Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research by Dustin Harp & Jaime Loke & Ingrid Bachmann

Author:Dustin Harp & Jaime Loke & Ingrid Bachmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319908380
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Overture

Lucía

We started writing this chapter a few days after Lucía Pérez died in an emergency room in Mar del Plata, an Argentine city off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, 250 miles from Buenos Aires. She was drugged and gang-raped. Her assailants also impaled her, washed her, dressed her up, and then dropped her off at the hospital unconscious, declaring she had overdosed. But she did not. She died because of the tortures she suffered. Lucía was 16 years old.

Despite the tragic events that led to Lucía’s death, readers’ comments about the event pointed to the “responsibility” of the girl for what happened to her and highlighted her parents’ “negligence.” Comments such as “she was actively looking for drugs,” “she trusted mere acquaintances,” “she looks high in her pictures,” “she got into a stranger’s car,” “she was so pretty,” “parents have lost their authority over their kids,” demonstrate how Lucía and her parents were the ones held responsible for her death in the words of news readers.

Obviously, there are contested discourses deployed in the digital public sphere, where women and feminist organizations fight against gender stereotypes, through speeches mobilizing a feminist ethics of care and denouncing violence against women. In fact, Lucía’s murder triggered such rage across the continent that it mobilized women’s marches in many countries, organized by grassroots movements and feminist NGOs, throughout online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of women of all ages shared their sexual harassment experiences on their online profiles as a way to increase consciousness and shed light upon the pervasiveness of the violence against women. Some of these experiences likely gained media attention due to the relatively high profile of other women sharing their experiences1 in a wave that is similar to what occurred in the United States, which was provoked by a video published by The Washington Post in which Donald Trump, then Republican presidential nominee, made lewd comments about women in a 2005 conversation. His extremely abusive language and his lack of recognition and self-responsibility resulted in an aftermath that motivated thousands of women to share their own experiences on Twitter under the hashtag #notokay and encouraged press coverage on the topic beyond the narrow focus of the US presidential campaign (e.g., Wang 2016).

Both the discursive and symbolic construction of girls and teenagers as responsible for their safety is still mobilizing the highly fragmented digital public sphere in South America. The objectification of girls and women is one of many dimensions of a broader frame under which they are violently portrayed, constrained, and even bullied. Placing the responsibility upon the victims of sexual assault is part of a larger continuum of violence women face in South America, both offline and online. Further, feminist organizations, activists, and scholars consider highly restricted access to safe abortions in the region a serious problem for women’s human rights and a part of a continuum of violence (Casas and Vivaldi 2013; Langer 2002; Segato 2003). Indeed, public campaigns and pro-choice advocacy in the

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