Hooligan Sparrow: Representation of sexual assault in Chinese cinema, feminist activism and the limits of #MeToo in China

Asian Cinema ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirela David
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Chinese Cinema ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Female Directors ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Female Director

Hooligan Sparrow breaks with many taboos in Chinese cinema. It is the first internationally acclaimed documentary by a Chinese female director to centre upon investigating the activities of Ye Haiyan, a Chinese sex and women’s rights activist, as well as to address the politically sensitive topic of sexual assault in China. This is the first study to examine the cinematic contributions of Wang Nanfu and Ye Haiyan’s activism and feminist writings posted on Ye’s online social media accounts on Sina Weibo and Twitter. I unpack the power dynamics in this documentary as well as the interplay between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the female rights activist’s subjectivity. This study also investigates how masculine aesthetic representations of sexual assault in Chinese cinema have blurred the issue of consent and shows how the subjectivities of female directors like Wang Nanfu and Vivian Qu bring more impactful representations of sexual violence in Chinese cinema.

scholarly journals Sexual Violence and Victim Blaming in Nigeria

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Emmanuel E. Nwusulor ◽  
◽  
Ifeoma I. Onwubiko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
African Country ◽  
Victim Blaming ◽  
Health Consequences ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Major Factors

Aims and Objectives To determine the trend and pattern of sexual violence and victim blaming in Nigeria, which is associated with a range of health consequences, to publish the trend and proffer solutions on how to stem the tide. Methods Questionnaires were administered to individuals physically by hand as well as electronically via online social media groups. Results In this study carried out between July 2019 and August 2020, the opinion of 251 respondents comprising 153 males (61%) and 98 females (39%) between ages 23 and 60 years, were sought concerning who to blame in a sexual violence event: 150 (60%) comprising 120 males (45%) and 30 females (15%) blamed the victim: 80 (31%) comprising 26 males (10%) and 54 females (21%) blamed the perpetrators, while 21 (9%) comprising 7 males (3%) and 14 females (6%) were indifferent. Conclusion Victim blaming is prevalent in Nigeria and this has been one of the major factors that make sexual violence the fastest growing crime in this most populated Sub-Saharan African Country.

Social Media Activism and Convergence in Tweet Topics After the Initial #MeToo Movement for Two Distinct Groups of Twitter Users

2021 ◽  
pp. 088626052110014
Author(s):  
Jason M. Baik ◽  
Thet H. Nyein ◽  
Sepideh Modrek
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Frequency Analysis ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Bigram Frequency ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Twitter Users

Online social media movements are now common and support cultural discussions on difficult health and social topics. The #MeToo movement, focusing on the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment, has been one of the largest and most influential online movements. Our study examines topics of conversation on Twitter by supporters of the #MeToo movement and by Twitter users who were uninvolved in the movement to explore the extent to which tweet topics for these two groups converge over time. We identify and collect one year’s worth of tweets for supporters of the #MeToo movement ( N = 168 users; N = 105,538 tweets) and users not involved in the movement ( N = 147 users; N = 112,301 tweets referred to as the Neutral Sample). We conduct topic frequency analysis and implement an unsupervised machine learning topic modeling algorithm, latent Dirichlet allocation, to explore topics of discussion on Twitter for these two groups of users before and after the initial #MeToo movement. Our results suggest that supporters of #MeToo discussed different topics compared to the Neutral Sample of Twitter users before #MeToo with some overlap on politics. The supporters were already discussing sexual assault and harassment issues six months before #MeToo, and discussion on this topic increased 13.7-fold in the six months after. For the Neutral Sample, sexual assault and harassment was not a key topic of discussion on Twitter before #MeToo, but there was some limited increase afterward. Results of bigram frequency analysis and topic modeling showed a clear increase in topic related to gender for the supporters of #MeToo but gave mixed results for the Neutral Sample comparison group. Our results suggest limited shifts in the conversation on Twitter for the Neutral Sample. Our methods and results have implications for measuring the extent to which online social media movements, like #MeToo, reach a broad audience.

The rhythms of shame in digital sexual assault: Rhythmic resistance and the repeated assault

First Monday ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Signe Uldbjerg
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Data Persistence ◽  
Social Media Presence

The non-consensual distribution of intimate images is a highly mediated kind of sexual violence. This article shows how data persistence and shareability constitute victim experiences of digital sexual assault as ‘repeated assaults’; as recurring instances of exposure and shaming facilitated by mediated rhythms and circulation. I also show how the participants of this study, young women victimised by digital assault, managed to create stability and resist the rhythms of their assault by modifying their social media presence and politicising their experiences.

scholarly journals The Ukrainian-Russian Virtual Flashmob against Sexual Assault

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feruza Aripova ◽  
Janet Elise Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
New York University ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
University Center ◽  
Female Promiscuity ◽  
The Impact

Feruza Aripova – PhD Candidate in World History, Northeastern University; Center Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University; Visiting Scholar, Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University, USA. Email: [email protected] Janet Elise Johnson – Professor of Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Visiting Scholar, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University, New York, USA. Email: [email protected] This article examines the 2016 Ukrainian-Russian virtual flashmob that took on the issues of sexual assault, including childhood sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape. Begun by a Ukrainian activist on Facebook, the flashmob resulted in more than ten thousand original posts and led to a broader discussion on violence against women in Ukrainian and Russian. Many women (and some men) for the first time publicly disclosed excruciating details of physical and psychological coercion and the lasting trauma they suffered. The commonalities across the posts and the public visibility of the flashmob directly confronted the stigma attached to the topic of sexual violence. The media reactions to the flashmob ranged from empathy toward the victims and condemnation of the perpetrators to criticism of female promiscuity and victim blaming. The flashmob had concrete results: criminal cases were opened against teachers at one of Moscow’s prominent public schools and a series of initiatives were directed against sexual violence in Ukraine. This article provides the first systematic documentation and analysis of these posts as well as their reception in mass media and the impact so far of the flashmob, situating this flashmob as the same kind of activism that was seen in the bigger 2017 #MeToo campaign. In these ways, we contribute to what little social scientists know about violence against women in the post-Soviet region and assess this new tactic of feminist activism. Unsurprisingly, such activism does not change societies in one fell swoop, but the Ukrainian-Russian flashmob shows how virtual activism can nudge towards progressive change.

scholarly journals The use of social media and popular culture to advance cross-cultural understanding

Comunicar ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (51) ◽  
pp. 63-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sait Tuzel ◽  
Renee Hobbs
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Learning Activity ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Redes Sociales ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Cultura Popular ◽  
Use Of Social Media

Although we live in a global society, educators face many challenges in finding meaningful ways to connect students to people of other cultures. This paper offers a case study of a collaboration between teachers in the US and Turkey, where 7th grade students interacted with each other via online social media as a means to promote cultural understanding. In a close analysis of a single learning activity, we found that children had opportunities to share ideas informally through social media, using their digital voices to share meaning using online writing, posting of images and hyperlinks. This study found that students valued the opportunity to develop relationships with each other and generally engaged in sharing their common interests in Hollywood movies, actors, celebrities, videogames and television shows. However, not all teachers valued the use of popular culture as a means to find common ground. Indeed, teachers had widely differing perspectives of the value of this activity. Through informal communication about popular culture in a «Getting to Know You» activity, students themselves discovered that their common ground knowledge tended to be US-centric, as American students lacked access to Turkish popular culture. However, the learning activity enabled students themselves to recognize asymmetrical power dynamics that exist in global media culture. Si bien vivimos en una sociedad global, los educadores se enfrentan a numerosos desafíos a la hora de hallar formas significativas de conectar a los alumnos con gente de otras culturas. Este artículo muestra un caso práctico de colaboración entre profesores de los Estados Unidos y Turquía, en el que alumnos de séptimo grado interactuaron entre sí a través de las redes sociales con el fin de promover la comprensión cultural. Al analizar una única actividad de aprendizaje hallamos que los alumnos tenían la oportunidad de compartir ideas informalmente a través de las redes sociales, usando su voz digital para compartir significados mediante la escritura online, publicación de imágenes e hipervínculos. Este estudio halló que los alumnos valoraban la oportunidad de relacionarse entre sí y tendían a compartir su interés común en películas de Hollywood, actores, famosos, videojuegos y programas de televisión. Sin embargo, no todos los profesores valoraban el uso de la cultura popular como medio para la búsqueda de puntos en común. En efecto, los profesores tenían perspectivas muy distintas sobre el valor de esta actividad. Mediante la comunicación informal en torno a la cultura popular en una actividad de conocimiento mutuo, los propios alumnos descubrieron que sus conocimientos en común tendían a estar centrados en los Estados Unidos, en tanto en cuanto los alumnos americanos no tenían acceso a la cultura popular turca. Sin embargo, la actividad de aprendizaje permitió a los propios alumnos reconocer las dinámicas de poder asimétrico que existen en la cultura mediática global.

A survivor just like us? Lena Dunham and the politics of transmedia authorship and celebrity feminism

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rona Murray
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Complex Culture

Lena Dunham is a modern celebrity and television producer-writer who is important in her willingness to self-identify as a feminist, and to engage in feminist activism on social media and in her memoir writing. Her writing in her successful television series, Girls (2012–17), has already raised questions of authenticity. This article develops this analysis further by considering how Dunham’s situation, as a transmedia author, complicates this authenticity, particularly through her construction of ‘affective ordinariness’, a key aspect of her identity as a feminist activist. Her various personas, including that of the celebrity feminist, highlight the ‘contradictions’ which exist within the current complex culture of postfeminism and the perception of new feminisms. Nowhere are these contradictions more apparent than in the dissonance created by Dunham’s transmedia voice in the matter of rape and sexual violence.

scholarly journals A novel few-shot learning based multi-modality fusion model for COVID-19 rumor detection from online social media

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e688
Author(s):  
Heng-yang Lu ◽  
Chenyou Fan ◽  
Xiaoning Song ◽  
Wei Fang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Fusion Model ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Detection Techniques ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Meta Learning ◽  
Rumor Detection

Background Rumor detection is a popular research topic in natural language processing and data mining. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, related rumors have been widely posted and spread on online social media, which have seriously affected people’s daily lives, national economy, social stability, etc. It is both theoretically and practically essential to detect and refute COVID-19 rumors fast and effectively. As COVID-19 was an emergent event that was outbreaking drastically, the related rumor instances were very scarce and distinct at its early stage. This makes the detection task a typical few-shot learning problem. However, traditional rumor detection techniques focused on detecting existed events with enough training instances, so that they fail to detect emergent events such as COVID-19. Therefore, developing a new few-shot rumor detection framework has become critical and emergent to prevent outbreaking rumors at early stages. Methods This article focuses on few-shot rumor detection, especially for detecting COVID-19 rumors from Sina Weibo with only a minimal number of labeled instances. We contribute a Sina Weibo COVID-19 rumor dataset for few-shot rumor detection and propose a few-shot learning-based multi-modality fusion model for few-shot rumor detection. A full microblog consists of the source post and corresponding comments, which are considered as two modalities and fused with the meta-learning methods. Results Experiments of few-shot rumor detection on the collected Weibo dataset and the PHEME public dataset have shown significant improvement and generality of the proposed model.

Virtualized Violence and Anonymous Juries: Unpacking Steubenville’s “Big Red” Sexual Assault Case and the Role of Social Media

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 477-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Fairbairn ◽  
Dale Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Group Response ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
Sexual Assault Case ◽  
Forms Of Violence

In this article, we analyze a 2012 sexual assault case from Steubenville, Ohio, and the hacktivist “Anonymous” group response to the sexual assault. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s discussion of dromoscopy and concept of virtualization, we demonstrate the speed at which a “local” sexual assault can be exposed and go viral and how broader publics can be interpellated as bystanders in such cases. We show how emerging forms of online activism are exposing and contesting these new forms of violence against women and consider their potential to erode criminal justice blockages to justice for survivors of sexual violence.

Boards of directors in Russian publicly traded companies: the gender aspect

2018 ◽  
pp. 142-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. A. Garanina ◽  
A. A. Muravyev
Keyword(s):  
Boards Of Directors ◽  
Company Performance ◽  
Corporate Boards ◽  
Publicly Traded ◽  
Publicly Traded Companies ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Female Directors ◽  
Female Director ◽  
Gender Aspect ◽  
Longitudinal Dataset

This article studies the gender composition of corporate boards of Russian companies, including its relation to company performance. The analysis is based on a unique longitudinal dataset of virtually all Russian companies whose shares were traded on the stock market in 1998-2014. It shows a relatively small representation of women, just 12% of all the seats, while about 40% of the companies did not have any female director. At the same time, both the share of companies that appoint female directors and the share of female directors on boards show a clear upward trend. The econometric analysis suggests a positive link between the presence of female directors on boards and company performance, especially when firms appoint several, rather than one, female directors.

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