Abstract
Violence against Women in Politics has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of research of global relevance (Esposito and Zollo 2021). The present paper aims to contribute to this field, adopting a linguistically-anchored, doubly contrastive angle to the study of gender-based online aggression. Borrowing our conceptual tools from feminist pragmatics (Christie, 2000), language aggression and impoliteness research (Bou-Franch, 2014; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch, 2014; Culpeper, 2011) and inspired by insights from Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018), we explore how Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking Twitter users target two female politicians positioned at opposite ends of the political spectrum: the Spanish left-wing former MP, Irene Montero and the Greek right-wing MP, Niki Kerameus. The results reveal that, despite the opposing social values and ideological positionings reflected in the tweets examined, misogynistic abuse anchored in sexist representations of women emerges as a salient shared strategy in both Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking datasets.
1 Introduction
Social media, conceptualised as âdigital agoraâ (Johansson et al., 2017), have been celebrated as spaces that offer opportunities for engagement with matters of socio-political relevance and enhanced public participation, fostering new forms of sociality and democratic emancipation (Papacharissi, 2004). Despite its democratic potential, the cybersphere also constitutes a fertile arena for the expression of conflict, incivility, cyber-bullying and online abuse, targeting public figures in general and in particular politically active women and female politicians, as attested by Amnesty International in 2018 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/12/rights-today-2018-violence-against-women-online/) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) (NDI 2021). Specifically, Amnesty International reports that online abuse against female public figures, including activists, politicians and journalists is a âcommon experienceâ and may take various forms such as, rape threats, privacy violation (doxing) and sexist insults among others, rendering Twitter a âtoxic spaceâ. Similarly, NDIâs report âTweets that chillâ warns that the high prevalence of gender-based violence in a range of countries, such as Indonesia, Kenya, Colombia and Uganda can lead to womenâs silencing and exclusion from political discourse and the public sphere more broadly. While in South Eastern Europe this type of violence may take more insidious forms, described as âhidden violenceâ, it is equally pervasive with online abuse rating particularly high for all countries involved in the study (NDI 2021: 30).
Against this background, Violence against Women in Politics (henceforth VAW-P) has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of research of global relevance (Esposito and Zollo, 2021) studied from a range of approaches in a number of disciplinary fields, i.e., gender studies (Felmlee et al., 2020), (social) media studies (Haraldsson and Wängnerud, 2018), sociology and politics (Erikson et al., 2021; Southern and Harmer, 2021), mainly from a macro-perspective. Relatively few studies have taken a micro-level approach to this phenomenon (e.g. Hardaker and McGlashan, 2016) despite the fact that speech acts, such as insult, threat and name-calling, described in impoliteness research as conventionalised impoliteness forms (Culpeper, 2011), take a centre stage as analytical categories in the above described body of research. Even fewer studies have been conducted in languages other than English, particularly from a contrastive angle.
The present study attempts to bridge this gap by adopting a linguistically sensitive, doubly contrastive angle to the analysis of gender-based online aggression, focusing on the case studies of two female politicians in Spain and Greece. Borrowing our conceptual tools from language aggression and impo- liteness research (Culpeper, 2011; Bou-Franch, 2014; Bou-Franch and Garcés- Conejos Blitvitch, 2014), feminist pragmatics (Christie, 2000), and inspired by insights from Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018), we explore how Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking Twitter users target two female politicians positioned at opposite ends of the political spectrum: the Spanish left-wing former MP, Irene Montero and the Greek right-wing MP, Niki Kerameus. Responding to recent calls for in-depth, nuanced investigations of online gender-based aggression, we scrutinise the linguistic realisations of the phenomenon in the two lingua-cultures under consideration. Consequently, our aim is to offer both contrastive empirical findings on the language of gendered online aggression and a heuristic that will facilitate further investigations of the phenomenon across a range of languages and cultures.
The research questions guiding the present study are the following:
RQ1: What are the key realisations of impoliteness targeting Irene Montero and Niki Kerameus?
RQ2: Which strategies of gender-based aggression are preferred in the two lingua-cultures under examination based on the two case studies examined? What are the key similarities and differences observed?
RQ3: How do users target female politicians by exploiting the affordances of Twitter in the two datasets examined and what is the role of multimodality?
The structure of the remaining paper is as follows: section 2 discusses the theoretical underpinnings of this study, namely the link between impoliteness, culture, situatedness and entertainment; section 3 provides an overview of the data collection and methodology process and the remaining of the paper is devoted to the data analysis and discussion followed by our concluding remarks in section 5.
2 Impoliteness: Culture, Situatedness and Entertainment
The aim of this section is to offer a discussion of theorisations of im/politeness in relation to areas that are relevant to the specific study, namely culture, situatedness and entertainment. Acknowledging the lack of agreement among theorists on the precise definition of impoliteness, and following Culpeper (2011; 2021), we adopt an all-encompassing view of impoliteness as a ânegative attitude towards specific behaviours occurring in specific contextsâ (Culpeper, 2011: 23) and thus as an umbrella term that includes a range of phenomena such as rudeness and verbal aggression. Impoliteness has been viewed from both a first order perspective (impoliteness1), paying attention to a lay personâs understanding of what constitutes impolite behaviour and from a second order perspective (impoliteness2), foregrounding the analystâs interpretations.1 A number of impoliteness taxonomies have been put forward starting from Culpeperâs (1996) influential work proposed as a reversal of Brown and Levinsonâs politeness framework. Among those, Culpeperâs (2010, 2011, 2016) impoliteness formulae offer a window into the linguistic realisations of impoliteness.
Crucially, Culpeper (2011: 136) acknowledges that the formulae proposed are incomplete as they do not include paralinguistic, vocal and more broadly non-verbal aspects; we might add that this is especially the case in online contexts of communication which lend themselves to the expression of impoliteness through a variety of semiotic modes. Indeed, recent research into impoliteness and multimodality (Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch, 2022; Andersson, 2024) has begun to bridge this gap.
The link between im/politeness and culture, which is of special relevance to the present study, has been extensively discussed in both traditional and discursive approaches. Early politeness studies view cultures as homogeneous and fixed (e.g. Wierzbicka, 1985). While this body of research has offered important insights into the link between politeness, culture and language, discursive theorists have interrogated these essentialist views, proposing instead that cultures are placed and negotiated within specific interactional contexts, drawing attention to how individuals make their own culture relevant in the micro-level of interaction (Bargiela-Chiappini and Kádár, 2011).
In line with this approach, im/politeness may be viewed as situated in socio-cultural and interactional contexts (Davies, Haugh, and Merrison, 2011; Locher, 2011; Han, 2021) both face-to-face and online. In particular, online instantiations of im/politeness reflect complex connections between online and offline spheres of knowledge, referred to as the online-offline nexus (Blommaert 2019; Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch 2022). Arguably, the type of gender- based aggression we are dealing with in this study can be better understood as practices embedded in complex online and offline configurations; these include social media affordances, conventionalised impoliteness formulae and community norms which may reflect broader socio-cultural expectations, or violations. Indeed, the perceived violation of social norms and values has been posed as one of the key explanatory factors of online aggression reflecting the moral turn to impoliteness research (see for example Kádár and Márquez-Reiter, 2015).
Recent research on impoliteness in online political contexts â in Greece, Spain and the UK â (e.g. del Saz-Rubio, 2023; Georgakopoulou and Vasilaki, 2018) points towards the perceived breach of the moral order as a justification for the expression of online aggression and hostility targeting political figures. Similarly, Parvaresh and Tayebi (2018: 91) based on a study of Facebook aggressive posts targeting an Iranian actress, propose a view of impoliteness as âa reaction to social attributes or social actions that are deemed undesirableâ and point out that the use of aggressive language in such contexts can originate from group-based expectations and assumptions (see also Kádár and Haugh, 2013). What exactly is entailed in the category âgroup-basedâ is not always clear, however it may refer to communities of practice, lingua-cultures, or ideologically-based groupings that share common values, or indeed a combination of these. In particular, impoliteness in ideologically charged discussions among homophilous communities â groups that share the same values â reinforces the validation and solidification of pre-existing ideologies (Andersson, 2021), acting as an echo chamber (KhosraviNik, 2017; Bouvier, 2022). More crucially, collective attacks against public figures, such as female politicians in social media contexts can be viewed as attacks against an individual as a member of a particular group (Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch, 2010). This corresponds to Spencer-Oateyâs (2008) social identity face (a sense of public worth), although as we will see in the present study, quality face (personal qualities, competence, appearance) and social identity face may often merge.
By turning our attention into how im/politeness resources index social values and ideologies (see Christie, 2013), we open a window into the study of attacks against social identity categories, such as ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality and gender, also referred to as protected characteristics in the hate speech and impoliteness literature (Culpeper et al., 2017; Baider et al., 2020). Recent attempts to disentangle the two concepts (Culpeper, 2021) reveal that there is a degree of overlap between them; coercive impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) could be viewed as situated at the intersection of these two notions as it involves âdamage to the social identity of target persons and the lowering of their power or statusâ (Tedeschi and Felson, 1994, cited in Culpeper et al., 2017) and may be manifested in the form of insults, threats, dismissals and other strategies, as seen in the current study. Online attacks targeting female politicians would fit into this category despite the fact that they may be perceived as a form of âeveryday sexismâ (Bates, 2016) and not necessarily as expressions of explicit prejudice and misogyny.
The often-observed entertaining or ludic nature (Vladimirou and House, 2018) of such face attacks should not, however, be viewed as masking their prejudicial, or perhaps hateful underpinnings. Here, the notion âhumorous genuine insultsâ (Dynel, 2021) is particularly relevant as it captures the practice of sharing wittingly formulated yet offensive messages usually found in social media contexts. As observed in an increasingly developing body of research (e.g. Andersson, 2024), social media affordances and in particular their polylogal nature (Lorenzo-Dus et al., 2011) play a crucial role in the expression of entertaining impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011) through a variety of semiotic modalities. These studies have turned their attention to the ways in which the creative exploitation of multimodal elements enhances the audienceâs pleasure and thus more easily spreads across different communities, enhancing the potentialities for aggression and hostility and the dissemination of specific ideological positionings. Arguably, the employment of entertaining impoliteness can neutralise hostility leading to the normalization of sexist attacks and to the perpetuation of gendered ideologies. In this paper we are interested in the instantiations of these attacks in the two cultures under consideration.
3 Data Collection and Methodology
The point of departure for our data collection was the compilation of two datasets, one in Spanish and another one in Greek, which allowed us to conduct a comparative investigation of online gender-based aggression in the Spanish and Greek lingua-cultures. Following a case study approach, we focus on the Twitter profiles of the left-wing Spanish politician, Irene Montero who is a Member of the European Parliament and served as Minister of Equality and the right-wing Greek MP Niki Keremeus who served as the Minister of Education and Religious Affairs. Both politicians have been the target of online aggression and misogynistic abuse. Montero has received extensive social media attention due to her feminist agenda and Kerameus due to her conservative agenda and her allegiance to the Greek Orthodox Church. In this study we adopt a doubly contrastive perspective â the comparison of gender-based aggression in two languages and cultures, targeting politicians positioned at the opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Our data collection started with the selection of event-driven tweets which dealt with controversial topics (Monteroâs feminist agenda and comments reacting to Spanish feminicides for the Spanish dataset and Kerameusâ promotion of religious affairs and University reforms for the Greek dataset). The tweets selected elicited a high number of responses, the majority of which contained aggressive language. All replies to the selected event-driven tweets were initially collected, but as the focus of this study is the in-depth investigation of aggressive language, only replies that contained impoliteness strategies were selected for inclusion in the final corpus. These included replies with or without the use of the @handle. The first 400 replies to the initial, triggering tweets were collected in total, 200 for each sub-corpus, a number we deemed enough to obtain significant results. These were manually retrieved and copied and pasted into an Excel sheet. Table 1 provides a detailed description of our dataset make-up:
Spanish and Greek dataset compilation
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Twitter data are publicly available suggesting that tweets could be used for research purposes, however, as noted by a number of scholars (e.g. Dâ Arcy and Young, 2012; Locher and Bolander, 2019), the collection of internet data is not without challenges. The presentation of our data is in line with guidelines published by the Association of Internet Researchers (Markham and Buchanan, 2012). The examples presented in this paper are viewed as illustrations of linguistic patterns typical in the lingua-cultures under consideration, not as contributions by individual contributors (Pihlaja, 2017). In addition, to protect the identity of users, all identifying information including names and pseudo-names was removed. In line with previous research on gender-based online aggression and other research on political public figures, we retained the names of the two female public figures whose Twitter accounts were scrutinised.
Culpeperâs (2010, 2011, 2016) list of impoliteness formulae was adopted as a point of departure. Using it as a starting point we devised a data-driven, bottom-up analytical framework which reflected the aims of the present study and allowed us to capture the realisations of impoliteness from a comparative perspective. Following Culpeper (2011: 136) we acknowledge the significance of non-verbal material in the expression of impoliteness. Thus, the category âMultimodalâ has been added to allow us to explore the realisation of impoliteness via multimodal means alongside lexical and grammatical aspects.
Table 2 presents the final analytical framework devised for this study and examples from the Spanish and Greek datasets:
Data-driven taxonomy of impoliteness strategies
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Due to the nature of our dataset and the affordances of Twitter we deemed it necessary to distinguish between two key categories: Verbal, which reflects the majority of the examples in our corpus, and Multimodal; the latter includes non-verbal and verbal elements and creative as well as implicational expressions of impoliteness, such as the representation of spitting, a context-driven impoliteness trigger which is taken up in the analysis section below. We have also departed from Culpeperâs initial list by adding the following data-driven categories:
Defamation is only encountered in the Spanish corpus and is defined as the employment of (often false) communication, or rumours âthat harm a personâs dignity, prestige and reputation in the social communityâ (Guillén-Nieto 2020: 1).
Condemnation reflects the violation of the moral order mainly by making references to shameful behaviour reflecting the moral turn to impoliteness research.
Finally, different insult sub-categories have been introduced: Insult- appearance, Insult-competence/intelligence, Insult-mental health and Insult-slut-shaming. These separate sub-categories allow us to focus on the delegitimization of female politicians by means of gender-based attacks (see Esposito and Zollo, 2021; Esposito and Breeze, 2022).
The Greek dataset was coded by the first author. The Spanish dataset was coded by the second author and a sample was also coded by the first author. Samples from both datasets and all problematic cases were discussed and agreed upon. If a tweet included more than one type of impoliteness formula, each separate type received separate coding. The frequencies presented in the âresults and discussionâ section indicate the number of tweet responses in which a particular category occurs.
4 Results and Discussion
Table 3 presents the overall distribution of quantitative comparative results for the Spanish and Greek datasets:
Overall frequencies of impoliteness strategies: Spanish and Greek datasets: raw frequencies and percentages
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
As shown in table 3/figure 1, Greek and Spanish-speaking tweeters display a similar preference for strategies deemed as impolite (344 and 296 tweet responses, respectively) against the two female MPâs. Insults and criticisms were the most prominent categories in our datasets accounting for more than half of all impoliteness strategies used. Insults in particular displayed an impressive 30,40% percent with 90 occurrences in the Greek corpus and rated second in the Spanish corpus with 66 instances, the second highest after criticisms which occurred in 94 tweet responses.
Distribution of impoliteness strategies
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Dismissals feature as the third most popular strategy in both datasets. In the case of the Greek corpus, threats also had the same percentage of occurrence (10,81%), while in Spanish, this strategy was only present on 11 occasions (3,19%). Unpalatable questions and negative expressives/ill-wishes were employed to a similar extent by Greek-speaking users and their Spanish-speaking counterparts, whereas silencers were barely used at all. Defamations were only observed in the Spanish dataset and finally visual expressives (including GIFâs, memes and images) were found to be more than double in the Greek corpus.
In the following sections we delve into the more in-depth analysis of the most notable patterns discovered in the two datasets: insults and threats (4.1.), condescencions (4.2), dismissals and silencers (4.3), pointed criticisms and unpalatable questions (4.4) and multimodal artifacts (4.5).
4.1 At the Highest End of Offence: Insults and Threats
Insults and threats have been strongly associated with the language of hate speech (Culpeper et al., 2017), thus they arguably carry a high potential for causing offence. This section discusses the realisations of the two categories in our data.
Despite the centrality of sexist representations and comments focusing on female politiciansâ bodies and physical appearance, as documented in previous literature (e.g. Cameron and Shaw, 2016; Williams, 2020; Esposito and Zollo, 2021), tweeters in both the Spanish and Greek datasets, surprisingly, largely refrain from using appearance-oriented insults. As shown below, the admittedly few such comments discovered, target the two politiciansâ clothing preferences and their alleged failure to adhere to expected beauty standards:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Instead of âbody-shamingâ, users engage in high degrees of âmind-shamingâ, (Esposito and Zollo, 2021), rendering competence/intelligence-oriented insults as the preferred type of insult in both datasets. While Monteroâs and Kerameus âquality faceâ (Spencer-Oatey, 2002; 2008) â linked to personal qualities, competence and abilities â seems to be primarily under attack, one would argue that the MPâsâ public worth, i.e. âsocial identity faceâ is also targeted, pointing towards well-established exclusionary discourses of women who are denied participation in politics and in the public sphere more broadly.
Such attacks are realised as conventionalised impoliteness formulae (Culpeper, 2011: 135), i.e. personalised negative vocatives and assertions, directly addressing the target, with adjectives and linguistic expressions drawing from similar semantic fields as seen below:
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Message enforcement in such types of attack is achieved through a range of linguistic means, such as repetition in example (7):
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In examples 8â9 the targetâs alleged incompetence is specifically linked to their lack of education; Montero is described as illiterate, while Kerameusâ use of incorrect syntax in the tweet that triggers these reactions indexes what is perceived as her inadequacy as a Minister of Education.
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Both MPâs are represented as ridiculous and as lacking any form of worth, as seen in the examples below:
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Interestingly, in the following example Kerameusâs unfavourable evaluation as the most ridiculous Minister of Education is compared to another, unsuccessful, female MP:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Other insults bring to the fore sexist stereotypes pathologising the MPâs, connecting them to female hysteria and depicting them as in need of mental health support:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Tweeters also participated in moral degradation through slut-shaming. These insults are associated with the historically entrenched link between women and their reputation (Esposito and Zollo, 2021):
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Finally, the category Insults-other, mostly prevalent in the Greek dataset, includes insults linked to political, ideological and religious orientation and alleged criminal activity, which do not fit under the previously described categories. Previous research reports on the intersectional nature of gendered attacks targeting female politicians, pointing towards/documenting Islamophobic and anti-Semitic discrimination alongside sexist abuse (Kuperberg, 2021; Rasulo, 2021). This type of multiple discrimination has been described as mainly targeting minority female politicians.
Notably, in the Greek dataset, religious identity, or rather what is perceived as the excessive/hyperbolic expression of Kerameusâ religious identity is linked instead to right-wing political ideologies, which are deemed undesirable. The terms âChristian-Talibanâ and âEuropean Iranâ index conservative political values and allude to authoritative regimes, including the troubled history of the Greek dictatorship, entrenched in the vocative âsperm of dictatorshipâ; Kerameus is thus seen as instantiating/representing these values and is attacked because of them:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Tweeters in these examples engage in the production of creative formulations, which arguably fit under the notion of âhumorous genuine insultsâ, defined as âwittingly formulated, but purposefully offensive messagesâ (Dynel, 2021: 26). Such manifestations of âludic impolitenessâ (Vladimirou and House, 2018) bring together users who share similar values and political orientations and contributes to the formation of homophilous communities (Andersson, 2021). In (19) we see a further example of this practice, manifested with the creative blend âSra Feministraâ, this time reflecting an opposition against feminist values which are placed at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Spanish users also made creative insults to criticize Irene Monteroâs use of inclusive language in the trigger tweet. Montero refuses to use the masculine gender Spanish form; instead she prefers a recently proposed grammatically neutral gender form. In this example, the user applies this linguistic strategy to mock and ridicule the Minister of Equality:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Finally, this category includes examples that target the politicians with serious accusations, drawing from the semantic field of criminal activity further enhanced by the use of capitalization:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Alongside insults, threats have been identified as one of the main building blocks of the language of hate crime, constituting a type of coercive action which involves the possibility of causing social harm (Culpeper, et al., 2017: 14). Our results show that threats are manifestations of the language of online gender violence overall, yet, we found considerable differences in the prevalence of this category between the two lingua-cultures. In the Greek dataset threats featured three times more than in the Spanish dataset. In line with Culpeper et al.âs (2017) study, the vast majority of threats encountered in our dataset are non-conditional, 5 that is the target is presented with no option to correct or amend their behaviour. Their level of severity, ranged from relatively mild to more serious threats:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
In many of our examples the consequences to be inflicted on the target centre around the loss of political power, i.e., losing the elections, which is not surprising given the nature of our data. These target the MPâsâ social identity face, but they also function as a type of collective threat against the political parties in their entirety, as seen in examples (25) and (26):
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In the following example this type of collective threat is more clearly spelled out as the user here appears to be speaking on behalf of a group:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Arguably, threats can be interpreted as more severe if the MPâsâ quality face is attacked alongside their social identity face, as seen in example (28) in which Monteroâs abilities and qualifications are called into question. Here, the user expresses certainty that Montero will in fact cease being a minister âcuando â whenâ:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Personalized negative vocatives such as âdisgustingâ and taboo words such as âfucking childrenâ further exacerbate the intensity of the threat (example 30) as well as threats that concern the MPâs family members:
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4.2 Belittling Female Politicians: Condescensions
Condescensions in our datasets best encapsulate what Cameron (2020: n/p) pertinently refers to as, the âgender respect gapâ, defined as âthe enacting and normalizing of a banal form of everyday sexismâ, stemming from the assumption that women are not entitled to the same form of respect as their male counterparts.
The expression of lack of respect and belittling by means of condescension is mainly preferred by the Greek-speaking respondents with only two instances occurring in the Spanish corpus and is encoded in a range of linguistic resources, such as titles, address forms, diminutives, mock endearment and mock deference vocatives; many of these have been identified in early language and gender research as sexist asymmetrical language (Sunderland, 2020).
In particular, mock-endearment vocatives as seen in examples (31)-(33) function as a means of devaluation of the MPâsâ social standing; in this case diminutives do not perform the well-documented in both Spanish and Greek (Sifianou, 1992; Márquez-Reiter, 2000) function of signalling endearment and affection. Instead, as previously observed in del Saz-Rubio (2023) and Vasilaki (2020) they arguably convey a patronising stance stemming from the mismatch between the formality expected in interactions between politicians and the public and the display of a seemingly affective stance which in this case is clearly not genuine (see also Taylor, 2015, on the link between mock politeness and condescending behaviour). A similar effect is achieved by the employment of mock-deference vocatives, such as in example (33). Here the use of bare surname (Kerameus) violates the expected politeness form (title + surname) and suggests that the tweeter assumes a superior position addressing an inferior party which would be similar to that of teacher-student or army officer addressing recruits type of interactions (see Vasilaki, 2020; Culpeper, 1996).
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
In the Greek dataset we further observe the deployment of offensive gendered denigrating address forms, such as âmiss-y/missus Nickyâ and the most offensive âmyri kyratsaâ â which additionally has lower social class and ageist connotations; both of these would normally be encountered in private informal settings. The latter in particular is a case of what Schultz (1975) has referred to as semantic derogation indexing a lexical asymmetry and constituting a lexical gap (Sunderland, 2020) with the absence of the equivalent masculine term.
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
4.3 Excluding Female Politicians: Dismissals, and Silencers
Dismissals and silencers most directly reflect attempts to exclude female politicians from participation in the public political sphere, constituting an articulation of what Culpeper (2011: 252) refers to as coercive impoliteness, that is, the ârealignment of values between the producer and the targetâ and in this case the enforcement of compliance, e.g. by resigning from their position. Tweeters seek the reversal of the social power differential that exists between the MPâs and the wider public by symbolically lowering the MPâs power of status (see Tedeschi and Felson, 1994). As argued by Culpeper (2011: 227), the social harm inflicted by coercive impoliteness is linked more to symbolic rather than material benefits. This is ever more so due to the de-individuated nature of social media, as participants have no tangible means of forcing compliance to the dismissals or silencers issued at the targets.
Previous research in political contexts, such as the UK House of Commons confirms male dominance (Shaw, 2000). In fact, the employment of inter- ruptions and other means of exercising conversational dominance is well- established in the literature since Zimmerman and Westâs (1975) seminal work and other studies that reflect the dominance approach to language and gender (e.g. West and Zimmerman, 1983). Interestingly, both Greek-speaking and Spanish-speaking tweeters in our datasets refrain from directly silencing the MPâs voices (Kuperberg, 2021) rendering silencers, such as âMejor que te callesâ â(itâs) better you shut upâ very rare.
Instead, tweeters resort to dismissals, a strategy particularly prominent in the Spanish corpus; a number of these reflect a particularly strong gendered dimension. As seen in examples (36) and (37) a dichotomy between public and private spheres which clearly illustrates the gendering of spaces (Lazar and Ke, 2020) is carved out, reflecting well-documented patriarchal ideologies. Montero in these examples is sent back home, which by implication is where she belongs:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Dismissals encoded by means of informal devices and offensive emojis constitute illustrations of what Culpeper (2011) refers to as affective impoliteness. Within a context of affective publics (Papacharissi 2014) tweeters publicly express their anger at the politicians:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
A particularly interesting manifestation of this strategy reminds us of Culpeper et al.âs (2017: 19) incitement example âGET THEM OUT OF OUR COUNTRYâ â an attack linked to religious hatred; here, Kerameus is excluded from the country, not simply from the political sphere:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
A special type of dismissals encountered in our data centres around calls for the resignation of the two female politicians. Dismissals of this type are encoded as imperatives addressing the target (44, 45):
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The above examples may be contrasted to the following ones in which the same propositional content is conveyed through the use of surface negative politeness forms, i.e. + plural, thus reducing the potential degree of offence:
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Likewise, the hashtags #IreneMonteroDimision âIreneMonteroResignationâ and #κεÏαμεÏÏ_ÏαÏαιÏηÏÎ¿Ï âkerameus resignâ urge the MPâs to step down, framing their resignation as a collective, public demand and often occur alongside other strategies, including visuals. For example, the screenshot included in this tweet functions as a form of criticism that provides justification for Kerameus âwished forâ resignation:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
The above hashtags reflect the dymanics of echo chambers (KhosraviNik, 2017) bringing together homophilous âlightâ communities which bond through ambient affiliation (Zappavigna, 2014); yet these hashtags also contribute to the construction and dissemination of exclusionary discourses (Erdogan-Ozturk and Isik-Guler, 2020), normalising calls for exclusion from the public sphere.
4.4 Pointed Criticisms and Unpalatable Questions
Our findings suggest that pointed criticisms were the most prominent category observed in the Spanish dataset and the second most prominent in the Greek dataset (27, 32% vs. 15, 54%). Most pointed criticisms reflected a negative evaluation of the MPâsâ performance and their intensity varied. The most common realisations encountered were assertions (example 49), assertions with message intensifiers such as capitalization (example 50) and tweets with humorous undertones such as in example (51). As illustrated in example (52), many pointed criticisms occurred alongside other strategies:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Unpalatable questions were also present in our corpora, with a similar amount of occurrence in both languages: 47 instances in Spanish (13,66%) and 31 instances in Greek (10,47%). In line with previous authors (Bagga et al., 2021), we observed that these questions are predominantly rhetorical, since they are typically posed not to elicit a response but rather to emphasize a particular argument, as can be seen in examples (53) and (54):
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Research indicates that when an individual is confronted with an unpalatable question, it places the interlocutor in a vulnerable situation, making them more susceptible to subsequent verbal attacks (Bousfield, 2007; Wijayanto et al., 2017). This seems to be the case in our corpora, where the unpalatable questions are not posed to seek information but rather to express disapproval, criticize, or admonish.
4.5 Multimodal Artifacts
The link between entertainment and impoliteness has already been pointed out in our analysis, yet visual and multimodal artifacts are the most pertinent expression of this function in our datasets. Entertaining impoliteness goes hand in hand with exploitation involving a number of participants who are entertained at the expense of a (potential) victim who may, or may not be aware of the attacks they are being subjected to (Culpeper, 2011: 233); lack of awareness may occur in social media contexts, although arguably MPâs will probably be aware of how their tweets are received by the public. In our data this type of attack may take the form of âludic impolitenessâ defined as the âcollaborative, playful targeting against a public figure observed in social media contextsâ (Vladimirou and House, 2018: 150; Andersson, 2021).
As we see in the examples below a range of semiotic resources are mobilised, creatively manipulated and shared, the majority orienting towards a set of themes already identified, e.g. public ridicule, insults and exclusion â usually with humorous undertones. In tune with recent research (Abdel-Raheem, 2021; Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch, 2021), it is the visual and multimodal expression of these themes that we will be focusing on.
Example (55) depicts a set of what appear to be photoshopped images of animals or objects placed in odd and unfit positions and backgrounds according to logical spatial principles. The last image shows Kerameus with the Ministry of Education as a background. By analogy the implicated message is that Kerameus is placed in an unfit role, an interpretation further reinforced by the caption: âHave you ever seen things which made you wonder how the hell they got there?â Kerameusâ unambiguous objectification, framed as a joke, orients towards patriarchal discourses of women viewed as objects (Esposito and Zollo, 2021: 57).
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Similarly, the rather monstrous depiction of Kerameus in example (56) exhibits high degrees of creativity and is reminiscent of political cartoons. Here we see a gruesome image of Kerameus adding students to a meat cutting machine labelled as âuniversityâ. As previously, the creative blend âbutcher Kerameusâ contributes to the disambiguation of the message, further enhances the âdramatic entertainmentâ (Culpeper, 2011: 240) offered by the poster and functions as a form of political critique, attacking Kerameusâ proposed tertiary education law.
The next example is a manifestation of multimodal impoliteness targeting protected characteristics, i.e. in this case Kerameus religious identity. The tweeter here exploits a range of remixing resources to portray Kerameus as Virgin Mary alluding to the public expression of her faith which is seen as not congruent with her professional identity and her role as MP in Greeceâs secular state. This collage has been shared a few times and has the potential to become viral clearly functioning as a form of ridicule and yet again political critique:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
Attacks that are hurtful for the target may be manifested in non-verbal forms, however, one would expect that these cannot be employed in computer mediated contexts of communication. Spitting has been described as a non-verbal insulting behaviour linked to hate speech and impoliteness (Culpeper et al., 2017: 136). Users in the Greek dataset employ spitting as a symbolic act through the use of GIFâs:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
We now turn to the analysis of the multimodal Spanish examples:
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
In this example the user is making reference to Irene Monteroâs private life and her relationship with the former leader of her left-wing party, Pablo Iglesias, whose photo is foregrounded. More specifically, the tweeter invites the reader to combine their previous knowledge with the title of the magazine in order to obtain the implicature that Irene Montero and Pablo Iglesias belong to a âcasteâ. The picture seems to represent the cover of the Spanish magazine âCasa y JardÃnâ (House and Garden). In the title, the word âcasaâ (house) has been changed to âcastaâ (caste). Irene Montero and Pablo Iglesias fiercely condemned other politicians who lived the high life at the expense of the taxpayers for being an elite or a caste. With this image, the tweeter is criticizing Iglesiaâs and Monteroâs luxurious lifestyle choices, which are against their partyâs ideology. This criticism is reinforced by the text âYou are the worst. A fraudâ.
The couple is playfully ridiculed through Iglesiasâ representation as a gardener, and Monteroâs depiction in stereotypical female roles, carrying shopping bags and a baby carriage.
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
In example 60, we see a further attempt to delegitimise Montero by rendering her illiterate and lacking education. A newspaper article criticizing Monteroâs choice to use the grammatically-neutral gender form is shared alongside the image of a donkey, an animal reference used to describe a stupid or inept person. Moreover, the background in the donkey image is using the colours and logo of Irene Monteroâs party, Podemos. To strengthen this association, the terms âburras, burros, burresâ (donkey in Spanish) have been added to mock the ministerâs use of gender-neutral language.
Citation: Contrastive Pragmatics 6, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26660393-bja10132
This user is criticizing Irene Monteroâs capacity as the Minister of Equality through an unpalatable question (What have you done to avoid it, Irene?). To reinforce this idea, the user includes a cover of the fashion magazine Vanity Fair, whose Spanish edition features Irene Montero on its front cover. In October 2020, Irene gave the magazine an interview and posed for a photo shoot, modelling luxury clothing on the rooftops of wealthy areas of Madrid. Once again, the female politicianâs work is devalued bringing to the fore moral judgements about what constitutes appropriate behaviour by female politicians (see also Esposito and Breeze, 2022).
5 Concluding Remarks
This paper has set out to compare and contrast gender-based online aggression targeting the Spanish politician Irene Montero and the Greek politician Niki Kerameus. More specifically, we attempted to answer the following research questions:
RQ1: What are the key realisations of impoliteness targeting Irene Montero and Niki Kerameus?
RQ2: Which strategies of gender-based aggression are preferred in the two lingua-cultures under examination based on the two case studies examined? What are the key similarities and differences observed?
RQ3: How do users target female politicians by exploiting the affordances of Twitter in the two datasets examined and what is the role of multimodality?
Regarding the first research question, the results showed that tweeters in both Spanish and Greek make use of a wide array of impoliteness strategies â in fact all impoliteness strategies were present in both datasets with the exception of âdefamationâ, which was only encountered in the Spanish corpus. Insults were a dominant pattern in both corpora (first more frequent category in Greek and second in Spanish).
Pointed criticisms often focusing on the MPâsâ perceived incompetence also emerge as a highly preferred strategy in both corpora (the first most frequent category in Spanish and the second most frequent in Greek). While pointed criticisms carry less potential for offence, this strategy was most often used in combination with other strategies such as insults resulting in increased gravity of the offence.
A more detailed scrutiny of the results also revealed some interesting differences. Greek speaking users overall displayed higher levels of hostility against female politicians realised in the form of insults and threats. Further investigation involving a higher number of female politicians in both cultures could confirm whether this is a culturally-based pattern, or whether it is specific to the case studies under investigation.
As for the second research question, in line with Esposito and Zollo (2021) our overall results confirm that both female politicians, regardless of their ideological orientation, are âportrayed, evaluated and perceived in gendered waysâ (Esposito and Zollo, 2021: 6) and are subjected to various forms of gendered aggression. Tweeters in both datasets were mainly oriented towards the delegitimisation and belittling of female politicians; this pattern points towards the pervasiveness of what Cameron (2020) refers to as the âgender respect gapâ.
In relation to the third research question, we observed that Spanish-speaking tweeters displayed a higher preference for attempts to exclude female politicians from the public political sphere realized in the form of dismissals and more specifically demands for resignation, often with the employment of the hashtag #IreneMonteroDimision (#IreneMontero resignation) and #κεÏαμεÏÏ_ÏαÏαιÏηÏÎ¿Ï (#kerameus_resign); these clearly reflected the workings of the online/offline nexus (Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch 2022). There is a clear connection emerging between the perceived breach of the moral order by the politicians in the offline world, the enactment of impoliteness online and future orienting calls for resignation in the offline world. The use of such hashtags alongside other social media affordances also facilitated the forging of communities of like-minded individuals who collectively engaged in the deligitimisation and collective ridicule of the target, as attested in previous research (Vladimirou and House, 2018; Andersson, 2021).
Indeed, in line with the key principles of Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik, 2017) our findings suggest that online gender-based violence is a techno-social phenomenon. Multimodal expressives, one of the most obvious instantiations social media affordances is a strategy preferred mostly by Greek-speaking users. Highly offensive symbolic non-verbal expressives such as spitting (Culpeper, 2011: 136) were made possible through the use of GIFâs. Tweeters are engaged in playful attacks and ridicule against the target, imbued with locally relevant references. Ludic impoliteness (Vladimirou and House, 2018), or hate play (Jane, 2014) can function as an insidious form of gender-based attacks as the entertaining element could mask the expression of sexist ideologies.
The comparison and contrast of our datasets has unveiled interesting nuanced differences in the strategies preferred by Spanish and Greek-speaking users and offers us a useful heuristic for the examination of gender-based aggression from a cross-cultural angle. Our overall findings point towards the pervasiveness of gender-based violence against female politicians in both cultures potentially leading to the enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of the phenomenon as a culturally recognizable practice in social media communication, or in other words as a type of normalised incivility. More crucially, while attacks against the MPâs under investigation target their individual social identity face, they may also serve the purpose of attacking female politicians as a group indexing sexist ideologies and exclusionary discourses. Twitter becomes an ideologically-vested springboard for the expression of heightened collective emotion against female politicians mainly focusing â as we have seen â on their public role. In line with the principle of Im/politeness reciprocity (Culpeper and Tantucci, 2021) one could argue that such attacks function as a response to the MPâs perceived failed political actions and breach of social contract and as attempts to restore the moral order.
To sum up, this study makes a contribution to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics, impoliteness research and gender and language studies by offering new empirical evidence on gender-based aggression against female politicians in Spanish and Greek. This study, however, is based on a limited dataset of two specific case studies, so further research needs to investigate the distribution of gender-based violence in a more extensive dataset in a variety of cultures and social media settings. New research avenues could explore further the link between impoliteness and gender in social media contexts.
Funding
The research contributed by LucÃa Fernández-Amaya and reported in this paper has been funded by the Research Project âPatologización discursiva en Twitter, Instagram y TikTokâ (PATDISC, PID2022-136840OB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Innovation, Science and Universities /10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF, UE.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the editors of this Special Issue, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Rosina Márquez-Reiter for their support and insightful comments. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the journal for their constructive and detailed comments.
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Biographical Notes
Dimitra Vladimirou (PhD, Linguistics, Lancaster University) is a Lecturer in English at Coventry University. She teaches in the areas of Critical Discourse Analysis, Digital Discourse, and Sociolinguistics. She has previously published in international journals such as the Journal of Pragmatics and the International Journal of Applied Linguistics on impoliteness in social media, cross-linguistic studies of academic discourse, and the politics of academic knowledge production. She currently conducts research on political discourse and online aggression. Her research interests include digital discourse as a site of social engagement, impoliteness and conflict, language and gender and identity construction in professional contexts.
LucÃa Fernández-Amaya (PhD, University of Seville) is Associate Professor at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville). She teaches English as a foreign language and âIntercultural Competenceâ (Masterâs Degree in International Communication, Translation and Interpreting). Her research interests include cross-cultural pragmatics, (im)politeness, the language of service encounters and digital discourse. She has published in international journals like Pragmatics and Society and Journal of Politeness Research, among others. In 2022, she published the volume A Linguistic Overview of WhatsApp Communication (Brill). She is currently guest-editing a special issue for the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict on âConflict talk in Spanish digital interactionsâ.
It should be noted that the present study complies with impoliteness2 approaches.
This comment refers to a former allegedly unsuccessful Education Minister, Anna Diamantopoulou. During her time photocopies were used in schools, as textbooks had not been printed on time for the beginning of the school year.
All the examples have been copied verbatim without any corrections.
That is, from Spain.
Realisations of non conditional threats follow the form âI will (not) do Yâ, while conditional threats may be realized as âIf you (donât) do X, I will (not) do Yâ (Limberg 2009).
