A systematic literature review of online misogyny intersectionality: main issues, relations and strategies for gender equality plans

Abstract

This communication is part of our research project Visibilizing and measuring the scale and scope of sexual and gender-related violence in universities (SeGReVUni) belonging to the Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades(RTI2018-093627-B-I00. Agencia Estatal de Investigación-Convocatoria 2018. Proyectos de I+D+i Retos Investigación). This research addresses someof the main thematic lines of the 11th European Conference on Gender Equality in Higher Education. And its main objective is to make progress in the design of instruments and protocols for the detection of gender violence in university institutions. Specifically, the contribution we are presenting now focuses on the study of sexual and gender-based violence in digital spaces and media, as well as its relationship with other traditional spaces. As we explain below, our point of view originates in the idea that the problems of Sexual and Gender related Violence (SGRV) must be approached in blended and mixed realities. And this object of study will be referred as online misogyny. We consider that our research may be relevant for the development of future actions in the thematics areas: Policies fostering structural change for gender equality in the research, technology and innovation system and Gender Equality Plans and strategies in research, technology and innovation institutions. In addition, according to one of the two cross-cutting dimensions for all the conference areas of the Conference (Gender and Intersectionality), our contribution addresses online misogyny from the perspective of intersectionality. From the idea that technologies not only facilitate, and add, existing forms of misogyny, but create new ones that are inextricably connected with the technological possibilities of new media, the algorithmic policy of certain platforms, the cultures of the place of work produced by these technologies and the people and communities that use them, our contribution presents, through a systematic review of the bibliography, the state of the question about the socalled online misogyny. All this with the purpose of identifying the main approaches of interest, as well as emerging methodologies. As will be seen, this systematic review allows us to appreciate the intersectional nature of online misogyny, as well as the way in which this intersectionality reinforces the exclusion of women from digital Internet infrastructures, which implies a lower probability of participating in both production and consumption of its tools, platforms and services, as well as reproduce the most fundamental structural conditions of inequality and discrimination in the technological field. Moving away from dichotomous visions that see technologies in a single plane, we place ourselves in a scientific production that recognizes them as a complex, nodal and localized space. We see these spaces as public, political and traversed by power relations, and therefore a place of violence and possible reappropriation and transformation of practices. The technologies can be a field of practices for the eradication of Sexual and Gender related Violence, among them, the design of instruments and protocols for detecting gender violence in university institutions.