A Woman’s Room Online

 

An interesting artistic representation of how online harassment impacts women:

Amy has created an exhibit called A Woman’s Room Online: a free-standing 8×10 foot room that is being installed in the L.A. Center for Inquiry office. It will look superficially much like any office in which a woman might work, with the usual accoutrements.

 

But each object will be covered with messages these women have received on Twitter, Facebook, and email. Real messages, actual things sent to them that are the vilest, most hateful examples of the worst humanity has to offer.

I’ve received a variety of gross and abusive messages and feedback for expressing my opinions online. Much of this was explicitly gendered. Much of it was anonymous, but not all. I use a pseudonym here so I don’t have to expect more of the same tomorrow.

So the concept behind this artwork is quite compelling to me: it captures something of the ways in which I’ve experienced this kind of abuse as inescapably permeating my environment, both at work and elsewhere. It helps to make vivid what it feels like to be told I should just ignore it or “brush it off”, or that it’s not a big deal.

Also relevant in this connection:

Women take online harassment more seriously not because we are hysterics, but because we reasonably have to. There is no gender equivalence in terms of the denigrating, hostile and sometimes exceedingly dangerous environmental effect that misogyny has, online or off.

Call For Abstracts: Dominating Speech

Conference at UConn, November 21-23


Keynotes: Jason Stanley (Yale)
 Ishani Maitra (Michigan) Richard Wilson (UConn)


The Injustice League in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut seeks abstracts on topics related to the conference theme. Suggested topics include: hate speech, slurs, propaganda, slut-shaming, bragging, and gossip.

We seek philosophical work from a variety of subfields, including: ethics, political philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of language, epistemology (e.g. epistemic injustice), feminist philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophy of race.
Please send abstracts of 750 – 1000 words, prepared for blind-review, to our graduate student project assistant, alycia.laguardia@uconn.edu by September 22th, 2014. Please put “DS Submission” in the subject line of the email. Decisions will be made shortly thereafter.

If you have any questions pertaining to the conference, please email: Suzy.Killmister@uconn.edu

Papers resulting from the conference will be strongly considered for publication in a special volume of Social Theory and Practice focused on the conference theme, guest edited by Hallie Liberto.