Feminist approaches of cyber-misogyny: a French perspective

Abstract

This article deals with the trends in French scientific research about cyber-misogyny. The generic label “misogyny” refers to different realities on the internet. Yet, they must be understood as part of a continuum of violence against women. As a consequence, the theoretical framework dwells on feminist theories in order to analyze the corpus of scientific articles. Thanks to a network-based methodology, we could identify three lines of research within the disciplinary fields of French sociology and communication studies. The first one highlights the hegemonic sexist and anti-feminist rhetoric thanks to semiotics and discourse analysis. The second one focuses on feminism 2.0 from both a discourse analysis and sociological perspective. The third line of research lays the emphasis on the “ordinary uses” of feminism as an out way from the dialectics between domination and resistance typical of the two others trends. Four contributions stand out: 1) the field of gender and internet studies is scattered and little structured; 2) it can be modelized in three lines of research; 3) it is designed by epistemological debates surrounding the naturalist ideology as well as the concept of gender; 4) this trend of research is still to be developed.