Abstract
In Exploring Language Aggression against Women, Bou-Franch and her colleagues have critically engaged with a range of media in order to analyse the ways that violence against women is realised in discourse. The aims of the volume are twofold: not only to conduct a feminist analysis of the language of violence against women, but also to develop an activist approach to confronting this issue and working towards gender equality.
One of the ways the authors achieve this aim is through the structure of the volume, each chapter offering a new layer of understanding on the overarching issue of language aggression against women. The first chapter is an introduction by Bou-Franch that provides a thorough history of the language of violence against women as well as establishing the need for the analyses in this volume. In chapter 2, Attenborough analyses newspaper reports covering a very high-profile case of sexual assault in order to demonstrate how the media recontextualises the victim’s rape narratives and reinforces discourses of rape denial. Trinch’s chapter 3 allows the reader to see how this reconstruction is occurring whenever a reader comes across a rape narrative. Trinch analyses both professionally published and online reviews of the book Denial: A Memoir of Terror, in which author Jessica Stern provides details of her own sexual assault, to argue that the prevalence of rape-silencing strategies in reviews shows that feminists have not been successful in politicising rape, which remains a problem that survivors must deal with at an individual level and in silence.
In chapter 4, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich demonstrate how the silencing of the victims as well as of the issue of violence against women is then carried out in online commentary. They perform a feminist critical discourse analysis of YouTube comments posted on public service advertisements against the abuse of women to make evident the discursive strategies that are used to support the perpetuation of violence against women. Issues of implicit sexism suggested before come to prominence in this chapter, as the authors find only rare examples of obvious and unquestionable misogyny, but instead discover forms of sexism that are harder to identify and call out but serve to support and perpetuate violence against women. Santaemilia and Maruenda’s chapter 5 combines corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how two popular Spanish newspapers present violence against women. Their approach uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify how each newspaper evaluates violence against women through their discourse, finding that affective language is used to reinforce the implicitly sexist stereotype of the weak female victim of domestic violence.
Implicit sexism is again brought to the fore in Anderson and Cermele’s analysis of public and private abuse in chapter 6, which compares a corpus of public abusive tweets sent to a particularly well-known feminist and a private corpus including reports from civil protection orders (CPOs). The comparison shows that private abuse is rife with overt sexist language, including misogynistic terms for women and threats of physical and sexual violence, while public abuse was far more likely to contain covert examples, such as reiterating the weakness of women. This confirms the findings of the previous chapter. In the final chapter, Georgalidou utilises a combination of approaches to demonstrate the problematic nature of aggression against women in Greek parliament. Second-wave feminist linguistics allows Georgalidou to target overtly misogynistic language, while third-wave feminist approaches are useful for more covert and insidious forms of misogyny. Georgalidou argues that the harassment of female politicians is tactically used by male politicians to challenge the position of women in parliament.
The organisation of the volume assists the reader in constructing an understanding of the issue of linguistic violence against women. Starting with the media as the focus of analysis, then moving to an analysis of print and online media before focusing on the commentary of Internet users, demonstrates to the reader the path that these ideologies take. The following chapters then demonstrate how these discussions can lead to the occurrence of public covert sexism that reinforces and perpetuates violence against women, emphasising the links between all kinds of abuse against women, from rape to verbal harassment, and its realisations. Through these realisations, the reader is also led to understand the problematic reinforcement of an underlying ideology of patriarchal control over women through the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes and silencing tactics.
One of the strengths of this edited volume is the focus on online discourse, particularly social media and their growing influence on the formation of discourse and ideologies. Overall, this book offers a thorough and diverse discussion of language aggression against women. Bou-Franch and colleagues not only demonstrate how feminist linguistics offers new and valuable insight into the language of violence against women, but they also display this insight in a way that allows the reader to anticipate how it can be improved within society, whether that is by understanding the motives, of the media when it represents violence against women, appreciating that language does not need to be explicitly misogynistic to carry implicit support for violence against women, or by challenging the gendered attacks against female politicians in parliament. By ending each chapter with a call for further research, they have highlighted the continuing nature of this problem and the hope that it will help to contribute to the overarching aim of gender equality.