The online world: A space for women?

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), legal frameworks, and processes of cultural and political change, with particular attention to the Italian and French legal contexts. Drawing on three complementary theoretical frameworks — J.L. Austin and Judith Butler’s philosophy of language, which theorizes online hate speech as a performative act with material silencing effects; Hannah Arendt’s distinction between moral fault and collective political responsibility; and Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson’s established-outsider framework as a sociological account of digital exclusion — the article analyses the structural mechanisms through which the architecture of online spaces produces and sustains conditions of vulnerability for women. It further investigates the relationship between legal change and cultural transformation in the digital era, examining how different constitutional traditions in Italy and France configure the tension between freedom of expression and the protection of dignity online, and how media discourse around the so-called cancel culture has been mobilized to obstruct anti-discrimination legislation. The Ligue du LOL affair, a case of coordinated online harassment within French journalism, is used to illustrate these theoretical propositions and their legal and institutional implications.

Keywords: Technology-facilitated gender-based violence, hate speech, anti-discrimination legislation, collective responsibility.