“Embarrassing and disgraceful”: technology-facilitated sexual violence and victim’s healing process

This study aims to reveal the communication experience of victims of online gender-based violence and the healing process from the trauma they experienced. The main research questions are how victims experience violence online, what motives encourage perpetrators to commit violence from the victim’s perspective, the meaning of the communication experience, and the victim’s process of healing the traumatic experience. In this qualitative study, phenomenological methods and symbolic interaction theory were employed. The research subjects are women victims of online gender-based violence cases. Informants were selected through a purposive sampling technique. The results showed that most cases of threats of spreading intimate photos or videos were experienced by victims when they asked for a breakup or did not follow the wishes of the perpetrator. Victims of violence in the online realm are also vulnerable to multiple layers of violence. The video is used as a tool for the perpetrator so that the victim does not refuse to have sex with the perpetrator. The impact experienced by the victim is psychological loss, social isolation, and limited mobility. The three motives behind the above cases are relational, sextortion or extortion, and unknown motives. The meanings obtained from the communication experience of victims are shame, disgrace, loss of identity, feeling tarnished, and having mistrust of the opposite sex. The victims used various ways to heal themselves from the trauma, namely getting closer to God, telling stories to friends, and consulting psychologists

The Politics and Aesthetics of 1990s Punk Women's Writing: Reading Riot Grrrl after Kathy Acker and against the anti-feminist backlash

Riot Grrrl, a hardcore feminist punk movement that emerged in the early 1990s in America, is often contemplated through a subcultural studies lens. As a result, its status as a political movement and social phenomenon still overshadows its status as an artistic movement in its scholarship. This thesis applies a literary studies lens to Riot Grrrl, examining specific devices employed in the movement’s literature and tracing these back to an experimental literary avant-garde, to fortify its status as an artistic movement. I argue that Riot Grrrl practitioners appropriate much of their artistic investments from American punk-feminist writer and postmodernist, Kathy Acker, who is frequently cited as a precursor to Riot Grrrl. Building on recent studies that have begun to demystify Acker’s influence as manifest in Riot Grrrl zine writing, I ask: to what ends do Riot Grrrls incorporate devices from Acker’s literary critique of patriarchal culture in the 1980s into their later critique of patriarchal culture in the 1990s? Following the successes of second wave feminism in gaining women’s liberation, their art responds to the media-driven backlash against feminism that emerged in the 1980s, which resulted in the concept of ‘post-feminism’ gaining traction in the 1990s. Two key manifestations of this backlash were the discrediting of working women, as well as attempts to reassert control over female sexuality, which mutated into postfeminist trends in the 1990s that similarly hinged upon the themes of work and sex: ‘New Traditionalism’ and ‘Do-Me’ feminism. I focus on Acker’s 1980s novels that influenced Riot Grrrl writing, such as Great Expectations (1983), Blood and Guts in High School (1978; published in 1984), and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986), tracing her ideological and aesthetic influence into Grrrl zines sourced from The Riot Grrrl Collection archive at New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections. This analysis reveals how the critical function of avant-garde literary devices, inherited from Acker by Riot Grrrl zinesters, shifts according to gender developments being made in the 1990s that posited a stratification of feminist definitions

Sexual Violence and the Role of Public Conversations in Japan: A Closer Look at the “Bakky Case”

While the #MeToo movement has led to successful campaigns against sexual harassment in many parts of the world, results have been mixed in Japan. In spite of the fact that #MeToo has inspired a number of offshoot campaigns, many victims of sexual abuse remain silent. Greater attention needs to be directed at the reasons for this reluctance to pursue justice. One factor that requires greater scrutiny is the role of public conversations; that is, widely reported comments from prominent members of society which generate some level of discussion and which exercise some influence over people’s way of thinking on particular topics. If public conversations denigrate women by labeling them as sexually promiscuous or as failures in terms of normative motherhood, the result may be increased violence against women and greater difficulty for women who seek justice in the aftermath of sexual violence. This argument is developed in this article which explores the ways in which a set of public conversations during the 1990’s and early 2000’s may have helped to incite extreme reactions of sexual abuse by stigmatizing certain young women both in terms of masculinist norms of sexuality and of female reproduction. Through engagement with relevant texts and member-checking with gender activists, the author found that the failure to learn lessons from a case of pornography-related sexual violence in the early 2000’s (referred to as the “Bakky case”) means that women remain vulnerable, especially if they are stigmatized for “failing in their duty” to bear children. Prominent figures in society must refrain from initiating public conversations that can lead to the stigmatization of women who challenge traditional gender norms. This study is made so that concerned citizens in Japan today, and readers everywhere, can more strongly justify their insistence on public conversations that reflect principles of gender equality and respect