Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 218
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Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-5381-4779-5 • Hardback • October 2021 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-5381-4781-8 • Paperback • August 2023 • $40.00 • (£30.00)
978-1-5381-4780-1 • eBook • October 2021 • $38.00 • (£30.00)
Louise Richardson-Self is lecturer in philosophy and gender studies at the University of Tasmania. She currently holds two prestigious Australian Research Council grants investigating women’s and queer rights and in 2019 she was the recipient of the Annette Baier Prize awarded by the Australasian Association of Philosophy for most outstanding philosophical paper published by an Australasian woman in 2018. In 2017, she was a Residential Research Fellow with the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. In 2016, she was awarded the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ Max Crawford Medal, Australia’s most prestigious early-career award for achievement and promise in the humanities. She is the author of Justifying Same-Sex Marriage: A Philosophical Investigation (2015).
Introduction: Hate Speech Against Women Online
Chapter 1: Social Imaginaries and Imagined Subjects
Chapter 2: Sexual Imaginaries
Chapter 3: Conceptualising Hate Speech
Chapter 4: Analysing Hate Speech Against Women Online
Chapter 5: Countermeasures Against Online Hate Speech
Chapter 6: Challenging Images of Cyberspace
Conclusion: Imaginal (R)Evolution
This book is a superb analysis of the urgent matter of online hate speech, particularly online misogyny. It asks the questions: what does such the speech do, who does it do it to, and how can it be countered? Richardson-Self approaches this through the framework of the social imaginary and articulates the damaging ,and often pre-reflective, imaginaries which both enable such speech and which it reinforces and reproduces. She convincingly demonstrates that such practices of abuse damage groups and not just individuals and explores the range of strategies, legal and other which can be employed to counter such damage. This includes the search for counter imaginings which can take affective hold. There are no easy solutions but we all need this book to get clear exactly what is at issue and to creatively inform our pathways of resistance. This is sophisticated philosophical analysis applied in an exemplary way to one of the key issues of our times.
— Kathleen Lennon, , professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Hull
This timely and thought-provoking book presents a brilliant and compelling analysis of online hate speech against women. At the same time, it offers an innovative yet pragmatic approach to ameliorating the harm inflicted by contemporary digital imaginaries. Richardson-Self is at the forefront of an emergent counter-imaginary movement that speaks back to spiteful power with force and dignity.
— Moira Gatens, Challis Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney