JUEGO Y DESARROLLO

To complete the review of CMC literature, I present a trend that I have detected in the latest coverage of online misogyny both on SNSs and in international media. My case here is that unexpectedly the problems I pinpointed in the previous section have also had a positive consequence. In fact, I suggest that such limits and pitfalls have in some way fostered the development of a newly growing literature made up of mixed forms of contemporary contributions, which are chronologically ascribable to the third wave but which show a very different nature and scope. Since approximately 2013, many women working in different fields – especially journalism and activism – have started to produce contributions aimed at denouncing and analysing the phenomenon of sexist harassment present on Web 2.0.27 _More

27 _{Even if in 2007 the harassment of the tech blogger Kathy Sierra became famous in the USA (see Citron, Hate}

Crimes - Part 1), probably the first report of online misogynistic attack which gained international resonance worldwide is the case of the British scholar Mary Beard in 2013 (see Day).

specifically, a significant number of these contributions focuses on the discursive mechanisms of online misogyny and provides visible proof of it through first-hand experiences, data, and testimonies. It is the case of those women who have become targets of hate speech for actively inhabiting the cybersphere, and who have decided to stand up against this abuse by publicly denouncing it through different types of contributions, like books, newspaper articles, debates, web-based projects, and guidelines to explain, fight, and prevent online harassment.28

Furthermore, this new wave of feminist activism was very helpful for several scholars (see Citron, Hate Crimes; Jane, Misogyny Online; Mantilla, Viral) who are trying to steer academic attention towards online gendered hate speech. By recounting their own experiences or cases that have occurred to other women, in the last few years these researchers have attempted to explain the features of online misogyny and its implications in different scholarly fields, producing ground-breaking analyses of this pervasive phenomenon.

While this trend in academic research has lately developed and spread in several English-speaking countries like the United States, Australia and the UK, a focus on online misogynistic discourse is still consistently absent among scholars working within the Italian academia, where some contributions on antisocial use of the Web can be found in legal and

28 _{As for books, see Warren; Penny (Cybersexism); Ford (Fight); and Jeong. Similarly, examples of newspaper}

articles can be found in the production of several feminist journalists for The Guardian, like Jessica Valenti (e.g., Insults) and Laura Bates (e.g., Online Abuse). Among the most interesting public panels on online harassment there are: the speeches of Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen (Sarkeesian, TEDxWomen) and XOXO Festival (Sarkeesian, XOXO Conference), and the conversation on cybersexism between Emma Jane, Laurie Penny, and Clementine Ford (Festival of Dangerous Ideas) during the 2015 edition of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney. Relevant examples of web-based projects against online misogyny are Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency, and Women Media Center’s Speech Project, chaired by the actress Ashley Judd and directed by the journalist Soraya Chemaly. Both these websites also provide helpful guidelines against Internet attacks (Feminist Frequency, Speak; Women's Media Center, Tools).

psychology studies (see Martoni and Palmirani; Mazzoni et al.; Mazzoni, Cannata and Baiocco), but where research focused on the discursive and gendered dimensions of hate speech is basically absent. While the reasons of this academic vacuum would need a deep analysis which goes beyond the aims of my thesis, I would argue that the lack of a systematic articulation of gender studies in Italian universities may be one of the reasons why Italian academia has not yet developed this kind of interdisciplinary research, and that perhaps for this reason contributions on the actual presence of misogynistic hate speech against Italian women come mainly from the media coverage of this phenomenon. Furthermore, as the critical analysis of my case studies demonstrates in the next chapters, while Australian and American media tend to report cases of harassment against previously unknown women, Italian newspapers usually only denounce abuse received by famous women, like the on-going online attacks to the President of the Chamber Laura Boldrini, who was the first to publicly speak up against this phenomenon in Italy back in 2014 (Davies).

Regardless of these differences among national press coverage and scholarly research, considering the trend at a broad international level, I suggest here that these mixed (auto)biographical recounts of online misogyny have generated a Feminist Academic Activism 2.0 – i.e., the cyber version of what Michelle Lazar calls “feminist analytical [academic] activism” (145) – which I explain in the next chapter, and which is essential to study the discursive strategies, sociocultural origins, and repercussions of this phenomenon. Indeed, these contributions, despite their origin in grassroots activism, have unconsciously overcome the problems of the three waves of CMC studies, and they have instinctively complied with four of the nine solutions suggested by Emma Jane (What Flaming? 80-81) to solve such academic pitfalls, in particular the need to adopt a broader definition of flaming to avoid its undercoding, to focus on new and different research questions (e.g., by investigating the consequences of online harassment), to understand the evolving nature of online platforms, and finally to quote

explicit examples of abuse. These extra-academic contributions have not lost themselves in complex working definitions, and they have provided what much scholarly literature previously failed to recognise, namely the identification of the strong gendered nature of this discourse through a primary focus on the experience of targeted women and through clear examples of online abuse. Thus, in conclusion, this last issue has overcome the problem of unspeakability of harassment on social media. It also succeeded in recognising that different abusive acts – like gendered cyberbullying and doxxing – are tactics whose common denominator is the misogynistic prejudice that persists in our societies. For this reason, these new contributions have been the most relevant references for my research and they have helped me develop a specific methodology for the creation of my database and for the critical analysis of its case studies, as the next chapter explains.