I was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion hosted by the CFSHRC on studying digital aggression as an intersectional feminist. As noted on the event page, our guiding questions were:

• How can researchers prepare themselves to study digital aggression?
• What do feminist methodologies look like when researching digital aggression?
• How can researchers prepare for/prevent aggressive attacks?
• What resources are available for digital aggression researchers?
• How do axes of privilege or oppression influence initial approaches to researching digital aggression and/or preparations for/responses to aggressive attacks?
• What do mentors need to know about working with a digital aggression researcher?
• How can institutions support digital aggression researchers?

Access copy of the talk below.

Intersectional Feminism & Digital Aggression: Research Experiences and Approaches

Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition (CFSHRC)
December 9, 2020

Let me begin by stating what is easily found online: I’m a queer, disabled, Tamil woman, a rhetorician, media studies scholar, and novelist, a 4channer myself for several years who wrote extensively about the subculture as a graduate student, an autoethnographer who has published enough traditional research to look like a conventional scholar. These identity factors indicate that I occupy strange territory when it comes to trolls. I’m an ideal target for digital aggressors, and yet I have never been truly targeted. Instead, I have found myself on a razor’s edge between communal respect and the unspecified promise of communal retaliation. The first time I realized I had made myself a target was in 2014, when I received an anonymous email to a private encrypted account, grudgingly informing me that, despite one misspelling, my article about the use of the “Tits or GTFO” meme on 4chan was “pretty good.” At best, this was evidence I’d attracted attention. I spent weeks with bated breath, worried that this minor infraction would be enough for a doxing, but—despite the fact I was a brown woman—the Internet Hate Machine silently shrugged by.

A few years later, my name appeared in more concerning threads on 4chan and 8chan, where users were compiling a list of academics who warranted targeting. Alongside women scholars, who were ridiculed on the basis of their gender, my race—of all things—may have offered my first shield: I was first misgendered as male, either because readers were skipping the prefatory material including my name, which codes as South Asian female, or because distinctively ethnic names are not obviously gendered to white audiences. Because masculinity operates unmarked in many anonymous online spaces—that is, all users are presumed male until proof to the contrary emerges—and because I possessed profound insider knowledge and apparently wrote like a troll in articulating it, they assumed I was white and male, one of them, only pretending to be feminist to “redpill,” or convert the academic community. By the time they located the bio on my blog, which included my author photo, graduate student status, descriptions of my autoethnographic research, and other evidence of a “feminist agenda,” they had already praised my work for its accuracy, and so rationalized my position by deciding I was “a high-caste Indian woman. I would assume she isn’t ‘one of us,’ but just sharp and has an inherited affinity for the Aryan mindset.” Shortly thereafter, another user pointed out that outgrouping me based on sex, race, and left-leaning politics in order to discredit me and assign me an enemy status didn’t make sense—if my work was accurate enough to earn their respect, “maybe she can be a feminist and still claim her own opinions?” Ultimately, I was deemed a “possible ping for high-knowledge threat in the future.”

BIPOC scholars with ambiguously gendered names might coopt this strategy of “passing,” but “model minority” academics like myself, who benefit from the presumption of intelligence, are more likely to pass effectively: in my case, my race in an academic setting imposes on me the prefabricated stereotype of the “high-caste Indian with an Aryan mindset,” despite all the markers that expose me as not that. In those threads, the worst thing I got called was “POO,” a racist reference to my skin color and to open defecation in India. Still, none of this feels safe, and the possibility of an intersectional feminist approach in research on spaces like 4chan is not one that overtly presents itself. Because white masculinity is rendered the default race and gender users are expected to conform to, marginalized women scholars whose difference is apparent are exponentially more likely to be targeted by digital aggressors. Intersectional feminist interventions like user integration and disclosure—for example, visible racially-coded tags on a social media profile or project website, like “diaspora” or “feminism”—might be possible but undesirable. Unnecessarily disclosing your identity in an anonymous, anti-leader, anti-celebrity forum is an invitation to be trolled. So is proclaiming oneself expert enough to speak for them. But openly condemning discourses of racism and sexism as what they are, racist and sexist, without examining their uses or the origins of such community practices is similarly risky. And accepting that words don’t or differently matter on 4chan in order to unpack purposely repellent subcultural logics feels like a betrayal of the goals of intersectional feminism, even if the end result—understanding a phenomenon in order to subvert and defuse it—is worthy.

We can’t generalize about experiences of trolling any more than we can generalize about what trolling is, and I doubt my situation—where my intersectionality strangely legitimized my feminism—is common. And if I continued my research in this area, who knows how long I would have avoided direct attacks? In more inimitable ways, I’m well positioned for this kind of research. I grew up with the shadow of genocide at my back, with paranoia and the understanding that anyone can turn on you, turn you in, turn a blind eye. I’ve been braced for retaliation for existing my whole life. “Passing” is a mode of survival. This is of course not to belittle the impact of digital aggression or suggest that I’d be ready for it if it occurred, but it is an acknowledgment that choices we make about risk are ultimately subjective and informed by axes of privilege and oppression. What we are able and willing to look at. How we write about it. What we disclose, and when, and how.

Given the enormous challenges of an intersectional feminist approach to data-gathering on sites like 4chan, and given my own narrow escape, the question I keep returning to is actually this: What does an intersectional feminist methodology look like for digital aggression researchers outside the sites of research, in the spaces where people can’t be deleted or blocked? Though I benefit from the “model minority” stereotype, I expect and regularly experience microaggressions within the Ivory Tower, and my study of onsite trolling on 4chan has earned me more misreading and castigation from my fellow academics than I’ve ever received from *chan users. For example: After a conference presentation on the logics of misogyny on 4chan, a senior scholar accosted me in the bathroom and asked why I was championing anti-feminist values. At a different conference, another scholar offhandedly suggested I was deviant for being able to look at it, let alone comprehend it well enough to explain it to others. A student in my graduate program joked that I was “betraying women” while another asked me, in not so many words, if my racial background made me forgiving of rape culture. In scholarly publications, I’ve been dubbed an apologist for bigotry and likened to conservative media pundits who exert intense intellectual effort to partially excuse or deny misogyny. I want to suggest that an intersectional feminist approach to digital aggression—and to supporting researchers—is one that doesn’t downplay the offline costs of doing this research. I avoid the conferences those senior scholars are known to attend. I remain wary of white-feminist white women studying digital aggression, the ones who decry bigotry and attempts to understand it, as though only bigots are capable of understanding. I pay for liability insurance. I have trouble expecting anyone will protect me.

Perhaps my focus on onsite trolling allows me to say all this, because it rarely if ever resembled the digital aggression experienced by BIPOC women scholars on sites like Twitter. All I can say from my own experience is that the *chan users scrutinizing me seemed willing to ignore identity factors if the content was “fair”—which, notably, is not the same as being kind or forgiving—and if the paper was well-written. Researchers must also ask themselves who they are writing for and what their ultimate goals are: to investigate a space or to unequivocally denounce it. I may not care if the subjects of my research find my content fair if I view their content or practices as abhorrent, but insofar as it allowed me to continue my research in a community that has been known to be a hotbed of racism and misogyny, by taking it seriously and approaching it without immediate judgment, I was more able to undermine and subvert certain expectations. Thus, I write with a background awareness of trolls’ reading practices, which from those threads seemed to be ordered like this: title, body, ctrl-F for “misogyny,” “hate speech,” “toxic,” “safe space,” and other words associated with liberal sensibilities. I avoid centering my expertise or alleging connections between my credentials or the duration of my research and my expertise. I request permission from BIPOC women researchers before using their scholarship because of my awareness of potential backlash, and I try not to extol any single researcher. I never condemn without first unpacking. And, on some level, I try to “pass” just long enough to be read beyond “POO” and “pozzed feminist shill” and a series of ctrl-F commands.

I’ll end by wondering aloud how we approach the phenomenon of naming. We might address the problem of misogyny and racism in these spaces without resorting to overt and obviously worded condemnation. We might never announce that we are incorporating intersectional feminist praxis in our work, and still effectively use it. But when academia seeks names and moral judgment as proof of expertise and compliance with respectability politics, what does it mean, if our research is rigorous, that passing grades or publication might hinge on the inclusion of names that places us at risk? What does it mean if we turn to the language of moral judgment not just as a preemptive defense against accusations of complicity, but also as a performance for the Ivory Tower?