Exploring Language Aggression against Women: (86 Benjamins Current Topics)

Exploring Language Aggression against Women presents a collection of systematic studies that delve into the critical role of language in constructing violence, creating inequality, and justifying discrimination against women. Drawing on a range of discourse analytic methods, this volume subjects to scrutiny mediated and non-mediated (re)tellings and reactions to rape and sexual assault, newspaper reports of intimate partner abuse, YouTube responses to public service advertising for abuse prevention, and verbal sexism on Twitter and in legal and parliamentary contexts. Special attention is paid to the multiple forms that verbal violence against women can take, and its pervasiveness in contemporary Western societies, precisely at a time when the need for, and usefulness of, feminism are continuously being questioned. Exploring Language Aggression against Women will be of relevance to scholars and students interested in gender, language and sexuality, discourse, media, feminism, and communication. Most articles were originally published in Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict Vol. 2:2 (2014).

Review :
The pervasive and widespread nature of violence against women is surely sustained by discourses that excuse, minimize and deny its existence. This volume is unique in bringing together critical analyses of such ‘discourses’ as they appear in a variety of institutional and online contexts. In its deconstruction of many of the unquestioned assumptions surrounding gendered violence, the collection is a timely and important political intervention into what the World Health Organization has labeled a ‘global health problem of epidemic proportions'. The collection of essays Exploring Language Aggression against Women documents consistent patterns in the way that aggression, violence and rape instigated by men against women is reported in the press. The essays also focus on the way that linguistic aggression manifests itself on social media. Consistently throughout this collection of essays is an engagement with complex notions of aggression and a questioning of conventional associations of gender and aggression. Nevertheless, the essays are clear in demonstrating the way that rape and male violence towards women are downplayed or erased in accounts of violence against women. This important collection of essays is a vital tool for interrogating the way that violence against women is erased and downgraded in the press and on social media, and the way that threats of violence serve a silencing role on social media. How timely now. How deeply needed. The book offers powerful perspectives. This is an important book to read for anyone interested in the problem of violence, especially violence against women. In a society where violence is so widely misrepresented and misunderstood, work that reveals the flaws and problems of our social responses cannot be underestimated. People often assume that words do no harm. This volume challenges the idea that when people talk, they cannot injure others. Exploring Language Aggression against Women is an important and timely collection that examines how words, texts, and media representations condone, minimize, and sometimes enact gendered violence. I recommend the book to scholars of communication, discourse, media, and gender studies. Patricia Bou-Franch’s excellent volume offers a varied and timely collection of papers that bring the reader face to face with the many ways in which language contributes to both linguistic and non-linguistic forms of violence against women in contemporary society. While there is much here that makes disturbing reading, the careful analyses that inform the papers in this volume show why this is an issue that we cannot afford to ignore.