories. This shift in empirical focus requires a shift in analytic focus. For although literary and mediated texts both tell stories, they do so in differing ways. In that stylistics asks how certain aesthetic effects are achieved through the language of a literary text (Simpson 1992), it is able to assume that the text in question represents a story in which characters, plot, events, etc. have all been constructed by that text’s author (e.g. Burton’s analysis of Plath’s prose, 1982). Media texts, on the other hand, almost always involve attempts to translate — or recontextualise — characters, plots and events that have already been constructed elsewhere, by others, in a different context. Unlike other forms of stylistics, then, mediated stylistics is interested not in one-off stories, but in the various iterations of a story that are reproduced over time and across various contexts. In this chapter, for instance, the aim is to show that and how subsequent journalistic retellings of the initial ‘allegations of rape and sexual molestation’ made against Assange were often stylised such that his accusers could still be seen to be making their allegations, but only now in a context where descriptions of Assange’s actions rendered those allegations entirely defeasible. 4. Assange and the allegations of [X] Assange is known to most of us as the founder of the organization WikiLeaks. Since 2006, WikiLeaks has been publishing submissions of secret and/or classified information leaked to them via various, often anonymous, news sources and/

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or whistle-blowers.1 Despite some early successes, it was only in 2010, with the publication of US military and diplomatic documents that WikiLeaks — and, by implication, Assange — became internationally well known. The publication of those documents, including confidential and secret material, caused huge controversy: the United States Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation; the Vice-President, Joe Biden, and various US senators, denounced Assange as a terrorist, whilst the Chairperson of the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence sought to have WikiLeaks reclassified as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It was around the time that this political storm was breaking that Assange visited Sweden. Whilst there, he met two young women. For now, let us describe the actions he engaged in with these women as [X]. On the basis of their experiences of [X] both women went to the police. Their subsequent accounts of [X] took the form of separate transcripts — one with Woman A, the other with Woman B — in which their words were glossed by an interviewing officer. In that this chapter is interested in how people developed various accounts of what [X] really was, the question at stake here is not what was [X]?, but rather, what did [X] become in these initial, third-party recontextualisations of it? The extracts below reproduce the most relevant parts of each transcript:2 Extract 1 (Woman A, Nordic News Network 2012) 1. …Assange had not made any physical approach toward her earlier that 2. evening, except now which Anna initially welcomed. However, it felt 3. ‘unpleasant right from the start’, because Assange was rough and 4. impatient. According to Anna, ‘everything went so fast’. He tore 5. off her clothes and in the process pulled at and broke her 6. necklace. Anna tried to put some clothes back on, because it all 7. went so fast and she felt uncomfortable; but Assange immediately 8. took them off again. Anna states that in fact she felt that she no 9. longer wanted to go any further, but that it was too late to tell 10. Assange to stop, as she had ‘gone along this far’. She thought she 11. ‘had only herself to blame’. She therefore allowed Assange to remove 12. all of her clothes. Then they lay down on the bed, Anna on her back and 13. Assange on top of her. Anna sensed that Assange wanted to insert his 1.  Understood in the longue durée of modern European history, the organization’s political philosophy constitutes an updated, digital friendly version of the 18th century Jacobin vision of a transparent society: to break all secrets and to eradicate all informational inequalities will be to render any and all unjust systems vulnerable to destruction by more open forms of governance (see Maslan 2005). 2.  The data come from English translations of the leaked, Swedish language police interview transcripts, which are widely available on the internet.



14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

penis in her vagina right away, which she did not want because he was not wearing a condom. She therefore tried to twist her hips to the side and squeeze her legs together in order to prevent penetration. Anna tried several times to reach for a condom, but Assange stopped her from doing so by holding her arms and prying open her legs while trying to penetrate her with his penis without a condom. Anna says that eventually she was on the verge of tears because she was held fast and could not get a condom, and felt that ‘this can end badly’. To my question Anna replies that Assange must have known that Anna was trying to reach for a condom, and that he therefore held her arms to prevent her from doing so. After a moment, Assange asked Anna what she was doing and why she was squeezing her legs together. Anna then told him that she wanted him to wear a condom before he came in her. At that, Assange released Anna’s arms and put on a condom that Anna fetched for him. Anna sensed a strong unspoken reluctance by Assange to use a condom, as a result of which she had a feeling that he had not put on the condom that he had been given. She therefore reached down her hand to Assange’s penis in order to ensure that he had really put on the condom. She felt that the rim of the condom was where it should be, at the base of Assange’s penis. Anna and Assange resumed having sex and Anna says that she thought that she ‘just wanted to get it over with’. After a short while, Anna notes that Assange withdraws from her and begins to adjust the condom. Judging from the sound, according to Anna, it seemed that Assange removed the condom. He entered her again and continued the copulation. Anna once again handled his penis and, as before, felt the rim of the condom at the base of the penis; she therefore let him continue. Shortly thereafter, Assange ejaculated inside her and then withdrew. When Assange removed the condom from his penis, Anna saw that it did not contain any semen. When Anna began to move her body she noticed that something ‘ran’ out of her vagina. Anna understood rather quickly that it must be Assange’s semen. She pointed this out to Assange, but he denied it and replied that it was only her own wetness. Anna is convinced that when he withdrew from her the first time, Assange deliberately broke the condom at its tip and then continued copulating to ejaculation. [Continues]

Extract 2 (Woman B, Nordic News Network 2012) 1. …They fell asleep, and when they woke up they may have had sex 2. again; she does not really remember. He ordered her to fetch him 3. some water and orange juice. She did not like being ordered about 4. in her own home, but thought ‘what the hell’ and fetched the liquids 5. anyway. He wanted her to go out and buy more breakfast. She did not

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

want to leave him alone in the flat — she really did not know him very well — but she did it anyway…When she returned she served him oatmeal porridge, milk, and juice. She had already eaten before he awoke, and had spoken with a friend on the phone. [Paragraph break] They sat on the bed and talked, and he took off her clothes again. They had sex again and she suddenly discovered that he had placed the condom only over the head of his penis; but she let it be. They dozed off and she awoke and felt him penetrating her. She immediately asked, ‘Are you wearing anything?’, to which he replied, ‘You’. She said to him: ‘You better don’t have HIV’, and he replied, ‘Of course not’. She felt that it was too late. He was already inside her and she let him continue. She didn’t have the energy to tell him one more time. She had gone on and on about condoms all night long. She has never had unprotected sex before. He said he wanted to come inside her; he did not say when he did, but he did it. A lot ran out of her afterward… She said to him: What if I get pregnant? In reply he merely said that Sweden is a good country to have children in. She said jokingly that, if she is pregnant, he would have to pay off her student loan. On the train to Enköping, he had told her that he had slept in Anna Ardin’s bed after the crayfish party. She asked if he had sex with Anna. But he said that Anna liked girls, that she was lesbian. But now she knows that he did the same thing with Anna. She asked him how many he had had sex with, but he replied that he had not counted. He also said that he had taken a HIV test three months earlier and that he had had sex with one girl afterwards, but that girl had also taken a HIV test and was not infected. She made sarcastic comments to him in a jocular tone. She believes that she was trying to minimize, in her own mind, the significance of what had happened. He, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care. [Continues]

Without yet looking at the discursive operations at work here, it is possible to identify the discursive outcomes that we, as readers, are being invited to see as there in the extracts: there is the exposure, rather than concealment, of violence (e.g. Extract 1: 16–21; Extract 2: 3–5; 14–16); the presentation, rather than obfuscation, of the perpetrator’s responsibility (Extract 1: 34–44; Extract 2: 12–13); the exposure, rather than concealment, of the victims resistance (Extract 1: 6, 13–19); and the positioning of the victims’ actions as understandable, rather than blameable (Extract 1: 8–12; Extract 2: 35–36). In these moments, we can also see how the



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interviewing officer — as author and animator — allowed for each woman — as principal — to retain a degree of control over the descriptive vehicle developed under her (anonymised) name (Goffman, 1979). Each of these descriptive vehicles provided the authorities with enough evidence that [X] could have involved rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion for an international warrant to be issued for Assange’s arrest. Soon afterwards, though, the transcripts were leaked online, which had the effect of providing media commentators with enough evidence to develop their own, third-party recontextualisations of what the transcripts really revealed.3 Before moving towards a more focused analysis of the chapters in which these allegations were recontextualised as allegations-of-anything-but-rape, there are two things worth noting about the data corpus as a whole. First, every description of what happened took place after the mediating journalist had shifted footing, appearing as author and/or animator to some other principal, whether the women in question (Extracts 3, 6), or another relevant party (Extracts 4, 5). In this way, s/he appeared merely to be passing on information about what happened (see italicised sections, below). Extract 3 (Democracy Now, 20/12/10) 1. This is what the report says…Quote Extract 4 (NewStatesman, 15/12/10) 1. The Australian barrister James Catlin, who acted for Assange 2. in October, says that both women in the case told prosecutors that Extract 5 (Gizmodo, 03/12/10) 1. Police reports obtained by the Daily Mail show that Assange 2. met the two women who denounced him… Extract 6 (Daily Mail, 06/12/10) 1. According to her testimony…Assange wore a condom

Second, and although this chapter focuses on recontextualisations in which recipients were invited to see the original transcripts as evidence of anything but rape, nevertheless, the transcripts were not always recontextualised in that way (cf. Coates and Wade 2007, 520). Across the data corpus there were examples of recontextualisations in which the transcripts had been kept intact as readable accounts of rape. But this should not be taken to suggest they were more faithful to the transcripts than those in which what happened became anything-but-rape. As 3.  Using the database LexisNexis and a basic online new media search, a total of 27 English language news articles that referenced the transcripts were collected. Along with the original witness transcripts, these mediated recontextualisations comprise this chapter’s data corpus.

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vehicles for social action, they may have had the same angle of movement as the original transcripts (Latour 1988), but the action they sought to accomplish was subtly different: not describing an alleged rape…where I am the victim, but describing an obvious case of rape…that Assange’s weird/left-wing/cultish devotees are deliberately refusing to acknowledge as such. To make the nature of the rape as obvious as possible was, for these accounts, to make obvious to others the ideological blinkers of those weird/left-wing/cultish devotees. As a result, they are marked by attempts to embellish and/or exaggerate certain of the details contained within the transcripts. In Extract 7’s “overdetermined account” (see Drew 1998), for instance, the woman in question was not just asleep. Nor was she just unconscious. She was asleep and unconscious, at the same time (lines 5–6). Extract 7 (Daily Telegraph, 22/08/14, p. 23) 1. As the Twitterati and army of internet Assange groupies began 2. their celebrations [at Assange being granted asylum by Ecuador 3. after his appeal had been lost], the belittling of the accusations 4. began. What had allegedly happened was “not rape”, they argued. 5. This, even though it is clear that one woman claims she was asleep 6. and unconscious when, she alleges, Assange raped her.

Similarly, in Extract 8, the suggestion that he ignored her demand that he use a condom (line 4) glosses a part of Extract 1 (lines 12–23), but ignores other parts that could have been used to show Assange agreeing to her demand (see Extract 1, lines 24–27). Extract 8 (Daily Mail, 20/12/10, n.p.) 1. What’s disturbing is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have 2. misrepresented the allegations…It’s been known for some time 3. that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex 4. on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and 5. penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a 6. condom, despite her wishes.

In the vast majority of cases, however, the women lost control of their descriptive vehicles. Here, third-party recontextualisations had a very different angle of movement to the original transcripts: not describing an alleged rape…where I am the victim, but something like describing absurd and clearly false allegations of rape… that have been trumped up by two stooges for a US Government which is desperately trying to find ways to extradite, and then prosecute, Assange for his work with WikiLeaks. To make the rape allegations as implausible as possible was, for these accounts, to make obvious to others the fact that they must, or can only be,



Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

politically motivated allegations. It is to the question of how they attempted this obviousness that we now turn. 5. The concealment of violence This section focuses on the differing ways in which the original transcripts, and their mediated recontextualisations, dealt with the issue of interpersonal violence. We start with an extract from a mediated account in which the apparently essential details of each respective transcript (see Extracts 1 and 2) have been glossed. Miss A is Woman A, whilst the second woman is our Woman B. Extract 9 (Democracy Now, 20/12/10) 1. If you read these allegations, he took off Miss A’s clothes too quickly for 2. her comfort. She tried to tell him to slow down, but then, quote, ‘she 3. allowed him to undress her.’ This is what the report says. The second 4. woman says she woke to find him having sex with her. When she asked 5. whether he was wearing a condom, he said no. Quote, ‘According to her 6. statement, she said: “You better not have HIV.” ’ He answered, ‘Of course 7. not.’ Quote, ‘She couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because 8. she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had 9. unprotected sex before.’

The first thing to note here is that the phrase “quote, ‘she allowed him to undress her’ ” (lines 2–3) is reported as if an accurate representation of Woman A’s in-direct speech as it was transcribed in Extract 1. If we look back at the original allegations, however, we can see that Woman A’s actually reported position was that “she therefore allowed Assange to remove all of her clothes” (Extract 1, 11–12). As such, Extract 9’s representational device is more akin to free indirect speech that masquerades as a kind of indirect speech: words attributed to Woman A in Extract 1 either blend with, or are replaced by, those of the journalist in Extract 9. A small detail, perhaps, but in the context of an allegation of rape, not an insignificant one. Consider, for instance, the difference between removing clothes and undressing. There are certain words and phrases which can, given the right context, become readable as affectionate or sexually charged. To describe someone as undressing a woman is not always and inevitably such a phrase. It can, for instance, be read as an action performed within, and as part of, a number of non-sexually orientated relational pairings: mother/child, carer/patient, etc. But here, in this Extract, we already know that we are reading about something with a sexual edge. Our task, therefore, is to try and “position” (see Sacks 1992, 585) that something on a spectrum of sexual possibilities, from ‘violent rape’ at one end of the scale,

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to consensual sex or love making at the other. And so if what happened between Assange and “Miss A” was, in fact, describable as an undressing that she allowed then it is not difficult for us, as readers, to work back from that activity to the sort of relational pairing in which such an action might have taken place: a sexualpartner/sexual-partner relationship. Important for the success of our discovery of this pairing as the right kind of pairing is the expectable nature of allowing and undressing as actions that parties to such a pairing might perform. There is nothing in such a sequence of actions that readably violates any of the standardized rights and obligations that each party to a sexual relationship would have in relation to the other: she allows him to do something, and undressing is the kind of something that a sexual partner might allow. Indeed, if she (as the supposed complainant) accepts that she allowed an undressing, then in the very act of describing things that way she tacitly confirms her own, self-ascribed identity as one pair part within a sexual-partner/sexual-partner relationship. An undressing that is allowed, in other words, provides for a sense of a sexual-partner/sexual-partner pairing in which neither party did anything other than act in the right (i.e. non-violent, non-forceful) kind of way. Contrast this now with Extract 1. To be described, as Woman A allows herself to be described in the police transcript, as having allowed Assange to perform an action that she saw as removing all of her clothes is to pair two actions that are not easily readable as taking place within a similarly mutual, consensual sexual-partner/sexual-partner pairing. To be sure, allowing is still the sort of action one might associate with such a pairing. But in the context of a telling of a sexual encounter, it becomes difficult to work back from her account of him removing all of her clothes such that we (as readers), or her (as our narrator), are able to find anything quite so adequately fitted to that pairing. Unlike allowing, removing all of someone’s clothes is an action description that shifts register: it is expectable less in a personal than an institutional relationship, hinting not at mutual actions of love and tenderness, but the sanitised, technical sort to be found within the confines of something like a carer-patient interaction, with all of the attendant asymmetries of power that that sort of pairing can be heard to invoke (see Sacks 1972, 37). Indeed, that she allowed something that she herself saw as a removal of her clothes indicates to us, as readers, that this might have been something that she had no choice but to allow. What we get, then, is the sense not of a sexual-partner/sexual-partner pairing that went right, but one that went wrong such that he forgot his standardized rights and obligations in relation to her, and did what he wanted rather than what they both wanted. In the very act of describing what happened with these distancing words and phrases of “estrangement” (Fowler 1996), she tacitly confirms her own, selfascribed identity as one pair part within a failed sexual-partner/sexual-partner relationship.



Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

It is here, in Extract 9’s slight reformulation, that we see the start of a process whereby the violent acts at stake within this whole episode are placed “into a framework of normal sexual activity, rather than into a framework of assault on part of the body” (Coates et al. 1994, 194). Elsewhere, for instance, there is a readable difference between “woke to find him having sex with her” (Extract 9, line 4) and “she awoke and felt him penetrating her” (Extract 2, line 14). Most obviously, the descriptor sex imputes to the activity so labelled the kind of uncontroversial ontological status that is precisely the thing at stake in the whole episode. More subtly, the preposition with (Extract 9, line 4) helps to minimize any sense of violence in Assange’s actions. Despite the fact that she wakes to it happening, nevertheless, because it appears as something he is doing with rather than to her, a subtle presupposition is created, namely, that consent for it had carried over from the night before. In the transcript’s version, however, the very fact that she has to wait to feel what is happening to her body (rather than, say, verbally or perceptually agreeing to/understanding what was about to happen), draws our attention to a lack of consent. The verb penetrate — which again, deliberately echoes the dry, non-sexualised register of a carer/patient or doctor/patient interaction — suggests that she felt he saw her not as a partner, but as brute biological genitalia, to be fucked whenever he wanted to fuck. For while you can have sex with someone, you cannot penetrate or rape with someone — those verbs describe things that are done unilaterally and do not require the person to whom they are done to be playing the role of sexual partner. Similarly, in Extract 10, the formulation making love implies an even greater degree of mutuality and co-production. Extract 10 (Daily Mail, 06/12/10) 1. …She had snagged perhaps the world’s most famous activist, and 2. after they arrived at her apartment they had sex. According to her 3. testimony to police, Assange wore a condom. The following morning 4. they made love again.

It also provides for an interesting form of lexical cohesion between “sex” (line 2) and “made love again” (line 4). In that it is happening “again”, line 2’s “sex” can retrospectively be understood by the reader as a sub-category of what now appears as a more general (and far more intimate, passionate and consensual) category of “making love” (see Johnstone 2007, 120). Both episodes were, it turns out, an instance of that category. In this way, it is Woman A’s own descriptive “testimony” (line 3) — and not the journalist’s narrative — that renders her claims of “rape” and “sexual molestation” as at best far-fetched, and at worse, outright fabrications. I want now to consider Extract 9’s use of the phrase “he took off Miss A’s clothes…” (line 1). It appears as if a gloss on Extract 1’s suggestion that Assange had been “rough” and “impatient” (lines 3–4), “so fast”, and had “tore off her

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clothes” (lines 4–5), “pulling at and breaking a necklace” (lines 5–6). To be sure, to “take off ” clothes and to “tear”, “pull”, and so on might all be formally correct descriptions of the same action. But in the context of a description of an alleged rape, they are not interchangeably meaningful. To get at the rhetorical significance of this point, let us follow Jayyusi (1993) in distinguishing action descriptions that foreground “outcomes” (e.g. he killed her) from those that foreground “the mechanism(s)” that may cause a particular outcome (e.g. he pulled the trigger). Whereas the former point retrospectively to a possible trajectory of actions that may have led up to the outcome, the latter allow for a set of possible trajectories that may end up unfolding from the mechanism-as-described. As a result, different kinds of action descriptions can be co-fitted in such a way as to produce a certain sense of action, and a certain sense of intention (or accidentalness) on the part of the person committing the action. It is via this kind of co-fitting that contextually specific accounts of actions end up with “finely tuned inter-organizations of different kinds of items so that mechanisms and outcomes are both rendered, as necessary for the practical purpose at hand” (ibid, 439). Pursuing these ideas here, we can see that one of Extract 2’s “practical purposes” was to show the violence of Assange’s actions, and to do so via certain kinds of co-fitted action descriptions. Three such fine-tuned assemblages can be identified: Extract 11 (adapted from Extract 1, lines 4–6) 1. The tearing and pulling [mechanism]…breaking of a necklace [outcome] Extract 12 (adapted from Extract 1, lines 3–6) 1. Him tearing, pulling and being so fast, rough and impatient 2. [mechanism]….her putting clothes back on [outcome]; Extract 13 (adapted from Extract 1, lines 4–6) 1. Her trying to put clothes back on [mechanism]… him immediately 2. taking them off again [outcome].

If any discursive representation of violence is an indexical matter, and one that therefore has to build a sense of its own abnormality out of its own lexis, syntax and rhetoric, then it is here, in these moments, that violence is literally being constructed. We, as readers, are provided with an account in which we can work forwards from mechanisms to outcomes (and back again) such that we find Assange’s actions to be deliberately and intentionally violent. We are invited to see not just the mechanisms behind, and outcomes of, Assange’s actions, but also the fact that he too must have seen those same outcomes. To depict Woman A as trying to put clothes back on so as to halt the unfolding sequence of events is to show something that would have been “glance available” (Jayyusi 1984, 68–73) to anyone. We see this, just as Assange must have seen it. Yet we also see that, nevertheless,



Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

he “immediately” took them off again. In that he does so, the very deliberate, intentional nature of his attempt to force non-consensual sex upon Woman A is foregrounded. But what now of Extract 9’s version of those same events? First, we get the gloss “he took off Miss A’s clothes” (line 1). Precisely as a gloss, it removes from view the co-fitted actions descriptions in Extracts 11 and 12. Gone, in other words, is any sense that the mechanisms via which those clothes were removed were in any way violent. Moreover, this new sense of the action in question is co-fitted with a certain kind of outcome such that the “taking off ” of the clothes was “too quick for her comfort” (lines 1–2). As a recontextualisation of Woman A’s “felt uncomfortable” (Extract 1, line 7), the word “comfort” helps in a number of ways to downgrade the violence of Assange’s actions. First, and as in the case of allowed and undressed, we have a coupling — to take off clothes and comfort — that is now readably expectable within the bounds of a sexual, rather than violent, relationship. Second, to flip in this way, from the negative uncomfortable to the positive comfort, is to subtly change the “moral profile” (Watson 1976, 68–70) of the interaction Woman A appears to be focalising. To show someone judging an interaction in terms of their comfort levels not their levels of uncomfortable-ness is to give some idea of the prior expectations that that person must have had when they entered into the interaction. Levels of comfort are not the standard evaluative yardstick of a victim, but they may be read as just such a thing for an incumbent of a category like sexual partner. This flip, in other words, offers us as readers an invitation to see Woman A as tacitly confirming her own, self-ascribed identity as one pair part within a sexual-partner/sexual-partner pairing. But to describe the interaction in terms of her comfort levels is also to change what it is that we think Assange himself was attempting to achieve. A sexual-partner cannot give a co-partner a feeling of unpleasantness without that feeling calling the entire pairing into question. But a sexual-partner can try, and fail, to provide a partner with comfort without that failure calling the nature of the pairing into question. Extract 9’s “too quickly” (line 1), which decelerates Extract 1’s “so fast” (line 4), enhances the sense that we are seeing a sexually acceptable action that was simply performed without any finesse: to take off clothes too quickly for your partner’s comfort can perhaps be readable as a forgivable faux pas; but to rip and tear clothes off so fast that you make someone feel uncomfortable cannot. Assange’s failure to provide comfort, then, is not to be found in the removal of clothes, simply the speed of their removal. That is all. Note also here how Extract 9 deletes the details of violence provided within Extract 13. In Extract 1, as Assange is “tearing” and “pulling” (lines 4–5), Woman A performs a material action, putting her clothes back on. As already noted, this is an action Assange is shown to have seen, because he immediately takes them off again. Extract 9, however, chooses to ignore those visible, material actions, instead

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presenting Woman A’s resistance solely in the form of her having “tried to tell him to slow down” (line 1). In any such verbal action, the three readably expectable participant roles would include a sayer, in this case Woman A, a message, in this case slow down, and a recipient, in this case Assange (see Simpson 2004). I write that such an action would include those things, however, because telling is an action that Woman A only “tried” to pull off. So what does it mean to try to tell somebody something? Considered as a decontextualized action, it could mean any number of things — its readability as a particular kind of action depends upon the local interactional context in which it is invoked. So let us deliberately start by considering a possibility with the potential to undermine my argument that Extract 9 minimizes any sense of violence or resistance. This is a possibility in which trying to tell somebody something means something like I tried to tell him…but he just wouldn’t listen. Trying here implies a temporally drawn out persistence on the part of both I and he: I is readable as having kept on saying what I had to say, and he is readable as having kept on doing what he had already been doing before I attempted to intervene. In this way, it becomes difficult not to identify the recipient he as culpable for what followed, and the sayer I as someone whose message had tried to prevent that which followed. But this cannot be a readable possibility in the case of Extract 9’s failed telling precisely because no such persistence is allowed for. Crucial here is the temporal precision afforded by the phrase “but then”. It deletes any sense of persistence in two interrelated ways. First, it creates a sense of the rapid pace at which things unfolded: this happened… “but then” this other thing happened! In the parlance of narratology, we do not appear to be receiving a “summary” in which a long story is compressed into a short statement of only its main features, but a “scene” in which story and text duration are identical simply because the story in question has no other features (O’Toolan 2001, 49–50). Second, the coordinating conjunct “but” provides for an understanding of why the story is as brief as it is. In the hypothetical formulation I tried to tell him…but he just wouldn’t listen there is no change of action on the teller’s part. The “but” connects two actions, one hers and the subsequent one his, such that we see what ends up thwarting the telling not as her motivations, but his obstinacy and stubbornness. And, of course, obstinacy and stubbornness are phenomena that need time to reveal themselves — indeed the combination of the adverbial “just” and modal verb “wouldn’t” suggests not a one-off failure to listen, but something that happened a number of times. Here, then, in this scenario, she tries…but his actions mean that, ultimately, she fails. However, with “she tried to tell him to slow down, but then, quote she allowed him to undress her” (Extract 1, lines 2–3), the but is coordinating two actions, where both of those actions are hers and hers alone. In that he does nothing other than what she allows, the only possible cause of the failed telling must be her motivations and not his obstinacy and stubbornness. It is here



Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

that the rapid pace implied by “but then” becomes relevant: she tried…but then quickly decided not to try anymore. On this reading, we might also start to suspect that Assange himself may have seen this lack of resistance. If you try a material action like “taking someone’s clothes off ”, evidence of either success or failure will be visible to others. But with a verbal process action, you either say something — i.e. you try and succeed and can be seen to succeed — or you say nothing — i.e. you try and fail and the whole process is invisible. In that her telling is something she only “tried” to do, we can take this to mean something like she was just about to say something…but then changed her mind. And no-one, not even a sexual partner, could see, decode and process such a thing. Finally here, let us note what it is that Extract 9 is cueing us to see as the answer to the question why might this woman’s change of mind have come about? As we have seen, in that Extract 9 presupposes that it was the pace, rather than the nature, of what Assange was doing that upset Woman A’s comfort levels, one readable answer to this question is that he got better; that is, she started to tell him to stop… but then he really started to turn her on. In classic rape myth terms, then, he would have convinced her that her failed no, stop it, was, in fact, and when it came down to her basic biological desires, a yes — carry on. Whether we reach this sort of conclusion or not, a more subtle deletion of the violence that would have required any such resistance in the first place would already have taken place. For if we accept the invitation to see that she changed her own mind — irrespective of her reasoning in doing so — then we are also accepting that this was an action only she was capable of performing. One can be forced to do various things against one’s will; but one cannot readably be seen to have been forced to change one’s mind about wanting to do those things unless the threat of violence lurks somewhere in the narrative structure. In that Extract 9 presents us with no hint of such violence, the suggestion is that she was free to resist or even just to tell him to ‘slow down’ but chose, of her own free will, to do neither. 6. Rape is rape (except when it’s not) Speaking on the NBC Channel’s Tonight Show in 2012, Barack Obama was presented by the host, Jay Leno, with comments attributed to Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, in which pregnancies that occurred after rape had been described as a gift from God. In response, Obama suggested what he described as “a very simple proposition”, namely, that “rape is rape”. “It is a crime”, he continued, “and so these various distinctions about rape don’t make any sense to me”. It is the phrase “rape is rape” that I want to reflect on here in this conclusion. The fact that the President of the United States of America could reach for such a phrase indexes its status as

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something of a meme in our digital culture, increasingly to be found at work in the texts and speeches of politicians, feminist rights groups, campaigners and activists. As the content of Obama’s “simple proposition” suggests, the work it attempts is that of holding together the category of rape as one singular phenomenon; as one singular type of crime. But as with any such frequently cited ontological claim, it is precisely the frequency with which it is — indeed has to be — cited that hints at the precarious, unstable nature of the object being claimed. In part, the need to make such a claim, and to make it ever more frequently, stems from the sheer weight of counter claims made by people who believe that rape is, of course, always, absolutely, 100%, totally, categorically, utterly rape…except when it’s not; except when it’s, say, a gift from Mourdock’s God; or when women lie about what really happened to them; or when women secretly want it, real bad; or when they knowingly lead men on; or when it’s enjoyable; or when women make the claims up just to get back at their former partners; or when…and so on and so forth (e.g., see McMahon & Farmer 2011). But beliefs do not just exist independently, out there somewhere in the ether. To attract and maintain adherents, they need to be seen to be testing themselves against real-world occurrences of a type that the belief in question should be able to account for, expose, unveil, demystify, and so on, as a particular type of real-world occurrence. So where might occurrences of rape-that’s-not-rape appear to and for those kinds of people? If rape is rape… except when it’s not, then how do they get to know about cases in which rape is not, in fact, rape? Many places, to be sure. But, on the basis of this chapter’s findings, we can suggest that one such source is undoubtedly ‘the media’, and, in particular, media recontextualisations of allegations of rape. But a pretty high degree of precision is required whilst unpacking what is meant here by recontextualisation. Because across the data-corpus, when the actual events were presented, they were presented as if the actual events as-reported-by-the-two-women-who-had-beenclaiming-those-events-as-rape. There was, in other words, no hint of a journalist doing anything other than passing on details as they were when s/he came across them. As a result, we got something that looked like each woman’s own claim of rape and each woman’s own description of the events that constituted the rape. And yet, as we have seen in this chapter, the look of things can be deceiving: those apparently faithful descriptions of each woman’s version of events had, in fact, been tweaked, reformulated and glossed such that description and evaluation were no longer in alignment. We could still read that each woman was claiming rape, of course; but only where each woman’s account of events now appeared to show something that was very difficult to see as anything-like-rape. So what do we end up with? Well, if you are one of those people who think that rape is rape…except when it’s not, then you get to test your beliefs against an apparently factual, apparently objective account, taken straight from the apparent victims themselves. And,



Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

in that your beliefs stand up to this apparently formidable test without being falsified, they end up getting strengthened: these particular women can clearly be seen to be exaggerating their claims and making a fuss about nothing…just as you suspected, in theory, that women in general had a tendency to exaggerate and make a fuss about nothing. Rape would still be rape, of course…just not in this case (or, of course, in any number of other similar cases, the real meaning of which you would now be able to decode). It is an empirical question — and one that would need to be answered on a case-by-case basis — as to whether or not this strategy of recontextualisation is at work in other media reports of rape. But given that a large proportion of people read about what violence against women is and is not precisely through the sorts of recontextualisations that have been placed under analysis here, it stands as an empirical question worthy of further study.

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Attenborough, Frederick. 2013. “Sexism Re-Loaded…or Sexism Re-Presented? Irrelevant Precision and the British Press.” Feminist Media Studies 13 (4): 693–709.  doi: 10.1080/14680777.2012.700524

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Coates, Linda, and Allan Wade. 2004. “Telling it Like it Isn’t: Obscuring Perpetrator Responsibility for Violent Crime.” Discourse and Society 15 (5): 99–526. ​doi: 10.1177/0957926504045031 Coates, Linda, and Allan Wade. 2007. “Language and Violence: Analysis of Four Discursive Operations.” Journal of Family Violence 22: 511–522. ​doi: 10.1007/s10896-007-9082-2 Drew, Paul. 1998. “Complaints about Transgressions and Misconduct.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 31 (3): 295–325. ​doi: 10.1080/08351813.1998.9683595 Ehrlich, Susan. 2002. “(Re)contextualising Complainants’ Accounts of Sexual Assault.” Forensic Linguistics 9 (2): 193–212. Fowler, Roger. 1996 [1986]. Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goffman, Erving. 1979. “Footing.” Semiotica 25: 1–29. ​doi: 10.1515/semi.1979.25.1-2.1 Harp, Dustin, Jaime Loike, and Ingrid Bachmann. 2014. “Spaces for Feminist (Re)articulations: The Blogosphere and the Sexual Attack on Journalist Lara Logan.” Feminist Media Studies 14: 5–21. ​doi: 10.1080/14680777.2012.740059 Jayyusi, Lena. 1984. Categorization and the Moral Order. London: Routledge. Jayyusi, Lena. 1993. “Premeditation and Happenstance: The Social Construction of Intention, Action and Knowledge.” Human Studies 16: 435–54. ​doi: 10.1007/BF01323027 Johnstone, Barbara. 2007. Discourse Analysis. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Kettrey, Heather. 2013. “Reading Playboy for the chapters.” Violence against Women 19 (8): 968– 994. ​doi: 10.1177/1077801213499241 Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. McMahon, Sarah, and G. Lawrence Farmer. 2011. “An Updated Measure for Assessing Subtle Rape Myths.” Social Work Research 35 (2): 71–81. ​doi: 10.1093/swr/35.2.71 Maslan, Susan. 2005. Revolutionary Acts: Theatre, Democracy and the French Revolution. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. O’Toolan, Michael. 2001. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge. Sacks, Harvey. 1972. “An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology.” In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. by David Sudnow, 31–74. New York: Free Press. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Volumes 1 and 2, ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Simpson, Paul. 1992. “Teaching Stylistics: Analysing Cohesion and Narrative Structure.” Language and Literature 1 (1): 47–67. Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics. London: Routledge. Stivers, Tanya, and Jack Sidnell. 2013. “Introduction.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 1–8. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.



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Stokoe, Elizabeth. 2010. “‘I’m not Gonna Hit a Lady’: Conversation Analysis, Membership Categorization and Denials of Violence towards Women.” Discourse and Society 21 (1): 59–82. ​doi: 10.1177/0957926509345072 Wales, Katie. 2011. A Dictionary of Stylistics. Harlow: Longman. Watson, David R. 1976. “Some Conceptual Issues in the Social Identification of Victims and Offenders.” In Victims and Society, ed. by Emilio C. Viano, 60–71. Washington: Visage Press. Worthington, Nancy. 2008. “Progress and Persistent Problems: Local TV News Framing of Acquaintance Rape on Campus.” Feminist Media Studies 8 (1): 1–16.  doi: 10.1080/​14680770701824878

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De-authorizing rape narrators Stance, taboo and privatizing the public secret Shonna Trinch

This chapter examines how reviewers take silence-sustaining or silence-breaking stances toward rape in online reviews of anti-terrorism expert, Jessica Stern’s (2010) book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror. I analyze how reviewers recontextualize the story of this uncontroversial rape and its narrator. The data consist of 47 reviews, ranging from professional reviewers at major newspapers to ‘citizen reviewers’ found on commercial bookstores’ websites and on readers’ blogs. Using stance as my analytic framework (Jaffe 2009), I show how readers align their reviews in ways that either authorize or de-authorize the narrator and her narrative. Keywords: rape, (de)authorizing, stance, book reviews, Jessica Stern, denial, silence

1. Introduction Jessica Stern is an anti-terrorism expert. She travels the globe to interview dangerous men. In 2001 Time Magazine named Stern as one of seven innovative thinkers whose work would change the world. She has written two books about her research: Terror in the Name of God — which won the New York Times Notable Book Award and The Ultimate Terrorists. Stern received degrees from Barnard, MIT, and Harvard. At the White House, she served as a staff director of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. Actress Nicole Kidman plays a character modeled on Stern’s White House work in the movie the Peacemaker. Her resume is long and varied. I learned of Stern when she gave a talk at John Jay College, where I am a professor, about her third book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror (Ecco Publisher, 2010). In it, she recounts how, in 1973, when she was 15 years old, she and her younger sister, Sara, then 14, were raped at gun point by a stranger who broke into their home. Stern’s goal in writing Denial, was: doi 10.1075/bct.86.02tri 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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to help not only the millions of women and men who have been raped or tortured but the soldiers who risk their lives on our behalf, returning with psychic wounds so excruciating that both they and we cannot bear to admit these wounds exist (Stern 2010, xii ).

For Stern (2010, xii), “Denial is almost irresistibly seductive, not only for victims who seek to forget the traumatic event but also for those who observe the pain of others and find it easier to ignore or ‘forget’.” At Stern’s talk, a colleague suggested that because of Stern’s stature, scholarly prominence, and importance as a national security expert, people would (finally) have to take a rape story seriously. With Stern as narrator, she reasoned, readers would not be able to ignore the reality of rape by undermining the victim with issues of credibility (see Frohmann 1991) and victim-blaming ideologies (Matoesian 1993, 1999). In this chapter, I examine book reviews of Stern’s memoir to see what kind of uptake it gets. The book review, I argue, serves as one semiotic site for the practice of silence-sustaining or silence-breaking discourses of rape. As a genre, the book review provides a unique perspective for studying rape narratives in terms of how these accounts of trauma and/or resilience are “taken up” (Austin 1962) by readers and represented to other potential readers. The reviewer takes a position or a stance in his/her review both toward the narrator and the narrative as well as toward his or her own readership. The book review genre is both descriptive and evaluative, and ultimately, it functions to prescribe whether there should be future readings. The data and analyses show how reviewers’ alignments either authorize or de-authorize Stern as narrator and/or expert and take either silence-sustaining or silence-breaking stances. Silence-breaking stances suggest that the rape narrative is an important site of knowledge, while silence-sustaining stances continue to index rape as a socio-cultural taboo that is too difficult to be heard. Interestingly, as we will see, some reviewers authorize Stern as a narrator, but still manage to erect the taboo against talking about rape. This analysis is contextualized in a culture and society where rape and sexual assault are underreported crimes (Russell 1982, 1983; Bergen 1996). I have discussed elsewhere (Trinch 2001, 2003) how people negotiate these subjects with a range of linguistic strategies including euphemism, particularly to refer to both the crime itself and to the physical details involved. Following Ullman’s (1966) framework of linguistic taboo, the term rape — an unpleasant, fear evoking crime involving sexual activity — is itself not only marked as taboo, it may also be loaded with evaluative and judgmental suppositions on the part of women who experience it and among practitioners who attempt to address it (Finkelhor and Yllo 1985; Michael et al. 1994; Wood and Rennie 1994; Lamb 1999a, 1999b; Gavey



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1999; Phillips 1999). Linguists have shown how institutionalized discourses mitigate women’s meanings of sexual assault by recasting accounts of it in terms more palatable to social standards of sexuality (Ehrlich 1998; Coates et al. 1994) and/or more contextually appropriate ways to discuss it (Trinch 2001, 2003, 2010a). Stern is a unique narrator. Because of her background and the facts surrounding her rape, her credibility is not at issue. The conventional norms for interrogating alleged victims of rape do not adhere (see Ehrlich 2001, 2007a, 2007b, 2012; Matoesian 2001; Mulla 2011). Therefore, Stern’s narrative has an opportunity to transcend rape stereotypes and shatter the linguistic norms common in its representation. As an uncontroversial narrator, Stern could reveal truths about rape that get obfuscated when complainant credibility — either due to mundane discrepancies of fact or to sexist notions of a woman’s culturally improper gender behavior — tends to trump all else. Reviewers who authorize Stern allow her the authority of telling her account in her own voice. They value her as an author with expertise and her book as a source of knowledge. Their reviews refer to what a reader can learn from Stern. And conversely, those reviewers who de-authorize Stern diminish her account, her ability to author it and her validity as an expert source on rape. Analogous to Bou-Franch’s (2013) analysis of online comments about intimate-partner abuse as sustaining- or challenging-domestic violence, I examine whether and how deauthorizing reviews map onto silence-sustaining stances toward rape. 2. Methodology: The book review genre To examine these issues, in October 2010, I assembled a corpus of 47 reviews by conducting a keyword search on Google for Jessica Stern, Denial, and Review. I also went to Stern’s webpage and found a list of links to reviews. Additionally, I keyed in the names of major U.S. newspapers, such as the New York Times, along with Stern’s name and the book title. And, reviews were found on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble’s website, and on the blogs of individual citizen readers. After reading each review several times, I highlighted words, phrases, and ideas that resonated with what prior academic work — discussed briefly above and in more detail below — would predict to be the cultural responses to both rape and to women who have been raped. I assessed if, generally speaking, reviewers expressed a positive or negative orientation toward Stern and her memoir (Tannen 1993). By positive I mean that reviewers recommended Denial and supported the form and content of Stern’s representations of rape, trauma, and resilience. By negative, I mean that reviewers did not like the book as evidenced by the way they expressed disapproval for its writer or for the way it was written. To aid in my

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assessment of reviews as positive or negative, I incorporated the sociolinguistic analytic of stance (Jaffe 2009). Du Bois (2007, 163) defines stance as a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means…through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, positions, and subjects (themselves and others), and align with the other subjects with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field (as quoted in Jaffe 2009, 5).

Specifically, I examine the reviews with respect to the ways in which readers take up Stern and her story, as well as the manner in which they may or may not ratify her position as a narrator of rape and of post-traumatic stress disorder for potential readers. Sociolinguistic resources such as frames, speech acts, and uptake are used to identify the reviewers’ stances toward Stern’s account. If Stern wrote her book so that others would read her story, the review genre provides an interesting and unique communicative space through which to assess uptake. Austin suggests that “securing uptake” is part of a complex process of a speaker’s making his/her intent known to his/her interlocutors. Blommaert (2005) adds to this understanding of uptake by suggesting that uptake also depends on an interlocutor’s ideological lens. By examining reader alignments towards the narrative, one can discern the different ideologies through which interlocutors not only take up Stern’s rape narrative, but also whether they recommend or discourage future readings. 3. Findings and discussion Following the steps outlined above, 23 reviews were counted as positive, while only 14 were considered to be negative. The remaining 10 fell into the hybrid and ambivalent category that authorized Stern as a rape narrator, but cautioned readers to beware (or be aware) of taking up her narrative. In the section that follows, I illustrate what are considered positive, negative, and ambivalent reviews. The positive reviews are noteworthy because they seem to break with conventional ways of talking about rape. 3.1 Positive reviews Examples 1 and 2 below are considered positive reviews because their focus is on the book as a locus of comprehension. Their favorable framing of the book is projected from the beginning through titles like “Very Powerful” and “Brave”, and these reviews strongly suggest that the book explores a topic that is worth apprehending.



(1)





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Princeton Reader “Very Powerful.” Amazon.com, July 5, 2010. 1. The story line itself is mesmerizing 2. Writing style and story organization are artful 3. The basic approach is that of “ground truths” which is based on immersion in exploration of stories as they unfold rather than library search or other people’s research. 4. The narrator goes through an exploration of herself, her past trauma (holocaust (second generation), death of a mother, abandonment by a stepmother and rape all through childhood and early teen age years). However, she doesn’t stay in her home to do soul searching, rather she goes to any length to engage in dialogues with many who can help get deeper and understand better. The reader joins the journey, captivated. 5. A strong message is that exploration with others is powerful anti-shame measure. 6. The exploration of her relationship with her father is brutally honest and teaches the power of dialogue. 7. It is tough to put the book down. It makes one hopeful that many will read it and be inspired by the author’s insights, courage and knowledge.

In Example 1, the reviewer takes an epistemic stance toward the memoir. That is, this writer performs his/her reading of Denial in an academic way and reviews it similarly by providing declarative and unmediated evidence to readers in a list of the book’s merits. Presented as an argument bolstered with evidence, and not the reader’s opinion, the enumerated list of the memoir’s instructional virtues makes for an authoritative stance that commends Stern as the authority on knowing and telling her rape story and as the person to reveal new information about rape. Princeton Reader in Example 1 examines the mechanics and presentation of writing as well as the way the account is organized, researched, and vetted. The reader names the methodology Stern uses for exploration: “immersion” and “ground truths”. And these methods are equated to books grounded in positivistic research design and library sources. Notably, the writer does not suggest that any one trauma stands out among the others. The book is described as a story about trauma and an account of how one person dealt with several traumatic experiences. Each of the review’s constituent parts is enumerated in didactic fashion, and the overall evaluation of the book is affirming: “It is tough to put the book down. It makes one hopeful that many will read it and be inspired by the author’s insights, courage and knowledge.” Describing the book as “tough to put down,” the reviewer never suggests that the readers will be burdened by Stern’s story; the conclusion is that they will be galvanized by it.

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In Example 2, the reviewer uses a more affective stance in his review of Denial, Stern’s authority and Stern as an author. He states that Stern’s account provides a transformative experience for readers. (2) John Bowes, “Brave.” Amazon.com, August 1, 2010. Exposing herself in ways authors rarely do, the author forces the reader to evaluate their own ability to handle trauma and family relationships. A look at PTSD that is relevant to our times and has always been with us, even if we didn’t know what to call it. Originally I purchased the book for insights into her rapist, I was acquainted with him after his prison years, her handling of trauma became the real story. Very well done.

The reviewer in Example 2 refers to Stern as “the author” and though he uses verbs that signify difficult material, (i.e.; “exposing” and “forces”), this reviewer ultimately evaluates the book as positive for its metamorphic effect: it gave far more than was bargained for. Readers are told that insight into the rapist — the reason he read the book — is actually less interesting than the wisdom gained from knowing how Stern handled trauma. I show the positive reviews first because (a) they are strong examples of what it means to have someone evaluate work on rape as thoughtful and admirable as opposed to simply shocking and horrifying, and (b) these positive reviews starkly contrast with the negative and hybrid/ambivalent reviews that tend to annul not rape, but rather the act of talking about it. As we will see, the negative reviews incorporate predictable and even culturally appropriate responses to reading rape narratives: horror, empathy, sympathy, and outrage. And while empathetic or sympathetic responses are not antagonistic to Stern, per se, they can be stifling to others who have suffered victimization. Furthermore, once compared with the very positive reviews, it becomes clear how such common and culturally appropriate expressions of horror and even some shows of empathy create a discourse of suppression. The positive reviews show a different ideological orientation toward the readers’ uptake of information about rape, proving that there are other ways to hear rape disclosures. They illustrate for us how people can talk about rape without falling into the conventional rhetoric that mutes conversation, fosters shame and allows for denial. 3.2 Negative reviews Reviews with de-authorizing and silence-sustaining stances tend to employ language to evaluate Stern and her narrative negatively. Some can be read as speech acts of discouragement, because they downgrade Stern’s ability to communicate new knowledge about rape. Additionally, negative reviews incorporate rape myths



De-authorizing rape narrators

and victim-stereotypes. Several reviewers in this group reject Stern’s right to speak about her experiences in the way she chooses. And most importantly, most of the negative reviews uphold rape’s privileged status as an unspeakable phenomenon. The three reviews that most blatantly incorporate stereotypes and myths about rape were written by two writers for the New York Times and one for the Washington Post. All three of these reviews reify the stereotype that women that are raped suffer from a rape trauma syndrome that researchers like Haag (1996), Gavey (2005) and McCaughey (1997) claim essentializes women who have been raped as “eternally broken in body and irrevocably damaged psychologically.” Marie Arana, for example, writing for The Washington Post, begins her review with the following two paragraphs that highlight the mythology that rape ruins a woman forever: (3) Maria Arana, “Jessica Stern’s Denial,” Washington Post, August 15, 2010. If a victim of childhood rape grows up to fear the dark, avoid sex, cower in the streets and shrink from human relationships, it shouldn’t surprise us. Sadly, the arc is common enough. Psychiatrists have parsed the ravaging effects of post-traumatic stress in thousands of clinical studies. But if a victim of that monstrous act grows up to be preternaturally calm, surprisingly courageous — with antennae so acute that she is sought after to elicit sensitive information from ruthless terrorists — that is a remarkable outcome. Psychiatrists have parsed this, too, and they call it post-traumatic growth.

Because not many people speak to terrorists, Stern is remarkable, but she is not alone in this work. Furthermore there are women who are raped who also go on to live productive lives. Arana’s characterization of people who are raped as doomed to a life of being afraid of the dark, unable ever to have sex again is a common and reductive stereotype. This review is one of the most blatant de-authorizing reviews in the corpus. Rather than reviewing the book, Arana reviews Stern as a victim with pathologizing psychiatric discourse. Stern’s authority is handed over to the psychiatric experts, and through them, Arana tells potential readers all about Stern. This review has the potential not only to dissuade readers from taking up Denial, but it could also serve as a silence-sustaining discourse as potential readers who have been victimized by sexual violence read the review and note that they do not fit the bill that Arana reports is expected by the experts. In other words, this review could have the effect of foreclosing on all women who experience nonstereotypical responses to rape. Moreover, this reviewer and the one in Example 4 de-authorize the author by using material outside the text to evaluate and explain her — not as writer, narrator, or person with a first-hand experience of rape, trauma and resilience — but as victim already explained by psychiatry.

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In a similarly de-authorizing stance, one of the two reviews published in the New York Times also replaces Stern’s authority to speak for herself by quoting Stern’s colleague. (4) Charles McGrath, “Private Trauma Sheds Light…” NYTimes, June 29, 2010. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has been a friend of Ms. Stern’s since the late ’90s, said he was astonished to learn what happened to her. “If you met some completely dysfunctional person who you could see was wearing the scars of such an experience, then you might not be surprised,” he explained. “But that’s not Jessie”.

These reviewers use others’ words to explain Stern. Does her victim-status mark her as unreliable for them? Reviewers in 3 and 4 take de-authorizing stances both by what they say and by how they say it. The stereotype that normal raped women should have no future success is present in Review 4, albeit attributed to a colleague. This stance is again silence-sustaining because women who have been raped and who have stories that do not conform to the stereotype (a) might choose to remain silent for fear of not being believed or (b) might not be heard because their interlocutors subscribe to the stereotype (see Trinch 2013). Unlike his two colleagues who make Stern out to be the exception by giving her superhuman qualities — a raped woman with a life, career, and success — rather than the presumed rule — the raped woman that is forever convalescing, drug addicted, and loveless — the other NYTimes writer, Dwight Garner, concludes that Stern is indeed, damaged. An excerpt of his review is shown in Example 5. Notice how Garner actually dehumanizes Stern. His review takes the formulaic shape of “she’s exactly what we would expect after rape: an angry, man-hater.” (5) a. Dwight Garner. “Violence Expert Visits Her Dark Past.” NYTimes, June 24, 2010. About these facts, Ms. Stern is understandably bitter…Ms. Stern’s id floats very near the surface. Her anger is barely sublimated and emerges in unexpected and jagged ways, ways that feel authentic but somewhat beyond her control.



And to support his claim, in (5b), Garner offers the following textual evidence from the two pages on which Stern writes about her anger in her monograph of more than 300 pages: (5) b. Dwight Garner. “Violence Expert Visits Her Dark Past.” NYTimes, June 24, 2010. Imagining a meeting with her rapist, she writes: “He will realize that he wronged the universe, and his brain will explode. Also his penis will fall off. I will leave him there, his brain on his plate.’









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About a psychiatrist who evaluated her rapist in prison and described him as “not a sexually dangerous person,” she thinks: “I imagine this doctor’s penis wilting and shrinking in terror, as small as a bean, and there is some satisfaction in this cruel thought. But wilting is not enough: I want to bloody him. In my mind’s eye I swing a bat right at this doctor’s learned head, smashing his skull, the skull that contained his bad, addled brain.” …Reading “Denial” is like ingesting a novel from a particularly damaged Joyce Carol Oates protagonist come to life. Ms. Stern can seem like a potent distillate of every Oates character put to paper.

And in the last paragraph in (5b), we see that Garner, begins the conclusion of his review by using the word “damaged” to describe Stern. Garner reduces Stern to an id, a Freudian psychological term referring to a part of the psyche associated with instinctual impulses and primitive needs. Her story of trauma and resilience is made akin to a novel, and prospective readers are told that Stern does not have control of herself, which suggests that is it she, not her rapist, who is dangerous. There are, however, four other reviews in the corpus that also mention Stern’s anger and bitterness. For space purposes, I can include only one in Example 6 below,

(6) Phurba, “Intriguing Tale of Revisiting a Past Crime” June 30, 2010, Barnes & Noble.com Some of Stern’s observations and feelings of anger are blunt and intense, but such feelings show her honesty and respect for the reader who does not want a filtered reality.

Here, the reviewer acknowledges Stern’s anger, and with the discourse marker “but” used as contrastive connector arguably acknowledges her transgression (see Schiffrin 1987): she should not be talking about her anger. One of Stern’s messages is that rape is wrong and harmful, but it is denial that is damaging. She never states that she is damaged or that her life was ruined. Yet, reviewers insist upon and continue to impose a damaged identity. Notice how reviewers do this in Examples 7 and 8: (7) Joseph D. Policano. “Rape and Retribution,” Amazon.com, July 10, 2010. It is a heartbreaking account of a life never made whole after a terrifying experience as a teenager. (8) Eclectic/Eccentric, June 22, 2010. Being raped is a woman’s greatest fear and can be the source of a woman’s greatest shame. How does a reader critically analyze a story so personal, so damaging, and so removed from her own life?

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This separation between myself and the author was consistently apparent and not just regarding the rape.

Furthermore, Raphael Peterson in (Example 9) says that Stern tries to deal with the trauma that looms over her, but he does so in an underhanded way, as he gives her agency over to the repercussions of the rape: (9) Raphael Peterson, “Brutal Memories,” The Roanoke Times, August 29, 2010 Traumas of this magnitude can tower over a person’s life. Stern does her best to implode its foundations with the passion of the forever marked.

A couple of readers de-authorize Stern by suggesting that her prose, method of knowing, and means of writing are flawed. They discuss how Stern could have done a better job writing her memoir. The most notable is, perhaps memoirist Helen Epstein (in two reviews excerpted in Example 11). Epstein and another reviewer, J. J. Weiland, in Example 10, criticize Stern for her resistance to psychology and to the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both Epstein and Weiland disparage Stern for ignoring the expertise that science and the humanities have to offer. They even state that she did not cite them or their colleagues. (10) J. J. Weiland, “The past is never dead…” July 6, 2010. Amazon.com. “Denial” represents a powerful self-revelation of the impact of traumatic events, and their acceptance or non-acceptance by caregivers and loved ones, on emotional functioning later in life. … And yet I was dismayed with certain aspects of the work. Granted a memoir is not a scientific treatise and one cannot expect it to be organized as such. Still, Dr. Stern does use references at certain points in the book, but omits references or even crediting of others for insights not uniquely her own. For example, she boldly states a hypothesis of hers that humiliation is the wellspring from which savagery emerges. …A nonacademic writer producing a memoir that included such a revelation might be excused of such omissions, but not one with the credentials and resources of the author. Secondly Dr. Stern repeatedly denigrates work done in the psychological fields by reducing, wholesale, their findings to ‘psychobabble’. Indeed, she outright states that her motivation for interviewing a soldier with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was due to her mistrust of the diagnosis of her own symptoms from a therapist. In this regard, I found her arrogance to be quite similar to that of her father’s… Finally, and most intriguingly, Dr. Stern focuses the bulk of her memoir on her rape and rapist and the investigation surrounding it, and her father’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the incident… Such contrasting sources and durations of childhood abuse, and their relative impacts, are discussed



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thoroughly by the likes of Dr. Jennifer Freyd with her Betrayal Trauma hypothesis, but there are others as well…” (11) Helen Epstein, “Interesting and difficult” Amazon.com and World Books Review, August 20, 2010. …And pursuing the subject of context and reading, there’s hardly any reference to prior work on her many themes. Did she read (and take in) Susan Brownmiller’s classic book on rape or the many others that followed its publication? Did she study Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery or any of the many studies that…? Any of the large literature on Holocaust survivors and their families that would contextualize her father for her? If so, what helped her understand herself? If she did not read up on any of these subjects, why not? The inexplicable omission of the vast literature on shame, rape, motherless daughters, Holocaust survivors, and trauma in general is all the more peculiar because Stern introduces herself as a scholar. Is she uninterested in what other people have discovered about trauma? Does she still disavow its relevance to herself? Or is she just sloppy. In a memoir, the reader wants to know.

Epstein even asks why Stern did not read and cite her own book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. In addition to these scholars’ complaints of Stern’s lay treatment of the disorder, we find reviewers that have trouble with Stern’s attempt to portray consciously and deliberately the way her mind moves because of her PTSD. See Excerpt 12 below: (12) Dancing Mom, “Therapeutic Diary,” Amazon.com, August 7, 2010. I did not like this book… I expected to be wowed by her insight and experience. Instead I felt like I was reading a teenager’s diary which would actually make a lot of sense, since she hasn’t opened this compartment since the horrific experience when she was 15. What made it feel like a dairy of a teenager was the constant exploration of personal interpretation, innuendo, and perception. Dr. Stern provides an inner dialogue of her journey from the moment the detective calls her to the publication of her book. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I simply thought it contained irrelevant information along with some gold nuggets. For instance, while talking with any number of people, the conversation is reported verbatim…On the inside, the author is contemplating birds, surfaces and discusses the way the person uses verb tenses. Many of these inner dialogues come to naught.

And another reviewer, shown in Excerpt 13, has similar complaints:

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(13) debeehr, “I’m not sure what I expected…” Amazon.com August 28, 2010. I’m not sure what I expected…but this wasn’t it. There is no question that what the author went through during the assault was terrible, and that she is to be admired for having surmounted her trauma to lead a successful career, but unfortunately, simply having a terrible experience in one’s background doesn’t automatically make you a good writer. The book rambles and jumps around in a rather ostentatiously “literary” style. Perhaps the writer was attempting to use the literary style to simulate the effects of trauma and PTSD for the reader; however, it didn’t work for me. The rambling, disjointed narrative detracts from the power of the account; the author’s exploration of the effects of her ordeal on her psyche, which should have been gripping, instead comes across as facile, almost self-absorbed and/or self-aggrandizing.

Reviewers are entitled to their opinions, but opinions are grounded in the very ideologies about which Blommaert (2005) notes act as filters for uptake. These opinions are created in and constitutive of the same culture of denial that keeps people silent about sexual violence. Those who have been victimized perceive these risks in speaking (Trinch 2007, 2010b). Stern describes herself as having possessed this kind of disdain for victims and ties it to her father’s insistence on their family’s having a stiff-upper-lip. Processing trauma and its effects were defined by both Stern and her father as navel gazing. Some reviewers seem to be saying something similar, though they couch their distaste for the processing that Stern does as a complaint against her prose. In linguistics, when someone’s utterance upsets the status quo, analysts have found that those invested in maintaining the status quo use topic slifts or complaints about complaints to shift focus by lifting the complaint out of its original context and moving into another where the form and/ or content of the complaint itself can be examined (Hirsch 1998; Matoesian 1993; Trinch 2010b). Here, Stern’s complaint about her culture which tolerates rape, trauma, and denial is subjected to reviewers who complain that her prose is flawed. 3.3 The caveat reviews While the negative reviews are de-authorizing and silence-sustaining — especially those that appearing in the national American newspapers — the most interesting reviews are those that subtly uphold the culturally privileged position of rape as public secret. Taussig (1999) claims that public secrets circulate and trade in what is known in culture but not articulated. This third category is complicated. These reviewers, on the one hand, valorize Stern and her project. They believe her and also seem to authorize her as a credible narrator. Rather than complaining about her complaints, they often endorse them. But, on the other hand, these reviewers



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suggest that Stern is transgressive. In these writings, Stern is at once an author with something important to say and a person who says things that are beyond the boundaries of acceptability. Thus, these writers present Stern to their readers with a caveat, or a buyer-beware, that indicates that Stern’s narrative could do them damage. And so, these reviewers’ stances leave readers with a decision to make for themselves as to whether they should read Stern. Therefore, the stance taken in the majority of the reviews in this group both authorizes Stern and simultaneously could allow for the persistence of the silence that surrounds rape. Potential readers are given the option either to take up the narrative and ratify it or leave it and remain unaware of the knowledge it contains. These reviewers’ charge to readers to be on guard may stem in fact, precisely from Stern’s credibility as a narrator of rape. And, as I will argue, the type of ideology expressed in this third category presents a new danger both to women who are raped and to our ability to broaden understandings of rape. The discursive processes of the reviewers in this group mirror the explanation Mookherjee gives of Taussig’s public secret. Mookherjee (2006, 435) explains: Taussig (1999: 7) argues that defacement, achieved by the drama of revelation, produces the sacred. The act of revealing a familiar public secret is transgressive. Hence the knowledge of secrecy of this public secret is made powerful through an active not-knowing … paradoxically, secrecy is actively not known and yet it is disclosed in order to be defaced, revealed … which in turn enables its concealment.

When reviewers write that reading the book was an emotional burden or when they incorporate vocabulary that suggests the book is disturbing, we see them erecting the public secret of rape. They reveal its power through disclosure and then quickly deface it as something that should not be known. The data make clear how reviewers warn readers. Some of the warnings come squarely in the reviews that I considered negative. For example, in the blatant READER BEWARE group, we get the following cautions: (14) Epstein on Amazon.com and on World Book Review: “Denial is a difficult book, uncomfortable to read and even more uncomfortable to review.” Dwight Garner writing for The New York Times: “Denial is a hard book to read, in part because of its subject matter, in part because [of] Ms. Stern’s [anger]”. The blogger, Eclectic/Eccentric: “This is not an easy story to read. There is so much violence, so much terror.”

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V. Garza Gaby on Amazon.com: “When reading it, I would have to put it down and take a minute after a particularly hard page or two.” Lit *Chick Blogger: “This was a difficult read — both the subject matter and Stern’s commitment to laying all things bare definitely caused this reader to some moments of discomfort.” Heart2Heart: “This is a difficult book to read without getting emotionally involved with Jessica’s story of her traumatic rape of her and her sister experienced.” Cyraen on Barnes and Noble.com: “This book was tough to read at times, embarrassing at others, and completely compelling.”

Interestingly, blogger, “Take Me Away,” confines her reader beware caveat to the chapter where the rape occurs by saying, “For those who may be concerned, the chapter in which the author describes the actual rape may be difficult for some to read — especially if they experienced something similar. However, the rest of this was not a difficult read in that manner.” Along these lines of demarcating the potential peril Stern’s book can do by marking the dangerous pages or delineating especially vulnerable populations, there are reviewers that say Stern’s book should be avoided during the summer: (15) Joseph D. Policano writes: “Obviously, Denial is not the sort of book one brings to the beach for summer reading.” And blogger, Sophisticated Dorkiness, states: “Summer just wasn’t the time for me to read a book on a topic as difficult as rape, and I suspect some of my impressions were colored by that… [The stories Stern shares about her family and the people she interviews] are not easy to read…”

This signaling of danger to certain people, of certain pages and particular times of the year could be taken up as permission to not know about rape. While they validate the book project, these reviewers also suggest that there are people who need not know about sexual violence. The comments that are posted in response to these reviews on the blogs confirm that this is exactly how the caveats in the speech acts of warnings are taken up. Several commentators on the blogs, Jenn’s Bookshelves, Reading on a Rainy Day and Lit * Chick pick up on the license reviewers give to readers to avoid reading about rape by saying:



De-authorizing rape narrators

1. That book does sound very disturbing. I do love memoirs, but this one almost feels too personal to me. 2. I don’t think I could read this book myself, but I do agree that it probably should be read. Thanks for being part of the tour. 3. I can’t even imagine living through something like that, and to be honest, I don’t want to read about it either. Too tough, too true. 4. That sounds intense! Maybe something to tackle one day. 5. This sounds like a difficult but worthwhile read — thanks for being part of the tour. 6. Wow, this sounds like a very disturbing story. I cannot imagine living my life like that. 7. Wow, I just heard the author of this book interviewed on NPR yesterday, then I saw it listed somewhere else and now on your blog! It sounds so interesting but so difficult to read. Thanks for the review. 8. I heard of this book elsewhere, but it’s going to go on my wish list. I might find it hard to read, though, because of the intensity. 9. This book would be too intense for me, but I’ve heard some great things about it from other bloggers. Thanks for being part of the tour. Even some of the relatively positive reviews that do not incorporate an all-out caveat, still employ language that hints at the book’s power to make readers illat-ease. The use of certain vocabulary — mostly noun phrases and adjectives — warns readers that the material is both uncommonly seen and upsetting. Dwight Garner, of The New York Times, squarely in the negative category, gets listed here too for his vocabulary use warning of emotional disturbance: “Ms. Stern describes that night [of the rape] in brutal detail.” It was a night that changed her and taught her a dire lesson: “Shame can be sexually transmitted” (italics mine). Also J. J. Weiland writes, “What unfolds in this narrative is an intriguing and admittedly harrowing account of the latter part of Dr. Stern’s childhood…” And William Doolittle states as well, “This is a harrowing tale of rape…” In these reviews it is the telling itself that is described as being harrowing and brutal, not the act of rape, per se. Throughout the reviews there are a series of discourse frames that Tannen (1993) argues expose people’s cultural expectations. Tannen notes that when speakers or writers evaluate utterances with words like surprising or even personal, they indicate that there is a cultural expectation for silence on the topic. In this way, the reviewers seem to expect that Stern would suffer quietly, and thus, her speaking catches them unaware. Epstein, for example, states, “Her story is often vivid, surprisingly candid…” and Knittingmomof3 says, “Denial is deeply personal, raw and profound look at the effects of trauma on an individual…and the damages

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stemming from denial…this is the first memoir that is so honestly fresh, raw…”. And others suggest that Stern’s voice could deprive readers of their composure and frighten them with her truthfulness. For example, Cynthia “Andante Cantible” states, “Her voice is so unnervingly private that she’s able to share each baby step of healing.” The reviewer for the Providence Journal writes, “This startlingly honest memoir reveals the ways that ordinary people go numb in the face of unbearable truth and the damage to children …” (emphasis mine). By using such words and phrases, the reviewers reveal their own expectations that rape is and should remain personal, private, and deeply embedded in one’s own trauma. In the same vein, these reviewers are saying that in writing about it, Stern catches her reader off-guard, deprives interlocutors of composure, and breaks up the tranquility of their settled state. The revelation of her rape produces shame for them and they pass this information on to their readers in the form of caveats that take on paternalism. Mookherjee, who did field work in Bangladesh during 1996 and 1997, writes about how the public secret operates on memory and secrecy with respect to rape in a small village there, called Enayetpur. The contexts of Concord, Massachusetts and Enayetpur are very different, yet where rape is concerned, they are oddly similar. The three women raped in Mookherjee’s study were victims of wartime rape — where estimates indicate that somewhere between 200,000–400,000 women were raped in the civil war between East and West Pakistan that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. The three Bangladeshi women in her study were raped in 1971. This is the same year that police in Massachusetts began recording reports of rape committed by Stern’s rapist. In all, Stern’s rapist raped at least 44 other girls under the age of 19. In Mookerjee’s analysis the public secret operates through scorn to reveal the wartime rapes of the three women at the same time shame operates to conceal the secret. By the 1990s, the women were likened to prostitutes, because strange men had had access to their genitals and because as women who spoke out against rape, they received tangible goods and gifts and intangible benefits such as fame as war heroines. Villagers, for example, say things like these women are “in the business of being naked.” Mookherjee (2006: 441) states, Some of the younger men in the village have expressed disbelief about whether the women were actually raped. The key paradox here is that these youths reason that someone who has ‘truly’ been raped would ‘attempt to conceal it’ (chapa rakhbe) … Local liberation fighters similarly disbelieved the women. To them the yardstick of being authentically raped is based on hiding one’s history and masking it through marriage…



De-authorizing rape narrators

So while there exists a national rhetoric of heroism for women raped during the war, in their villages these Bangladeshi women, known as birangonas, are shamed for speaking. The local ideology is that those truly raped would not speak about it. Mookherjee analyzes the discourse of a local patriarch named Halim: Halim in a Taussigian vein, seems to suggest that ‘truth is a revelation which does justice to it’ (Taussig 1999: 2), or in other words, that truth is only worth evoking if one can seek justice through it. For the women it is fruitless to reveal the truth of rape, as they cannot punish the rapist. Halim said the idea of purdah was to keep things covered chapa (hidden, covered), which was not necessarily through the external burkha but via the right codes of conduct. The action of the women in talking about the rape, particularly for the purpose of receiving money in exchange, is therefore sinful. The rightful action of the victim, weak and tabooed, is to be quiet, to remain covered and invisible… (441).

No English-language readers blatantly suggest that Stern should remain quiet to be considered a raped woman. Many do, however, suggest they do not like hearing her voice. Some readers seem to regret having to know the public secret of rape in the way Stern talks about it. And more telling still, these reviews are over and over again, cautionary notes for potential readers that may discourage uptake and ratification of the rape narrative. In Enayetpur, the public secret operates on the telling and the teller. What the rape narrator reveals is intimate and private, a fact that shames and dishonors herself and her family. The tellers are made to look like attention-seekers for something that does not mark them culturally as heroines. A virtuous victim-identity in Bangladesh is claimed through silent suffering. Speaking out is crude, debasing to the self, and destabilizing to the social order. Again, no English-language reviewer expresses contempt for Stern as a stained and inferior person. In contrast to the shamefully uncovered birangonas, Stern is construed by her reviewers as the perfect neoliberal rape victim who is entitled to tell her story. A rape victim like Stern is seen as an empowered individual who has the right to decide to speak. But, the public secret persists in the U.S. context as well. It is revealed though, through the interlocutors’ right to refuse to hear what gets conceptualized as a private (or privatized) trauma. 4. Conclusions The autobiographical story of a person who overcomes tragedy to become a productive societal member seems to resonate with these reviewers as a boot-strapping, personal triumph narrative that makes for a truly great tale. But in this way,

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we see how rape has become a depoliticized problem. If the reviews are a window into the political climate, they suggest that the speaking I and the power of eyewitness testimony to break the silence and to inform the public about experiences that are not only unspeakable (Felman and Laub 1992), but also potentially disruptive to the current cultural status quo (Beverley 1993; Briggs 1997; Eades 2008; Sommer 1991), are being overshadowed by notions of interlocutor(hearer/ reader)-agency. We find ourselves in a situation where there is at least a tacit belief that while people have the right to have voice, that same right to conversation applies on the receiving end as well. And thus, there might not be anyone who wants to hear it. In other words, with the idea of choice and individual’s rights to speak in tow, communication is not being conceptualized as a two-way street. The voice that speaks of trauma can, if interlocutors desire, travel down a one-way street to a dead end. The political configuration of the individual’s right to be a speaking subject as in “Can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak 1988), is countered with the interlocutor’s individual right to hear what he or she wants. Rape then is conceptualized as a problem that the individual raped woman alone must overcome by her personal resilience. For most readers in this corpus, knowing about the public secret of rape is just one of the many choices an individual makes. If the story is too intense, disturbing, unnervingly personal, angry, or brutal, then, the individual reader need not bother with the individual victim and her personal journey. The data I examine here support Mardrossian’s conclusion that feminists have lost control of the ability to theorize rape as a political issue. She states that the discipline of psychology has managed to individualize the problem in the psyches of each singular woman raped. She complains, too, that contemporary feminist theorists’ focus on changing women’s psychic and affective orientations further instantiates the hegemonic discourse on victimization and reduces the political to the personal (Mardrossian 2002, 772). These reviewers write of Jessica Stern as the only victim of this crime. But Stern writes of how at least 44 other young girls were raped by the same man, not during a war, but in three lovely and peaceful Massachusetts communities. From 1971–1973, parents, teachers, school administrators, law enforcement officials, medical professionals, religious leaders, and politicians, or in other words, an entire society, denied the reality of rape. And today, in these reviews, that rape is a political and cultural problem is rarely mentioned. Reviewers scrutinize the narrative, critique the telling’s merits and then write about how it affects them personally. Then, they warn others that reading such material could harm them. These stances further entrench the idea that rape is a crime that happens to the unfortunate individual woman who needs the fixing. I’ll close with some final words from Mardrossian (2002, 772):



De-authorizing rape narrators

Feminist theory in particular can do a lot to change the depoliticizing course that approaches to rape have taken in the last decade. We need to theorize and reconceptualize the meanings of categories such as “victim” and “experience” rather than merely criticize their use. We need to identify the ways in which women are no longer “silent” but are in fact encouraged to speak (out) through numerous yet nonpoliticized channels controlled by the liberal and bureaucratic state. Indeed, without a concerted effort on the part of both feminist academics and activists to reconceptualize rape, the radical feminist slogan, “break the silence” might soon have no more valence than “keep talking.”

As feminist linguists, we might shift our analytic focus from sexual assault disclosure to interlocutor uptake of such disclosures as a first measure in shifting the onus of disclosure/exposure from those victimized to the social responsibility of interlocutors to hear, know about, and act in ways that will not only break the silence that continues to surround rape, but also to act in ways that actually stop rape.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Edward Snajdr, Sameena Mulla, Katie Gentile, and Greg Matoesian for comments about this work that helped me make it clearer. I am especially grateful to Susan Ehrlich for her insightful remarks as a discussant on a panel that she and I organized for the AAAs, where I presented a first iteration of this chapter. I’m indebted to Patricia Bou-Franch for her generosity as a colleague while I was in Spain presenting this work to different audiences and making it ready for publication. I am also grateful for Martin Viola’s proofreading of this chapter. Peer-review always makes a piece stronger, and I thank the anonymous reviewers who took the time to critique my argument. And finally, I am thankful to Las Religiosas de la Asunción for providing La Casita where I revised the piece for both presentations and publication.

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Phillips, Lynn M. 1999. “Recasting Consent: Agency and Victimization in Adult-teen Relationships.” New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, ed. by Sharon Lamb, 82–107. New York: New York University Press. Russell, Diane. 1982. “The Prevalence and Incidence of Forcible Rape and Attempted Rape of Females.” Victimology: An International Journal 7 (1–4): 81–93. Russell, Diane, and Nancy Howell. 1983. “The Prevalence of Rape in the United States Revisited.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (4): 688–695. ​doi: 10.1086/494003 Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511611841

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stern, Jessica. 2010. Denial: A Memoir of Terror. New York: Ecco Publishers. Tannen, Deborah. 1993. Framing in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Palo Alto, CA.: Stanford University Press. Trinch, Shonna. 2001. “Managing Euphemism and Transcending Taboos: Negotiating the Meaning of Sexual Assault in Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Violence.” Text 21 (4): 567–610. Trinch, Shonna. 2003. Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ​doi: 10.1075/impact.17 Trinch, Shonna. 2007. “Deconstructing the ‘Stakes’ in High Stakes Gatekeeping Interviews: Battered Women and Narration.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (11): 1895–1918.  doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.07.006

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Appendix: Data for this study come from the following sources: Customer Reviews, June-October 2010, Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/DenialMemoir-P-S-Jessica-Stern/dp/B008SLFTEK. Customer Reviews, June-October 2010, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/denial-jessica-ster n/1103176743?ean=9780061626654 Knittingmomof3, June 23, 2010 from rundpinne.com2010/06/book-review-and-book-tourdenial-by-jessica-stern. http://www.rundpinne.com/2010/06/book-review-and-book-tour-denial-by-jessica-stern.html. http://www.takemeawayreading.com/2010/06/blog-tour-denial.html Tlc book tours by Jennifer Comments section Wed. June 23, 2010 Vorenberg, Amy. June 20, 2010. “I am Lucy.” The Boston Globe. Cramer, Maria. July 12, 2010. “Sharing story emboldens survivor: Rapist left trail of victims” www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/07/12/sharing_story_emboldes Fischer, Karin. June 20, 2010. “A Terrorism Expert Turns Her Gaze Inward.” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle review. http://chronicle.com/article/A-Terrorism-ExpertTurns. McGrath, Charles. June 29, 2010. “Private Trauma Sheds Light on Terrorism.” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/books/30sternhtml? Arana, Maria. August 15, 2010. “Jessica Stern’s Denial: A Memoir of Terror,” The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/13/AR Bratcher, Drew. Denial By Jessica Stern. Washington Read, Washingtonian. (http://jessicastern. files.wordpress.com/2010/08/washingtonian8-2010denial.pdf) August 2010. Grant, Anne. August 8, 2010. “So much comes to light in Denial”. The Providence Journal Books. www.projo.com/books/content/Book-Denial_08-08-10_OVJ8VD2 Kim. July 12, 2010. “Review: Denial — A Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern.” Eclectic/Eccentric, June 22, 2010 writes, http://www.eclectic-eccentric.com/2010/06/book-review-denial.html Sophisticated Dorkiness. www.sophisticateddorkiness.com/2010/07/review-denial Long, Karen R. June 28, 2010. “Jessica Stern layers her rape memoir, Denial, with brilliance.” The Plain Dealer. http://blog.cleveland.com/books_impact/print. Garner, Dwight. June 24, 2010. “Violence Expert Visits Her Dark Past.” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/books Raphael Peterson, “Brutal Memories,” The Roanoke Times, August 29, 2010

Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

This chapter examines language aggression against women in public online deliberation regarding crimes of violence against women. To do so, we draw upon a corpus of 460 unsolicited digital comments sent in response to four public service advertisements against women abuse posted on YouTube. Our analysis reveals that three patriarchal strategies of abuse — namely, minimize the abuse, deny its existence, and blame women — are enacted in the online discourse under scrutiny and shows how, at the micro-level of interaction, these strategies relate to social identity and gender ideology through complex processes of positive in-group description and negative out-group presentation. We also argue that despite the few comments that explicitly support abuse, this situation changes at implicit, indirect levels of discourse. Keywords: violence against women, social identity, ideology, YouTube

1. Introduction This chapter analyses language aggression against women as it is performed in public online deliberation regarding crimes of violence against women perpetrated by male intimate partners. More specifically, the study identifies and examines the discursive strategies and processes through which those involved in online public deliberation position themselves alongside gender ideologies and construct themselves and others as members of specific social groups. Our aim, therefore, is to critically examine online discourse alongside gender ideologies and social identity processes, in the context of violence against women (VAW, henceforth) in Spain. To do so, we draw upon a corpus of unsolicited digital comments sent in response to YouTube video-clips discussing VAW.

doi 10.1075/bct.86.03bou 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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2. Background In 2005, an important law with specific legal, educational and social measures to fight violence against women by intimate male partners came into force in Spain.1 Since then, the Spanish Judiciary has monitored different factors surrounding this type of crime as well as the legal reactions to it. However, in their seven-year assessment of judicial responses to VAW, published in their 2012 report,2 the Judiciary unveiled that despite having taken to court nearly one million cases of VAW, 74% of dead victims had never filed a police report. Further, the Judiciary noticed an increase in the number of withdrawn police reports of cases of violence which were, therefore, never taken to court. The report also revealed an increase in the number of murder victims, which adds up to 639, oscillating between 52 and 75 dead women per year. Official data, therefore, point to a large number of murdered victims and unreported cases of abuse, suggesting that official figures only deal with the tip of the iceberg. While the seriousness and frequency of this social problem alone already justifies its becoming our object of study, experts have recently claimed that, in terms of VAW, “it is society, in its entirety, that fails. We are not yet fully aware that gender violence is an issue as sensitive as terrorism.”3 Indeed, scholarly research into intimate partner abuse voices the same sort of concern. Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt (2009), for instance, claim that situations of abuse may be maintained not only because of inadequate and/or limited social and legal support (Coates and Wade 2004, 2007; Ehrlich 2008; Mildorf 2002; Trinch 2007) but also due to “a lack of active public acknowledgement that domestic abuse is unacceptable” (Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt 2009, 95, our emphasis). The failure to recognize the seriousness and intolerability of this kind of violence has been attributed to patriarchal, societal constraints on gender roles resulting in power imbalance and inequality. This patriarchal frame has been found to underlie popular music, films, book reviews, advertising, poetry, dictionaries, and even newspaper reports of VAW (Attenborough, chapter 2; Bengoechea 2006, 2010; Christie 1998; Fernández Díaz 2004; Jackson 2001; Lledó 2010; Muehlenhard and Kimes 1999; Santaemilia and Maruenda 2013, chapter 5; Talbot 1997; Trinch chapter 3; Wheeler 2009). 1.  Ley Orgánica 1/2004, de 28 de diciembre, de Medidas de Protección Integral Contra la Violencia de Género 2.  General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) /Observatory against domestic and gender violence (2012) Balance de los siete años de entrada en vigor de la Ley Integral. 3.  http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2013/10/27/valencia/1382898671_282931.html El País de 28 de octubre de 2013.



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

The ubiquity of this type of discourse has led some scholars to claim that the hegemonic cultural practices of patriarchal societies create and reinforce a conceptual network that naturalizes violence against women (Bengoechea 2006). This view underlines the importance of societal or systemic explanations of abuse as it establishes that interconnections between ideologies of “masculinity, power and violence do influence IPV [intimate partner violence]” (Lockwood Harris, Palazzolo, and Savage 2012, 649, emphasis in the original). In line with this, some scholarly research into the discourse of VAW has focused on the discursive strategies that male perpetrators employ in discussing their violence against women (see, among others, Adams, Towns, and Gavey 1995; Boonzaier 2008; Coates and Wade 2007; Eisikovits and Buchbinder 1997; Morris 2009; Stokoe 2010). For instance, in their study of the discourse of violent men, Adams, Towns, and Gavey (1995) showed how these men combined a number of linguistic and rhetorical devices to build a discourse of dominance and natural entitlement to exert power over women, which in turn legitimated the violence. Such a discourse of aggression against women draws from a range of strategies that include denying the existence of abuse, removing agency and responsibility, minimizing the frequency and seriousness of the violence, blaming the victim or resorting to external factors in an attempt to justify abusive behaviors (Adams, Towns, and Gavey 1995; Boonzaier 2008; Coates and Wade 2007; Eisikovits and Buchbinder 1997; Morris 2009; Stokoe 2010). Scholars have further suggested that the gendered discourse of male violence is perpetuated through ordinary talk across settings (Stokoe 2010). Thus, the need to understand ideologies of violence against women in the wider social context seems to be a priority (see Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt 2009). However, research into VAW has mainly examined legal, medical, and social service interactions, interviews with survivors of VAW or with perpetrators, and/or representations of abuse in the arts and traditional media. Fewer discourse scholars have examined citizen4 talk about VAW in other social settings. Lockwood Harris, Palazzolo, and Savage (2012) and Bou-Franch (2013) are significant exceptions. The former examined university students’ talk on VAW, through focus groups and interviews, in order to unveil how they view the relationship between gender and power and the role of gender in the perpetration of abuse. Their findings indicate that participants encountered ideological dilemmas and contradictions between systemic / individual factors and different forms of sexism surrounding the 4.  This should not lead to the belief that victims and perpetrators, whose talk has been analyzed in different situations, are not ordinary citizens; indeed, they are. Our point is that talk on VAW has not been investigated in settings that are not directly or institutionally involved in fighting or reporting this crime.

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violence. The authors suggest that working on such contradictions could contribute to the reshaping of public talk on intimate partner abuse. Bou-Franch (2013) examined talk on VAW in a public debate of unsolicited digital comments sent in response to a newspaper article published in a British broadsheet. Her study revealed that, on the one hand, some comments resorted to abuse-perpetuating discourses and ideologies through covert comparisons, presuppositions, implications, and ambiguity. On the other hand, twice as many comments were found to contest and challenge such discourses and abuse-sustaining ideologies through the expression of anger, sarcasm, disagreements, and factual arguments. This study concluded that such online debates were suitable spaces to counter the sexism of patriarchal arguments through the dissemination of messages against VAW with mentality transforming potential. Although these two studies of the wider social context (Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt 2009) differ in the type of data used, they both adopt discursive and ideological frameworks which share the view that particular discursive events constitute social practices that both recreate and are shaped by the social structure that frames the events (Fairclourgh 2003). A discourse event, thus, is socially constitutive “both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, 258). In view of the above, this chapter draws on the premise that the investigation of popular discursive constructions of abuse is essential to bring about social changes that may contribute to the elimination of this violence. Importantly, despite the severity of VAW in Spanish society, to our knowledge, there is no previous discourse analysis of Spanish online citizen talk on VAW. This is precisely the focus of our research, which adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to the study of gender ideologies and social identity processes in online talk about VAW. Feminist critical discourse analysis gives gender ideologies center stage. However, this form of (feminist) textual analysis has often come in for criticism due to its exclusive focus on elite discourses (van Dijk 1989) and the top-down processes of ideological hegemony to the neglect of “the ‘bottom-up’ strategies of those who may contest or subvert these ideologies” (Bucholtz 2003, 58). The present study, for its part, departs from mainstream (feminist) CDA practices inasmuch as it examines gender ideologies and social identity processes vis-à-vis popular talk on the web, i.e. talk among citizens who have recently gained access to a public sphere in which to either contest or reinforce dominant ideologies (Turner 2010). Our study concurs with van Dijk’s view of ideology which is defined in terms of the “belief systems [that] are socially shared by the members of a collectivity of social actors” (2006, 117, emphasis in the original), and which involves social, cognitive and discursive frameworks (van Dijk 1995a, 1995b, 1998, 2006). The



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

social function of ideologies is oriented to the “co-ordination of the social practices of group members for the effective realizations of the goals of a social group, and the protection of its interests” (van Dijk 1998, 24, emphasis in the original), while the cognitive function is to “organize specific group attitudes” (van Dijk 1998, 25). A group’s beliefs and attitudes shape the personal opinions of group members which are expressed in texts, and which link the socio-cognitive with the discursive frameworks. This multi-faceted framework is especially suitable to our work because it places social identity at the heart of ideological work. Ideology formation involves representations of self and others, and these in turn play a key role in social conflicts between groups (van Dijk 1998, 1995b). In this context, van Dijk’s (1998) research also reveals the tendency for ideological polarization into us-versus-them groups — a four-way evaluative structure that he labels the ‘ideological square’. This is particularly relevant to the online context that we examine in this chapter, which is already highly predisposed to ideological polarization, as discussed below. The ‘us group’ is constructed through discursive strategies that emphasize its good properties and actions and mitigate its bad properties and actions. For its part, the ‘them group’ is constructed through discourse strategies that invert this evaluative scheme by emphasizing its bad properties and actions, and minimizing its good ones. Furthermore, our study of gender ideologies and social identity processes draws from YouTube text-based data, which has been shown to constitute a type of deindividuated setting in which social identity and processes of dis/affiliation with social groups are salient (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lorenzo-Dus, and BouFranch 2013; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch, and Lorenzo-Dus 2013). Participation therein tends to lead to polarization and the expression of extreme views (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010), which often contain language aggression and conflict, a fact that makes our data ideal given our research aims (Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010; Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, and Bou-Franch 2011). More specifically, since our data revolve around VAW, we expect us-versus-them groups will be formed along the lines of gender ideologies regarding this issue. In the online debates under scrutiny, beliefs and assumptions about gender become especially salient, for “[w]here conflict in conversation often occurs is when assumptions about gender are not shared by participants” (Mills 2008, 129). Against this backdrop, we pose the following research questions. RQ1. Is the discourse of VAW employed in the data? If so, what specific discursive strategies / processes are employed to invoke it? H1. Considering scholarly suggestions that such patriarchal discourse must be entextualized in different settings (Bengoechea 2006, 2010; Stokoe 2010),

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and that it has been found to emerge in previous research on online public discourse (Bou-Franch 2013), we hypothesize that we will also find it to be present in our data. Moreover, we hypothesize that it will draw from the macro discourse strategies / processes identified in the literature on the discourse of male abusers mentioned above. RQ2. How are these discourse strategies / processes related to social identity construction, at the micro-level of social interaction? H2. We hypothesize that, since text-based YouTube polylogues often lead to polarization and hostility, macro strategies /processes of patriarchal violence against women will be related to social identity construction, at the micro-level, through the use of two main strategies of polarization, namely, positive in-group description and negative out-group presentation (van Dijk 1998, 2006). 3. Methodology 3.1 Data Our corpus consists of 460 consecutive YouTube comments (totaling c. 25,000 words), in Spanish, sent in response to four video-clips regarding domestic violence that were uploaded between 2006 and 2010.5 The data are a subset of the larger Gentext data (cc. 40 million words), which contain texts from newspapers as well as digital comments to newspapers, YouTube and blogs compiled by the University of Valencia’s Gentext Research Group, in order to investigate gender inequality in British and Spanish societies. The data subset under scrutiny was selected for two main reasons. Firstly, because of the video-clips’ direct and explicit relevance to the issue under investigation: all four were part of advertising campaigns against domestic violence. Secondly, their privacy levels on YouTube were public and therefore open to citizen participation. As an online environment, YouTube provides an interactional context that has been characterized as deindividuated and polylogal (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010). It is deindividuated because of the lack of physical presence, which is potentially linked to a certain loss of self-awareness that may in turn lead to lower levels 5.  The videos were: (1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUljmPFq3ew&NR=1 (uploaded in November, 29 of 2006); (2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yOoRwKz0bk&feature=related (uploaded in November, 24 of 2007); (3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5akHwRw1Ek&feature=related (uploaded in Mary, 11 of 2007); and (4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unKIgXrQXNU&fe ature=related (uploaded in November, 20 of 2010).



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

of inhibition (Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire 1984, Siegel et al. 1986; Sproull and Kiesler 1986). Under these circumstances, the Social Model of Deindividuation Phenomena (SIDE) posits, individual identity is de-emphasised, and social identity gains salience (Reicher, Spears and Postmes 1995), such that people interacting in deindividuated environments tend to construct their identity principally as members of relevant social categories, i.e. they tend to discursively foreground their social or collective identity. Importantly for our study, deindividuation has been related both to polarization and conflict in on-line interaction (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010; Papacharissi 2004; Tannen 1999), where polarization is understood as individuals’ tendency, following a group discussion, “to endorse a more extreme position in the direction already favored by the group” (Lee 2007, 385). In polarized environments, beliefs, attributes and social practices associated with the in-group tend to be embraced categorically. In turn, those beliefs, attributes and practices associated with the out-group tend to be categorically rejected (see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lorenzo-Dus, and Bou-Franch 2013; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch, and Lorenzo-Dus 2013 for studies of polarization and in/ out-group formation in a YouTube context). As other forms of social media, YouTube is interactionally a polylogue, that is, a multi-authored / multi-recipient interaction (Androutsopoulos 2011; GarcésConejos Blitvich 2010; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004; Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, and Bou-Franch 2011). Within YouTube, such interaction may take diverse realizations, including individual users commenting on other users’ contributions, on the video that triggers the polylogue, and addressing the entire membership of the polylogue (and hence implicitly to anyone potentially reading the comments but not necessarily posting their own), etc. This may be seen to pose certain challenges as regards the conversational management of the entire polylogue, or parts thereof, as posited in early work on coherence in computermediated communication (Herring 1999). However, further work has revealed that YouTube users deploy a sophisticated range of adaptive resources in order to “produce collaborative, coherent interaction” (Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus, and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012, 515). 3.2 Framework and procedure Given our aim to examine the online discourse of violence against women vis-àvis gender ideologies and social identity processes, we adopt a social constructionist approach to identity analysis. This approach is based on the premise that identity is something that those involved in social activities do and that, in the course of these doing — or performative — practices, they “align with or distance themselves from social categories of belonging depending on the local context

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of interaction and its insertion in the wider social world” (De Fina 2006, 372). Groups with gender ideologies that either naturalize or challenge violence against women, for instance, do so — amongst other means — through a repertoire of discursive strategies that are locally constructed. In this study, these local constructions take place in the YouTube comments sent in response to the four selected videos. The local dimension of identity construction does not deny the possibility to link up, as it were, local identities to shared ideologies and beliefs (see De Fina 2006). As noted earlier, van Dijk’s (1998) work on ideology is closely connected to social identity and, in particular, to the tendency for ideological polarization in in-group/out-group interactions (see Section 2). The analytical procedure in our work involved several steps. In the first place, the explicit positioning of comments towards abuse against women was considered. The careful, discourse-analytic reading of the data revealed that the relevant strategies / processes of the discourse of VAW through which YouTube users construct their gender ideologies were: (i) minimize the severity and/or frequency of abuse; (ii) deny its very existence; and (iii) blame the woman for the abuse (see Section 2). Therefore, all occurrences of such strategies were identified and computed in the data. This classification involved the independent coding by the authors of this study, and then joint coding; during the joint coding, differences were resolved through discussion. For instance, when more than one strategy was invoked, the relevant (part of the) comment was assigned to the more salient strategy. All categories were then quantitatively analyzed. The last step in the analytical procedure involved the qualitative analysis of relevant discourse patterns as they relate to the strategies of ideological polarization identified by van Dijk (1998, 2006) (see Section 2). In sum, our analysis combined quantitative and qualitative methods. While the latter are widely recognized as valid in the broad area of discourse and identity (Benwell and Stokoe 2006; De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006), the former are under-developed in identity scholarship (De Fina 2000, 2006, but see GarcésConejos Blitvich, Lorenzo-Dus, and Bou-Franch 2013). 4. The discourse of VAW — quantitative analysis In terms of overall gender ideologies towards violence against women, and as can be seen in Figure 1, 36 comments were explicitly supportive of VAW, and were, therefore, coded as pro abuse (henceforth PROA) while 223 comments explicitly challenged VAW and were coded as against abuse (henceforth AA). However, as will be argued below, explicitly anti abuse comments were not always interpreted as challenging the violence, as comments could be violence-sustaining at more



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

indirect and implicit levels (see Anderson and Cermele chapter 6; Bou-Franch 2013; Mills 2008). Finally, a total of 201 comments were classified as other, that is, they either revealed no clear, explicit, positioning or they referred to other issues.

PROA, n= 36; 8%

OTHER, n=201; 44%

AA, n= 223; 48%

Figure 1.  Gender ideologies about VAW

Furthermore, the analysis unveiled 261 strategies employed to realize the discourse of violence against women. These were distributed into the three different strategy types as shown in Figure 2: 140

No of occurences

120

130 107

100 80 60 40

24

20 0

Minimize abuse

Deny existence of Blame women abuse Discursive strategies

Figure 2.  Discourse strategies of VAW in the data

Blaming women for the abuse that they suffer emerges as the most frequent discursive strategy in the data (n = 130), followed closely by seeking to minimize the importance of such abuse (n = 107). What may be seen as the extreme version of

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such minimization, i.e., denying the existence of abuse altogether, is — comparatively speaking — used much less frequently in the corpus (n = 24). 5. Patriarchal discourses, gender ideologies and social identities — qualitative analysis In this section, we tackle the detailed, qualitative, analysis of the linguistic realization of the three main discursive strategies of minimization, abuse denial and blaming, relating them to processes of social identity construction that take place at the micro-level of social interaction. As discussed in Section 3, the anonymity afforded by the YouTube environment fosters the salience of social identity as well as the polarization of ideological positioning. This makes it an ideal site for our analysis as, according to van Dijk (1998, 25), ideologies are at the heart of social identity construction. Often, group ideologies are based on the synergy achieved between positive self-representation and negative other-representation. In the case under scrutiny, the ideologies associated with patriarchal discourse, and more concretely with the discourse of VAW, will also be based on the positive representation of the in-group and the negative representation of the out-group. Regarding the discursive strategy of minimizing VAW, this was realized in our corpus either by minimizing the frequency and / or the severity of the abuse suffered by women or by arguing that violence against men is as severe as that perpetrated against women. Examples (1) and (2) are especially interesting in this respect. (1) danielvartan: un grupo de psicologas carcelarias han dicho a De la Vega que hay muchos hombres presos por falsas denuncias,.- las ha contestado que si lo hacen publico que se atengan a las consecuencias “a group of prison psychologists told De la Vega (former vice president of the Spanish government) that there are many men in prison unjustly convicted on false claims (of domestic violence) — she (De la Vega) answered that they (the group of psychologists) should be aware there would be repercussions if they dare to make this information public”

(2) excelmaster7: Yo te hostigo, yo te insulto, yo te provoco, tu me golpeas, yo te denuncio a las autoridades y pido el divorcio y me quedo con casa e hijos. Tal es la fórmula de un negocio exitoso y de nulo riesgo. lamarchamasculina (punto) com (diagonal) periodicos Si eres hombre, únete. “I harass you, I insult you, I provoke you, you hit me, I report it to the authorities and I file for divorce and keep the house and the children. This is the formula for a successful business that carries no risk. lamarchamasculina (dot) com (slash) periodicos. If you are a man, join us.”



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In the examples above, danielvartan and excelmaster7 are engaged in a discussion with other YouTube users triggered by a video that depicts a battered woman on an underground metro car who, despite being surrounded by people, seems invisible to those around her. Both their comments respond to those posted by other participants in the polylogue. In both cases, the severity or even the existence of domestic violence is minimized or implicitly denied. danielvartan argues that not only are innocent men unjustly incarcerated due to women’s false accusations, but that authorities are complicit as they are aware of this situation, yet take no steps to avert it. The powers that be, therefore, support women rendering men effectively powerless. This YouTuber uses this argument even though it is rumor-based. The ambiguity of reference in relation to those whose speech is reported, together with the fact that no authoritative source for the information reported is provided, underline this idea. For his/her part, excelmaster7 claims, along the same lines, that women manipulate men into physically assaulting them, so that they can report the assault to the authorities and use the domestic violence that they instigated as leverage during divorce proceedings to keep their homes and children. Excelmaster7 uses the present tense, hence constructing his/her position as a habitual action. In the first sentence, s/he speaks for a generic identity of the woman who performs a series of evil actions to achieve an evil end. The linguistic strategies deployed to this end are constructed dialogue and personal/pronominal deixis, which model the outgroup’s (here women) role-based identities and constrict the in-group’s position and identity in the process. This rhetoric lends the resulting comment a more vivid and interpersonal manner. Further, excelmaster7 provides information on an organization’s website (la marcha masculina) that fights against feminism, promotes traditional masculine values, and encourages all men to unite in the fight against the dictatorship established by women. Both comments are ideologically similar and promulgate the values associated with the patriarchal discourse of VAW, or “the new lad ideology” (Benwell 2006, 13). The in-group (men) is presented as innocent, tricked into violence, unprotected by the institutions and thus disempowered by the false accusations and manipulating practices of the out-group (women). Although neither danielvartan nor excelmaster7 openly support VAW, their minimizing or denying its existence contributes to an abuse-sustaining positioning that further perpetuates the values associated with the discourse of VAW. Another way to minimize the severity of VAW is to equate it to violence perpetrated by women against men, or other groups. The next two examples are illustrative of the way in which this strategy is realized in our corpus:

(3) granudisimo: Por eso el maltrato físico hacia el hombre es menos frecuente, pero más perverso en compensación; tal como están las cosas (hay un vacío legal cuando una mujer maltrata a su pareja masculina, por lo que el juez

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suele dictaminar agresión, y no maltrato) denunciar es lento e inútil y defenderse directamente peligroso, ya que si le haces daño al pararle la mano (como se te escape a ti sin querer la cagas del todo) te denuncia, y luego, a ver con que cara dices que te estabas defendiendo. “That’s why violence against men is less frequent, but it is much more perverse in comparison; as things are (there is a legal vacuum regarding men being physically assaulted by women, that’s the reason why judges tend to rule aggression rather than assault) reporting these cases is slow and useless and defending oneself is downright dangerous, because if you hurt her when you stop her hand (and if you hit her by accident, you are a dead man) she will report you and then who is going to believe you when you claim you were just defending yourself.” (4) JUSTICIA Y VERDAD: Un tribunal que juzga exclusivamente a varones, es como uno que juzga exclusivamente a negros. Las mismas leyes para todos ¡Ya! En 2010 23 niños fueron asesinados, 16 a manos de sus madres ¿Es violencia hembrista? Los malos tratos a ancianos también son perpetrados en su mayoría por mujeres ¿Se demoniza a los hombres para sacar pasta? “A court that judges males exclusively is like a court that judges blacks exclusively. Same laws for all, now! In 2010 23 children were murdered, 16 by their mothers. Is this femalist violence? Abuse against the elderly is also perpetrated mainly by women. Are men demonized to make money?”

In (3) granudisimo expresses a similar concern to that conveyed in (1) and (2) in relation to the current legal vacuum regarding men’s rights in cases of domestic violence. He argues that, although less frequent, violence against men is more perverse. However, this does not seem to be a very realistic position and detracts from the seriousness of the epidemic of cases of VAW that are reported on a daily basis. For example, the Spanish Judiciary reports that 62 women and 7 men were murdered by their (former) intimate partners in 2011.6 As for (4), here women are seen as a social group characterized by violence, as they are the ones who commit most murders of vulnerable groups: children, their own children in fact, and the elderly. Rhetorically, this comment uses facts and figures to lend credibility to the discursive strategy of minimization being put forward. As we saw above, both comments here also express an ideology in alignment with traditional values of the discourse of VAW. There is a clear positive representation of the in-group: men are defenseless, cases of violence against men are ruled aggression rather than assault, men hit women in self-defense, violence

6.  See Informe sobre víctimas mortales de la violencia de género y de la violencia doméstica en el ámbito de la pareja o la expareja 2011, at http://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Poder_Judicial



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

goes in both directions. Women, the out-group, are presented as violent and as manipulators of the system. Another discourse strategy related to male abusers consists in denying the mere existence of abuse. (5) ThePoltergueist: Yo conozco a un vecino que le pega su mujer a él. Y es él el que no puede acudir a nadie porque ser maltratada esta bien visto, pero ser maltratado no. El maltrato huele a podrido. No me creo nada. “One of my neighbors is battered by his wife. And he cannot get any help because being battered is fine if you are woman, but not if you are a man. The whole thing about abuse smells fishy to me. I don’t think it is real.”

(6) Patxi Lopez: Retomando el tema del video no hay informacion suficiente, y que la mayoria pensemos nada mas verlo que es una maltratada sin nisiquiera ver ningun tipo de lesion,agresion,sin nisiquiera salir el maltratador. Solo se ve una mujer gritando y corriendo y un vecino cotilla que le abre la puerta. El resto de la informacion la inventamos y solo demuestra lo manipulados que estamos. Al final si se ven lesiones pero podia deberse a cualquier cosa y si lo achacamos a violencia de genero es porque ya estamos pensando que siempre que existe lesion de mujer gritando es violencia de genero no se si me explico. Estoy de acuerdo en que el anuncio esta mal deberian sacar al maltratador para dejar mas claro que el de rojo es el vecino ajja. “Going back to the topic of abuse, there is not enough information and the fact that right away most of us think that she is a battered woman without having seen any bruises, any aggression, or even without having seen the batterer. You can only see a woman running and screaming and a nosey neighbor who opens his door to her. The rest of the information we just come up with and that only shows how manipulated we are. At the end, you can see bruises but they could be due to something else and if we think this is a case of gender violence it’s because we are already thinking that whenever there is a bruise or a woman screaming we are dealing with gender violence, you see what I’m saying? I agree. The ad is off they should have shown the batterer to clarify that the man in red is just the neighbor hahaha.”

A strategy to deal with very sensitive social issues such as racism or, in the case under scrutiny, VAW, is to deny their existence (van Dijk 1995a). Examples (5) and (6) are illustrative of similar discursive attempts at distancing from views that may be associated with socially inappropriate, even illegal, identity traits and behaviors. In (5) Poltergueist argues that although men are also abused by women, giving the example of a neighbor of his who is abused by his wife, they have no social or medical support and that abused women are well regarded by society, but that is not true in the case of men. He concludes by stating that, in his opinion,

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VAW is a fabrication. His argument is constructed via a narrative — the telling of a story about a neighbor. This works towards making it come across as believable and persuasive, for story-telling is a common strategy used in the legitimation of arguments (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). Patxi Lopez follows the same line of argumentation claiming that the fact that we assume right away that the woman shown in the video was abused is due to how manipulated we are. The implication is that we are manipulated by discourses of feminism and the mass media. Even if a woman is bruised, this does not necessarily mean she has been abused, but it may be due to a different cause. He ends his comment with a mocking tone, which adds to his dismissing of abuse as a fabrication and the result of mass manipulation. In both comments, women are presented as aggressors or as not necessarily victims of abuse. This contributes to othering women, portraying them as violent, erratic, and to maintaining undisturbed the values of a patriarchal discourse that favors the in-group, i.e. men. VAW does not really exist; it is just the product of mass manipulation. Therefore, we may see abuse where there is none. Out of the three identified in the corpus, blaming women for the abuse that they suffer was the most frequently used discursive strategy. The reasons why women were blamed varied, but some lines of argumentation were found repeatedly over the corpus. The examples below are illustrative of these lines. (7) MarcoZacMex: Pues yo quiero dar un aplauso a las mujeres que se fueron con esos cavernícolas, recibieron su merecido ni mas ni menos, si vieras cuantas mujeres hallan fascinante la figura del patán violento, del cavernícola, del hombre agresivo, del macho, del golpeador, y ahora que se sienten con derecho a elegir, prefieren elegirlos a ellos que elegir a un hombre aburrido que jamas les pondría la mano encima, asi que a lloriquear menos y a valorar mas a los Hombres que no a los gañanes “I want to give a round of applause to those women who chose those cavemen, they got what they deserved, nothing more nothing less, if you knew how many women are fascinated by the violent boor, the caveman, the aggressive man, the macho, the batterer and now that they feel they have the right to choose, they prefer to choose them rather than to choose a boring man that would never lay a hand on them, so less boohooing and more recognizing the value of Men not those bumpkins”

A frequent line of argument found in the corpus was to blame women who had been abused by their partners for choosing the wrong kind of man. Several YouTubers, like MarcoZacMex in (7), argued that women should not complain about being abused since, s/he argues — through a direct, unmitigated statement — they got what they deserved for choosing the aggressive macho type rather than



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

a boring, but peaceful man. In this example, there is an interesting deviation from the pattern of positive in-group representation versus derogatory out-group representation. What we observe here is an example of what Garcia-Bedolla (2003) calls “selective dissociation”, the in-group are the real Hombres, but they exclude from their definition of this identity those bumpkins that they see as contributing to a negative image of their group and, we may add, take women from them. Still the real out-group are women who are described as masochistic and lacking common sense. It must be noted that different types of gender identities emerge in this comment. The author seems to be frustrated with traditional beauty/beast scenarios and blames women for the violence they receive in such a way that he (weakly) challenges a strict patriarchy, which is upsetting to him, as it leaves him out of the power structure. This complex comment, like others in which we observe how social groups evolve and change, suggests the need for a more sophisticated framework for the analysis of in-/out-group formation and (dis)affiliation. (8) weytox: la mina esta wena y tiene poco cerebro, como no saben defenderse wn ohh, es tan facil como denunciar y listo se acabo el problema, pero parece que les gusta…B mujeres! denuncien agresiones y maltratos no teman porque hay instituciones que si se preocupan por uds. “the girl is good-looking and has a small brain, why can’t you defend yourselves ohh it is as easy as reporting [the abuse] and that’s it, problem solved, but it seems they enjoy it… B women! Report aggression and abuse, do not be afraid because there are institutions that do care about you.”

weytox’s comment illustrates another line of argumentation often found in the corpus whereby women are blamed for their abuse since by not reporting it their problem is perpetuated . The consequences or the difficulty involved in denouncing their abusers are not taken into consideration, and women are further blamed by reportedly “enjoying the abuse”. This YouTuber comes across as highly patronizing, as can be inferred from the use of onomatopoeic ‘oohh’, which refers to the stereotype of the delicate, weak female, before providing his/her piece of advice (“it is as easy as reporting…problem solved”) that is clearly inaccurate, for reporting is very difficult and it does not always end the abuse (Bostock, Plumpton, and Pratt 2009; Trinch 2007). The comment is additionally full of sarcasm as the writer implies that women do not bother to defend themselves because there already exists an institution that will do it for them. Women not only enjoy abuse but also institutional attention. Further, the fact that the protagonist of the video-clip is described in terms of her physical appearance and as having a low level of intelligence points to the overall description of the out-group as being firmly grounded in traditional male abusers’ discourse: women are cowardly, masochistic, in need of attention, dumb, and should be judged in terms of physical attributes. After his negative

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construction of female victims, weytox’s ends his comment with some (sarcastic) advice, encouraging women to report abuse rather than shy away from it. (9) lovo0: osea como? no le entendi, tengo q andar pidiendo ayuda para las mujeres en el metro? y yo q culpa tengo q desobedescan a sus hoombres chale estan locos o q “So, what? I didn’t understand it, am I supposed to ask for help for women on the underground? It is not my fault that they disobey their men come on are you crazy or what”

lovo0’s comment, through a series of rhetorical questions which he answers himself, also blames women for the abuse they suffer by implicitly arguing that they deserve it for having disobeyed their men. This comment represents the out-group (women) as being necessarily subjugated to men. That is the status quo. If women disobey their men, they should face the consequences. It is not that men, the ingroup, are at fault. It is women who misbehave and need to be put in their place. Any other interpretation would be “crazy”. All along, lovo0 seems to be concerned that the video-clip implicates him as part of the problem for not doing anything to prevent the violence against the video protagonist. His argument seems to ring of why should I do anything to stop this private violence between a man and a woman?, a view which advocates for the traditional, patriarchal individual and private view of VAW, and simultaneously rejects the social and public perspective of abuse adopted in the public service video-clip which triggered the comment. (10) MarcoZacMex 3 years ago Me gustaría saber si hay mujeres que comprenden que el hembrismo es machismo inverso y si serían capaces de combatirlo, esas mujeres valdrían la pena por encima de las hembristas o las feminazis resentidas, afortunadamente conozco algunas, pocas pero las hay y nunca han necesitado de un discurso feminista para construir su autoestima y darse a respetar con los hombres pero sobre todo con otras mujeres, que entre mujeres se irrespetan y se agreden emocionalmente mas que con los hombres. “I’d like to know whether there are any women who understand that femalism is reverse machismo and whether they would be able to fight against it, these women would be much more worth it than the ‘resentful feminists’ or the feminazis, fortunately I know some, there just a few out there, but there are some and they have never needed a feminist discourse to build their self-esteem on and make themselves be respected by men but above all by other women, because women disrespect each other and abuse each emotionally much more than men do.”

MarcoZacMex equates “hembrismo” with “machismo” and blames feminist movements and the group described as “feminazis” for making women into oppressors



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

and then suggests that there are only a few good women out there who do not need feminist ideologies to make themselves equal to men and other women. The use of terms like “hembrismo”, or “feminazis” are cases of a process of “lexicalization” which clearly reveals gender ideologies in discourse (van Dijk 1995a, 25). Further, this comment presents another interesting case in which there is a fluctuation in the in-/out-group membership (see example 7). On the one hand, we again see selective dissociation at work (Garcia-Bedolla 2003). The in-group is made up of men and those few women who abide by the norms of patriarchal discourse and do not buy into feminist ideas, yet somehow are not subjugated by men either. “Resentful feminists” and “feminazis” and all other women are the out-group. This YouTuber constructs the selected out-group as women who lack self-esteem, which is precisely their reason for adhering to feminist values. However, towards the end of the message, women as a whole are again represented as the out-group. They are depicted in negative terms as disrespectful and emotionally abusive to each other to a higher degree than men are. Therefore, men are portrayed as better overall than women even if they abuse them because they do it to a lesser degree than women do to other women. 6. Conclusion This chapter set out to explore processes of gender ideology and social identity formation in a public debate on violence against women in the deindividuated, polarized context afforded by YouTube textual polylogues. A feminist critical discourse analysis approach was adopted which, instead of focusing on the discourses of the elite, examined citizen talk on the web, thus contributing to an emerging body of research which unveils the discursive strategies used by ordinary citizens who may reproduce or transform hegemonic ideologies The investigation was guided by two research questions to which, on the basis of our findings, we are now in a position to respond. Our first research question was: “Is the patriarchal discourse of VAW employed in the data? If so, what specific macro strategies / processes are employed to invoke it?” To answer these questions we began by exploring the gender ideologies related to violence against women as explicitly expressed by contributors to the comments under analysis. Our study of gender ideologies towards women abuse reveals that nearly half of the comments (48%) explicitly argued against it, and only a small percentage of comments (8%) explicitly defended the violence. It would seem that the discourse of abuse was not common in our corpus. However, these results contrast greatly with the very high frequency of the discursive strategies of VAW in the data, which total 262 instances. It is essential at this point to bear

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in mind that while the study of the positioning of YouTubers alongside abuse was limited to those cases in which the positioning was realized explicitly, this requirement was absent in our study of the discourse strategies of violence, which were also computed when they took implicit or indirect forms. This would explain the contradictory findings. Our study, thus, suggests that the discourse of VAW was not only present but indeed prevalent, just as had been hypothesized. Importantly, such discourse strategies were often realized through indirect, implicit language. The implicit support of violence against women can be seen in terms of what Mills (2008) calls “indirect sexism.” Indirect sexism is a form of discrimination which is somewhat ambiguous, or not overtly expressed, and as a result it is more difficult to identify and contest than the explicit and overt support of abuse. This finding also concurs with previous research that shows that abuse-perpetuating discourses often draw from implicit language and indirect sexism (see Anderson and Cermele, chapter 6; Georgalidou, chapter 7; Bou-Franch 2013). In terms of the kind of discursive strategies through which VAW was invoked, our findings identified two as quantitatively salient and qualitatively diverse, namely minimizing the abuse (41%) and blaming women (50%). Denying the existence of abuse was also used in the corpus, albeit much less frequently (9%). These are not new strategies — they have been identified, as discussed in Section 2, in other social and discursive contexts as the vehicles through which male perpetrators justify their violence, and hence as a means of legitimating the discourses of VAW. Our findings thus support a growing body of concerning evidence that points to a well-rooted ideology that cuts across media, cultures, and languages. It was precisely the ideological basis of these discursive realizations that our second research question sought to examine, and specifically their link to social identity construction. Our second research question is reproduced here for greater clarity: “How are these discourse strategies / processes related to social identity construction, at the micro-level of social interaction?” Our findings in this respect showed that YouTube users constructed their identities through strategies of ideological polarization regarding gender, specifically drawing upon positive in-group depiction and negative out-group depiction. The in-group (men) was constructed as innocent and tricked into violence, institutionally unprotected and disempowered by the false accusations and manipulative practices of the out-group (women). Common arguments provided to support this construction were those of men hitting women in self-defense and of violence being directed against both women and men. The out-group, for its part, was portrayed as a community of aggressive, cowardly, masochistic, dumb women, who should be judged in terms of physical attributes and who, if refusing to accept their assumed submissive role, deserved to be battered. In the past, general incompetence and excessive concern for appearances, among others, were considered to be characteristic features of the feminine.



Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women

Mills (2008, 129) argues that such stereotypes should only be considered to be sexist “when they are evaluated negatively”. In our data, these not only constituted negative evaluations of the social identity of women, but were further used as the basis for justifying and/or sustaining the violence against women. Multiple gender identities were constructed through the comments under scrutiny, with the formation and (dis)affiliation of social groups in constant flux. This suggested the need for a more sophisticated framework for the analysis of social identity and ideology. In fact, our qualitative study also identified interesting cases of selective dissociation (García-Bedolla 2003) in which the in-group was made up not just of men but also of women who reject feminist ideas and take on the traditional values of patriarchal societies, while the out-group was described as a crowd of resented feminists. This discourse is typical of gender ideologies which attempt to exert masculine power as a way to resist feminism (Benwell 2006). Our findings thus provide a complex picture. Social identity formation vis-à-vis gender ideologies reveals abuse-supporting comments that draw upon patriarchal values and traditional stereotypes. This is undoubtedly worrying in the context of groups operating within democratic societies. At the same time, abuse-supporting comments, and particularly comments that explicitly supported VAW, are challenged to a considerable extent, too. Further research should explore the counter-arguments that these comments put forward and the valuable discursive work that they realize in contesting VAW in online public deliberation. Such deliberation, of which YouTube textual polylogues constitute an important though by no means unique forum, is a most welcome addition to a public sphere in which the discursive contours of VAW can be fruitfully challenged. To do so is more than just a language exercise for there is no doubt that discourse is both constitutive of and constituted by society. The power of discourse — and why, as Fairclough (1997, 273) puts it, discourse “is worth struggling over” lies in its potential for social change, including transforming the ideologies on which language aggression against women is based (Lockwood Harris, Palazzolo, and Savage 2012).

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus’s valuable input in the analysis of the data and composition of this chapter and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This work was partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [GenText Research Project, FFI2012-39289] and the University of Valencia’s research abroad grant [UV-INV_EPDI13-114874]. Patricia Bou-Franch would like to thank María Elena Placencia for welcoming her at Birkbeck College during her research stay of 2013.

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The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse The term ‘woman’ in Spanish contemporary newspapers José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda

‘Woman’ is a key social actor, and a central conceptualization, in the construction of media discourses of gender-based violence. Scholarly research at the turn of the 21st century (Bengoechea 2000; Lledó 2002; Fernández Díaz 2003; Jorge 2004) showed that in the Spanish press, media discourses had a tendency to naturalize male aggression not as violence but as part of the (private) sexual arrangement between the sexes. In this chapter we explore the treatment of the phrase mujer maltratada (EN ‘battered woman’) in intimate partner violence newspaper articles from 2005 to 2010. Our aims are: (i) to account for the discursive representation of violence against women (VAW) in Spanish contemporary media discourse in recent years; and (ii) to unveil the expectations about gender, sexuality and power implicit in public discourses about VAW, given their apparent objectivity. In doing so, we draw on the evaluation framework for the analysis of news reports proposed by White (2004, 2006) and on Corpus Linguistics tools. Keywords: violence against women (VAW), Spanish newspapers, linguistic violence, mujer(es) maltratada(s) [battered woman/women], evaluation

1. Introduction ‘Woman’ is a key social actor, a central concept in culture and a source of metaphors and interdictions. It is also essential in the construction of violence-related discourses, and particularly in the construction of media discourses of genderbased violences, where the discursive construal of women is part of a political agenda (Weatherall 2002). Undoubtedly, violence against women (VAW) has become a major social concern in the last few years, with large-scale media coverage and visibility and more social, political and legal measures. Media represent doi 10.1075/bct.86.04san 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

the social and political arena where VAW discourses are constructed, negotiated, represented or enacted with alleged objectivity. Against this backdrop, in this chapter we explore the construction of VAW discourse(s) in the Spanish press, with an emphasis on the presence of subjective evaluation. Specifically, we explore the treatment of woman/women in a large corpus (circa five million words) of gender-based newspaper articles in Spanish (from the quality dailies El País and El Mundo, which are typically associated with progressive and conservative views respectively), covering the period 2005–2010. We draw on the appraisal or evaluation methodology (Martin and White 2005), and more specifically on the evaluation framework for the analysis of news reports proposed by White (2004, 2006). We will mainly focus on the evaluative prosody surrounding the phrase mujer(es) maltratada(s) [“battered woman/women”], which might come from the writer or the reader of the news. In carrying out this task, we need to resort to both corpus linguistics (Baker et al. 2008) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough and Wodak 1997) — i.e. a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Our aim in this chapter is two-fold: (i) to account for the discursive representation of violence against women (VAW) in Spanish contemporary media discourse in recent years; and (ii) to help unveil the expectations about gender, sexuality and power implicit in public discourses about violence against women. This chapter is divided into five sections. Section 1 deals with the interplay among women, violence and language, and the different forms of violence as related to discourses of power and heteronormative masculinity. In Section 2 we give an overview of the history of violence against women in the Spanish press since the early 1970s until 2010 through the review of the relevant literature on the topic. Our research questions are stated at the end of this section. In Section 3 we account for the data and methodology used in the chapter, with a description of the procedure for quantitative analysis. In Section 4 we discuss the results of the quantitative analysis and provide a qualitative analysis of two random extracts from our corpus, using the adopted theoretical framework. Section 5 is for the conclusions. 2. Women, violence and language: The violence(s) against women An initial key issue is the close connection between woman and violence, and this connection starts with language. Violence against women is a widespread, popular expression, which designates a dramatic reality but which is, however, recognised as natural. In contrast, the term violence against men also exists, but the link with reality is much weaker, and its use sometimes sounds as an exception or a social reaction. While men may also be the target of intimate partner violence, women

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continue to be the majority of victims and men the majority of perpetrators. The result is, therefore, that the identification between woman and violence has become transparent and unproblematic. At the heart of the discourse on violence is the question of power and control in a patriarchal society. For Arendt, “violence is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power” (1970, 35). Though not always, violence tends to be instrumental in the exercise of power. Van Dijk (1996) deals with the discursive reproduction of power, which involves access to discourse and to a wide range of communicative events; in his view we need to explore the implications of the complex question Who may speak or write to whom, about what, when, and in what context, or Who may participate in such communicative events in various recipient roles, for instance as addressees, audience, bystanders and overhearers. Access may even be analyzed in terms of the topics or referents of discourse, that is, who is written or spoken about. We may assume, as for other social resources, that more access according to these several participant roles, corresponds with more social power. In other words, measures of discourse access may be rather faithful indicators of the power of social groups and their members (van Dijk 1996, 86; emphasis in the original).

At play in most cases of violence against women is a performance of an aggressive hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity. In this context, power “is conceived of as male ‘power over’ women, in that men hold the power that enables them to oppress women through acts of violence” (Shepherd 2008, 44). Many types of violence are possible. Garver (1958) distinguishes between overt and covert (or quiet) forms of violence — the former includes mugging, rape or murder, all of them characterized by explicit physical assault on the body of a person; the latter does not “necessarily involve any overt physical assault on anybody’s person or property” (Garver 1958, 260), and may include psychological violence, threats or institutional violence. Garver also distinguishes between personal and institutional violence, depending on whether it is carried out either by an individual or by an institution or the state. Galtung (1969) reframes this binary categorization, from the point of view of the victim, as personal vs. structural violence. In the first case, the perpetrator is an individual (e.g. murderer) whereas in the second case violence is part of a system, and is chararacterized by power asymmetries and inequality in the distribution of e.g. justice, health or education. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is a rather elusive concept, closely linked to symbolic power and to ways of exercising power, and is defined as gentle, invisible violence, unrecognized as such, chosen as much as undergone, that of trust, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, debts, piety, in a word,



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

of all the virtues honoured by the ethic of honour, presents itself as the most economical mode of domination because it best corresponds to the economy of the system (Bourdieu 1990, 127).

Galtung (1990) also proposes another classification in which violence is understood as forming a sort of triangle, and so he refers to direct (an event), symbolic (a process), and cultural (a permanence) types of violence, with violence starting at one of the corners and easily being transmitted to any of the other two, with the evident risk that direct forms of violence (e.g. violence against women) are likely to turn into cultural, institutionalized forms of violence. A recurrent example in all forms of violence thus presented is the perpetuation of women’s subordination by men. In many marriages or sentimental relationships, women are likely to experience all forms of violence. In fact, long before physical, overt or direct forms of violence appear, women may experience covert, institutional, structural or symbolic forms of domination or violence that may be oppressive or constraining and, most tragically, remain socially invisible. Though many violences are at play when we deal with the discursive representation (or construction) of gender-based violence, we will restrict ourselves to linguistic (or discursive) violence. Language is a social practice, as “whenever people speak or listen or write or read, they do so in ways which are determined socially and have social effects” (Fairclough 1989, 23). Thus, language may be an instrument of war, of racism, of alienation, of powerlessness, of (de)legitimization of practices and ideological positions. Tellingly, Ross (1981, 195) claims that “[w]ords can hurt, and one way they do is by conveying denigrating or demeaning attitudes”. Gay (1997) explicitly posits the existence of linguistic violence as a type of covert institutional violence, a form of verbal hatred closely associated with subordination, vulnerability, powerlessness. Language is at the center of the processes of violence making and representation, and is particularly powerful in the construction of sexual inequality, since it “both helps construct sexual inequality and reflects its existence in society” (Graddol and Swan 1989, 164). Feminist linguistics has exposed the violence(s) of language, particularly for women. Spender, in her well-known Man Made Language (1980), put forward the idea that language is a male-controlled system and suggested that language is the result of a patriarchal social system which encodes a set of stereotypical beliefs about women. Other types of discriminatory language may likewise affect the day-to-day construction and/or enactment of our gender and sexual identities. The example of the widespread use of derogatory terms for gays and lesbians, as well as other non-canonical identity categories, is a case in point. Women, in particular, suffer from all forms of linguistic violence, in terms of discrimination,

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strict regulation of their sex-related behaviors, and alienation from language and culture. As Cameron (1985, 155) affirms, “[a] whole vocabulary exists denigrating the talk of women who do not conform to male ideas of femininity: nag, bitch, strident. More terms trivialize interaction between women: girls, talk, gossip, chitchat, mothers’ meeting.” Ehrlich (2004) analyzes a range of linguistic features which can function to construct rape, in the public arena of legal discourse, in sexist and androcentric ways. As a consequence, heterosexism emerges as a powerful gender and language ideology, whose sometimes physical violent reinforcement “often makes an open discussion of sexual orientation quite difficult” (Gay 2007, 436). In sum, linguistic violence tends to accompany and reinforce physical, overt forms of violence. Issues of sexist language, rape narratives and media representations of violence against women or hate speech are inextricably linked to the contemporary social and ideological order. In the following section, we provide the history of the media representation of VAW since the 1970s. 3. The portrayal of gender violence in the Spanish press VAW is a universal phenomenon that has existed since the beginning of time, though only recently has it entered public discourse. For centuries, it has been seen as a private, family issue and especially a social taboo. Viewing VAW as a public issue, however, involves understanding it as a manifestation of social, gendered violence. It is, as well, a conclusive indication that some measure of institutionalization and social legitimation has been reached. In Spain, media coverage of violence against women has significantly changed over the last four decades. Fagoaga (1994, 1999), Alberdi and Matas (2002) and Jorge (2004) have identified three different phases. We deal with each phase in turn. 3.1 First phase: The 1970s and mid-1980s A modest number of news reports on the issue were published during this period (e.g. 229 texts for the years 1982 and 1983 — see Fagoaga 1999). These were short, irrelevant texts that were found in the crimes sections of the newspapers. VAW was not identified as a crime, nor was it even characterized as a social problem. Indeed, the Spanish Criminal Code at the time stated that marriage was an attenuating factor in wife battering. This was so until the law reform in 1989 (Berganza Conde 2003). Rape or even murder were placed along other news items such as armed robbery, corruption scandals or non-sexual murder, narrated from



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

a predominantly judicial or police perspective. No contextual information — i.e. causes and consequences, details of perpetrator(s) or victim(s) — was offered. Some thirty years ago, Spanish media discourses on VAW tended to naturalize male aggression not as violence but as part of the (private) sexual arrangement between the sexes — gender violence episodes were treated as individual instances of violence inflicted by individual men on individual women in an intimate relationship, mostly due to jealousy. Victims were practically disregarded, and no authorial or editorial reflection was offered. 3.2 Second phase: From the mid-1980s to the end of the 20th century Thanks to the work of feminist groups and to raising social awareness, VAW turned from a secret, private object into an object of public communication (Fagoaga 1994, 88), and by the end of this period intimate partner violence news reports definitely found their way onto the hard news agenda of the two major Spanish daily newspapers (El País and El Mundo). From the mid-90s onwards, in particular, there is a substantial increase in the quantity of published news items. Fagoaga (1999) states that El País published 754 texts between 1997 and 1998. These texts constitute more serious narratives, with growing contextual information (actors involved, circumstances, locations, and other details) and the consolidation of a specific vocabulary to deal with malos tratos (‘maltreatment’) or violencia doméstica (‘domestic violence’). For Fagoaga (1994), gender-based violence had become thematized or routinized. Besides, the news items abandoned the crimes section and landed on the current news section. Largely responsible for this new social awareness was the shocking murder of Ana Orantes, a woman from Granada, in December 1997. She was set on fire by her ex-husband, only a few days after appearing on a TV talk show to describe the domestic abuse she had suffered while married. This case drew extraordinary public attention and was to bring about legislative measures, and public campaigns, against gender violence. 3.3 The 21st century The third phase in news reporting of abuse started at the turn of the 21st century, and it seems to consolidate the process described thus far. Today, VAW is undoubtedly a major topic in the Spanish press. As an illustration, in 2010 El País published around 640 news items on the issue, while El Mundo reached 500.1 This bears witness to an effective and sustained public interest and a more serious 1.  See Graph 1 below for the number of news items in the years that constitute our corpus per search term.

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treatment. News texts, in fact, offer more analysis and interpretation, with a wealth of statistics, figures, graphs, and other facts, which help to better contextualize this social malady and which frequently leads to demanding more legal and political measures. This is consistent with Bou-Franch’s (2013, 278) statement that “[i]n modern times, Western societies have moved from treating abuse as a private affair to considering it a social public problem”. Indeed, VAW — in its extreme manifestations of femicide and rape — has undoubtedly become today a major social concern with increasing media coverage. However, other manifestations of daily sexual abuse or harassment — whether verbal, economic or emotional — tend to remain unknown. This is especially important because most of our knowledge, our image(s) and our discourse(s) of VAW come from media constructions, which are (re)interpreted in terms of our personal experiences and our social membership. 3.4 El País and El Mundo As we have seen, media accounts of violence against women are a very recent phenomenon in Spain, very closely related to two quality dailies, El País and El Mundo. El País is the highest-circulation Spanish daily newspaper, with an editorial line more in tune with progressive policies. It was first published in 1976, and since the beginning, it featured a number of news articles on violence against women: around 50 texts in 1976 and 1977 (Fagoaga 1999). Published for the first time in 1989, El Mundo, albeit more conservative, was the first Spanish newspaper to explicitly offer a wider coverage of gender-based violence. In any case, both El País and El Mundo are probably the two most respected daily newspapers in Spain today, and constitute influential benchmarks not only for the population at large but also for politicians and legislators. 3.5 Research on VAW discourse(s) in the Spanish media The beginning of the 21st century witnessed the growth of a body of research addressing the portrayal of VAW in the Spanish media (Fagoaga 1994, 1999; Bengoechea 2002; Lledó 2002; Alberdi and Matas 2002; López Díez 2002; Fernández 2003; Jorge 2004). The significance of the topic in contemporary Spanish society, together with its controversial nature, offer ample opportunity for further investigation in a variety of fields and directions. Among them, we can cite the images or stereotypes offered by newspapers; the social attitudes toward the issue; the implicit and explicit definition of violence against women offered by the mass media, as well as an analysis of the main labels used (domestic violence, gender violence, sexual violence, and others) and their ideological implications; the (de)legitimised voices and sources of information on the topic; the representation



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse 89

(and construction) of the main actors involved, from victims to perpetrators and official authorities, among many others. Previous studies on the representation of domestic violence in the Spanish press have focused on the representation of the phenomenon as a social problem, with specific proposals on how these representations should be construed in ethical terms (Martín Serrano 2000; Sánchez Aranda et al. 2003; Berganza Conde 2003). However, in the last ten years there is a lack of studies on the construction and representation of VAW discourse(s) in the Spanish press. Surprisingly, research has not accompanied the increasing social and political interest in VAW, which has led to legal and political measures (e.g. the Spanish Organic Act 1/2004 of 28 December on Integrated Protection Measures against Gender Violence). To fill this gap, this chapter is particularly concerned with examining the evaluative discourse of news reports (White 2004, 2006; Martin and White 2005; Bednarek 2006, 2008) in the representation of mujer(es) maltratada(s) (‘battered woman/women’) in two Spanish papers, as this will unveil important aspects of how women are currently represented in the media vis-à-vis violence. We address two research questions: RQ1: Given the alleged objectivity of media discourse, is there evaluative discourse in VAW newspaper articles? If so, how is it linguistically realized? RQ2: Is there any significant difference between the two newspaper data sets analyzed (El País and El Mundo) that may point to ideological considerations? We must bear in mind that discursive representations of VAW “have regulatory (i.e., material) effects” (Ehrlich 2004, 227). They constitute powerful discourses with attendant socio-ideological consequences — they delimit what is (or is not) intimate partner violence, which stories are newsworthy, and which attitudes or emotions are to blame or praise. This discourse constitutes our object of research in this chapter. 4. Data and methodology: An evaluation framework 4.1 Data The corpus for this study is made up of circa 5 million words on VAW newspaper articles from the Spanish quality dailies El País and El Mundo covering the period 2005–2010. This corpus was compiled using Nexis UK News Databases, entering the key search terms violencia de género (VDG; ‘gender violence’), violencia doméstica (VD; ‘domestic violence’) and violencia machista (VM; ‘sexist violence’).

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The total number of articles is 7894 (4794 in El País and 3100 in El Mundo) and their distribution per year and per search terms is the following: 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

2005 VDG El País

2006 VDG El Mundo

2007 VD El País

2008 VD El Mundo

2009 VM El País

2010 VM El Mundo

Graph 1.  Number of articles per year and search term in El País and El Mundo

4.2 Theoretical framework This chapter relies on evaluation or appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) for the analysis of VAW news, with the aim of investigating subjective (or ideological) positioning in discourse(s) (see White 2004, 2006). Briefly, Appraisal Theory is concerned with (1) how writers communicate attitudinal meanings with a varying degree of explicitness and (2) how they negotiate their subjective position with other similar or divergent ideological stances. Thus, this chapter focuses on the expression of attitude through evaluation — as relevant for gender-violence news reports. Evaluation is defined as: [T]he text position of its audience to take either negative or positive views of the participants, actions, happenings and states of affairs therein depicted. It is via such evaluative positionings, of course, that the media constructs a particular model of the social and moral order — a model of what is normal and aberrant, beneficial and harmful, praiseworthy and blameworthy, and so on (White 2006, 37).

This framework distinguishes between various types of attitudinal assessment, namely affect, judgment and appreciation, and the different (linguistic) realizations by which these assessments are activated in the text either explicitly or implicitly. In this respect, the degree of explicitness of evaluation, in terms of propositional content, is directly linked to the writer’s negotiation of interpersonal positioning with regard to potential readers, relative to communicative purpose(s).



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

4.2.1 Means for evaluation: Explicit vs. implicit attitude In considering attitude, we are concerned with those utterances which can be interpreted as indicating “values by which positive or negative viewpoints are activated” (White 2006, 38), as referred to some individual, action, event or state of affairs. Such evaluations, as mentioned above, can be explicitly conveyed or implicitly invoked. White labels these different means as: Attitudinal inscription (positioning) Specific words or fixed phrases which explicitly carry a negative or positive sense in that the positivity or negativity would still be conveyed even if the wordings were removed from their current context (White 2004, 231).

Examples of attitudinal inscription in our corpus are lexical items such as tormentor, brutally, vulnerable, or murderer. (1) El Mundo (Aug. 17, 2006) [authorial emotion] El musical ‘Casa de Locos’ aborda la brutalidad doméstica con un mensaje de esperanza. “The musical ‘Mad House’ tackles domestic brutality with a message of hope.”2 (2) El País (Nov. 28, 2010) — on forced marriages [non-authorial emotion] En muchos casos las víctimas padecen también amenazas y agresiones. “In many cases victims also endure threats and violence.” (3) El Mundo (Nov. 26, 2010) [opinion] (…) acabar con la lacra de la violencia de género exige el compromiso de todos. (…) “To put an end to the scourge of gender violence demands commitment from everyone”. Attitudinal trigger/token (invoked) Formulations which do not operate so directly or overtly and which rely on implications and on inferences drawn by the reader/listener (White 2004, 234). There is no single item which carries a specific positive or negative value (White 2006, 39).

(4) El Mundo (Nov. 5, 2006) [evoking] Desde enero, más de 50 hombres han matado (a sus mujeres). A pesar de las medidas judiciales, sanitarias y asistenciales puestas en marcha, las mujeres siguen muriendo. “Since January, more than 50 men have killed (their wives). Despite the implemented legal, health and support measures, women are still dying.”

2.  All further examples are extracted from the corpus for this study. The translations are the authors’.

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(5) El País (Mar. 7, 2005) Pascual Maragall (President of the Catalan government at the time, referring to the criticism of the Spanish government against his term of office): Mi gobierno se siente como una mujer maltratada. “My government feels like a battered woman”.

As it is the reader who does most of the evaluative work, the intended implicit attitude may or may not be retrieved, depending on the reader bringing a particular set of beliefs and expectations — in terms of socially and culturally conditioned inferences — to the process of interpretation. To sum up, we can classify attitudinal evaluations according to the amount of work done by the text and the reader/listener respectively, which varies along the explicit and implicit dimensions. This distinction roughly equates the traditional semantics vs. pragmatics distinction and is present in the three types of evaluation (see 4.2.2). Table 1.  Linguistic realizations of evaluation + explicit (semantics)

+implicit (pragmatics)

Attitudinal inscription (Positioning)

Attitudinal trigger (Invoked)

4.2.2 Types of evaluation: Affect, judgment, and appreciation As stated above, attitudinal meanings are concerned with evaluations relating to emotional reactions, morality/ethics of behavior and aesthetics, consisting of the three sub-systems of affect, judgment and appreciation, summarized in Table 2: Table 2.  Types of evaluation basic attitudinal Affect system evaluation of institutional social norms

Judgement

(emotions)

personal feelings

(ethics)

(moral) evaluation of actions / behaviors

Appreciation (aesthetics) evaluation of aesthetic qualities

As it will become evident, clear-cut distinctions between these sub-systems are hard to pin down, given the diverse ways linguistic resources are used for construing positive and negative evaluation. We will briefly deal with each in turn: 1. Affect: “deals with resources for construing emotional reactions” (Martin and White 2005, 35; our emphasis). It “is concerned with registering positive and negative feelings” (Martin and White 2005, 42; our emphasis):



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

(6) El País (Feb. 28, 2007) El juicio a su ex-marido por asesinato revela el calvario de una mujer maltratada. “The trial of her ex-husband for murder brings to light the torment of a battered woman.”

2. Judgment: It consists of “resources for morally evaluating human actions, behavior or character according to a set of normative principles” (Martin and White 2005, 35): (7) El País (Jul. 14, 2005) La escasísima preocupación social por la violencia de género (…) no se corresponde con el número de denuncias por el denominado terrorismo doméstico. “The negligible social concern for gender violence (…) is not correlated with the number of reported crimes for the so-called domestic terrorism”.

3. Appreciation:3 It includes resources used to evaluate the aesthetic quality of processes, things and products (and human beings when they are seen as entities), according to the way in which they are valued or not in a given field (Bednarek 2008; Martin and White 2005). For example: (8) El País (Mar. 7, 2005) [see (5) above] (…) las palabras de Maragall suponen “un error” que no es “digno” de un presidente de la Generalitat ni de un dirigente socialista. “(…) Maragall’s words mean “a mistake” that is “derogatory for the dignity” of a President of the Generalitat and a socialist leader”.

4.3 Procedure Our method combines corpus linguistic (CL) tools (Baker et al. 2008) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough and Wodak 1997), thus integrating quantitatively-based research with the qualitative analysis of text. We believe that the results obtained from such a synergy shed light on the way contemporary Spanish quality dailies (El País and El Mundo) express and construct affect towards women victims of gender-based violence. We are aware that CL and CDA have strengths and limitations. A quantitative analysis is useful in showing what meanings readers are regularly exposed to, and thus the way attitudes are construed and spread in society. However, corpus-based 3.  Due to space limitations and its lack of statistical significance for the topic at hand, in this chapter we do not deal with Appreciation. Some facts that may be of interest regarding this subsystem are dealt with briefly in the conclusions.

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computations fall short of providing evidence for inferential processes communicators entertain — both in interpreting explicit and implicit meanings — as a result of this exposure. Besides, these meanings often extend over the sentences and are thus not captured in a single concordance line (O’Halloran 2010). In the quantitative study of our corpus, we use Wordsmith 6.0 in order to retrieve the most frequent 5R and 5L collocates and the concordance lines for the phrase(s) mujer(es) maltratada(s) (‘battered woman/women’) in order to extract attitudinal inscription that may reveal patterns of evaluation of the content words associated with this phrase. Results are manually classified according to Part of Speech (PoS) (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), given their typicality in the types of evaluation. For instance, adjectives describing emotion tend to appear in the Affect sub-type, which may be indicative of the subjective appraisal of the victims. The results of this analysis are presented in Section 5.1. The second step in our analysis of evaluation of VAW news reports involves the random selection of two extracts (one from each newspaper), which are subsequently analyzed qualitatively. Therefore, we focus on the implicit evaluative aspects that news reporters use to characterize violence against women victims and the phenomenon itself. In doing so, we aim to (1) further answer our research questions by providing a discourse perspective, thus complementing the results obtained in the quantitative part, and (2) extend the collocational analysis by adding a ‘textual’ and context-bound outlook to evaluation unveiling particular evaluative prosodies with a pragmatic (rather than semantic) substance (Louw 1993; Morley and Partington 2009; Sinclair 1991). In sum, the need for a qualitative perspective is fully justified as the evaluative force of some propositions may go unnoticed in an automatic analysis of the corpus. The results of the qualitative analysis are presented in 5.2. 5. Results and discussion 5.1 Mujer(es) maltratada(s) in Spanish newspapers: A general look at evaluation The examination of the phrase mujer(es) maltratada(s) offers some initial insights into both lexico-grammatical relations and into the authors’ semantic, discursive and ideological preferences. With 338 occurrences in El País and 265 in El Mundo, this phrase seems fairly well established in the Spanish press to refer to the victims of VAW. The first observation to be made is that, in evaluative terms, Spanish news reports on VAW seem to show a marked preference for the judgement category in both dailies, as compared with affect and appreciation, which lag far behind:



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

Table 3.  Evaluation preferences in El País and El Mundo El País (338)

with evaluation: 181

Affect: 40 (22.1%) Judgement: 122 (67.4%) Appreciation: 19 (10.5%)

El Mundo (265)

with evaluation: 130

Affect: 33 (25.4%) Judgement: 88 (67.6%) Appreciation: 9 (7%)

These results suggest that both El País and El Mundo favor an analysis of violence against women in social, professional and ethical terms, rather than in emotional ones. 5.1.1 Judgement Table 4 shows the most statistically significant nouns in the corpus used to refer to the phenomenon of VAW with their most frequent immediate (L1/R1) collocates.4 Although the results also indicate (see 5.1.2) that VAW news reports Table 4.  Five most (1L/1R) collocates to refer to VAW in El País (EP) and El Mundo (EM) delito ‘offence’

situación ‘situation’

problema ‘problem’

crimen ‘crime’

EP (1003) EM (701) EP (1081) EM (665) EP (1416) EM (677) EP (789)

EM (690)

perseguible ‘indictable’ (1.03) flagrante ‘flagrant’ (0.89) invisible ‘invisible’ (0.75) presunto ‘alleged’ (0.71) supuesto ‘supposed’ (0.69)

imperdonable ‘unforgivable’ (1.15) horrendo ‘horrific’ (1.15) execrable ‘execrable’ (0.86) brutal ‘brutal’ (0.76) trágico ‘tragic’ (0.68)

condenable reprehensible’ (0.99) gravísimo ‘most serious’ (0.97) execrable ‘execrable’ (0.76) horrible (0.76) ‘horrific’ presunto ‘alleged’ (0.76)

aterradora ‘terrifying’ (1.15) paupérrima ‘very poor’ (1.12) precaria ‘precarious’ (1.01) caótica ‘chaotic’ (0.98) traumática ‘traumatic’ (0.93)

indeseada ‘undesired’ (1.15) durísima ‘very hard’ (1.1) desastrosa ‘disastrous’ (1.05) penosa ‘pitiful’ (1) precaria ‘precarious’ (1)

endémico ‘rife’ (1.08) enquistado ‘entrenched’ (1) gravísimo ‘most serious’ (0.96) lacerante ‘wounding’ (0.92) invisible ‘invisible’ (0.77)

crónico ‘chronic’ (1.09) acuciante ‘urgent’ (1) importantísimo ‘extremely important’ (1) dramático ‘dramatic’ (0.87) escondido ‘hidden’ (0.87)

execrable execrable’ (1.1) aborrecible ‘detestable’ (1.09) encubierto ‘hidden’ (1.07) escabroso ‘rough’ (1.01) gigantesco ‘gigantic’ (0.93)

4.  Given the nature of the data subject to analysis and our purposes, ‘statistical significance’ is measured using raw frequency and t-score. The minimum collocate frequency was established at 4 and the percentages of the test under 1.0 were automatically discarded.

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lend themselves to personal, sentimental narratives (and thus to emphasizing affective meanings), what seems to predominate is a constant moral, ethical, and professional analysis of this social malady. Both dailies reveal similar attitudinal positions in terms of (im)morality, (il)legality or (im)politeness, adding blunt rejection of those social and individual attitudes against the dignity of women. However, the results also evince that negative values of judgement are more ‘combative’ in El País, given, on the one hand, the higher number of occurrences of these nouns and, on the other hand, the stronger evaluative semantic prosody of the adjectives used (“flagrant” vs. “very serious”, “terrifying” vs. “unwanted”, “traumatic” vs. “disastrous”, etc.). These convey a sense of guilt, blame or social dysfunctionality. Positive steps towards the eradication of gender violence are praised, while negative opinions are strongly criticized (9) and ensuing punishments explicitly endorsed (10). They should be read against the backdrop of normative assessments of right/wrong, ethical/unethical, and correct/ incorrect. (9) El País (Mar. 7, 2008) Suspendido el auto que obligaba a una mujer maltratada a dejar su caso “Court order that forced a battered woman to leave her home suspended” (10) El País (Oct. 8, 2008) Interior expulsa a un ‘ertzaina’ por vejar a mujeres maltratadas “Home Secretary dismisses a [Basque police officer] for harassing battered women”

Both authorial and non-authorial endorsement of judgement can be found on the pages of both quality dailies. This stance is confirmed by the extensive use of two strategies: 1. Facts, figures and statistics — this is what Bednarek calls facticity (2006, 17). In our corpus, statistical relevance is referred to number of battered women (e.g. “17 out of the 55 women killed in 2009…”), those assisted by social or psychological services (e.g. “151 battered women have already received help…”) and, finally, the issuing and enforcing of protective orders (e.g. “a total of 6256 out of the 8388 protective orders issued”): Table 5.  Facticity in judgement articles in El País and El Mundo: occurrences and percentages battered women

social and psychol. services

protective orders

EP

EM

EP

EM

EP

EM

10 (8.1%)

7 (7.9%)

15 (12.2%)

10 (11%)

9 (7.3%)

4 (4.5%)



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

2. An overwhelming list of social and political agents, institutions, or associations — or, in Bednarek’s (2006) words, eliteness (EP 70 [57.3%] / EM 55 [62.5%]). These two strategies are instrumental in building a more objective judgement discourse and they greatly enhance the evaluative potential of media texts. Focusing on judgement values constitutes a useful rhetorical strategy “for distancing selfblame and constructing appraisal as ‘factual’ and therefore less open to challenge or dismissal” (Painter 2003, 201). Battered women are thus surrounded by an institutional network made up of laws, regulations, courts, judges, political institutions, associations, etc., which newspapers, to some extent, depict as empty terms, in demand of more social coverage. 5.1.2 Affect Although the moral and ethical dimensions seem to be far more frequent than the emotional ones (see Table 4), VAW news cannot escape offering a display of the victims’ emotions, from rage to fear, from vulnerability to humiliation. Affect is the basis of the system of attitude, and constitutes a crucial semantic dimension in analyzing newspaper reports on violence against women, essential to understanding the complexity of the issue, which is characterized by a combination of acute personal suffering, growing social evaluation, and ideological struggle. An initial analysis of concordance lines (with an extended horizon: 25L/25R) enables us to obtain an approximate picture of the affective values attributed to battered women. The results in Table 6 were obtained from the chapters conveying affect identified earlier — 40 in El País and 33 in El Mundo (see Table 3 above) — and are organized according to part of speech. Affect is mostly indicated through abstract nouns. Other linguistic resources like emotion adjectives and process verbs are also present, while comment adverbs are almost inexistent in the vicinity of mujer(es) maltratada(s): The highest number of occurrences is for abstract, uncountable emotion nouns identifying negative states and feelings associated with gender-based violence victims. These nouns — some of which are nominalizations — constitute a cumulative catalogue of the (negative) traits characterizing both VAW and its victims. The range of uncountable nouns includes peligro ‘danger’, calvario ‘ordeal, hassle’, drama ‘drama’, angustia ‘anguish’, vergüenza ‘shame’, culpa ‘guilt’, aislamiento ‘isolation’, desprecio ‘contempt’, confusión ‘confusion’, sufrimiento ‘suffering’. Both dailies offer a rich inventory of emotion nouns, providing a fairly complete depiction of the emotional states associated with VAW victims. In general terms, El País shows a higher number of occurrences, while El Mundo is much more limited in characterizing battered women: only dolor ‘pain’ and tragedia ‘tragedy’ show higher

97

98 José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda Table 6. Affect values attributed to battered women in the corpus NOUNS word

ADJECTIVES n. of occur. EP

EM

peligro ‘danger’

23

12

culpa ‘guilt’

19

dolor “pain”

word

VERBS n. of occur. EP

EM

vulnerables ‘vulnerable’

8

2

10

incapaces ‘incapable’

5

14

18

anulada ‘annulled’

3

tragedia ‘tragedy’

12

15

sufrimiento ‘suffering’

10

5

drama ‘drama’

8

4

vergüenza ‘shame’

7

3

desprecio ‘contempt’

8

4

aislamiento ‘isolation’

6

4

calvario ‘ordeal’

5

2

confusion ‘confusion’

5

3

word

ADVERBS n. of occur. EP

EM

sufrir ‘suffer’

16

9

2

padecer ‘endure’

9

5

1

desconfiar ‘distrust’

3

1

word desgraciadamente ‘unfortunately’

n. of occur. EP

EM

4

5



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse 99

occurrences than in El País. Equivalent to emotion adjectives, emotion nouns (abstract and concrete) are less direct, less personalized, less explicit in reflecting the evaluative positioning of media texts vis-à-vis battered women. The results suggest that it is nouns that bear the weight of attitudinal evaluations in Spanish media texts on the victims of gender violence, creating negative discourse prosody around this issue. Far less numerous and less frequent are emotion verbs and adjectives. Three verbs with a clearly (negative) evaluative meaning were found, sufrir ‘suffer’, padecer ‘endure’ and desconfiar ‘distrust’. Sufrir is projected onto a number of similarly negative objects, such as síndrome de la mujer maltratada ‘the battered woman syndrome’, mutilación genital ‘genital mutilation’, maltrato psíquico ‘psychological abuse’, angustia ‘anguish’ and others. Three adjectives of emotion were found, ascribing qualities to battered women in a more straightforward manner — incapaces ‘unable’, vulnerables ‘vulnerable; and anulada ‘destroyed’. An example stands out, in which a man states Se tiene que sentir tan anulada (…) Tiene que ser una sensación horrible ‘She must feel so destroyed (…) It must be a horrible feeling’ (El País, April 29, 2008), in which El País endorses an attributed emotion, in which a man sympathizes with women’s suffering. And, finally, only one explicitly evaluative comment adverb was detected — e.g. desgraciadamente ‘unfortunately’. In this section, a close look at the attitudinal meanings observable in a collocational analysis of mujer(es) maltratada(s) has made apparent the difficulty of separating affect from judgement or appreciation. In fact, emotion underlies all three, though each manifestation privileges a different focus. All three are sides of the same (irregular) triangle, dialectically reinforcing each other. In the case of gender-based violence, a basic scheme would look like this. If we concentrate our attention on the key side (affect), battered women feel shame and are going through a dramatic situation (emphasis on the individual emotional response, which is negative). If we look at another side (judgement), violence becomes a criminal offence (emphasis on a social/ethical negative view of the phenomenon, while at the same time conveying a positive feeling towards the battered person). Finally, if we look at the third side (appreciation), gender violence episodes become horrible (cases) (emphasis on a qualitative or aesthetic view of the phenomenon, which adds to the negative emotion felt by the victim, the negative social/ethical evaluation of gender violence and the ensuing sympathetic view of the victim). This preference for negative emotions is “caused by the news value of negativity, which decides that it is the negative that is reported rather than the positive” (Bednarek 2006, 179).

100 José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda

5.2 Mujer(es) maltratada(s) in selected texts: Evaluation in El País and El Mundo In this section, we provide the qualitative analysis of two randomly selected extracts, one from each newspaper. We focus on both the explicit and the implicit features of evaluation that news reporters strategically use to characterize VAW and the victims, and which inevitably escape computational scrutiny. In doing so, we aim to (1) provide a more fine-grained picture of subjective evaluation in VAW news reports, thus complementing the quantitative approach and (2) unveil particular evaluative prosodies that bear a pragmatic content. 5.2.1 El País5 Excerpt (1) A parish newsletter of the Archbishopric of Valencia accuses battered women of “provocation” “No one has confessed what the victims did, as more than once they provoke with their tongue”. This is an extract of the chapter about mistreatment of women, published last Sunday on the parish newsletter Aleluya, edited by the Archbishopric of Valencia and authored by the retired professor of Theology Gonzalo Gironés. (…) “Without contesting (violence against women), it is necessary to clarify matters. First, no one has confessed what the victims did, as they more than once provoke with their tongue. Generally, men do not lose their temper due to authority but to weakness: they can’t stand it any longer and react venting their anger and crushing the instigator. Second, has anyone considered that, during the same period, there were 80,000 admitted abortions in Spain? For each woman who dies at the hands of their husbands, there were 1,350 children killed by the will of their mothers. This is worse.” (El País, Feb. 14, 2006)

This is a piece of news reports on an article, edited by the Archbishopric of Valencia, which justifies VAW, as women provoke or stir up their husbands to anger. Evaluation is established on two different levels, depending on who the emoter (E) and the trigger (T) are: the journalist (E1) towards the priest (T1) and the priest (E2) towards battered women (T2). In the first case (E1-T1), with a focus on judgement, the writer shows distance and outright rejection of the asserted opinion by means of attribution — i.e. quoted discourse — and the verb “to accuse”, with a markedly negative evaluative prosody. The use of this verb to refer to battered women, a highly sensitive and emotionally 5.  Due to space limitation, we can only provide our own translated version of extracts 1 and 2 (below).



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse 101

loaded conceptualization, aims to trigger an emotional reaction on the reader based on counter-expectation or untypical collocation (“no one has confessed what the victims did, as they more than once provoke with their tongue”). The alignment of the journalist (E1) with women seems also corroborated by his use of non-authorial affect elsewhere in the chapter (data not shown), as in “Many Catholics addressed media and the publishing house yesterday (…) to express their indignation with the chapter”. This is a case of emoted, directed and overt affect. In the second case (E2-T2), the author of the controversial ecclesiastical opinion conveys a negative affect value of (battered) women both explicitly and implicitly. Overtly, the priest considers that men act under provocation when battering their partners. Women are portrayed as instigators as they “provoke with their tongue”. Implicitly, the author attempts to justify battering by conveying a positive affect value of the perpetrators. Men “lose their temper” because of their “weakness”, and they cannot stand what women do to them: “no one has confessed what the victims did”. Finally, the author uses facticity with an evident evaluative purpose: to compare aggression against women with women aggression against their aborted fetuses: “For each woman who dies at the hands of their husband there are 1,350 children killed by the will of their mothers. This is worse”. Thus, negotiation of meaning occurs when the author tries to neutralize or invalidate existing, socially-construed beliefs and assumptions of battered women as individuals to be respected, protected, supported, etc., in stark contrast with the rhetoric delineated in the corpus-based analysis. 5.2.2 El Mundo Excerpt (2) The aftermath of the ‘tsunami’: One year later “My husband hit me continuously for the dowry, but the fear of rejection prevented me from telling my family and friends”. For Kalawathy, her joyous wedding bed was a complete nightmare. Trapped in a (too) early marriage, with four little children and an unfaithful and violent husband, should Kalwathy have been born in the West, her injuries, bruises and medical assistance would not have gone unnoticed. Sadly, Kalawathy was born 35 years ago in Sri-Lanka, where domestic violence is a problem for more than 60% of women.” (El Mundo, Dec. 23, 2005)

Kalawathy’s is the tragic story of most women in Sri Lanka. One year after the tsunami, male domination in an abusive patriarchal society had even worsened, depriving women of their most fundamental rights. The chapter condemns (data not shown) the vulnerable situation of women, dispossessed of their entitlement

102 José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda

to land and dowry and constantly subjected to physical (including sexual) violence (due to men’s drinking alcohol). In contrast to the previous example, in this chapter the use of non-authorial affect clearly seeks to align readers with the reported value position. The victim — i.e. the emoter — overtly expresses her emotional response through nominalization (miedo ‘fear’). In this case of directed affect, the dual trigger compels her to remain silent: (1) fear of being beaten by her husband and (2) fear of being rejected by her own family and friends (me impidió contárselo a mi familia y amigos ‘prevented me from telling my family and friends about it’). Through authorial affect, the writer’s highly subjective presence is distinctly shown using different attitudinal associations. In the first case, the writer uses metonymy (dichoso lecho nupcial ‘joyous wedding bed’) to convey untypical expectations about marriage: “joyous wedding bed” vs. “a complete nightmare”. The contrast between positive and negative prosodies in this context may implicitly invoke the way the feelings of the victim evolved during her years of marriage or else the contrast between her public and private social images. In the second case, through metaphor, the writer overtly attributes affect values to the victim: atrapada (‘confined’), an emotional response that again sources in several triggers: cuatro hijos pequeños (‘four little children’) [attitudinal trigger] and un marido infiel y violento (‘an unfaithful and violent husband’) [attitudinal inscription — explicitly negative portrayal of the perpetrator]. Finally, through judgement, the author indirectly condemns the complicit silence of Eastern societies that often turn a blind eye to what is otherwise evident: the bruises (moraduras), injuries (heridas) and medical assistance (hospitalización). Signs of domestic violence, the author claims, would not have (allegedly) gone unnoticed in Western societies. This is, “sadly” (desgraciadamente — affect as comment), the tragedy of 60% of women in Sri Lanka, the unpredicted aftermath of a devastating tsunami. 6. Conclusion VAW is a very serious crime which still conveys an undesired connection between women and violence. Although considerable progress has been made since the 1970s in terms of a more accurate representation of battered women in the media (and in society in general), we believe that there is still a long way to go. In the last decade, violence against women has become thematized or routinized, with growing numbers of news reports which deal extensively with this issue, which offer more serious analysis and interpretation, and which seem to point towards a more strict consideration of violence against women as a social malady (229 [1982–1983] > 754 [1997–1998] > 1140 [EP-EM 2010] — data from Fagoaga 1999



The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse 103

and our corpus). However, the statistical relevance of facticity (Bednarek 2006) in our results — as referred to the actual battering, numbers of victims, protective orders, etc. — signify an over-representation of femicide at the expense of other forms of violence against women. In this chapter we have examined the subjective, evaluative dimension of the representation — and construction — of mujer(es) maltratada(s) ‘battered women’ in Spanish newspaper articles on VAW, combining corpus-based methods with an evaluation framework (Bednarek 2006, 2008; Martin and White 2005; White 2006) for a more accurate analysis of language and discourse, and for an exploration of the ways in which newspaper writers attribute attitudinal values to VAW and the victims. In media discourse — Caldas-Coulthard (1996, 268) claims — “evaluation is a crucial entrance point to the hidden discourse”. In this chapter, we have focused on the attitudinal types of judgement and affect, which have helped us begin to uncover the way VAW victims are evaluated in contemporary Spanish press. The examples analyzed from El País and El Mundo clearly indicate that judgement is the predominant category, with a certain objectification and institutionalization of victims. Affectual (negative) values are mainly conveyed through abstract nouns (“danger”, “drama”, “anguish”), in particular in El País. Evaluation is mostly accomplished through nouns, and to a lesser extent, by emotion verbs and adjectives. Collocationally, battered women are lexically surrounded by verbs indicating protection (proteger ‘protect’, ayudar ‘help’, defender ‘defend’ and many others), thus activating a positive, reassuring, euphemistic prosody that ties in with a benevolent social discourse on (weak, victimized) women, who deserve the benefits of a protective institutional environment. Men, in contrast, while explicitly labelled as agresor ‘aggressor’ whenever they are referred to, scarcely appear close to mujer(es) maltratada(s). This invisibility “lessens the readers’ awareness of his guilt and contributes to the maintenance of the status quo: male supremacy and female subordination. Violence, thus, becomes the arena of power used to create and maintain male dominance” (Adampa 1999, 21). The present study only focuses on the discursive representation of battered women in the Spanish press and thus offers a limited perspective. More studies are needed on the topic in order to re-examine the attitude towards women in sensitive socio-ideological texts and to place the discursive representation of women in a broader perspective. Comparable studies should be conducted in other languages and cultures. Indeed, further research within GENTEXT aims to carry out such comparable studies with British dailies (see Santaemilia & Maruenda 2013). Media discourse is powerful, as it creates expectations, imposes socially accepted images and consistently reinforces constructions of behavior, endowing them with

104 José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda

a commonsensical status. A continuous revision of the linguistic or discursive representation (and construction) of women in media texts on gender-based violence is necessary if we are ever to ensure gender equality.

Acknowledgements This study is part of the Research Project FFI2012-39289 ‘GEA (GENTEXT+ECPC+ ADELEX): Un macrocorpus sobre género, desigualdad social y discurso político. Análisis y elaboración de materiales didácticos, lexicográficos y computacionales’, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad

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Ehrlich, Susan. 2004. “Linguistic Discrimination and Violence against Women: Discursive Practices and Material Effects.” In Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries, ed. by Mary Bucholtz, 223–228. New York: Oxford University Press. Fagoaga, Concha. 1994. “Comunicando violencia contra las mujeres.” Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico 1: 67–90. Fagoaga, Concha. 1999. La violencia en medios de comunicación: maltrato en la pareja y aggression sexuada. Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman. Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis”. In Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. by Teun van Dijk, 258–284. London: Sage. Fernández Díaz, Natalia. 2003. La violencia sexual y su representación en la prensa. Barcelona: Anthropos. Galtung, John. 1969. “Violence, Peace and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6 (3): 167–191. Galtung, John. 1990. “Cultural Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 27 (3): 291–305. Garver, Newton. 1958. “What Violence Is”. The Nation 209 (June 24, 1968). Gay, William C. 1997. “The Reality of Linguistic Violence against Women.” In Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Laura O’Toole and Jessica Schiffman, 467–473. New York: New York University Press. Gay, William C. 2007. “Supplanting Linguistic Violence”. In Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2nd edn., ed. by Jessica Schiffman and Margie Edwards, 435–442. New York: New York University Press. Graddol, David, and Joan Swann. 1989. Gender Voices. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jorge Alonso, Ana. 2004. Mujeres en los medios, mujeres de los medios: imagen y presencia femenina en las televisiones públicas: Canal Sur TV. Barcelona: Icaria. Lledó, Eulàlia. 2002. “Crònica d’un equívoc: La construcció d’una identitat femenina en les notícies sobre maltractaments”. Lectora 8: 87–97. López Díez, Pilar. 2002. Mujer, violencia y medios de comunicación. Madrid: Instituto Oficial de Radio y Televisión. Louw, William. 1993. Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies. In Text and Technology (In Honour of John Sinclair), edited by M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli, 157-176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Martin, James, and Peter White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Martín Serrano, Manuel. 2000. “La violencia contra las mujeres: Un problema social.” Jornadas sobre medios de comunicación y violencia contra las mujeres. 9–12. Madrid: Instituto de la Mujer. Morley, John, and Alan Partington. 2009. “A Few Frequently Asked Questions about Semantic or Evaluative Prosody.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (2): 139–158. O’Halloran, Kieran. 2010. “How to Use Corpus Linguistics in the Study of Media Discourse”. In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Anne O’Keefe, and Michael McCarthy, 562–589. Abingdon: Routledge. Painter, Clare. 2003. Developing Attitude: An Ontogenetic Perspective on Appraisal. Text 23(2): 183–209. Ross, Stephanie. 1981. “How Words Hurt: Attitude, Metaphor, and Oppression.” In Sexist Language (A Modern Philosophical Analysis), ed. by Mary Vetterling-Braggin, 194–216. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield Adams and Co.

106 José Santaemilia and Sergio Maruenda Sánchez Aranda, José Javier, Mª Rosa Berganza, and Carmela García Ortega. 2003. Mujer publicada, mujer maltratada. Libro de estilo para informar en los medios de comunicación sobre la mujer. Pamplona: Instituto Navarro de la Mujer. Santaemilia, José, and Sergio Maruenda. 2013. “Naming Practices and Negotiation of Meaning: A Corpus-based Analysis of Spanish and English Newspaper Discourse.” In Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics, ed. by Istvan Kecskes, and Jesús Romero Trillo, 439–457. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Shepherd, Laura J. 2008. Gender, Violence and Security. Discourse as Practice. London and New York: Zed Books. Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Routledge. van Dijk, Teun A. 1996. “Discourse, Power and Access”. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, and Malcolm Coulthard, 84– 104. London and New York: Routledge. Weatherall, Ann. 2002. Gender, Language and Discourse. Sussex/NY: Routledge. White, Peter. 2004. “Subjectivity, Evaluation and Point of View in Media Discourse.” In Applying English Grammar: Functional and Corpus Approaches, ed. by Caroline Coffin, Ann Hewings, and Kieran O’Halloran, 229–246. London: The Open University – Hodder Arnold. White, Peter. 2006. “Evaluative Semantics and Ideological Positioning in Journalistic Discourse: A New Framework for Analysis.” In Mediating Ideology in Text and Image, ed. by Inger Lassen, Jeanne Strunck, and Torben Vestergaard, 37–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Public/Private language aggression against women Tweeting rage and intimate partner violence Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele

Verbal aggression against women often serves to naturalize a binary construction of gender. The form and content of verbal aggression against women may be shifting in the 21st century context, in which overtly sexist language in public settings is viewed as unacceptable. However, we argue that in fact, sexist language continues, albeit at times in less overt ways and particularly so when the discourse is public, or likely to be made public. This study examines the specific content of language aggression against women with two sources of data: 1) the population of tweets containing the handle @femfreq posted during 17 days in the fall of 2013, and 2) the population of 130 civil protection order petitions filed in the first 8 months of 2010 in a small city in the Pacific Northwest. We consider how the content of gendered language aggression in Tweets — a form of verbal discourse that is authored by people who do not personally know the object of their aggression — is similar to and different from the language aggression perpetrated by the intimate partners of women seeking legal protection from abuse from the courts — a form of verbal discourse enacted in intimate contexts. Keywords: domestic violence, gender, social media, courts

1. Introduction In his 2008 act Chewed Up, comedian Louis C. K. states, “I’m a white man — you can’t even hurt my feelings. What can you really call a white man that really digs deep: ‘Hey, cracker!’ Oh, shouldn’a called me cracker. Bringing me back to owning land and people — what a drag” (n.p.). The English language contains very few derogatory terms for white men, whereas the list of available words that insult women, members of subordinated racial/ethnic groups, and LGBT-identified people is long and varied (Sutton 1995; Thurlow 2001). However, the public use of racist and doi 10.1075/bct.86.05and 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

108 Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele

sexist slurs declined in the late 20th century (Bonilla-Silva 2002; Capodilupo et al. 2010; Mills 2008). Although an adolescent boy who wants to express aggression against a girl probably has cunt available in his repertoire of insults, he will be, in many contexts, sanctioned for the public use of the term. Yet he may also gain status through the use of this insult in other contexts, where he is less likely to be held accountable for using the sexist term (Eliasson, Isaksson, and Laflamme 2007). In this chapter, we analyze the content of verbal aggression against women with data from two sources: Tweets and Civil Protection Order petitions. These data sources are intriguing as a basis for comparison because they contain language aggression from two seemingly dissimilar contexts: (1) language delivered via social media and authored by people who generally do not personally know the object of their aggression, and (2) language usually delivered in face-to-face contacts between people who are or were formerly intimate partners. The tweet data consist of the population of tweets containing the handle @femfreq posted during 17 days in the fall of 2013. The @femfreq handle is used by Anita Sarkseesian, founder of the website Feminist Frequency: Conversations with Pop Culture. Feminist Frequency is best known for presenting critical analysis of gendered representations and the under-representation of female protagonists in video games. On June 10, 2013, Sarkeesian tweeted, “Thanks #XboxOne #E3 press conference for revealing to us exactly zero games featuring a female protagonist for the next generation.” Many of the responses to this tweet were verbally aggressive and some contained explicit threats of rape and other violence (Jensen and De Castell 2013; Romano 2013). Moreover, over the next few months, Sarkeesian’s critics posted over 400 YouTube videos that criticize Feminist Frequency and purport to debunk her claims. Tweet data were collected every few days in September-October 2013, as the dialogue surrounding @femfreq continued, so that the full population of real time tweets could be obtained. Many of the threatening tweets that were collected by Sarkeesian and others immediately after the June 2013 event were later removed by their authors (see Jensen and De Castell 2013 for analysis of these threatening tweets). Data on verbal aggression perpetrated by intimate partners are drawn from the population of 130 civil protection order petitions (CPOs) filed in the first 8 months of 2010 in a small city in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. CPOs in this state are explicitly designed to allow victims of domestic violence to seek protection from the civil-courts through filing a written petition in which they narrate the abuse that they have experienced. The court from which we collected the data hears CPO cases in which petitioners (those seeking protection) and respondents (those from whom petitioners seek protection) have co-resided or have a child in-common. Why choose these arguably very different data sources? Both sources document aggressive responses to women who challenge men’s privilege within society,



Public/Private language aggression against women 109

and therefore, enable comparative analysis of language aggression against women in different contexts. Tweets are publicly disseminated to all of the followers of a Twitter-user and available on-line to the general public. CPOs document behavior that usually occurs in private homes settings between people who are or were formerly in an intimate co-residential relationship. Both sources document aggressive responses to women who challenge men’s privilege within society. As a critic of the representation of women in video games, Sarkeesian challenges the maledominated industry and culture of gaming. Similarly, women petitioners in civil protection order cases seek legal protection from predominantly male intimate partners who perpetrate psychological and physical aggression, challenging the perception among perpetrators that they have the right to use stalking, physical violence, and emotional control against intimate partners. These data sources cross the “leaky” boundary between public and private language (Hall 1995). Tweets are a private form of discourse in that they are authored by individuals, sometimes anonymously, and engage the middling-style that “admits the possibility of plain speaking including slang and colloquialisms” (Hall 1995, 198). Yet they enter the public realm of on-line discourse, and thus also access what Hall calls “a ‘presumption of innocence’ for public discourse” in which the speaker is presumed to be unbiased and contributing to a discussion “addressed to the general good” (Hall 1995, 198). CPO petitions describe verbal aggression typically enacted in private settings, which are “protected by conventions of privacy, especially those of solidarity among interlocutors and the idea that private talk should not be taken too seriously” (Hall 1995, 198). Yet the petitions are legal documents that become part of the public record when they are filed, accessible to researchers, attorneys, journalists, and the respondent who is accused of domestic violence. Previous studies find that the authors of CPO petitions navigate how to present the violence that they have experienced in the context of legal discourse that seeks “good victims” (Trinch 2007). The socially constructed private/public distinction was used in U.S. law to justify a lack of state intervention in cases in which men harmed their wives and children throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries (Kelly 2003). The public/private dichotomy continues to limit public intervention in cases of intimate partner violence today, as bystanders and criminal justice agents are sometimes hesitant to get involved in a private interaction between partners of family members (Kelly 2003; Ptacek 1999). Similarly, the socially constructed dichotomy between public and private speech can be used to justify a lack of intervention into cases of verbal aggression against women. Hall (1995) proposes that speech that crosses the leaky public/private boundary gains access to both the “presumption of innocence” or claim of disinterest that protects the public speaker against charges of bias, and the presumption of private “light talk” which should not be taken too seriously. “These

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two ideological complexes protect racist (and sexist) discourse, and make possible its continued reproduction, even where convention proscribes it” (Hall 1995, 198). Although CPO petitions are formal public records, the speech acts they document may be viewed, by both the authors of petitions and the attorneys and judges who read them, as private speech which is expected to include slang and slurs. Acts of verbal aggression such as slurs and swearing are not included in the legal definition of domestic violence, which is limited to acts of physical harm or statements that lead to fear of imminent physical harm. Similarly, although tweets are public statements for which the speaker could be held accountable to the norms of civil discourse, they are protected by norms against censuring private backstage talk that includes slang, sarcasm, and joking. 2. Gender and language aggression Language is an important resource for the construction of gender identities and for the negotiation of status hierarchies (Eliasson, Isaksson and Laflamme 2007; Reid and Ng 1999; Thurlow 2001). As Butler (1997) proposes, language makes sex and gender through the discursive creation of binaries and hierarchies. Moreover, the language used to tear down, insult, and denigrate others by speakers who want to gain power and status is connected to status hierarchies of gender, race, social class, and sexuality (Armstrong et al. 2014; Mills 2008). Heterosexual boys and men can construct masculine identities through the use of language that differentiates them from women, girls, and gay men (Anderson and Umberson 2001; Pascoe 2007). Girls and women also use language to negotiate status hierarchies and gain power in their interactions with other women and men, but the cultural discourses available to them are influenced by gendered ideologies and hierarchies (Armstrong et al. 2014; Mills 2008). Previous studies find that language aggression is (1) a tool for the speaker to gain power and status in social interaction through denigrating, threatening, or insulting others, and (2) a strategy for identity management, in which actors engage in discursive strategies that position them as members of superior status groups by strategies that distance them from stigma by deflecting it onto others. 2.1 Language on the offense Studies of verbal aggression in the context of intimate partner relationships find that language is a central component of abusers’ efforts to gain status and power over women (Dutton and Goodman 2005; Kaukinen 2004; Kirkwood 1993; O’Campo et al. 1994). In a meta-analysis of 85 studies on intimate partner violence,



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Stith et al. (2004) found that perpetration of emotional aggression was one of the two strongest factors associated with physical abuse of a partner. Abusive partners use specific linguistic strategies to objectify, degrade, and tear down the dignity of their victims (Kirkwood 1993). In this sense, language aggression is overtly tactical and offensive — used to attack, denigrate, and harm the target and to gain ground for the perpetrator. Goetz et al. (2005) conducted the first investigation of the different types of verbal insults used by men against women intimate partners. They developed a survey of 47 specific insults used by men against women on the basis of feedback from 14 women residing in a domestic violence shelter in the U.S. This survey was subsequently administered to samples of university students in the U.S. and New Zealand. Factor analysis identified four distinct types of insults directed by men towards women, including derogatory comments about (1) women’s attractiveness, (2) their value as a partner and their mental competency, (3) their value as a person, and (4) their sexual fidelity. All four components of verbal abuse were associated with physical abuse and controlling behavior. The category of insults with the strongest association to physical abuse was derogatory comments about women’s value as a partner and their mental competency. These strategies are gendered because ideologies about the importance of women’s attractiveness and sexual behavior are prevalent within many cultures, including the U.S. context (Armstrong et al. 2014; Mills 2008). Studies also suggest that linguistic strategies used by people to gain control in interactions are gendered. Eliasson, Isaksson and Laflamme (2007) conducted interviews with 14–15 year-old boys and girls and observed their interactions in two schools in Sweden. They found that boys were more likely than girls to use verbal aggression and that insults were used by boys to enact masculinity. Verbal aggression against girls often contained a sexualized component. Boys used verbal insults and threats of violence against other boys to display toughness and construct masculine hierarchies in which cool boys were associated with toughness and less popular boys were feminized and constructed as weak. Similarly, Mora (2013) found that insults against homosexuals were used by young Puerto Rican boys to perform a hypermasculine variant of Latino masculinity within their school. Research on aggression against women on internet discussion boards and other computer-mediated contents finds that men more frequently use sarcasm and insults whereas women more frequently express appreciation and make qualified assertions (Herring 2008). Women are also more likely than men to conform to norms for politeness when making requests via email (Lorenzo-Dus and BouFranch 2003). These patterns can sometimes disfavor women, who may withdraw from on-line communication in response to unwanted sarcasm and insults (Herring 1999). Herring et al. (2002) report that feminist on-line forums have

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been disrupted by aggressive and disruptive posters and some have disbanded as result. These studies indicate that the strategies and content of offensive language aggression are shaped by inequalities of gender in both intimate relationships and on-line communication. 2.2 Language on the defense People also use language to gain status and power in a more defensive fashion, in which they position themselves as members of a high status category by distancing themselves from a stigmatized category (Schwalbe et al. 2000). The process of using language to position the speaker as superior or non-deviant is called “defensive othering” (Armstrong et al. 2014; Schwalbe et al. 2000). A small research literature examines defensive othering among men who have perpetrated domestic violence, and how this strategy normalizes men’s violence against women in intimate relationships. Qualitative analyses of the discourse of violence in abusive relationships focus on how abusers talk about violence. These studies suggest that men deny responsibility for violence by minimizing, blaming the victim, or claiming that they lost control (Anderson and Umberson 2001; Guzik 2009). Stokoe (2010) analyzes transcripts of police interrogations of men arrested for domestic violence in Britain. She finds that a prevalent linguistic strategy used by men is “ ‘category-based denial,’ in which speakers accomplish the social action of denying by making claims about their character, disposition, and identity memberships” (2010, 79, emphasis in the original). Through statements that they are not the kind of men who hit women, the suspects constructed multiple masculinities; some men hit women, but men like them would only use violence against another man. Additionally, Stokoe’s findings replicate other studies that find men who are charged with battering construct their partners as “the violent ones” and claim that they were only defending themselves against irrational, aggressive women (Anderson and Umberson 2001; Guzik 2009). Other researchers examine how people both normalize and resist cultural discourses that naturalize stalking and violence in heterosexual relationships (BouFranch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, chapter 4; Jackson 2001). Using a sample of 102 citizen comments posted in response to an article about domestic violence in a U.K. newspaper, Bou-Franch (2013) finds that posters make both “abuse-sustaining” and “abuse-challenging” comments. The abuse-sustaining comments blamed victims for remaining in abusive situations and trivialized abuse by comparing it to cases in which people actively engage in health-compromising behavior such as smoking. However, Bou-Franch (2013) finds that comments that challenged the abuse-sustaining discourse appeared twice as often as abuse-sustaining comments, suggesting that on-line media provides a venue for people to challenge



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sexism. These studies suggest that language can be used as a defensive tool to position speakers as superior and to construct social problems such as violence against women as normal or justified. However, in public forums, individuals have the opportunity to challenge discourse that perpetuates or constructs women as inferior or deserving of violence. 3. Direct and indirect gendered language aggression In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, language aggression towards subordinated groups is characterized by a shift to indirect sexism and covert expressions of racism (Mills 2008). The use of overt racist and sexist language usage in organizations and in polite public discourse has become less acceptable (Basford, Offeremann, and Behrend 2013; Bonilla-Silva 2002). As a consequence, expressions of racist and sexist ideologies occur through ambivalent, covert language forms. According to Mills (2008), language reproduces sexism in two ways. “Overt or direct sexism is the type of usage which can be straightforwardly identified through the use of linguistic markers, or through the analysis of presupposition, which has historically been associated with the expression of discriminatory opinions about women, which signals to hearers that women are seen as an inferior group in relation to males (Mills 2008, 11). Mills argues that direct sexism has been challenged by feminist reformers, and that its usage has decreased. The second way that language reproduces sexism is indirect and thus harder to identify and challenge. Indirect sexism refers to a humorous, ironic or playful use of sexist language that “manages to express sexism whilst at the same time denying responsibility for it” (Mills 2008, 12). Indirect sexism includes strategies that deflect charges of sexism with rhetorical strategies such as, “I don’t want to sound sexist but …”. Mills notes that this strategy allows the speaker to “position themselves as someone who is aware of the difficulties entailed in sexism. This allows the sexist statement to be made whilst permitting the speaker to avoid charges of intentional sexism” (2008, 135; see Bonilla-Silva 2002 for an analysis of this strategy applied to racist language). The current study examines the prevalence and the specific content of language aggression expressed against women in two contexts — tweeting, and petitions for orders of protection, to determine the form of the aggression and the meanings conveyed through verbal attacks. Tweeting, while public in nature, still allows for anonymous, and, therefore, somewhat private, ways of communicating aggression toward women. Similarly, the situations reported in the petitions for restraining orders, while largely private in their original occurrences, became public by virtue of being offered for review and judgment by the courts and others. Therefore, while we acknowledge the problematic framing of tweeting as public and the restraining

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order petitions as private, this framework nonetheless provides an important distinction for the contexts in which these methods of communication take place. We apply Mills’ (2008) framework to analyze whether verbal aggression against women is primarily direct or indirect, with a focus on the specific discursive strategies of aggression used and the ways that they construct gender. We also consider the ways that the context of speech can normalize or legitimize aggression against women by reproducing gendered stereotypes of women as incapable and weak. 4. Data and methods Data on verbal aggression perpetrated by intimate partners come from the population of 130 CPO cases filed in the Superior Court of a small city in the Pacific Northwest during January-August of 2010. CPO petitions are specific to victims of domestic violence in this state and require the petitioner to write a statement about the domestic violence perpetrated by the respondent. The instructions are as follows: “Statement: The respondent has committed acts of domestic violence as follows. (Describe specific acts of domestic violence and their approximate dates, beginning with the most recent act. You may want to include police responses).” Excerpts from the narratives were de-identified by changing all names and identifying information. Quotations from the statements are reproduced as they appear in the original petitions. Ninety-one percent of these petitions were filed by women seeking protection from men (n = 118), 8% were filed by men seeking protection from women (n = 8), 3% were filed by men seeking protection from men (n = 3), and 1% were filed by women seeking protection from women (n = 1). We use the subsample of 118 CPOS filed by women seeking protection from men for the present study because our focus is on language aggression against women and there are too few cases to compare the aggression perpetrated by women against women with the aggression perpetrated by men against women. Data on public verbal aggression against women come from the full population of tweets that contained the handle @femfreq for the period between September 17, 2013 and October 2, 2013. These data were retrieved using the advanced search option on the Twitter.com website. The search was limited to tweets in the English language and conducted every 2–3 days. Because users can delete their own tweets, it is possible that some tweets were removed by the users prior to data collection. Moreover, this search method provided only the first tweet from a conversation; specific responses to a tweet as part of a conversation were not included. The population contained 1117 tweets in this 17-day period. The data include tweets posted by both women and men, although the sex category with which the author identifies is not always readily apparent from tweet handles. The



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tweets are quoted here in their original form although the tweet author’s handle is omitted in order to maintain confidentiality. An advantage of these data is that they depict verbal aggression in “the naturally occurring institutional settings in which they are produced, and away from the collection and analysis of experiential narrative-elicited research interviews” (Stokoe 2010, 61). However, the CPO data reflect women’s accounts of the verbal aggression they experienced in the past and they are narrated with the goal of receiving legal protection from an abusive partner (Trinch 2007). The CPO data thus provide a more partial and filtered account of verbal aggression than do the tweet data, which are real time linguistic acts. We began by extracting tweets and phrases from the CPO narratives that contained verbal aggression. Following Culpeper (2011), we define language as aggressive if it is intended to harm or injure the target. As Culpeper (2011) argues, insults and commands are not always intended as harmful; these language forms can be used in a joking fashion to demonstrate solidarity or establish connections between people. This usage appeared in the tweets, such as a statement of support for @femfreq followed by a joking command such as, “go make me a sandwich.” We coded the acts as aggressive only where the context implied that the speaker intended insult or harm to the target. Initial thematic analysis indicated multiple forms of verbal aggression, including several types of insults, threats of harm, and silencing or harmful commands. We used the following categories to classify the type of aggression demonstrated in each tweet or phrase: Appearance

Derogatory or negative comments about the target’s appearance (fat, ugly)

Sex Part

Describing the target as a sexualized body part (cunt, pussy)

Overt Gender Insult

Explicitly gendered derogatory terms against the target (bitch)

Violence Threats

Threats to physically or sexually harm the target (I will rape you) Statements that the actor is watching the target or planning to take the children of the target (I will take the kids)

Non-gendered Insult

Derogatory terms against the target that are superficially genderneutral (stupid, cheat, fraud, selfish)

Patriarchal Control

Statements or commands that the target should enact a subordinated feminine role (get in the kitchen, you are mine– my right).

Command

Demands that the target stop or enact a behavior (shut the fuck up)

Unspecified

Statements that the target was yelled at or screamed at within the CPO narratives that do not identify the specific content of the verbal aggression (he yelled bad words at me).

116 Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele

Cases that contained more than one category of verbal aggression were classified with multiple codes. For example, the CPO narrative stating that “He raises his voice and swears at me using words like bitch, cunt, and piece of shit. After we got into the car, he said ‘get out of the car so I can kick your ass’ ” (CPO 66) was coded as containing Sex Part, Overt Gender Insult, Non-gendered Insult and Violence Threat types of verbal aggression. 5. Findings Table 1 presents the raw frequency of specific forms of language aggression against women in tweets and CPOs. A central finding is that tweets are substantially less likely than CPO verbal aggression to be overtly gendered or to involve threats of violence or harm. The most common type of aggression represented in the CPO data is violence threats, whereas the most common type of aggression in the tweet data is non-gendered insults. Moreover, CPO petitioners’ narratives of verbal aggression frequently describe the use of explicitly gendered commands and insults, including references to the target as a sex part, negative comments about appearance, and statements that express patriarchal attitudes about men’s right to control the behavior and bodies of women. These gendered forms of verbal aggression appear in tweets, but they are largely displaced by non-gendered forms of verbal aggression. Table 1.  Frequency of verbal aggression against women by category, public tweets (n = 1117) and private CPO petitions (n = 118). 160

144

140 120 100 80

Tweets CPOs

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Public/Private language aggression against women 117



Table 2 presents the percentage of total cases that are classified as each category of verbal aggression. The rate of verbal aggression was much higher in the CPO data than in the Tweet data. The population of tweets with the handle @femfreq included Sarkeesian’s own tweets, re-tweets, and many tweets of support for Sarkeesian’s project. The public nature of this discourse, then, allows for the challenging of sexist language in a way that the more private nature of the verbal aggression that takes place in intimate partner violence does not. Of the 1117 tweets in the population, 14 percent (n = 162) were coded as expressing one or more categories of verbal aggression. In contrast, 76 percent (n = 90) of the 118 CPOs filed by women against men contained accounts of verbal aggression. Overtly sexist language is infrequently used within tweets that contain the @ femfreq handle, whereas overt sexism remains a key component of verbal aggression enacted by men against women in intimate relationships. Yet it is possible that this finding may be particular to tweets as a form of public discourse, or the specific contexts of the tweets analyzed here (gaming); tweeting about publicized rape cases, for example, may pull for very different, and more overtly sexist, responses. However, as previous studies suggest, linguistic shifts away from overtly sexist usage do not mean that language is no longer used to reproduce power and subordinate women (Bonilla-Silva 2002; Sue 2010). Sexism in social media discourse may instead be expressed using subtle and covert practices (Mills 2008). In the following section, we analyze the specific content of verbal aggression against women in the CPO petitions and @femfreq tweets to identify contextual similarities and variations in how language constructs gender difference and women’s subordination.

Table 2.  Percentage of cases involving verbal aggression against women by category, public tweets and private CPO petitions. 70

59

60 50 40

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Tweet % CPO %

118 Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele

5.1 Verbal aggression against women in civil protection order petitions Women’s narratives of the verbal abuse directed towards them by abusive male partners contain explicitly sexist language aggression. Thirteen percent of the CPO petitions reported overt gender insults, the most common of which was “bitch.” The use of insults that refer to women as sex parts was slightly more frequent (19%), and “whore,” “slut”, and “cunt” were the most frequent insults in this category. Threats of violence were the most prevalent form of verbal aggression in the CPO narratives (59%): I will cut you neck open and bring the kids in to see you (CPO 10) He said, “if you walk out that door I’m going to drag your ass back in here by your hair” (CPO 14).

Additionally, 9% of the CPO narratives described the use of overt statements of patriarchal control: He said thing like “I want to lay with my wife.” “Your pussy is mine.” “You are mine, my right” (CPO 10) He said, “Do you understand how to fold clothes. Do you know where things go. Are you fucking stupid” (CPO 50).

These forms of verbal aggression are degrading and frightening in isolation, but the use of gendered and sexualized insults, commands, and statements about women’s subordinate role were combined with threats of violence and/or threats to kidnap children in the majority of narratives: [He] joked about locking me on a chain in the kitchen as all I was good for was cooking him food and cleaning for him (CPO 5). He was also very mentally abusive calling me “bitch, cunt, ugly, stupid, dope slut, whore …” and telling me multiple times that he wanted to overdose me on heroin (CPO 19). And Jake started To yell at me at started to call me a bitch and threaghten to take Jordan away From me and Kill him (CP0 9).

The use of threats of violence or kidnapping in combination with gendered insults, expressions of patriarchal control, or references to women’s subordinate status suggests that violence is used by abusive male partners to reconstruct a gender binary in which women are subservient and do not challenge men’s right to behave as they wish. The threat to drag a woman “back in here by your hair” draws upon cultural imagery of an imagined past in which men’s physical and sexual dominance over women was uncontested. Moreover, the insults reported by women in



Public/Private language aggression against women 119

abusive relationships use overtly sexist language, often in creative combinations. For example, one woman reported that her ex-partner said: “ ‘You are nothing but a bitch’. In front of the children he said: ‘where is your pussy bitch boyfriend’, ‘bring him over here and I will kick his ass.’ ” (CPO 66). The phrase “nothing but a bitch” denotes her ex-partner’s explicit effort to denigrate and devalue her on the basis of gender. Additionally, his linkage of the sexualized insult “pussy” to the feminized insult “bitch” and to a threat of violence suggests an effort to construct a masculine identity by categorizing a rival man as feminine and weak. Another woman reported that “he calls me a cunt all the time & says he loves sayin that to me because it is such a powerful word” (CPO 86). The CPO data show that verbal aggression against women in the context of intimate relationships is predominantly characterized by overtly sexist derogatory terms combined with threats of harm against the target and her children. However, these data likely underrepresent the frequency and nature of the verbal aggression against women, as the women may have summarized or sanitized the interaction for public viewing (e.g., “he called me names”, rather than “he called me a cunt”). 5.2 Verbal aggression against women in tweets The tweet data also contain threats of violence connected to overt gender insults, such as “Kill yourself you dumb cunt” (TWEET 32). However, overtly sexist language aggression and threats of violence were rare in the tweet data. The large majority of tweets coded as verbally abusive were initially classified as non-gendered insults, which included terms such as ‘idiot’, ‘Nazi’, ‘liar’, ‘cheater’, and ‘selfish’. More detailed analysis of the content of these tweets indicates that much of this language contains references to gender, but in a more covert form. As Bonilla-Silva argues in the context of racist language, the use of sexist slurs has been replaced by a “now you see it, now you don’t” version of sexist language (2002, 42). The aggression expressed towards @femfreq in tweets does not rely on sexist pejoratives or insulting commands that she enact feminine roles. Yet many of tweets coded as non-gendered insults, on closer analysis, do make claims about gender. These tweets construct gender by classifying the target of their aggression as feminized, lesser, and weak. The most common covert sexist strategy is verbal aggression against the target that states that she, as a woman, is not as capable as a man. In the case of @femfreq, who criticizes the gaming industry for its sexist representation and exclusion of women, this aggression takes the form of statements that @femfreq “is not a real gamer”:

120 Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele

You don’t ‘game’ (and if you were a gamer you’d know that’s not a thing), and you admitted as much yourself (TWEET 261). You ain’t a gamer~ not because you have tits~ you just don’t like video games~ you see them as standing in your waaaaaay~ Sing it! (TWEET 94).

These tweets construct the target of the aggression as other and lesser, although in a more subtle fashion than the explicit pejoratives of “bitch” or “cunt.” In several cases, this takes the form of sarcastic comments that imply that @femfreq is incapable of producing the video games she critiques: whats your game about and whats it called? (TWEET 217). Just create one game with female characters only. No men in game. Can like GTA, Resident Evil, or other. Just make it (TWEET 920).

As do the “you’re not a real gamer” insults, these tweets construct @femfreq as an outsider who is less capable than those who make video games. Research on gender microaggressions has found that the “assumption of inferiority” is a common means by which aggression is expressed against women in contemporary society (Capodilopu et al. 2010). It is both ironic and particularly harmful that these forms of verbal aggression against Sarkeesian suggest that she is an outsider who is unwelcome in the culture because Sarkeesian has stated that the gaming industry and culture makes girls and women feel unwelcome (Romano 2013). The verbally aggressive tweets that construct Sarkeesian as an incapable outsider seem particularly targeted to exploit a vulnerability that she has publically discussed. A second pattern of covert sexism in the tweets is language that conveys the idea that @femfreq is weak. This insult is expressed in two ways: first, that the target is posing as a victim to avoid engaging with her critics, and second, that she must rely on men: @femfreq attempts damage control with a series of ‘poor little me’ strawman arguments (TWEET 270). Says the coward who blocks any communication or feedback about anything she does (TWEET 68). Couldn’t be bothered to respond to @(handle omitted) yourself? Amazing that you still need men to fight your battles for you (TWEET 850). You choose a man to be your main defender, oh the irony! (TWEET 874). #Feminist Frequency, like #FEMEN, is in fact the brainchild of a man. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! (TWEET 223).

Public/Private language aggression against women 121



These tweets position the target of their aggression as afraid to fight her own battles and as in need of male protection. A common anti-feminist rhetorical strategy is to position feminist critics of gender inequality as falsely claiming victimhood and as ignoring the reality that they are the weaker sex (Ferber 2000). Moreover, the claim that there is a “man behind the curtain” furthers the idea that the target is not capable of playing in this “man’s world,” thus explicitly defining her as feminine and lesser. A third type of insult that initially appears as non-gendered is to claim that the target is enacting the sexism she purports to critique. This strategy, which BonillaSilva (2002, 54) terms “projection” in his work on racist discourse, protects the speaker from claims of sexism or racism by claiming that women/blacks are in fact the ones discriminating against men/whites: bullshit! Sexism is discriminating based on sex! both sexes! Men are just as discriminated against as women! Just in different ways (TWEET 507). you are ridiculous, do you seriously believe that only women can be ‘oppressed’; you make me sick and yes I am a woman (TWEET 579). btw, the @femfreq-&-friends attitude that media should be catered to THEIR preferences, is an attitude of privilege and entitlement just fyi (TWEET 786).

By projecting sexism back onto the target, these tweets position their authors as promoting equality. These rhetorical strategies also dismiss the criticisms about the representation of women in gaming raised by the Feminist Frequency videos as “ridiculous” and thus do not acknowledge the actual content of Sarkeesian’s critique. 6. Conclusion In the 21st century, language aggression against women takes on multiple forms. The repertoire of sexist, sexualized insults — “powerful word(s)” (CPO 86) — remains available to men who want to express anger towards women, yet the legitimacy of overt sexist aggression has been challenged by feminist reformers (Mills 2008). Boys and men have learned that they may be rebuked for the use of such language in the institutional settings of education and the workplace, and the usage of overtly sexist language has declined in many social settings (Mills 2008). Findings from this study suggest, however, that the use of overt sexist language is prevalent in abusive relationships. The CPO petitions analyzed here show that 19% of women report being called names that reduce them to a sexualized body part, and 13% report their partners using gendered verbal aggression such

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as “bitch” and “whore.” These forms of overtly sexist language are less likely to be enacted in the on-line forum of Twitter, although they do appear in tweets infrequently. Instead, the dominant pattern of sexist verbal aggression in tweets makes use of subtle strategies that construct women as weak, lesser, and other, while retaining the veneer of polite and reasonable discourse. Findings from this analysis suggest that verbal aggression against women is pervasive in both private intimate relationships and public tweet discourse, although in different forms. Moreover, these findings support Hall’s (1995) contention that language aggression against women is facilitated by the cultural construction of a dichotomy between public and private speech. Although the rape-threats, violence threats, and overtly sexist insults directed at Sarkeesian in tweets were publicized and criticized in newspaper accounts and in twitter conversations (Romano 2013), the authors of these tweets were not formally sanctioned by Twitter (Greenhouse 2013). Tweets may be considered both “public” speech that is assumed to be impersonal and protected by ideologies of free speech, and private speech that is protected by the conventions that it is backstage talk that should not be taken “too seriously.” Similarly, the verbal aggression described in CPO petitions is public in that it becomes part of an official court record, but is unlikely to invoke sanction from judges because it reflects private speech between intimate partners that is not held accountable to norms of public politeness. Only speech that contains overt threats of violence and harm meets the legal definition of domestic violence. As Hall (1995) argued, the leaky boundary between public and private speech allows sexist verbal aggression to remain unchallenged and unsanctioned in both of these contexts. Yet both overt and covert forms of language aggression are harmful to women. Overt verbal aggression enacted by abusive partners is reportedly the most damaging type of intimate partner violence. Survivors of abuse consistently report that the scars and wounds from physical assaults heal, but the scars from emotional insults linger for years (Dutton and Goodman 2004; Kirkwood 1993). Covert gender insults –the subtle insults that denigrate women as other and lesser– harm women by reproducing a binary construction of gender that justifies women’s subordinate status. Moreover, these forms of language aggression may prevent women from full participation in social life; previous research indicates that aggression can lead women to withdraw from situations and even occupations in which they experience harassment (Giuffre and Williams 1994; Herring 1999; Uggen and Blackstone 2004). These findings call for further investigation in several areas. First, future research must examine how verbal harassment against women is enacted in various contexts. For example, the data here suggest that tweeting, as a more public setting, may inhibit some of the more overtly sexist language that individuals use



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in the relative privacy of intimate relationships. In these tweets that referred to a feminist critic of gaming culture, the sexist language was more covert, and overtly sexist language often prompted others to tweet in defense of the author or to condemn the harassing tweets. However, it is clear that this varies depending on the topic being discussed. For example, tweets about the gang rape of a teenage girl in Steubenville, Ohio, included overt sexist and violent language about the victim and the assault, such as “I honestly feel sorry for the boys in that Steubenville trial. The whore was asking for it” (Mintz 2013, n.p.) Additionally, future studies should analyze real time verbal aggression as it is occurring to provide the most accurate information about the form and content of this aggression. The data used for this study are limited in that they reference past events. CPO data may not include descriptions of verbal aggression because the authors of the petition may not want to report, or not fully remember, the actual words used against them by their partners. Because verbal aggression is not included in the legal definition of domestic violence, petitioners may have omitted information about verbal aggression when writing the petitions. Additionally, the tweet data used here about @femfreq were collected several months after the initial publicity about aggressive responses to @femfreq. Data collected immediately after an incident or tweet that invokes aggression may provide more evidence of covert or direct sexism than data collected weeks or months later (Jensen and De Castell 2013). Furthermore, the fact that verbal aggression can be communicated in a kinder, gentler manner does not mean it is not threatening, either in intent or in impact. Covert forms of language aggression, by positioning women as subordinate and vulnerable, also serve to remind women that they live in a rape culture (e.g., McCaughey 1997), where violence against women is accepted as the norm. Framing women as other or lesser positions women in a lower position in the social hierarchy, with the implicit message that they should remain there, or else. A culture that tolerates and condones a level of violence against women that is a “public health problem” (Heise and Garcia Moreno 2002) does not need explicit or overt threats to communicate to women that there are consequences for challenging the status quo. Covert verbal aggression, then, may be experienced as seriously threatening by the women who are targeted by it. Future research would do well to investigate the multiple responses women are likely to have in response to covert verbal aggression in varying contexts, whether they are the designated targets or bystanders. These findings suggest that overt and covert language aggression against women work in tandem. Overt sexist language reminds women that the threat of violence against them is pervasive and ongoing. Covert sexist language reminds women of their subordinate and other status, and may make the target recall the

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threats of violence and sexist slurs they have previously suffered. These forms of verbal aggression against women have the same underlying purpose: to remake gender by punishing women who challenge male privilege.

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Kelly, Kristin A. 2003. Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kirkwood, Catherine. 1993. Leaving Abusive Partners: From the Scars of Survival to the Wisdom for Change. London: Sage.Hill. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, and Patricia Bou-Franch. 2003. “Gender and Politeness: Spanish and British Undergraduates’ Perceptions of Appropriate Requests.” In Género, Lenguaje, y Traducción, ed. by José Santaemilia, 187–199. Valencia: Universitat de València/Dirección General de la Mujer. McCaughey, Martha. 1997. Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense. New York: New York University Press. Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mintz, Zoe. “Stuebenville Tumblr Blog Reveals Horrific Twitter, Facebook Posts that Blame the Rape Victim.” International Business Times, March 19, 2013: Retrieved July 30, 2014: http:// www.ibtimes.com/steubenville-tumblr-blog-reveals-horrific-twitter-facebook-postsblame-rape-victim-photos-1136721. Mora, Richard. 2013. “‘Dicks are for Chicks’: Latino Boys, Masculinity, and Abjection of Homosexuality.” Gender and Education 25 (3): 340–356. ​doi: 10.1080/09540253.2012.757298 O’Campo, Patricia, Andrea C. Gielen, Ruth R. Faden, and Nancy Kass. 1994. “Verbal Abuse and Physical Violence among a Cohort of Low-Income Pregnant Women.” Women’s Health Issues 4 (1): 29–37. ​doi: 10.1016/S1049-3867(05)80107-0

126 Kristin L. Anderson and Jill Cermele Pascoe, Cheri Jo. 2007. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ptacek, James. 1999. Battered Women in the Courtroom: The Power of Judicial Responses. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Reid, Scott A., and Sik Hung Ng. 1999. “Language, Power, and Intergroup Relations.” Journal of Social Issues 55: 119–139. ​doi: 10.1111/0022-4537.00108 Romano, Aja. “Where Anita Sarkeesian Goes, Sexism Follows—Even to E3.” The Daily Dot, June 11, 2013. Accessed September 13, 2013: http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/e3-anitasarkeesian-sexism-rape-violent-threats/. Schwalbe, Michael, Daphne Holden, Douglas Schrock, Sandra Godwin, Shealy Thompson, and Michelle Wolkomir. 2000. “Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis.” Social Forces 79 (2): 419–452. ​doi: 10.1093/sf/79.2.419 Stith, Sandra M., Douglas B. Smith, Carrie E. Penn, David B. Ward, and Dari Tritt. 2004. “Intimate Partner Physical Abuse Perpetration and Victimization Risk Factors: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 10 (1): 65–98. ​doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2003.09.001 Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Stokoe, Elizabeth. 2010. “‘I’m Not Gonna Hit a Lady’: Conversation Analysis, Membership Categorization, and Men’s Denials of Violence towards Women.” Discourse and Society 21: 59–82. ​doi: 10.1177/0957926509345072 Sutton, Laurel A. 1995. “Bitches and Skanky Hobags: The Place of Women in Contemporary Slang.” In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, ed. by Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz, 279–296. New York: Routledge. Thurlow, Crispin. 2001. “Naming the ‘Outsider Within’: Homophobic Pejoratives and the Verbal Abuse of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual High-School Students.” Journal of Adolescence 24: 25– 38. ​doi: 10.1006/jado.2000.0371 Trinch, Shonna. 2007. “Deconstructing the ‘Stakes’ in High Stakes Gatekeeping Interviews: Battered Women and Narration.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1895–1918.  doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.07.006

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Addressing women in the Greek parliament Institutionalized confrontation or sexist aggression? Marianthi Georgalidou

In accordance with numerous studies highlighting aspects of political and parliamentary discourse that concern the rhetoric of political combat, verbal attacks and offensive language choices are shown to be rather common in the context of a highly adversarial parliamentary system such as the Greek. In the present study, however, the analysis of excerpts of parliamentary discourse addressed to women reveals not just aspects of the organization of rival political encounters but, as far as female MPs are concerned, aggressive and derogatory forms of speech that directly attack the gender of the addressees. Drawing on data from video-recordings, the official proceedings of parliamentary sittings, and the media (2012–2015), the present study investigates aggressive/sexist discourse within this context. The theoretical issues addressed concern the impoliteness end of the politeness/politic speech/impoliteness continuum in the light of extreme cases of conflict in political/parliamentary discourse. Keywords: political/parliamentary discourse, im/politeness, politic speech, conflict, aggression, sexism

1. Introduction During a heated debate in the Greek parliament, the then Education Undersecretary George Stylios addressed the statement “You are not going to turn me into Kasidiaris” to his female colleague, Liana Kanelli (Official Proceedings 6/11/2014). The person mentioned in the statement (Ilias Kasidiaris), the spokesperson of the extreme nationalist party, Golden Dawn, had previously physically assaulted Kanelli amidst a political discussion panel on a breakfast news show of live television (Antenna TV, 7/6/2012). The violent incident had been officially condemned by all political parties except for Golden Dawn. Nevertheless, reference to it constitutes a verbal attack against Kanelli as it places full responsibility for the

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aforementioned violent act against her on her1, indirectly justifying the attacker (Section 5.3, excerpt 7). Despite the fact that physical attacks against women parliamentarians have never occurred before or after the incident in question, sexist verbal attacks and defamatory categorizations are rather common in the discourse of Greek MPs (Makri-Tsilipakou 2014, 33). The above mentioned statement therefore, forms part of a body of numerous incidents of sexist forms of reference and aggressive discourse addressed to women in public domains (also see Bou-Franch 2014) and serves as a starting point for the subsequent discussion. Political and parliamentary domains, as numerous studies highlight, encompass conflict as an integral part of the organization of discourse and the rhetoric of political combat (Ilie 2001). In highly competitive parliamentary systems such as the Greek one, aggressive verbal attacks and offensive language choices are shown to be rather common (Georgalidou 2011; Tsakona 2011). In the present study, however, the analysis of excerpts of parliamentary discourse addressed to women reveals not just aspects of the organization of rival political encounters but, as far as female MPs are concerned, aggressive and derogatory forms of speech that directly attack the gender of the interlocutors. Aggression and conflict are crucial aspects of human communication both in public and private domains. Disagreement, disputes and conflict are more often than not integral parts of social encounters, in the sense that they constitute powerful ways of displaying stance, organizing resistance and opposition (Goodwin-Harness 2006; Shantz and Hartup 1992), and rearranging social order (Goodwin-Harness 2006, 33). Aggression, on the other hand, is basically behavior aimed at hurting another person or thing (Shantz and Hartup 1992, 4). Social aggression is directed towards damaging self-esteem or/and social status and may take direct (verbal rejection, facial expressions and body movements, as in the above mentioned incident) and indirect forms (slanderous rumors and social exclusion) (Galen and Underwood 1997, 589). Distinguishing between aggression and conflict is not always an easy task. What is more, aggression and conflict are allegedly distributed differently among men and women, with men being considered more overtly aggressive whereas women are viewed as more protective of the face of their addressees. This hypothesis has been, however, contested as empirical studies show that females make use of assertive language and claim positions of power both within same and other sex peer groups (Georgalidou 2009; GoodwinHarness 2006; Mullany 2007; Shaw 2009). In any case, aggression and conflict are constructed interactionally, by both men and women, via the turn by turn 1.  Further on during the episode Kanelli uses the tautology ‘Have I made Kasidiaris, Kasidiaris?’ to wonder whether she should be held responsible for both attacks against her. She therefore, contextualizes Stylios’ statement as an indirect accusation.



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participation in actual conversational sequences (Dersley and Wootton 2001). In the present study however, we will deal exclusively with cases of male MPs addressing (or referring to) their female counterparts by means of aggressive and derogatory forms of speech. As far as aggressive and derogatory forms of speech addressed to women are concerned, expressing opposition does not necessarily equal the attempt to strike a blow at another person’s gendered identity — much less a physical blow as in the incident described above. Nevertheless, the line separating aggression from opposition and conflict, specifically when indirect forms of aggression are employed, may not always be straightforward, especially in highly institutionalized and adversarial domains such as the parliamentary. Despite this fact though, acceptable forms of opposition, as opposed to (sexist) verbal violence, should be distinguished from each other, at least, to some extent. To this end, the analysis of aggressive encounters and of the turn by turn negotiation of meaning is the analytical choice made in order to tackle the questions raised in this study. What is more, reference will be made to the contribution of the media to the reproduction and recycling of aggressive discursive choices as forms of confrontainment (Androutsopoulos 2010; Archakis and Tsakona 2010; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2015; Georgakopoulou 2013). In this context, drawing on data from video-recordings, the official proceedings of parliamentary sittings, press releases, as well as media interviews for a period of three years (2012–2015), the present study investigates verbal aggression and sexism within the context of political/parliamentary discourse in Greece. The theoretical issues involved concern aggression as face-threatening communication pertaining to the impoliteness end of the politeness/politic speech/impoliteness continuum (Section 2), in the light of extreme cases of conflict in political/parliamentary discourse that exceed the limits of expected political rivalry (Christie 2005). In particular, this study investigates how sexist verbal attacks are constructed as dispreferred, therefore impolite actions in the context of the Greek parliament, the explanatory power of on record rebuttals to them and the role of the overall cultural context authorizing sexist discourse. In what follows we are going to discuss aggression and impoliteness in political encounters (Section 2), sexism as face threatening discourse (Section 3), the analytical framework concerning sexist aggression and impoliteness (Section 4), and the data (Section 5). Finally, Section 6 summarizes the findings of the present study.

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2. Im/politeness in the context of rival political encounters In Brown and Levinson’s framework (1987), politeness is defined as a set of linguistic strategies designed to reduce threats to face and maintain communication. By way of contrast, impoliteness should have to do with face-threatening speech acts and the breakdown of communication. However, recent approaches to im/politeness highlight the essentialist aspect of the above mentioned definition which perceives meaning as embedded in linguistic devices rather than as constructed by interlocutors in discourse (Arundale 2010; Culpeper 2005; Eelen 2001; Watts 2010). Within both ethnomethodological (Arundale 2010) and social constructionist approaches (Culpeper 2005; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013; Watts 2010) im/politeness is seen as an interactional construct accomplished by participants to discourse via concrete interactional action/reaction. Within this perspective, impoliteness comes about when the speaker communicates face attack intentionally and/or the hearer perceives or constructs behavior as intentionally face-attacking (Culpeper 2005, 39). In connection to the present study, the issue examined is how participants to political procedures construct threats to face2 and in particular sexist attacks to the gender of their women counterparts. By definition, parliamentary discourse is antagonistic as rival political parties strive to promote their ideological agenda and policies. Within codified and policed institutionalized practices such as parliamentary sittings, adversary politicians seek confrontation and conflict and often resort to speech acts that are designed to be face-threatening. What could be perceived as “systematic impoliteness” is expressed via criticism, challenges, ridicule and the subversion of opponents (Harris 2000). Nevertheless, such conduct is often rewarded rather than being sanctioned. Taking this fact as a point of departure, Watts’ (1992a) distinction between im/polite and politic behavior, the latter defined as socio-culturally determined behavior designed to maintain a state of equilibrium during on-going processes of verbal interaction (Watts 1992b, 50), seems to be applicable to speech events within parliamentary procedures (Christie 2005). Watts’ model, allows for the explanation of how polite and impolite verbal actions can be constructed as marked, whereas politic speech, i.e. mutually acceptable interactive choices that maintain on-going communication, as unmarked. It also allows for the explanation of how threats to face can be seen not just as acceptable, but as desirable in specific contexts. However, the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable 2.  Face is seen as a social phenomenon arising in interaction rather than as an individual phenomenon involving person centered attributes (Arundale 2010). For a thorough discussion of face also see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013.



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face-threatening acts can only be retrieved locally as it pertains to the actual communicative choices negotiated by participants to specific events. As was stated earlier, parliaments, being highly confrontational communicative contexts, welcome politic rather than polite verbal choices and more often than not this leads to participants taking advantage of tolerance to bald-on-record face-threatening communication in order to a) discredit opponents and b) gain publicity. Verbal combats among parliamentarians are privileged by both conventional and new media and communication technologies by being reproduced and circulated to large audiences (Archakis and Tsakona 2010). In this context, aggressive incidents are particularly privileged, often as a form of “confrontainment” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2015). As far as the Greek parliamentary system is concerned, aggressive discourse by rival political parties is shown to be compatible with the lack of a tradition of cooperation even in the recent years of economic crisis and governmental coalitions. Direct and indirect attacks (as in the use of humor and irony) aim at the destruction of the political image of different opponents (Archakis and Tsakona 2010; Georgalidou 2011; Sifianou 2008; Tsakona 2011). Discoursal choices, in the case of the present study sexist verbal attacks against women MPs, thus, show how politicians resort to impoliteness in order to address multiple audiences and targets at the same time. They also show that the local organization of the political system together with the role of the media in the formation of mediated dialogical networks (Nekvapil and Leudar 2002) that are based on the reproduction and distribution of such linguistic forms contribute to the blurring of ideological boundaries and possibly to the neutralization and reinforcement of beliefs that form part of sexist ideological biases. 3. Sexism as face threatening discourse Violence against women is a much disputed social reality recorded and discussed in numerous studies (Bou-Franch 2013). Overt as well as indirect sexist categorizations deriving from patriarchal ideologies are expressed in discourse and attempt to render women invisible (as in sedimented forms of language sexism), define them narrowly or depreciate them. They even attempt to deny, minimize or even attribute blame for verbal or corporal violence against women to the women themselves (Bou-Franch 2013; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014). Nevertheless, language sexism seems difficult to define (Mills 2003). Within an essentialist perspective, second wave feminism sees sexist language as the use of statements that create unfair or irrelevant distinctions between the sexes, whereas third wave feminism sees sexism as much less overt, residing in covert assumptions and kept in play at the level of presupposition (Mills 2003).

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The so called 2nd Wave Feminist Linguistics considers the overall cultural context as the essential factor determining linguistic meaning. It deals with sedimented forms of sexism embedded within the morphology of the language system itself, as well as the language of women as a subordinate group based mostly on the stereotype of feminine linguistic styles of straight white middle class women (Mills 2003). Despite justified criticism that aims at a) the essentialization of gender differences, b) the perception of women as a homogenized group and c) the less than sufficient analysis of verbal choices and multiple identities in specific conversational and institutional contexts, 2nd WFL has greatly contributed to the recognition of sexist language as a social problem calling for political action (Mills 2003). Thus, it has led to the politicization of the use of perceived sexist vocabularies as well as to policies dictating the appropriate linguistic reference to sexes and probably to less direct forms of sexist language uses. On the other hand, 3rd Wave Feminist Linguistics focus on the construction of meaning and variable gender (or other) identities within the local context of the interaction. It highlights indirect forms of verbal sexism, such as entailments and presuppositions, humor and irony, discourse prefaced by disclaimers and hesitation and sees gendering as a process rather than a state of being (Mills 2003). As much as language sexism can be considered a global category, it is constructed via texts and interactions and is, therefore, only retrievable within specific linguistic choices and the way those are perceived by interlocutors and audiences within discourse. The local level of communication therefore is the critical domain in both the linguistic construction and the meta-linguistic analysis of sexism. Nevertheless, Mills (2003) insightfully highlights the fact that 3rd WFL finds it difficult to refer to global, structural and systematic forms of discrimination and to the fact that locally expressed styles are authorized with reference to factors outside the local context, i.e. the hypothesized stereotype of gender behavior (Mills 2003, 5; Shaw 2000, 2002, 2009), or else how women who deviate from it should be castigated and disciplined. In this context, women’s linguistic choices that construct identities of power are treated as marked and women who deviate from the normative feminine conduct are subjected to verbal sexist abuse that is expressed locally and at the same time attributed to global structural parameters. The Greek Parliament offers abundant opportunities to study the phenomenon confirming Shaw’s (2000, 416) finding that, despite the fact that both male and female MPs belong to the same community of practice, they do so on different terms according to gender.



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4. Sexist aggression and impoliteness: the analytical framework A number of useful distinctions need to be made in order to exemplify analytical choices for tackling sexism in parliamentary discourse in the present study. On the one hand, parliamentary practices are seen as there and then social actions within actual speech events. That is, locally constructed intersubjectivity i.e., the communication of a sexist attack, is exclusively retrieved via the analysis of conversations informed by the Conversation Analysis paradigm (Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008; Schegloff 2007). Such an approach is compatible with third wave feminist linguistics as well as constructionist and ethnomethodological approaches to face and im/politeness (Arundale 2010; Culpeper 2005; Watts 2010). At the same time though, practices found in the data are also seen as part of structures, i.e. habitual ways of acting (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Christie 2005). Structures set the background against which communicative acts (or else practices) are interpreted. They are seen as dynamic ways of acting and assessing the actions of self and others as well as subject to local renegotiation and change. This constitutes a less than essentialist outlook on them, also informed by theoretical assumptions pertaining to ethnomethodology and social constructionism. In any case, habitual ways of acting and reacting that are connected to institutionalized practices and cultural stereotypes cannot be exempted from the equation seeking to explain how locally expressed styles are authorized with reference to factors outside the local context (Mills 2003). Thus, following Mills (2003), a combination of both 2nd and 3rd Wave Feminist approaches is proposed. In the context of interactional approaches to im/politeness and facework, the distinction of politic choices versus impoliteness can also be seen as a distinction between preferred versus dispreferred conversational choices (Pomerantz 1984), with politic choices constructed as preferred, and impoliteness as dispreferred. To define dispreferred communication, the point of view of the participants to actual talk-in-interaction is taken into account: meaning is not brought along but brought about via the interactional work done by participants in actual communicative events. The analytic question is: within the context of the interaction, how do participants contextualize sexist verbal attacks i.e., impoliteness defined as intentionally offensive acts (Culpeper 2005) which aim at the gender of the addressees? Constructions marked as dispreferred define the limits of rival/aggressive discourse as a politic/unmarked choice within political combat. The breakdown of communication, retrievable in the local context of the conversation, can be considered a marker of dispreferred communicative choices. Nevertheless, since parliamentary sittings are highly constrained institutionalized procedures, break-

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downs are not always possible or even eligible. Thus, sexist verbal attacks can be treated as part of the expected rivalry and not rebutted as abusive. Let us consider the following excerpt in which the then leader of the Opposition Antonis Samaras (Nea Democratia3), in the midst of the critical debate on the referendum (June 2015), referring to the House Speaker Zoi Konstantopoulou (SYRIZA), in her presence, addressed the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as follows: (1) 28/6/2015: Parliamentary sitting on the referendum “(…) και ’σεις κύριε Τσίπρα, να τη μαζέψετε” “(…) and you Mr Tsipras, you should control her”

Samaras switched to the vernacular to address the Prime Minister with a bald on record directive to “control” the then House Speaker of the Greek Parliament, Zoi Konstantopoulou4 simultaneously portraying her as an unruly minor in need of a guardian (also see excerpt 3), and the Prime Minister as the guardian. Due to the importance of the debate, his attack remained uncontested. The fact that offensive speech acts such as the above are not necessarily marked as dispreferred in the immediate context of the interaction puts forth critical questions: what is the role of the overall cultural context authorizing sexist discourse and sexist verbal abuse and what, on the other hand, is the explanatory power of on record rebuttals to it? What is more, what is the role of the media in recycling dominant (sexist) value systems by reproducing (excerpt 4) — or even inviting (excerpt 5) — sexist verbal attacks as media spectacles (Androutsopoulos 2010; Georgakopoulou 2013) and forms of “confrontainment” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2015)? Combining interactional as well as critical approaches to discourse, these are some of the questions we will try to address in the analysis of the data. 5. The analysis of the data5 In the context of Greek linguistics, sexist language use in private interactions and the public sphere have been discussed in several studies (Alvanoudi 2014; 3.  Political parties in the Greek Parliament 2012–2015: Nea Democratia (ND), Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), Greek Communist Party (KKE), POTAMI, Independent Greeks (ANEL), Golden Dawn. 4.  Since Konstantopoulou’s election in February 2015 several heated debates preceded this incident contesting her choice to undertake overt political stances as the Speaker of the Greek Parliament. 5.  Excerpts 3, 7, 8 & 4 retain the form in which they appear in the official proceedings of the parliament and the internet site from which excerpt 4 was retrieved.



Addressing women in the Greek parliament 135

Georgalidou and Lampropoulou in print; Lampropoulou and Georgalidou in prep.; Makri-Tsilipakou 2014; Pavlidou 2002) The present study6 investigates aggressive/sexist discourse against women parliamentarians drawing on data from video-recordings, the official proceedings of parliamentary sittings, press releases, as well as media interviews, for a period of three years (2012–2015). The excerpts used in the analysis were chosen because they pertain to an extensive dialogical network of sexist verbal abuses that were uploaded and commented upon in You Tube, blogs and news sites. They come from a) recorded procedures of parliamentary sittings that have been transcribed by the researcher (excerpts 2, 6, 9), b) the official parliamentary proceedings (excerpts 3, 7, 8), c) media reports on conversations during parliamentary committee sittings not available to the public via publicized official proceedings (excerpt 4) and d) media interviews and panel discussions with members of the parliament also transcribed by the researcher (excerpts 5, 10). The analysis of the data is qualitative, informed by conversation analytic, social constructionist and critical approaches to discourse. 5.1 Sexist rival discourse: female incompetence In excerpts 1 (Section 4), 2 and 3 male MPs construct their female counterparts as incompetent either by dismissing their actions/requests as unfounded or/and by inviting male counterparts to take action in order to control the situation. The first excerpt discussed in this section (excerpt 2) comes from the 2nd parliamentary sitting for the election of the President of the Greek Democracy in December 2014. It is chosen as indicative of both sedimented language sexism and the way female speakers who do not conform to the perceived standards of linguistic and parliamentary order are rebutted. MPs are called via the procedure of the roll-call vote to either state the name of their chosen candidate or their presence in the procedure which equals to a negative vote. Excerpt 2 consists of a hypercorrection on the part of the Speaker (Danis Tzamtzis, ND) with regards to the ‘grammatical standard’ of the generic masculine that has been established in Modern Greek (Alvanoudi 2014). Based on the perceived exclusive use of the male gender, even when females are addressed, Tzamzis, via repetition, repairs the statements of all women MPs who choose the participle παρούσα “present-feminine” (turn 3). In turn 4, Stambouli (SYRIZA) challenges the repair requesting the official recording of the feminine form of the participle. In turn 7, Tzamtzis, with a bald-on-record directive, i.e. 6.  The present study is part of an extensive project of analysis of sexist discourse in the Greek public sphere that has also been discussed elsewhere (Georgalidou and Lampropoulou, in print; Lampropoulou and Georgalidou, in prep.).

136 Marianthi Georgalidou

a bald-on-record impoliteness strategy (Culpeper 2005), orders his interlocutor to learn grammar portraying her as incompetent as far as the grammatical use of Greek is concerned. Via the activation of the presupposition of incompetence, he directly threatens the face of his fellow MP. Despite the fact that the process of voting goes on uninterrupted, there are critical comments and protests on the following days, both in various media and in the subsequent 3rd sitting for the presidential election, in which discernibly more women MPs chose the feminine form.

(2) 23/12/2014: The second vote for the election of the President of Greek Democracy Participants: Danis Tzamtzis ΔΤζ /DTz (Teller, ND) Markos Bolaris ΜπΜ/BM (Independent) Afrodite Stambouli ΣΑ /SA (SYRIZA) 1. ΔΤζ: Σταμπούλη Αφροδίτη 2. ΣΑ: Πα[ρούσα]= 3. ΔΤζ: [Παρών] 4. ΣΑ: =να γράψετε κύριε Πρόεδρε. [Μας έχετε αλλάξει φύλο], [σε όλες] 5. ΔΤζ: [Μπόλαρης Μάρκος] 6. ΜπΜ: [Παρών] →7. ΔΤζ: Να μάθετε γραμματική. Μπόλαρης Μάρκος. 8. ΜπΜ: Παρών 1. DTz: 2. SA: 3. DTz: 4. SA: 5. DTz: 6. BΜ: →7. DTz: 8. BΜ:

Stambouli Afroditi Pre[sent-feminine]= [Present-masculine] =write down Your Honor. [You have changed our sex], [to all of us] [Bolaris Markos]  [Present-masculine] Learn grammar. Bolaris Markos. Present-masculine

Excerpt (3) is part of a longer episode involving the PASOK MP Mihalis Kassis’ verbal attack against Zoi Konstantopoulou (see also excerpt 8). Kassis invited Konstantopoulou (SYRIZA) to illegally collect benefits, indirectly referring to family benefits that had been mistakenly credited to her mother’s salary. After Konstantopoulou’s strong protests (excerpt 8) the House Speaker (Ioannis Drivelegas, PASOK) calls her back to order ignoring Kassis’ derogatory insinuations of fraud. Instead of addressing the reason for Konstantopoulou’s strong protests, he addresses Panagiotis Lafazanis, the spokesperson of SYRIZA, at least 5 times (immediately preceding discourse), with the request to take action. Similarly to excerpt 1, the stereotype activated is that of an irrational female (reminiscent of

Addressing women in the Greek parliament 137



an unruly minor) who needs to be controlled by a rational male guardian, i.e. the stereotype of incompetence. In turn 3, Konstantopoulou strongly reacts against the House Speaker ordering him to apply parliamentary regulations, thus marking his contributions as unacceptable. The episode goes on for several turns, leading to the temporary breakdown of the procedure. (3) 1.



Official Proceedings (5/5/2014) Participants: Ioannis Drivelegas HS (House Speaker PASOK) Panagiotis Lafazanis PL (SYRIZA) Zoi Konstantopoulou ZK (SYRIZA) ΠΡΟΕΔΡΕΥΩΝ (Ιωάννης Δριβελέγκας): Μα, τι πράγμα είναι αυτό; Δεκαπέντε χρόνια στη Βουλή δεν το έχω ξαναδεί. Κύριε Λαφαζάνη, είστε Κοινοβουλευτικός Εκπρόσωπος. Σας παρακαλώ πολύ να πάρετε θέση! 2. ΠΑΝΑΓΙΩΤΗΣ ΛΑΦΑΖΑΝΗΣ: Δεν είμαι. 3. ΖΩΗ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ: Να εφαρμόσετε τον Κανονισμό.



1. HS: But what is this thing? I have been fifteen years in the Parliament and I have never seen this before. Mr Lafazanis, you are the Spokesperson. I request that you express your opinion on the matter! 2. PL: I am not. 3. ZK: Apply the regulations. ((several turns of strong protests follow temporarily breaking down the parliamentary procedure))

5.2 Sexist rival discourse: female sexuality and irrationality In excerpts 4, 5 and 6, male MPs indirectly attack their female counterparts via sexist insinuations on their sexuality and state of mind by means of humor and irony. Excerpt (4) comes from dialogues during parliamentary procedures reported in the media and activates the stereotype of sexual deprivation. The actual proceedings of the procedure are recontextualized by the press, as sexist insinuations concerning female sexuality are placed in the foreground of the reports. Reference to hormonal anomalies (i.e. the excess of the male hormone testosterone) is also reported in other parts of the text that are not discussed here. The incident is an example of how the press mediates parliamentary discourse by making specific choices as to the episodes that will attract the interest of the readership as a form of confrontainment (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2015), i.e. aggressive discourse that aims at gender/corporal traits of the persons of reference, thus fossilizing gender (and other) stereotypes.

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In the specific excerpt, taking advantage of a pun that revolves around Greek terms that refer to pregnancy and delivery, the then leader of PASOK Evangelos Venizelos wishes Zoi Konstantopoulou (SYRIZA) to get pregnant soon (turns 4, 6). He, therefore, activates the presupposition of the sexually deprived female based on the stereotype of unmarried, childless women resorting to anti-social behavior (spinsters). In tandem with his initial reference to the delivery process (turn 2) and Konstantopoulou’s humorous response in turn 3, Venizelos attempts to resolve incongruity by denying the literal meaning of his wish (turn 4) and by insisting on the interpretation of pregnancy as a metaphor concerning rhetorical strategies (turn 8). Nevertheless, his insinuations activate an indirect sexist attack to the face of his female colleague, further corroborated by means of the ironic7 denial. The attack pertains to indirect forms of sexism highlighted by 3rd Wave Feminist Linguistics (Mills 2003), and according to Culpeper (2005) constitutes an off-record impoliteness strategy i.e., a face-threatening act performed by means of an implicature. The immediate reaction to it is rather mild (turns 5, 7). However, due to its offensive content, the episode was reproduced by several media at the time.

(4) (http://www.megatv.com/megagegonota/article.asp?catid=27371&subid=2& pubid=30892468) Dialogue during parliamentary procedures reported in the media (3/4/2013) Participants: Zoi Konstantopoulou ZK (SYRIZA) Evangelos Venizelos EV (PASOK) 1. Ζ. Κωνσταντοπούλου: Αφήστε με να κάνω την ερώτηση. Επαγωγικά γίνονται οι ερωτήσεις. 2. Ευ. Βενιζέλος: Επαγωγικά, μαιευτικά. Δια της μαιευτικής. 3. Ζ. Κωνσταντοπούλου: Αν κυοφορείτε κάτι, ελπίζουμε να είναι καρποφόρα η κατάθεσή σας. 4. Ευ. Βενιζέλος: Ναι, κυοφορώ. Σας εύχομαι να κυοφορήσετε κι εσείς συντόμως. 5. Ζ. Κωνσταντοπούλου: Για ποιο λόγο; 6. Ευ. Βενιζέλος: Είναι μια ευχή. Εγώ κυοφορώ. 7. Ζ. Κωνσταντοπούλου: Μάλιστα. 8. Ευ. Βενιζέλος: Διανοητικά δεν λέμε; Διανοητικά δεν με ρωτήσατε αν κυοφορώ κάτι;

7.  For a discussion of humor, irony and puns in political discourse see Tsakona 2013, Tsakona and Popa 2011.









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1. ZK: Let me ask the question. The questions are made inductively. 2. EV: Inductively, dialectically. By means of the dialectic method. ((the Socratic method of inquiry — the Greek term literally refers to the process of delivering a child)) 3. ZK: If you are pregnant with something ((i.e. information)), we hope that your testimony will be fruitful. ((taking advantage of the delivery/pregnancy metaphor introduced in turn 2)) 4. EV: Yes, I am pregnant ((intellectually)). I wish you too get pregnant soon. 5. ZK: What for? 6. EV: It is a wish. I am pregnant ((intellectually)). 7. ZK: Yes. 8. EV: We mean intellectually, don’t we? You asked me whether I am intellectually pregnant, didn’t you?

Excerpt 5, is part of the dialogical network informed by texts such as the ones presented above and has been included as indicative of how the media recycle and authorize sexist attacks. The person invited in the night entertainment TV program on Antena TV Channel is a popular member of the Greek parliament, Gerasimos Giakoumatos (ND). Giakoumatos has in the recent past repeatedly engaged in verbal attacks against Zoi Konstantopoulou, MP of a rival political party (SYRIZA). At the beginning of the interview, he is invited to make a comment about his colleague. The request is posed by one of the hosts of the program, Grigoris Arnaoutoglou, and is followed by a comment by the hostess, Maria Bekatorou, “Look now how he ((Giakoumatos)) is going to be pissed off ((laughter))”, contextualizing the event as humorous. Sexist humor is produced by the activation of the presupposition of the sexually deprived woman (“in my prayers… I say God, when is our beloved husband of hers the marine going to disembark”) as a cause for unfeminine behavior on her part. The excerpt generated laughter on the part of both the hosts and the hostess of the program and the participating audience. It highlights sexist verbal attacks by male politicians as media spectacles (Georgakopoulou 2013) and as an acceptable form of entertainment (Culpeper 2005). What is more important is that it recycles — therefore legitimizing — sexist verbal discourse against women parliamentarians that do not conform to the stereotype of feminine parliamentary conduct. The fact that the incident has been uploaded and circulated by numerous news sites and blogs on the internet

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(though sometimes contextualized as a χυδαία ‘hideous’ attack) further reinforces this interpretation.8

(5) http://www.newsbomb.gr/politikh/parapolitika/story/573526/xydaiaepithesi-giakoymatoy-kata-tis-zois-konstantopoyloy#ixzz3dj7RELWf Event: “The Kardasians”, a night entertainment TV program on Antenna TV Channel (2/5/2015) Participants: Gerasimos Giakoumatos (MP-Nea Dimocratia), Maria Bekatorou (hostess), Grigoris Arnaoutoglou (host), the audience Gerasimos Giakoumatos: Εγώ κάνω μια- (.) στην προσευχή μου το βράδυ μέσα απ’ τ’ άλλα που λέω που την καταλαβαίνω και την αγαπώ πάρα πολύ λέω Θεέ μου ((κάνει το σταυρό του)) πότε θα ξεμπαρκάρει ο αγαπημένος μας ναυτικός ο άντρας της. Gerasimos Giakoumatos: I say a- (.) in my prayers at night among the other things I say, I who understand her and love her very much, I say God, ((he crosses himself)) when is our beloved husband of hers the marine going to disembark.

Excerpt 6 is another example of sexist attacks against women MPs during parliamentary sittings, this time by Adonis Georgiadis (ND). In the first part of the turn, Georgiadis attacks Zoi Konstantopoulou (SYRIZA), insinuating aberration (“it is absolutely obvious that she needs it ((help)) and we should somehow help her”). In the second part, he attacks Rahil Makri (ANEL) insinuating sexually provocative conduct (“the image of Ms Rahil Makri on the railings was really beyond every expectation”). Both comments comprise off-record impoliteness (Culpeper 2005) and indirect sexist verbal attacks via humor and irony. The speaker refers to strong protests outside the premises of the state TV channels that were shut down by the governmental coalition of New Democracy and PASOK. He confirms Konstantopoulou’s request for help taking advantage of the incongruity produced by the different interpretations as to the nature of the requested help, e.g. legal or medical/psychiatric, again activating the stereotype of female incompetence and irrational behavior. In the case of Rahil Makri, the phrase “on the railings” has various connotations as it indirectly refers to the Greek idiomatic phrase “the railing of the hooker”9 used by Greek speakers in informal contexts when things get out of hand. It is further contextualized as marked via the stressed first syllable of 8.  It is extremely difficult to measure the reactions of audiences and distant recipients of such events. Nevertheless, publicized comments exhibiting negative evaluations of female social identity and/or recontextualizing violent incidents are used as a basis for and/or sustaining violence against women (Attenborough 2014; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014, 244). 9.  The phrase originated in scenes taking place outside harbor railings where prostitutes used to wait for sailors to disembark.



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the word “κάγκελα” (railings) and the use of the scholarly full form of the prepositional phrase “εις τα” (instead of “στα”, onto the/on the) which further stresses the incongruity among the formal parliamentary context and reference to colloquial expressions containing sexual connotations. The attacks are contextualized as both impolite and sexist by the strong reactions of other MPs and the temporary breakdown of the procedure.

(6) Parliament 10/11/2013: Motion of censure on the government of ND, PASOK Adonis Georgiadis: Ευχαριστώ πολύ κύριε Πρόεδρε (.) Θα ήθελα να ξεκινήσω την ομιλία μου με τα χθεσινά γεγονότα στην ΕΡΤ, και την εικόνα της ε: κυρίας Κωνσταντοπούλου να: καλεί σε βοήθεια. Θέλω και ’γω απ’ την πλευρά μου να πιστοποιήσω, έχοντας ζήσει με την κυρία συνάδελφο στη λίστα Λαγκάρντ για περίπου πέντε μήνες, ότι είναι απολύτως προφανές ότι την χρειάζεται και θα πρέπει με κάποιο τρόπο να τη βοηθήσουμε. Επίσης, θα πρέπει να πω ότι η εικόνα της κυρίας Ραχήλ Μακρή πάνω εις τα κάγκελα, ήταν πραγματικά πέραν [πάσης προσδοκίας.] HS: [Παρακαλώ X12] ((strong protests)) Adonis Georgiadis: Thank you very much your Honor (.) I would like to begin my speech with yesterday’s events in ERT ((state TV channel)), and the image of Ms Konstantopoulou calling for help. I, too, on my side, want to certify, having been with Ms Colleague in the Lagard List ((committee)) for five months, that it is absolutely obvious that she needs it and we should somehow help her. Also, I should say that the image of Ms Rahil Makri onto the railings was really beyond [every expectation.] HS: [Quiet, please (x12)] ((strong protests))

5.3 Sexist aggressive responses to conflict In excerpts 7, 8, 9 and 10, male MPs respond to harsh criticism by their women counterparts via resorting to sexist aggressive attacks. As the following excerpts show, women who mostly become the target of attacks are the ones who adopt the type of aggressive formalized parliamentary debating techniques developed by male MPs (Shaw 2002), thus threatening the perceived male-order. For example, in excerpt 7, the then Education Undersecretary Yiorgos Stylios (ND) responded to Liana Kanelli’s (KKE) criticism (turn 3) by the statement “You are not going to turn me into Kasidiaris”. The person mentioned in the statement (Ilias Kasidiaris), the spokesperson of the extreme nationalist party, Golden Dawn, had previously

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physically assaulted her amidst a political discussion panel on a live breakfast news show on Antenna TV (7/6/2012) (see Section 1). The violent incident had been officially condemned by all political parties except for Golden Dawn. It had also been extensively discussed in the social media, where Kasidiaris himself posted a statement saying he regretted causing damage to the image of his party but blaming his adversaries for his actions (Georgakopoulou 2013, 6). Opinions varied according to the political stance and affiliations of users, with a number of them justifying the attacker on the grounds of Kanelli’s perceived lack of deference, i.e. activating patriarchal strategies to minimize abuse by assigning blame on the victim (Bou-Franch 2013; Bou-Franch and GarcésConejos Blitvich 2014). By the same means, reference to this incident in the verbal episode under scrutiny constitutes bald-on-record impoliteness (Culpeper 2005) as well as a sexist verbal attack against Kanelli as it places full responsibility for the aforementioned violent act against her on her, indirectly aligning with those who justified the attacker (turn 5: “You need Kasidiaris ((i.e. beating up)), Ms Kanelli but Stylios is not going to become Kasidiaris!”). It also activates sexual stereotypes of dominance/submission. The attack is again contextualized as unacceptable as the episode goes on for several turns of strong protests on the part of Kanelli and her walking out of the sitting. (7) 1.

2. 3.



4.

→5.



6. 7.

Official Proceedings (6/11/2014) Participants: Yiorgos Stylios GS (Education Undersecretary, ND) Liana Kanelli LK (KKE) Ioannis Drivelegas HS (House Speaker, PASOK) ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΣ ΣΤΥΛΙΟΣ (Υφυπουργός Παιδείας και Θρησκευμάτων): Κύριε Πρόεδρε και κυρία Κανέλλη… ΠΡΟΕΔΡΕΥΩΝ (Ιωάννης Δριβελέγκας): Κυρία Κανέλλη… ΛΙΑΝΑ ΚΑΝΕΛΛΗ: Να απαντήσετε μόνος σας, που θέλετε να μου κάνετε μάθημα μεγαλοστομίας, χρησιμοποιώντας την Άρτα και το χωριό σας για προεκλογικούς λόγους! ΠΡΟΕΔΡΕΥΩΝ (Ιωάννης Δριβελέγκας): Κυρία Κανέλλη, ο κύριος Υπουργός σας άκουσε. ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΣ ΣΤΥΛΙΟΣ (Υφυπουργός Παιδείας και Θρησκευμάτων): Κύριε Πρόεδρε και κυρία Κανέλλη, τις εξετάσεις τις δίνουμε στον ελληνικό λαό. Η κ. Κανέλλη θέλει να με κάνει Κασιδιάρη, αλλά δεν θα γίνω Κασιδιάρης! Θέλετε Κασιδιάρη, κυρία Κανέλλη, αλλά δεν πρόκειται ο Στύλιος να γίνει Κασιδιάρης! Να το γνωρίζετε αυτό. ΛΙΑΝΑ ΚΑΝΕΛΛΗ: Παρακαλώ; ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΣ ΣΤΥΛΙΟΣ (Υφυπουργός Παιδείας και Θρησκευμάτων): Θέλετε να με κάνετε Κασιδιάρη, όμως δεν θα γίνω Κασιδιάρης, διότι έχω περάσει τις





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εξετάσεις αριστεύοντας και διότι δίνω εξετάσεις στον αρτινό λαό και στον ελληνικό λαό κάθε μέρα και δεν με ενδιαφέρει η δική σας η βαθμολογία, η προσωπική. 8. ΛΙΑΝΑ ΚΑΝΕΛΛΗ: Κύριε Πρόεδρε, θα τον επαναφέρετε μετά από αυτό ή όχι;



1. GS: Your Honor and Ms Kanelli… 2. HS: Ms Kanelli… 3. LK: Address your answer to yourself, since you intend to give me a lesson of bombast by referring to Arta and your home-village in order to be reelected! 4. HS: Ms Kanelli, the Minister has listened to you. →5. GS: Your Honor and Ms Kanelli we are examined by the Greek people. ((using the metaphor of taking exams at school)) Ms Kanelli wants to turn me into Kasidiaris, but I am not going to become Kasidiaris! You need Kasidiaris, Ms Kanelli, but Stylios is not going to become Kasidiaris! Know that. 6. LK: I beg your pardon? 7. GS: You want to turn me into Kasidiaris, but I will not become Kasidiaris, because I have passed my exams with honors ((I have been evaluated excellently)) and because the Artan people and the Greek people examine ((assess)) me everyday and I am not interested in you personally grading me ((in you assessing me)). 8. LK: Your Honor, will you call him back to order after this or not?

Excerpt 8 is the part of the episode that precedes excerpt 3 (Section 5.1) involving Mihalis Kassis’ (PASOK) verbal attack against Zoi Konstantopoulou (SYRIZA) insinuating lack of integrity. Kassis responds to a censorious question on her part (turn 2) by inviting her to illegally collect child benefits (turns 3 and 5), indirectly referring to family benefits that had been mistakenly credited to her mother’s salary. Following her strong protests, he repeatedly prompts her to step on the seats (turns 12, 13) invoking the sexist stereotype of a totally irrational/hysterical female. Both his attacks constitute deliberate threats to Konstantopoulou’s face, and are constructed as marked, i.e. impolite (Arundale 2010; Culpeper 2005; Watts 1992a) in her responsive contributions requesting his being called back to order (turns 8, 11). It is also worth noting that the House Speaker refrains from rebuking the offender. On the contrary, he rewards his disrespectful bald-on-record directives (turns 3 and 5: “(You) go collect some family benefits”) and the aggravation of his attack (omitted turns and turn 9: “Me, I will not be deterred, Your Honor, by those things!”, i.e. Konstantopoulou’s strong protests against his defamatory insinuations) by inviting him to keep the floor (turn 10). He thus breaches

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parliamentary regulations.10 What is more, in turn 7, he aligns with Kassis in his attempt to silence Konstantopoulou (turn 5) refusing to acknowledge her right to defend her integrity. The attack is marked as dispreferred by the strong protests of the offended party and the temporary breakdown of the procedure. (8) 1. 2. →3. 4. →5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

→12. →13.

Official Proceedings (5/5/2014) Participants: Ioannis Drivelegas HS (House Speaker, PASOK) Mihalis Kassis MK (SYRIZA) Zoi Konstantopoulou ZK SYRIZA) ΜΙΧΑΗΛ ΚΑΣΣΗΣ: Συνάδελφε, μη μιλάς. Να ακούς. Θα μάθετε να ακούτε ((addressing third party)). ΖΩΗ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ: Σε ποιον απευθύνεστε; ΜΙΧΑΗΛ ΚΑΣΣΗΣ: Εσείς πηγαίνετε, να εισπράξετε κανένα βοήθημα. ΖΩΗ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ: Σε ποιον απευθύνεστε, κύριε; ΜΙΧΑΗΛ ΚΑΣΣΗΣ: Ηρεμήστε και πηγαίνετε να εισπράξετε κανένα βοήθημα. Μη συνεχίζετε! ΖΩΗ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ: Σε ποιον απευθύνεστε; ΠΡΟΕΔΡΕΥΩΝ (Ιωάννης Δριβελέγκας): Γιατί διακόπτετε; ΖΩΗ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ: Να τον ανακαλέσετε στην τάξη! ((several turns aggravating conflict)) ΜΙΧΑΗΛ ΚΑΣΣΗΣ: Δεν καταλαβαίνω εγώ, κύριε Πρόεδρε, από τέτοια πράγματα! ΠΡΟΕΔΡΕΥΩΝ (Ιωάννης Δριβελέγκας): Εντάξει, συνεχίστε. ΖΩΗ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ: Κύριε Πρόεδρε, θα τον ανακαλέσετε στην τάξη; ΜΙΧΑΗΛ ΚΑΣΣΗΣ: Καθίστε κάτω! Ανεβείτε και πάνω στα καθίσματα! ((several turns aggravating conflict)) ΜΙΧΑΗΛ ΚΑΣΣΗΣ: Εγώ χαίρομαι, κύριε Πρόεδρε, με το να ανεβεί και πάνω στα καθίσματα, ειλικρινά!

1. MK: Colleague, don’t talk. Listen. Learn how to listen. ((addressing third party)) 2. ZK: Whom are you addressing? →3. MK: You go collect some family benefits. 4. ZK: Whom are you addressing, sir? →5. MK: Calm down and go collect some family benefits. Do not continue! 6. ZK: Whom are you addressing?

10.  Parliamentary regulations (articles 77, 78) forbid indecorous behavior and offensive expressions against the integrity of fellow parliamentarians. They determine penalties for offenders that are nevertheless rarely imposed in the Greek Parliament.



7. 8. 9. 10. 11. →12. →13.

Addressing women in the Greek parliament 145

HS: Why are you interrupting? ZK: Call him to order! ((addressing the House Speaker)) ((several turns aggravating conflict)) MK: Me, I will not be deterred, Your Honor, by those things! HS: OK go on. ZK: Your Honor, will you call him to order? MK: Sit down! Step on the seats now! ((several turns aggravating conflict)) MK: I am glad, Your Honor, even if she stands on the seats. Honestly!

The next two excerpts come from both parliamentary (9, a committee hearing) and media (10, a political panel discussion) contexts. A number of interesting comments on aspects of the conversational organization and turn constructions could be made for both. What I would like to focus on, is the strategy employed by both Evangelos Meimarakis (ND) and Grigoris Psarianos (Potami) in structuring and licensing the aggravation of their attacks: they both resort to the use of derogatory terms addressed to themselves as if paraphrasing previous discourse (exp. 9: “You have me like an animal”, exp. 10: “once again I am a germanotsolias”, i.e. a traitor), which were nevertheless ascribed to their women interlocutors. This is one of the three strategies11 employed by male abusers in order to (in this case implicitly) assign blame for the abuse to the victims themselves (Bou-Franch 2013; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014). Both attacks were contextualized as unacceptable and led to the temporary breakdown of the procedure (exp. 9) and the walkout of Theano Fotiou (SYRIZA) from the TV studio (exp. 10). In particular, the verbal episode in excerpt 9 is initiated by the House Speaker’s indirect criticism aiming at members of the committee that had left the previous day postponing their statements (turn 1). In the subsequent unit of the same turn, Konstantopoulou invites Petrakos to take the floor. Meimarakis interrupts him (turn 4) requesting the right to speak on a personal issue. In Petrakos’ attempt to maintain the floor (turn 5), he responds with an on record rejection (turn 6 “No, I will not allow you”), defying parliamentary regulations in that he substitutes the House Speaker in her right to coordinate the procedure and the turns of the speakers. He goes on addressing the House Speaker on the issue of determining the closing time for the discussion. His contribution is followed by several (omitted) turns of debating over the closing time, his making the complaint without having been given the floor and indecorous behavior on his part, thus aggravating tension. In turn 7, he finally escalates his attack with an on record face-threatening act that declares his lack of respect towards Konstantopoulou (“you do not inspire my respect”), which constitutes bald-on-record impoliteness (Culpeper 2005). In the 11.  The other two being deny and minimize the abuse.

146 Marianthi Georgalidou

subsequent unit of the same turn, his referring to her in the 3rd person (“we are waiting for two and a half hours for (.) Mrs Her Ho:nor”) constitutes an indirect form of sexism (Mills 2003). The choice of the third person reference term in the House Speaker’s presence, the use of the address term “Mrs” after a minimal pause, in excess of the required honorifics (“(.) Mrs Her Ho:nor”) and the prolonged stressed vowel in the honorific (Πρό:εδρο/ Her Ho:nor) construct irony based on the incongruity between the expected reverence towards the House Speaker and the ironical “excessive politeness”12 employed by the speaker. The ironic outcome is in tandem with the previous statement as to his lack of respect towards her. The attack is, according to the speaker, licensed by his being treated “like an animal” attributed to the House Speaker. Sexism is produced not just by employing direct and indirect forms for attacking Konstantopoulou’s face, but by indirectly contesting her authority as the then Chair of the committee (and the then House Speaker of the Greek Parliament) to coordinate the procedure (turn 6). What is more, her delaying the opening of sittings is indirectly attributed to the alleged female incompetence in time management, thus recalling the stereotype of women making men wait unreasonably (turn 7). (9) 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. →7.

(https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=BEzHG6x5TnI) Institutions and Transparency Committee, 26/5/2015 Agenda: “The Siemens scandal” Participants: Evangelos Maimarakis EM (ND) Zoi Konstantopoulou ZK (House Speaker, SYRIZA) Athanasios Petrakos Π/P (SYRIZA) ΖΚ: (…) Εχτές περιμέναμε με τις ώρες ακόμα κι εκείνους που επιφυλάχθηκαν να τοποθετηθούν και εξηφανίσθησαν απ’ την επιτροπή. Ελάτε κυρία:-κύριε: Πετράκο. Π: ευχαριστώ [πολύ κυρία Πρόεδρε] ΖΚ: [Ελάτε κύριε Πετράκο] EΜ: [Επειδή- κύριε Πετράκο] με συγχωρείτε ένα λεπτό= Π: =Αν μου επιτρέψετε= ((addressing Meimarakis)) EΜ: = Επί προσωπικού. Όχι δεν σας επιτρέπω. ((addressing Petrakos)) ((several omitted turns aggravating conflict)) EM: (…) Και δεν θα μου κάνετε μαθήματα συμπεριφοράς εσείς, όταν με τη δική σας συμπεριφορά δεν μου προκαλείτε τον σεβασμό. Μ’ έχετε σα:ν ζώ:ον εδώ πέρα και περιμένουμε δυόμιση ώρες (.) την Κυρία Πρό:εδρο.

12.  Also see Culpeper 2005 for a discussion of sarcasm/mock politeness as a strategy of impoliteness.



Addressing women in the Greek parliament 147

Ωραία, σας περιμένουμε. Μας προσβάλλετε κι από πάνω; Λοιπόν, άντε μπράβο. Άντε μπράβο.

1. ΖΚ: (…) Yesterday we waited for hours even for the ones who reserved their right to take stand and disappeared from the Committee. Come Mrs:-Mr: Petrakos. 2. P: thank you [very much your Honor] 3. ΖΚ: [Come on Mr Petrakos.] 4. EΜ: [Because- Mr Petrakos] excuse me for a minute= 5. P: =If you allow me= ((addressing Meimarakis)) 6. EΜ: =((I request the right to speak)) On a personal issue. No, I will not allow you. ((addressing Petrakos)) ((several omitted turns aggravating conflict)) →7. EM: (…) And you are not ((in a position)) to lecture me on how to behave, when with your behavior you do not inspire my respect. You have me li:ke an animal here and we are waiting for two and a half hours for (.) Mrs Her Ho:nor ((ironically)). Ok, we are waiting for you. Will you offend us on top of everything? Well, enough. Enough.

Excerpt 10 is an episode that took place during a live evening political commentary program on Mega TV. Grigoris Psarianos (Potami) not only attacked Theano Fotiou (Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Solidarity, SYRIZA) verbally, but he also repeatedly pointed his finger at her pushing her shoulder. Both gestures constitute inappropriate (the former) and aggressive gesticulations in the Greek sociocultural context. What is more, he summoned her by means of the colloquial address term “re” (turn 3), which is exclusively used in either informal contexts among friends or during aggressive verbal conflicts. He also used the rather old-fashioned summon “psit” (turn 6), used either for waiters13 or cats, i.e. minors and/or persons of lower social status. Both Fotiou (turns 10 and 16) and the hostess of the program Olga Tremi (turns 7, 12 and 14), repeatedly addressed him with requests to stop the harassment. He responded to Tremi’s requests by a denial to comply with her pleas (turn 9, “No Mrs Tremi excuse me”), justified by criticism on the part of Fotiou (turn 1) that he sides with the creditors,14 which he repeats four times either in the interrogative (turns 3, 6 and 15) or in the affirmative form (turn 9). In turn 11, he paraphrases Fotiou’s perceived offence aggravating its content by attributing the term “germanotsolias”15, the synonym of a traitor, to himself. 13.  Together with the address term “child” as in “Ψιτ, παιδί!”. 14.  The European Union and the IMF which give loans to the Greek state on condition of austerity policies. 15.  Greek soldier in the traditional evzone costume of the Greek independence warriors working for the Nazis during German occupation in the 2nd world war.

148 Marianthi Georgalidou

He thus justifies the aggravation of his attack in turn 13 in which he refers to Fotiou by the outright derogatory phrase “the neomnemoniac laughing stock” followed by a tag-question seeking confirmation (“eh?”). The episode ends with Fotiou walking out of the studio, thus marking the whole incident as totally unacceptable (turn 16). Psarianos wishes her goodnight addressing her by her first name following the title Mrs, a combination basically used to address older men and women acquaintances in informal contexts. Fotiou leaves the studio despite pleas by both the hostess and the host to stay, and the discussion continues by them reprimanding Psarianos for his conduct. On the following days the episode was extensively circulated and discussed in the media and the social media. Aggression and bald-on-record impoliteness against Fotiou also constitute indirect forms of sexism embedded in (a) the summons “psit” accompanied by the pointing of the finger and the pushing, (b) the use of the Greek offensive expression σούργελο (‘laughing stock’), which is mainly (albeit not exclusively) used to refer to women whose conduct or appearance is considered ridiculous, and (c) the use of the informal address term “Mrs Theano” during a political discussion panel on television. Fotiou’s walkout from the studio further contextualizes this interpretation. (10) http://www.topontiki.gr/article/132335/psarianos-se-fotioy-eisaineomnimoniako-soyrgelo-video Mega TV, “Mega online”, 11/6/2015 Participants: Theano Fotiou Φ/F (Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Solidarity, SYRIZA) Grigoris Psarianos Ψ/PS (MP-Potami) YiannisVroutsis Βρ/Vr (MP-ND) Olga Tremi Τρ/Tr (Journalist-hostess) Nikos Evangelatos (journalist-host) 1. Φ: Είσαστε με τους δανειστές και λέτε ψεύδη αυτή τη στιγμή διότι [το ένα/] 2. Τρ:  [Από πού] [προκύπτει αυτό που λέτε;] 3. Ψ: [Ποιος είναι-ποιος είναι] [με τους δανειστές ρε; Εεε;] 4. Φ: [Θα σας πω εγώ. Διότι αυτό που λέτε/] 5. Βρ: [Να μιλήσω εγώ; Να μιλήσω εγώ;] Πού τα ξέρετε τα θέματα αυτά/ →6. Ψ: Ουε, ψι:τ ((pointing at her and pushing her shoulder with his forefinger)). Ποιος είναι με τους δανειστές; [Εγώ;] 7. Τρ: [Ε: κύριε] Ψαριανέ 8. Φ: Σας παρακαλώ κυρία/ 9. Ψ: Όχι κυρία Τρέμη παρακαλώ πολύ, [ότι είμαι με τους δανειστές] 10. Φ: [Ναι ναι θα υψ-μην υψώνετε τώρα-]



Addressing women in the Greek parliament 149

[Σας παρακαλώ κύριε] →11. Ψ: [Πάλι γερμανοτσολιάς [είμαι, έτσι;]] 12. Τρ:  [Ναι ναι ναι] αλλά να σας πω όμως μην το κάνετε ((the pointing and the pushing)) →13. Ψ: Το νεομνημονιακό σούργελο. [Ε:;] 14. Τρ:  [Μην το κάνετε] Μην της- μην της κάνετε όμως ((the pointing and the pushing)) 15. Ψ: [Είμαι με τους δανειστές εγώ;] 16. Φ: [Σας παρακαλώ κύριε.] Εντάξει. Να φύγω κυρία Τρέμη; Να [φύγω; Αν καλείτε αυτούς τους ανθρώπους να φύγω] 17. Ψ:  [Καληνύχτα κυρία Τρε-κυρία Θεανώ] 1. F: You side with the creditors and you are lying at this very moment because [the one/] 2. Tr: [Where does] [what you are saying come from?] 3. Ps: [Who sides-who sides] [with the creditors re? Ε:h?] 4. F:  [I will tell you. Because what you are saying/] 5. Vr: [Can I speak? Can I speak?] How do you know about these issues?/ →6. Ps: Oueh, psit ((pointing at her and pushing her shoulder with his forefinger)). Who sides with the creditors? [Me?] 7. Tr: [Ε:h Mr] Psariane 8. F: Please Ms/ 9. Ps: No Ms Tremi excuse me, [that I side with the creditors] 10. F:  [Yes yes you will rai-do not raise ((your voice)) now-] [Please sir] →11. Ps: [Once again I am a germanotsolias16 [am I not?]] 12. Tr:  [Yes-yes-yes] but let me tell you though, don’t do it ((the pointing and the pushing)) →13. Ps: The neo-mnemoniac laughing stock. [Ε:h?] 14. Tr:  [Don’t do it] Don’t do her- don’t do that ((the pointing and the pushing)) to her though= 15. Ps: =[Do I side with the creditors, me?] 16. F: [Please sir.] Ok. Should I go Ms Tremi? Should I [go? If you are inviting these people I’m going] 17. Ps: [Goodnight Ms Tre-Ms Theano]

16.  See footnote 14

150 Marianthi Georgalidou

On the whole, women politicians become the target of indirect sexist attacks based on insinuations of sexual or mental inadequacies (Sections 5.1 and 5.2, excerpts 1–6). In excerpts 4–6 in particular, humor and irony are used as weapons allowing male adversaries to become implicitly aggressive (Georgalidou 2011, 105). Women also become the target of bald on record insults and aggression (Section 5.3, excerpts 7–10), all the more when they address their men counterparts with remarks that entail criticism and conflict (Shaw 2002). Last but not least, they can become the target of corporal violence as in the extreme case of Ilias Kasidiaris’ assault against Liana Kanelli17 and Psarianos’ aggressive gesticulations against Theano Fotiou, Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Solidarity (excerpt 10). Analysis of the excerpts discussed above highlights aspects of sexism against women within political procedures that call for further analysis of the issue, not just as a phenomenon concerning the organization of discourse in politics, but as a social problem as well. 5. Discussion: exceeding the limits of the expected If politic uses of language constitute unmarked linguistic choices, this is not the case of discourse addressed to women members of the Greek Parliament. Despite the fact that the collapse of formal parliamentary procedures is not always possible within sittings, cases of intense protests, temporary breakdowns and even the walkout of offended parties impede discussions in process. Reactions such as the aforementioned ones, contextualize impoliteness, i.e. the unacceptable use of abusive linguistic forms that clearly exceed the limits of politic speech in contexts of expected political rivalry. Yet, these quite clear cases of contested abusive language are not all there is to be said about sexist verbal attacks in public political discourse. If one looks at single cases, separated from the overall context created by the way women politicians are portrayed in public discourse, then the phenomenon of sexism as a serious social problem escapes our attention. Uncontested abuses as well as the reproduction and recycling of sexist verbal attacks by the media as merely entertaining, allow for the neutralization and, therefore, the acceptance of sexism as a social reality. What is more, as the hypothesized stereotype of gendered behavior informs interaction, women who speak assertively are considered aberrant and aggressive because they are judged against a stereotypical norm of deference (Mills 2003, 5). Women who adopt the type of aggressive formalized parliamentary debating techniques developed by male MPs (Shaw 2002), thus threatening perceived male-order, mostly become the target of direct attacks and indirect insinuations referring 17.  And Rena Dourou (Antenna TV, 7/6/2012).



Addressing women in the Greek parliament 151

to their sexual status, as either a-sexual or sexual objects. As much as overt sexist aggression is hard to deny, sexism at the level of presupposition is much more difficult to challenge since the assumptions upon which it is based should be made overt (Christie 2005; Mills 2003, 9). In this context, the analytic approach for the present study is primarily based on the analysis of discourse units as there and then social actions. However, actions are also seen as dynamic practices informed by habitual ways of acting within the highly institutionalized environments of parliamentary procedures. Therefore, a combination of interactional and critical frameworks makes possible the multidimensional approach to complicated phenomena, such as the distinction between expected rivalry and sexist verbal abuse. In such a framework, impoliteness is used as a technical term useful in the local analysis and documentation of marked/dispreferred verbal acts as unacceptable, i.e. non-politic, choices by participants to specific interactions. Detailed analysis of excerpts of discourse addressed to women politicians reveals forms of the political combat that exceed the limits of expected politic choices. Sexist insinuations and offensive remarks presuppose female inadequacy and aim at the gender rather than at the political stances of the addressees. Despite the fact that conflict is an integral part of political (and social, Goodwin-Harness 2006) procedures, aggression, i.e. behavior aimed at hurting another person (Shantz and Hartup 1992, 4), and sexist aggression in particular, not only compromise the participation of women in political procedures but also shift the interest of audiences from what should have been at the core of politics: debating on political agendas. Sexist episodes that become viral media spectacles and forms of confrontainment, further reinforce this tendency. The present study attempted to highlight instances of sexist language abuse in political/parliamentary discourse and the fact that despite analysis and documentation of the phenomenon within 2nd and 3rd wave feminist linguistics, it still remains a social reality that calls for both scrutiny and social action. Having focused on a relatively small data sample, more research along these lines is needed to further examine subtle instances of “underground” sexism (Mills 2003), the extent of the phenomenon in other domains of public discourse, as well as the role of traditional and new media in its resilience.

152 Marianthi Georgalidou

Transcription symbols - / (.) = [] : underlined segments (…) (()) . , ;/?

self-repair interruption pause latching simultaneous speech, extended sound or syllable speaker emphasis omitted discourse extralinguistic information falling intonation short pause rising intonation

Acknowledgements I owe warm thanks to Maria Sifianou, Patricia Bou-Franch, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Villy Tsakona and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the present chapter.

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Contributors to this volume

Kristin L. Anderson ([email protected]) is professor of sociology at Western Washington University. She studies the links between gender and intimate partner violence; how the predictors and consequences of violence are gendered and how violence reconstructs gender. Her recent work, Violence against Women, (vol. 21, 2015) examines how three domestic courts respond to victim/ survivors of abuse. Frederick Attenborough ([email protected]) has written extensively in the area of feminist media studies, focusing on the media — as broadly conceived — from an ethnomethodological perspective. His publications include articles in Gender & Language, Discourse & Society, Feminist Media Studies and Journal of Gender Studies that analyse what it is that we read when we read about sexism, rape, misogyny, and so on, in the media. Patricia Bou-Franch ([email protected]) Patricia Bou-Franch is associate professor of English at the University of Valencia. She has published on gender inequality and on computer-mediated discourse in journals like Gender and Language, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Language and Politics and Pragmatics and Society. She is editor of Ways into Discourse (Comares, 2006) and co-editor of Gender and Sexual Identities in Transition (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2008). Jill Cermele ([email protected]) is professor of psychology and an affiliated faculty member of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Drew University. Her scholarship, teaching, and activism are focused on gender and resistance, outcomes and perceptions of self-defense training, and issues of gender in mental health. Most recently, she was the co-editor of the March 2014 special issue of Violence against Women, which focused on self-defense against sexual assault. Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich ([email protected]) is professor of linguistics in the department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests, on which she has published and lectured extensively, include im/politeness models, genre theory, and identity construction. She is especially interested in mediated communication, both traditional and digital media.

doi 10.1075/bct.86.07con 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

156 Contributors to this issue

Marianthi Georgalidou is Assistant Professor in Linguistics / Discourse Analysis in the Department of Mediterranean Studies, University of the Aegean, Greece, where she teaches Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics. She has presented papers and published articles on the pragmatics of code-switching and minority discourse, on political discourse and humor, on child discourse, gender and politeness. Sergio Maruenda-Bataller ([email protected]) is assistant professor at the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat de València, Spain. His research interests are in social and cognitive pragmatics, corpus linguisticscritical discourse analysis interface (semantic and discourse prosodies), and translation. He has recently published articles on the negotiation of meaning in socio-ideological discourse(s) through lexical pragmatics and an introduction to teaching translation. José Santaemilia ([email protected]) is associate professor of English language and linguistics at the Universitat de València, as well as a legal and literary translator. His main research interests are gender/sex and language, sexual language and translation. He has edited Género, Lenguaje y Traducción (Valencia, 2003), Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities (Manchester, 2005), and Woman and Translation: Geographies, Voices and Identities (MONTI — 2011), with Luise von Flotow. Shonna Trinch ([email protected]) is an associate professor of linguistics in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College in New York City. She has been writing about violence against women since the publication of her book, Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence (John Benjamins 2003). She has also published on the topic in Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Text and Talk, and Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Index

A abortion  101 abuse  5–9, 39, 59–62, 66–9, 71–7, 87–8, 99, 107–8, 111–2, 118, 122, 132, 134–5, 142, 145, 151 accusation  69, 76, 128n1 Adams, Peter, J., 5, 61 address term  146–8 advertising  7, 8, 59, 60, 64 affiliation/disaffiliation  63, 73, 77, 142 agency  46, 54, 61 aggression language  7–11, 13, 15–6, 65, 69, 83, 113–20, 122, 124–5, 127–9 sexist  127, 133, 135, 139, 147, 157 verbal  15, 113–7, 120–6, 128–30, 135 alignment  8, 37–8, 40, 65, 101–2, 142, 144 allegation  1, 15–6, 19, 23–5, 28, 32, 39 Anderson, Kristin L., 5, 7, 9, 67, 76, 110, 112 Androutsopoulos, Jannis  65, 129, 134 appraisal theory  9, 83, 90–3 Armstrong, Elizabeth A., 110–2 Assange, Julian  8, 15–6, 18–21, 23–31 assertion  111, 128, 150 assumption  1, 63, 101, 120, 131, 133, 151 Attenborough, Frederick  7, 8, 10, 15, 17–8, 60, 140n8 attitude  1, 2, 63, 85, 88–93, 96–7, 103, 116 audience  5, 15, 17, 84, 90, 131–2, 139, 140n8, 151 Austin, John L., 4, 38, 40

B Baker, Paul  9, 83, 93 battering  6, 9, 69, 76, 82–3, 86, 89, 94, 96–103, 112 Bednarek, Monika  89, 93, 96–7, 99, 103 behavior  39, 61, 71, 86, 92–3, 103, 109, 111–2, 115–6, 128, 130, 132, 138–40, 144n10, 145, 150–1 belief  2–3, 32–3, 54, 62–3, 65–6, 85, 92, 101, 131 Bengoechea, Mercedes  5, 60–1, 63, 82, 88 blaming  5–6, 9, 17, 22, 38, 59, 61, 66–8, 72–4, 76, 96–7, 112, 131, 142, 145 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo  108, 113, 117, 119, 121 Boonzaier, Floretta  5, 61 Bostock, Jan  5, 60–2, 73 Bou-Franch, Patricia  7, 8, 16, 39, 61–7, 76, 88, 111–2, 128, 131, 140n8, 142, 145 Bourdieu, Pierre  84–5 Bucholtz, Mary  3–4, 8, 10, 62 Butler, Judith  4, 110 C Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen  16, 103 Cameron, Deborah  4, 7, 86 Cermele, Jill  7, 9, 67, 76 children  52, 69–70, 101–2, 108–9, 115, 118–9, 138 Christie, Christine  2, 3, 5, 16, 60, 129–30, 133, 151 civil protection orders (CPOs)  6, 7, 9, 96, 103, 107–10, 113–9, 121–3 Coates, Linda  2, 5, 6, 9, 16–8, 23, 27, 39, 60–1 coercion  2, 23

command  115–9 conflict  10, 63, 65, 127–30, 141, 147, 150–1 confrontainment  129, 131, 134, 137, 151 confrontation  130–1 connector  45 context, see setting control  10, 17, 23–4, 45, 54–5, 84–5, 109, 111–2, 115–8, 134–5, 137 conversation analysis  10, 133 corpus linguistics  9, 82–3, 93, 103 court  60, 97, 107–8, 113, 114, 122 credibility  38–9, 48–9, 70 crime  3, 8, 20, 31–2, 38, 54, 59–61, 86–7, 95t4, 99, 102, 109 critical discourse analysis  8–10, 62, 75, 83, 93, 134–5 Culpeper, Jonathan  9, 10, 115, 130, 133, 136, 138–40, 142–3, 145, 146n12 D defense  6, 8, 19, 70, 73, 76, 103, 112–3, 123 denial  5, 9, 37–8, 42, 45, 48, 52, 54, 59, 61, 66–9, 71, 76, 112–3, 131, 138, 145, 147, 151 directive  134–5, 143 discrimination  1, 7, 10, 76, 85, 113, 121, 132 dispreference  129, 133–4, 144, 151 divorce  69 domestic violence  5, 39, 64, 69–70, 87–9, 102, 107–12, 114, 122–3 domination  61–2, 85, 101, 103, 109, 118, 134, 142 downgrading  15–6, 29, 42

158 Index E Ehrlich, Susan  1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 16–7, 39, 60, 86, 89 Eliasson, Miriam A., 108, 110–1 ethnomethodology  5, 18–9, 130, 133 evaluation  9, 16, 32, 41, 77, 82–3, 89–92, 94, 95, 97, 99–100, 103, 140n8 expectation  9, 10, 29, 51–2, 82–3, 92, 101–103 F Fagoaga, Concha  86–8, 102 Fairclough, Norman  7, 62, 77, 83, 85, 93, 133 femininity  76, 86, 115, 119, 121, 132, 139 feminism  1, 3–4, 8–10, 32, 54–5, 62, 69, 72, 74–5, 77, 85, 87, 108, 111, 113, 121, 123, 131–3, 138, 151 feminization  111, 119 Fernández Díaz, Natalia  5, 60, 82, 88 G Galtung, John  2, 84–5 Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar  7, 8, 63–6, 112, 129–31, 134, 137, 140n8, 142, 145 Gavey, Nicola  5, 38, 43, 61 gender equality  104 identity  3, 4, 9, 73, 77, 110, 129 ideology  3–4, 9, 59, 62–3, 65–8, 75, 77, 110 inequality  3, 5, 10, 64, 121 insults  115–9, 122 violence  1, 60, 82, 86–90, 96, 99 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra  129, 134, 139, 142 Georgalidou, Marianthi  7, 9–10, 76, 128, 131, 135, 150 glossing  15, 20, 24–5, 27, 29, 32 Goffman, Erving  23 H Hall, Jane H., 109–10, 122 Hall, Kira  3, 4, 10 harassment  88, 122–3, 147

Herring, Susan C., 6, 7, 65, 111, 122 Holmes, Janet  1, 3 humor  7, 113, 131–2, 137–40, 150 I identity  3, 4, 6, 9–10, 26, 29, 45, 53, 59, 62–9, 71, 73, 75–7, 85, 110, 112, 119, 129, 132, 140n8 inferiority  53, 113, 120 insulting  10, 107–8, 110–1, 115–22, 150 intimate partner violence  5, 7, 61, 82, 83, 87, 89, 109, 110, 117, 122 invisibility  53, 69, 84–5, 95t4, 103, 131 irony  7, 113, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140, 146, 150 J Jaffe, Alexandra  8, 37, 40 joking  10, 110, 115 L Litosseliti, Lia  3 Lledó, Eulàlia  5, 60, 82, 88 Lockwood Harris, Kate  61, 77 Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria  63, 65, 66, 111 M marriage  85–7, 102 Martin, James  9, 83, 89–90, 92–3, 103 Maruenda, Sergio  7, 9, 60, 103 masculinity  61, 69, 83, 84, 110–2, 119 Matoesian, Gregory M., 6, 8, 38–9, 48 media  16, 19, 23, 32–3, 61, 76, 82, 86, 88, 90, 97, 99, 101–2, 104, 127, 129, 131 metaphor  82, 102 Meyerhoff, Miriam  1, 3 Mills, Sara  7, 9–10, 63, 67, 76–7, 108, 110–1, 113–4, 117, 121, 131–3, 138, 146, 150–1 minimization  17, 27, 30, 59, 61, 63, 66–70, 76, 112, 131 mitigation  16, 17, 39, 63

N narrative  37–40, 42, 48–9, 51, 53–4, 72, 86–7, 96, 108, 114–6, 118 naturalization  61, 66, 82–3, 87, 107, 112 neutralization  101, 131 newspaper  16, 37, 39, 48, 60, 62, 64, 82–3, 86, 88–9, 94,97, 100, 103, 112, 122 nominalization  97, 102 normalization  112–4 P patriarchy  8, 59–63, 68–9, 72–5, 77, 84–5, 101, 116–8, 131 Plumpton, Maureen  5, 60–2, 73 politeness/impoliteness  9–10, 96, 111, 113, 122, 127, 129–31, 133, 136, 138, 140–3, 145–6, 148, 150–1 positioning  69, 76, 85, 90–2, 99, 102, 112–3, 121, 123 power  9, 26, 49, 51, 60–1, 69, 73, 76–7, 82–5, 110, 112, 117, 128 Pratt, Rebeka  5, 60–2, 73 presupposition  7, 27, 31, 62, 113, 131–2 Q qualitative/quantitative method  9, 66, 68, 76–7, 83, 93–4, 100, 112 R rape  7–9, 16–9, 23–5, 27–8, 31–3, 37–43, 45–55, 84, 86, 89, 108, 117, 122–3 recontextualisation  14, 21–6, 29, 31, 35, 38–9, 43, 143, 146n8 relationships  26, 43, 85, 87, 109–10, 112, 117, 119, 121–3 reportage  7, 9–10, 16–7, 25, 33, 83, 87, 89, 94, 97, 100, 102 representation  9, 17, 25, 28, 38–9, 61, 63, 68, 70, 74–5, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 102–4, 108–9, 119, 121 restraining orders, see civil protection orders (CPOs) reviewing  37–45, 47–54, 60

Index 159

rhetoric  10, 16–8, 28, 42, 53, 61, 69–70, 97, 101, 113, 121, 127–8 S Santaemilia, José  7, 9, 60, 103 Schiffrin, Deborah  4, 45, 66 settings institutional  5–6, 73, 76, 84–6, 97, 103, 115, 121, 127, 129, 130, 132 private  2, 52–3, 74, 82, 87–8, 102, 107, 109–10, 113–4, 117, 122–3, 128 public  2, 6, 48–9, 60, 62–3, 74–5, 77, 82–3, 86–8, 102, 107–10, 113, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 128 sexism  9, 10, 17, 39, 61–2, 77, 86, 108, 110, 113, 117, 121–3, 127–9, 131–2 covert  117, 119–20, 122–3 direct  9, 113–4, 123, 132 indirect  7, 9, 76, 113–4, 131–2 overt  113, 117–9, 121–3, 131 sexual assault  8, 27, 38–9, 48, 55, 69–70, 84, 123

sexual molestation  16, 18–9, 23, 27 sexuality  7, 9–10, 15–6, 45, 88–9, 116, 143 shame  42, 45, 47, 51–3, 99 Sifianou, Maria  131 silence  37–9, 42–4, 48–9, 51, 53–5, 102, 115 speech  25, 40, 42, 50, 109–10, 114, 122, 127–30 Spender, Dale  85 stance  37–42, 44, 49, 54, 90, 96, 128 status  43, 108, 110, 112, 118, 122, 128 stereotypes  9, 39, 43–4, 73, 77, 85, 88, 114, 132 Stern, Jessica  8, 37–54 Stokoe, Elizabeth  3, 6, 16, 61, 63, 66, 112, 115 Sunderland, Jane  3 T Tannen, Deborah  39, 51, 65 threat  9, 31, 84, 91, 108, 110–1, 115–9, 122–4, 130 Thurlow, Crispin  7, 107, 110

Trinch, Shonna  6–8, 38–9, 44, 48, 60, 73, 109, 115 Tsakona, Villy  128–9, 131, 138n7 Twitter  9, 24, 107–10, 113–7, 119–23 V van Dijk, Teun A., 3, 8, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 71, 75, 84 van Leeuwen, Theo  72 victim  16–7, 22, 24, 29, 38, 42–4, 48, 53–5, 72, 74, 84, 87–8, 94, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 108–9, 114, 120–1 W Wade, Allan  2, 5, 6, 9, 16, 17, 18, 23, 60, 61 Weatherall, Ann  82 White, Peter  9, 82, 83, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 103 Wodak, Ruth  62, 72, 83, 93 Y YouTube  8, 16, 59, 63–6, 68–9, 72–3, 75–7, 108

Exploring Language Aggression against Women presents a collection of systematic studies that delve into the critical role of language in constructing violence, creating inequality, and justifying discrimination against women. Drawing on a range of discourse analytic methods, this volume subjects to scrutiny mediated and non-mediated (re)tellings and reactions to rape and sexual assault, newspaper reports of intimate partner abuse, YouTube responses to public service advertising for abuse prevention, and verbal sexism on Twitter and in legal and parliamentary contexts. Special attention is paid to the multiple forms that verbal violence against women can take, and its pervasiveness in contemporary Western societies, precisely at a time when the need for, and usefulness of, feminism are continuously being questioned. Exploring Language Aggression against Women will be of relevance to scholars and students interested in gender, language and sexuality, discourse, media, feminism, and communication. Most articles were originally published in Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2:2 (2014).

“The collection is a timely and important political intervention into what the World Health Organization has labeled a ‘global health problem of epidemic proportions’. ” Susan Ehrlich, York University “This important collection of essays is a vital tool for interrogating the way that violence against women is erased and downgraded in the press and on social media, and the way that threats of violence serve a silencing role on social media.” Sara Mills, Sheffield Hallam University “This excellent volume ofers a varied and timely collection of papers that bring the reader face to face with the many ways in which language contributes to both linguistic and non-linguistic forms of violence against women in contemporary society.” Christine Christie, Loughborough University “This volume is an important and timely collection that examines how words, texts, and media representations condone, minimize, and sometimes enact gendered violence.”

ISBN

978 90 272 4274 7

Kate Lockwood Harris, University of Missouri

John Benjamins Publishing Company