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Gelms- Dissertation Final.pdf (2.3 MB)

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Volatile Visibility: The Effects of Online Harassment on Feminist Circulation and Public Discourse

Gelms, Bridget
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7860-9102
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1524157800257721

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
As our digital environments—in their inhabitants, communities, and cultures—have evolved, harassment, unfortunately, has become the status quo on the internet (Duggan, 2014 & 2017; Jane, 2014b). Harassment is an issue that disproportionately affects women, particularly women of color (Citron, 2014; Mantilla, 2015), LGBTQIA+ women (Herring et al., 2002; Warzel, 2016), and women who engage in social justice, civil rights, and feminist discourses (Cole, 2015; Davies, 2015; Jane, 2014a). Whitney Phillips (2015) notes that it’s politically significant to pay attention to issues of online harassment because this kind of invective calls “attention to dominant cultural mores” (p. 7). Keeping our finger on the pulse of such attitudes is imperative to understand who is excluded from digital publics and how these exclusions perpetuate racism and sexism to “preserve the internet as a space free of politics and thus free of challenge to white masculine heterosexual hegemony” (Higgin, 2013, n.p.). While rhetoric and writing as a field has a long history of examining myriad exclusionary practices that occur in public discourses, we still have much work to do in understanding how online harassment, particularly that which is gendered, manifests in digital publics and to what rhetorical effect. In this dissertation, I critically examine how harassment is enabled and circulated by digital platforms as well as the effects it has on people, online cultures, and social media design and policy. I outline a feminist theory of what I call “volatile visibility,” the correlation between a woman’s circulation online and the amount of harassment she experiences. To document and analyze the effects of volatile visibility, I conducted a survey and in-depth interviews with women who have experienced severe forms of online harassment. Their stories reveal how online harassment works to maintain existing cultural boundaries that exclude women from public discourses. Therefore, I argue online harassment, in its influence on how we exist and interact online, dampens women’s rhetorical influence and limits their opportunities for expression. This work has implications for social media rhetorics, circulation, and digital methodologies. I also present pedagogical implications, arguing we should incorporate concerns of online harassment into our digital writing courses to help students understand how harassment influences who can safely engage in public discourse online and how they can do so. I conclude with advice for what we can do as researchers, designers, and citizens to intervene in cultures of online harassment.
Jason Palmeri (Advisor)
Tim Lockridge (Committee Member)
Michele Simmons (Committee Member)
Lisa Weems (Committee Member)
Composition; Rhetoric
social media; digital rhetoric; feminist rhetoric; harassment; composition

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Gelms, B. (2018). Volatile Visibility: The Effects of Online Harassment on Feminist Circulation and Public Discourse [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1524157800257721

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Gelms, Bridget. Volatile Visibility: The Effects of Online Harassment on Feminist Circulation and Public Discourse. 2018. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1524157800257721.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Gelms, Bridget. "Volatile Visibility: The Effects of Online Harassment on Feminist Circulation and Public Discourse." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1524157800257721

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1524157800257721
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This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.