Reframing Hate Speech Against Women Online

Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania)

Deakin Philosophy Seminar Series

This is an in-person event at Deakin's Waterfront Campus as well as online via zoom.

Reframing Hate Speech Against Women Online

This talk discloses a heretofore unexplored framework for thinking through hate speech against women online: a social imaginaries framework. Following Susan James' insight that 'the social imaginary' – those networks of interconnecting symbols that give meaning to our existence, and our capacity (via imagination and collective agency) to generate and modify such networks – is our most basic ontological category, this book first theorises about 'the' social imaginary. There is a 'dominant' social imaginary in any given milieu, however that imaginary is constituted by several 'central' social imaginaries – and some of these imaginaries track identity traits. What's more, surrounding these central imaginaries are marginal imaginaries – alternatives in which we could collectively invest both cognitively and affectively. Most significantly for this book – the focus of which is hate speech against women, online – is the central sexual imaginary, which is patriarchal, and the central digital imaginary, which features a paradoxical mixture of liberal-esque utopianism and dystopianism. The book argues that it is necessary that central (and thus dominant) imaginal revolution occurs – that apt marginal imaginings are taken up and instituted in the ways we live our lives – for harms enacted against women online to desist. The book offers an account of some necessary but not sufficient methods to produce such revolution.

Speaker Bio

Louise Richardson-Self is the author of Hate Speech Against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures (2021) and Justifying Same-Sex Marriage: A Philosophical Analysis (2015). She was awarded an ARC DECRA to research hate speech against women in 2019 and is part of a Discovery team researching religious freedom and LGBT+ non-discrimination funded by the ARC in 2020. She is the Convenor of the AAP's Status of Women in the Philosophy Profession and a Lecturer in philosophy and gender studies at the University of Tasmania.