I am the price of your freedom: Gender, Islam, and cyber-harassment in the aftermath of France’s Affaire Mila

Abstract

This article discusses l’Affaire Mila (the Mila Affair), a 2021 landmark case of cyber-harassment in France: Mila, a queer French teen, experienced misogynist and homophobic cyber-harassment and death threats after criticising Islam on social media. State prosecutors launched criminal investigations and apprehended 13 individuals out of hundreds of Mila’s harassers. In July 2021, 11 of the 13 defendants were convicted of cyber-harassment in a widely publicised criminal trial that marked France’s first landmark ruling on cyber-harassment. The article considers the legal and social aftereffects of Mila’s cyber-harassment trial, contending that the ruling reinforced how gendered and homophobic cyber-harassment could only become intelligible and litigable to the state when couched in the idiom of secular injury as an attack on secular-liberal sexual freedoms. Under French laws regulating freedom of expression and hate speech, the anti-Islam harassment faced by Muslim women, online or offline, tended to be justified as harmless insults to religion – the right to blasphemy secured under the principle of laïcité. The article argues that the ample state support afforded to Mila, taking her case all the way to trial, stands in stark contrast to the muted response of French leaders to the cycles of gendered and anti-Islam cyber-harassment that target Muslim women daily.