Related Papers
Social tagging and networked misogyny on creepshot websites
Chrissy Thompson, Mark A Wood
A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voyeur of the late 1990’s, disseminating and sharing non-consensual sexual photographs viathe Internet. Alongside upskirting, creepshots are a recent and harmful iteration of sexual images that are captured and distributed without consent online. In addition to examining the changing conditions for image production, research into such non-consensual sexual photographs of women must take into account the changing context of information storage, classification and retrieval. In this paper, we therefore examine how the 21st century discourse network of computational and mobile media has transformed the storage, classification, retrieval and consumption of non-consensual sexual photographs of women. Through incorporating collective social tagging systems, we argue that creepshot websites have generated folksonomies of misogyny: multi-user tagging practices that function to tag content in a way that fosters harmful sexist attitudes. Such folksonomies of misogyny, we argue, not only offer a barometer of the vocabulary used to objectify women, but also represent an entirely new gendered regime of visibility where women’s bodies are recorded, tagged, fragmented, and aggregated for consumption.
"I'm a Creep, I'm a Weirdo": Street Photography in the Service of the Male Gaze
Stuart Hargreaves
This chapter considers two phenomena, both of which involve the digitally-mediated collection and sharing of images of people without their knowledge or consent. In the first, “creepshots,” individuals take surreptitious photographs and share them on online message boards. In the second, individuals scour virtual street maps (such as Google Street View) for “notable” images that are then placed elsewhere online for others to review. In both cases, there is a large and anonymous audience viewing the images. In both cases, women in public or quasi-public spaces are the overwhelming targets of this digital gaze. In both cases, the online commentary quickly becomes sexual in nature, and is frequently overtly hostile. This chapter argues that these practices implicate different kinds of harms — broader, more diffuse — than conventional privacy invasions. As such, rather than being understood through the rubric of ‘privacy’ they are better understood as a new form of public surveillance. Consequently, legal mechanisms grounded in the typical (liberal) dichotomous understanding of what is public and what is private are unlikely to prove an adequate solution.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology
Beyond the ‘sext’: Technology-facilitated sexual violence and harassment against adult women (with Nicola Henry)
2014 •
Anastasia Powell
Young people's use of technology as a tool for the negotiation of their sexual identities and encounters has increasingly become a focal point in popular and scholarly discussion. Much of this debate centres on the sending of explicit sexual images and/or video (‘selfies’ or ‘sexting’) by mobile phone, email or social media. In Australia and elsewhere, legislative frameworks have arguably over-regulated or criminalised young people's consensual, digital, sexual communications. Equally, the law has failed to respond to the harm that is experienced by victims of non-consensual making and/or distribution of such sexual images. In this paper, we examine the non-consensual creation and distribution of sexual images in the context of harassment, stalking and family or intimate violence. We argue that harmful digital communications are often framed as a problem of user naiveté rather than gender-based violence. Moreover, we argue that current legal and policy approaches fail to adequately capture the social and psychological harm that results from the use of sexual imagery to harass, coerce or blackmail women. We draw on preliminary data from a larger project investigating adult women's experiences of technology-mediated sexual violence and harassment.
Beyond the ‘sext’: technology-facilitated sexual violence and harassment against adult women
Nicola Henry
Young people's use of technology as a tool for the negotiation of their sexual identities and encounters has increasingly become a focal point in popular and scholarly discussion. Much of this debate centres on the sending of explicit sexual images and/or video (‘selfies’ or ‘sexting’) by mobile phone, email or social media. In Australia and elsewhere, legislative frameworks have arguably over-regulated or criminalised young people's consensual, digital, sexual communications. Equally, the law has failed to respond to the harm that is experienced by victims of non-consensual making and/or distribution of such sexual images. In this paper, we examine the non-consensual creation and distribution of sexual images in the context of harassment, stalking and family or intimate violence. We argue that harmful digital communications are often framed as a problem of user naiveté rather than gender-based violence. Moreover, we argue that current legal and policy approaches fail to adequately capture the social and psychological harm that results from the use of sexual imagery to harass, coerce or blackmail women. We draw on preliminary data from a larger project investigating adult women's experiences of technology-mediated sexual violence and harassment.
Feminist Media Studies
Feminist Media Studies Special Issue on Online Misogyny
2018 •
Debbie Ging, Eugenia Siapera
This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet’s anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cultural and gender-political factors. This collection of work is intended to lend focus and cohesion to a growing body of research in this area; to map, contextualise and take stock of current frameworks, making scholars aware of one another’s work and methodologies, and hopefully forging new interdisciplinary collaborations and directions for future work. Crucially, we move beyond the Anglophone world, to include perspectives from countries which have different gender- political and technological landscapes. In addition to mapping the new misogyny, several contributions also address digital feminist responses, evaluating their successes, limitations and impact on the shape of digital gender politics in future.
MDPI Encyclopedia
Image-Based Sexual Abuse: Online Gender-Sexual Violations
2023 •
Matthew Hall
Image-based sexual abuse describes the offline or online non-consensual sharing of real or fake images or videos with (un)known others of a person that are either sexually explicit or sexually suggestive. New information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide many open-ended and undefined possibilities for image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), such as ‘revenge p*rnography’, ‘upskirting’, deepfake p*rnography, sexual spycamming, and cyberflashing, to name just a few. These forms of abuse refer to the online, and also at times offline, non-consensual distribution or sharing of explicit images or videos of someone else by ex-partners, partners, others, or hackers seeking revenge, entertainment, or peer group status. The vast majority of these are committed by men against women. Given the many adverse impacts on physical and psychological health and well-being it has on its victim-survivors, exploring this form of online gender-sexual abuse and violation becomes an important endeavor. Situating the discussion within debates on gender and sexuality, the entry discusses the increasing use of new technologies for online gender-sexual abuse and violation, highlighting the motivations of those perpetrating IBSA, the negative physical and psychological impacts of IBSA on victim-survivors, and what has been, and could be, done to combat image-based sexual abuses and other misuses of new technologies, notably through legal, policy, and practice interventions within and between nations.
Angela Washko
The internet has always been a boys club. Women who choose to delve deeper into the net than their email inboxes needn't look very far to find themselves bombarded by the proliferation of archaic negative gender-based stereotypes in almost every digital space, including online games, meme culture, forums, online journalism, YouTube, and beyond. Every major platform and communication model online appears to be a megaphone for men to remind women that women don't belong or that they are only allowed to participate if they accept their role as objects of admiration or quiet, non-opinionated users, in the event they aren't deemed attractive enough for the former role. It is not uncommon for women online to be stalked, to receive death threats, and to be doxxed. And it is implicitly accepted that women will be under constant scrutiny in most digital spaces, especially if they dare to question these pervasive misogynistic field conditions. These threats can be alarming even when exclusively digital, as women have been raped in online spaces as early as 1993 (Dibbell, 1993). *Published by Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling
Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance.
2016 - Data Doubles and Pure Virtue(ality): Headless Selfies, Scopophilia, and ‘Surveillance p*rn
2016 •
Lara Karaian
The Selfie and the slu*t: Bodies, Technology, and Public Shame
Nishant Shah
The selfie, which has become a default aesthetic of self-representation, is either mocked at as a fad, or considered as a digital photograph. This paper looks at the phenomenon of "selfie-shaming" to see how either of these approaches of dismissal or trying to regulate the selfie through the same regulatory frameworks as the photograph fail to capture the complex practices of body, technology, control, and regulation that are implicated in this phenomenon. In looking at selfie-shaming and the subsequent processes of "slu*t shaming", it argues that we need to think of selfies not only as cultural artefacts but also as born digital objects to show how it produces new regimes of control and visibility of women's bodies online. Drawing from software studies, cyber-feminism and digital cultures, it constructs the case of #GamerGate to show how we need to expand the scope of women's problems of consent and agency online beyond the instances of revenge and non-consensual p*rnography.
From sex tapes to revenge p*rn: Construction of a genre
M Nabil
This paper makes an attempt to explain the construction of a newly developed genre called revenge p*rn flourishing in new media. The study analyzes the patterns of production and display of revenge p*rn content as well as the mechanisms of the site that archives such materials. The analyses reveal that young women are more frequently exposed in the revenge p*rn website. Biased and sexualized representation of their body coupled with misogynistic labeling present them as objects of pleasure and desire in front of a majority of hetero sexual male audience who further objectify the victim by making lustful and/or derogative comments . The results of this study suggest that the development of such a genre cannot be attributed only to liberatory and/or victimizing effects of the electronic space. Rather, social power structures based on discourses like gender, heterosexuality and capitalist patriarchy that exploit the surveillance mechanism of the internet are significantly influencing both individual uses of the internet as well as its apparatus and technologies. These are the major forces contributing to the institutionalization and commercialization of revenge p*rn in new media. This is a case study based investigation that uses both content analysis and discourse analysis as methods to interpret the revenge p*rn genre in new media.
