“Should I Even Be Writing This?”: Public Narratives and Resistance to Online Harassment

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine women’s public narratives of online harassment in order to interrogate the ways women share their stories as a means of enacting modes of resistance in digital spaces. More specifically, we identify four rhetorical strategies women use in their narratives, including calling out harassers and institutions, representing shared experience, disrupting hegemonic narratives of the internet and online harassment and defying harassers. We discuss both the potentials and limitations of each strategy in order to consider the practical implications these strategies have for the ways resistance to online harassment can be enacted. We also reflect on our own narratives of online harassment and consider the ethical implications of researching and reproducing women’s public narratives. In all these ways, we hope to shed light on the ways women use their public narratives of online harassment to seek public change as well as what new understanding can be gained through scholarship on online harassment resistance strategies.