Thesis
Gender, reputation and believability in mediated representations about sexual harassment and assault
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2026
- Thesis identifier
- T17657
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202163065
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- Name and reputation have become key battlegrounds in debates about sexual harassment and assault, and the discussions that revolve around these cases have serious implications for how believability and sexual violence are discursively constructed online. By drawing on feminist scholarship on media, sexual violence, #MeToo, and believability, this thesis contributes to the field of feminist digital and cultural studies by highlighting a new key actor in these debates: The online commentators. By drawing on a methodological approach of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988; Stanley & Wise, 1993) together with a discourse and semiotic analysis, I explore a particular historical conjuncture in which debates about reputation and believability are prominent in online discourses about sexual harassment and assault. By taking on a reflexive approach to my research, I selected two case studies that were popularly discussed across my social media feeds: The criminal trial of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, and the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial in the United States. With a dataset of 2516 social media posts (including over 70 hours of video content) collected across four platforms (Twitter/X, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube), I outline how gendered discourses on name and reputation can be used in the construction of believability online to excuse and/or justify male violence against women. By utilising a mixed methods approach to data collection that allowed me to mimic user-experiences on social media, I demonstrate that these debates have shifted to focus on who has the most supporters and who is the most popular, which translates to, who has the most power. In other words, I argue that it is no longer just ‘she said, he said’ as has been the focus of feminist research thus far. It has instead become, ‘s/he said, they said’.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Boyle, Karen, 1972-
- Higgins, Michael,
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Funder
Las relaciones
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PDF of thesis T17657 | 2026-06-16 | Público | Descargar |