Walking Alone Online: Intersectional Violence on the Internet (original) (raw)

2019, Intersectionality in Digital Humanities

This article discusses the targeting of women and minorities on the internet, specifically focusing on matters which have arisen within the Digital Humanities community in the Global North. 1 I explore the connection between Milo Yiannopoulos's key role in GamerGate, the online harassment of female journalists, and the targeted attacks against female academics working in the Digital Humanities. The link between these phenomena is organic, with Yiannopoulos playing a critical role in both attempts to terrorize female-identifying individuals into silence and compliance. The article also elucidates the reasons why an online mob mentality can overrule social boundaries and shows how hatred is directed mostly at individuals who stand at the intersection of several marginalized groups. I explore how the rise of the far right, currently referred to as the alt-right, 2 is directly linked to the type of harassment female academics experience and conclude that despite the internet's potential as an egalitarian space, 1 I wrote this article in the Global North, as I held a tenure-track post at a European University. My background, however, is intersectional. A mixed race Latinx, I grew up as the child of immigrants in a country in which I was not born (I am an adult Third Culture Kid) and where my accent and my appearance singled me out. My academic background in English literature required me to learn a new language in which I will never enjoy the advantages of a native-speaker. As a textual critic and a specialist in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I work among a very conservative group emphasizing and, often fostering, sameness. See Robinson's article on this same volume about female editors. 2 Alt-right is a term originally developed by the group itself as a rebranding of multiple hate groups. As defined in Wikipedia, the alt-right is "a loosely-connected and somewhat ill-defined grouping of white supremacists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists and other far-right fringe hate groups." "Alt-Right," Wikipedia, 18 June 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alt-right&oldid=846424649\. Although I consistently use the appellative alt-right in this article, I do this because I consider their tactics, specially developed for the age of social media, unify them as a group not because I believe that there is any legitimacy to any of their claims or that we should not clearly understand them as a hate group closely linked with White supremacists and fascists. the virtual plane is so profoundly tainted by the hetero-patriarchal reality as to allow figures which should have been marginal to take center stage and orchestrate coordinated assaults against what have become easy targets. I conclude that the threats of seemingly fringe individuals cannot be taken lightly in a world in which so many individuals can be manipulated through the smoke and mirrors of the internet. 1. Background 1.1 The importance of GamerGate I have chosen to start with the events surrounding GamerGate because this controversy became one of the most obvious instances in which women were publicly targeted, in this case for their perceived role in influencing game production. 3 GamerGate made headlines in major newspapers as it brought the mainstream public into what became one of the ugliest battles fought online. 4 Most of us did not know enough then to even begin to imagine what the future had in store. Now we know there was a backlash against achievements in terms of civil rights for minorities and women, a 3 The events of GamerGate were preceded in 2007 by the doxxing of technology blogger Kathy Sierra that lead to the closure of her blog and Sierra's leaving Twitter. Jessica Valenti, "How the Web Became