Tag: gender violence

3 Reasons Why We Need Critical Feminist Theory More Than Ever in the Age of Big Data

by Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen

8 NOV 2017

This post is a follow-up to Helgudóttir Ingulfsen’s paper “#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter”, which was published in the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series in 2016 (available here). That paper was also the winner of the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2016), and was responded to by Courtney McGinn and Reina Wehbi in the piece “Are Refugees Really Not Welcome?“

In the age of Big Data­­—when Silicon Valley “tech bros” are busy convincing us of the merits of machine learning, and the US president pretends to govern while flirting with his white supremacists followers on Twitter—I make the case for why we need critical feminist scholarship now more than ever.

  1. Gender is at the Core of Xenophobic and Nationalistic Discourses

In December 2015, I was in my third semester of graduate school at New York University. Concerned about the rising tide of xenophobia (little did I know how much worse it would get), I wanted to look at online discourses about immigration and was interested in applying a feminist lens to the research. I typed #Refugees and #RefugeesNotWelcome in the search bar on Twitter and what I discovered was so dense with explicit sexist and misogynistic imagery and language that a few months later it amounted to a 120 page thesis.

My dataset revealed conversations littered with images of young white women covered in blood – supposed European victims of rape perpetrated by male immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Twitter users from the US, Europe, and Japan alike portrayed the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe as a carefully calculated Muslim invasion of Europe, threatening to destroy Western civilization. The Twitter users employed powerful gendered language and imagery to construct a binary opposition between ‘Us’ – the White, Western, Enlightened community – and ‘Them’ – refugees, particularly Muslim refugees, construed as threats to the racial and cultural preservation and physical safety of the Western community.

Ironically, Enlightenment ideas – civil and political rights, feminism, freedom of speech – were used to justify fundamentally illiberal immigration and integration policies. The appropriation of feminist ideas was a prevalent strategy among the Twitter users I studied. These strategies are fraught with contradictions. The Twitter users call for the protection of both Western and Muslim women against the supposed violent nature of Muslim men, while consistently attacking what they see as hypocritical liberal and multicultural feminists, framed as naïve traitors of the Enlightened White community. The below meme from my dataset is one example of this strategy, accompanied by the following tweet: “RT@……….: The perks of multiculturalism #refugeesnotwelcome”.

(Image 8: Dataset 2 tweet 120)

  1. Feminist Research as a Tool to Understand and Combat Xenophobia

The realization that gender is instrumentalized in nationalistic and xenophpobic narratives is not new. Feminist scholars like Cynthia Enloe and Nira Yuval-Davis have been arguing as much since the 1980s. However, feminist studies of gender and nationalism have tended to be primarily based on interpretation of elite discourses or political statements. The vast amount of data produced by the billions of social media users around the world represents a new opportunity to develop more rigorous and empirically driven feminist studies of xenophobia. Social media are not just accessible pools of data that can be sampled for quantitative studies of social interactions; they are just as interesting for the richness and detail of the data produced by their users. Images, memes, and videos are combined with text commentary, providing detailed insight into how an individual user constructs a narrative and the types of visual and rhetorical tools employed to support that narrative. Knowing whether hashtags like #RefugeesNotWelomce, #Rapefugees or #WhiteGenocide are trending is not as valuable as understanding how each user justifies a narrative that frames male Muslim refugees as violent or racially inferior. If we want to combat xenophobia we have to understand what makes xenophobic narratives powerful and why they resonate with particular groups of people. Rather than counting hashtag use and “likes,” we need to delve into the stories behind the hashtags. Feminist discourse analysis is a powerful tool to do just that because gender binaries are key organizing principles behind these stories.

  1. Feminist Scrutiny of Algorithms: Exposing Patriarchal Bias in the Big Data Universe

My study, published in 2016, highlights why we should be careful to mine Facebook and Twitter to study public sentiment: social media users differ from the general population in multiple ways, and the algorithms that structure information on social media are built to generate profit rather than organic conversations and interactions. Returning to the topic now, I see that my study failed to explore in detail a critical component of algorithmic bias – the ways in which gender and race biases are themselves integral to the structure of online information and interactions. Scientists have revealed how “machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use.” The data that is used to train algorithms is after all generated by humans. One study found algorithms have adopted implicit biases commonly detected in psychology experiments: “[t]he words “female” and “woman” were more closely associated with arts and humanities occupations and with the home, while “male” and “man” were closer to math and engineering professions.” How might for example, Twitter’s algorithms have learned these types of implicit gender biases and how could those in turn be helping to make certain (gendered and racialized) content more prominent?

Phrases like artificial intelligence, Big Data, and machine learning give off a false aura of objectivity that can lead to fatal misrepresentations and uses of the data generated by social media users. I have witnessed first-hand how policy-makers can be seduced by Big Data’s false promise of objectivity. Participating in a meeting on Big Data and evaluation hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation and attended by UN evaluation officers and data scientists, algorithmic bias was not adequately addressed and Twitter was presented as a promising source of information on public sentiment. UN Global Pulse – the UN’s Big Data Initiative – was the main proponent, and several of their projects make use of social media data for perception studies. Presenting my findings to the data and research team at UN Women, I warned of the algorithmic biases in social media data and argued for extreme caution in using Twitter data to track public sentiment or perceptions on gender.

Feminist scholars would make ideal methodological foot soldiers in the battle to discount false narratives of Big Data objectivity, as feminist epistemology is inherently critical and skeptical of any tradition that lays claim to objective truth. We need more strong feminist voices like Soraya Chemaly to counter the corporate spin of Silicon Valley “tech bros.” We should ramp up investments in initiatives like the Women’s Media Center’s Speech project and the Algorithmic Justice League to begin to construct a more just and inclusive internet.

Inga H. Ingulfsen is a Research Analyst in Global Partnerships, at Foundation Center and graduated from NYU’s Center for Global Affairs in May 2016 with an MS in Global Affairs, specializing in gender, immigration and peacebuilding.

Comment on Violence, Mobility, and the Borders of Bengal

by Jason Cons

3 JUL 2017

Rimple Mehta’s ethnographic exploration of the violence of mobility in “Mobility across Borders and Continuums of Violence: Experiences of Bangladeshi Women in Correctional Homes in Kolkata” is a critical intervention in studies of migration across the India-Bangladesh border and of border crossing more generally. Through a study of Bangladeshi women in correctional homes in Kolkata, she foregrounds the ways that migrants crossing this border are exposed to multiple forms of gendered violence. Moreover, unlike much of the rapidly expanding body of work on the India-Bangladesh, she follows the trajectory of this violence outwards from the border—tracing it from Ready Made Garment factories in Dhaka to correctional homes in Kolkata and back across the border again. Thus, we learn from her work not only about the precariousness of border crossing, but also the violence of detention and return. In recent years, scholarship in the US and Europe has increasingly turned its attention to what Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (2010) have provocatively called “the deportation regime”. Mehta’s study reminds us that we must attend to the particularities of such regimes in other spaces where borders purport to curtail movement between radically unequal states.

Mehta’s work raises questions that scholars of borders, of migration, and of violence need to consider with more care. One of these is the need for a better understanding of violence and its specific articulations with gender. Mehta’s work shows that border crossing is an act fraught with gendered precarity. That said, it remains less clear how we should understand and differentiate these specific forms of violence in the context of the broader violence of borders (Jones 2016). As the Human Rights Watch study on shootings at the India-Bangladesh border that she cites makes clear, the vast majority of those shot-on-sight by India’s Border Security Forces are men. Moreover, in the tragic case of Felani Khatun that Mehta raises at the outset of the paper, there is ample evidence to suggest that she was shot simply because she was seen as a border crosser (moving from India back into Bangladesh). There is less evidence to suggest that she was shot specifically because she was a woman. How then might we better trace and understand the relationship between gender, mobility, and violence at this border?

As the work of Malini Sur (2007), Sahana Ghosh (2014), and Delwar Hussain (2013) has recently shown, gender plays an intimate role in mediating mobility at the India-Bangladesh border. Women crossing this border are certainly exposed to often horrific forms of violence. Yet, gender also plays a critical role in enabling certain kinds of movements even as it restricts others. This suggests that greater attention is needed to the micropolitics of crossing and the ways that bodies of both women and men are exposed to regimes of violent regulation.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Mehta’s paper is that it furthers the project of restoring voice to women who are often systematically reduced to statistics or glossed as abject victims in reporting on human trafficking. In the narratives of women in detention centers in Kolkata, we can begin to glimpse the ways that women who move across this border make difficult choices in conditions very much not of their own choosing. As Diana Tietjens Meyers (2011) has argued, much of the literature on trafficking is trapped in a two-victim paradigm—unable to represent women as anything other than abject victims or heroic resisters of their conditions. Mehta’s paper shows the realities to be much more complicated. It is an ethnographically rich exploration of what Meyers calls “burdened agency.” Through this reading, we begin to understand the often painful decisions that women make that expose them to often horrific forms of violence. Moreover, it forces us to reckon with these decisions as choices. Her work thus demands that we confront the question of agency and humanity in mobility even as it exposes the dehumanizing technologies and techniques of violence in border crossing and detention.

Work Cited

De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz (eds). 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ghosh, Sahana. 2014. “Anti-Trafficking and Its Discontents: Women’s Migrations and Work in an Indian Borderland.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 1220-1235.

Hussain, Delwar. 2013. Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border. London: C. Hurst & Co.

Jones, Reece. 2016. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London and New York: Verso.

Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2011. “Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of ‘Impure’ Victims.” Humanity. 2(2). 255-275.

Sur, Malini. 2007. “Bamboo Baskets and Barricades: Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh Border.” In Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 127-150.

Jason Cons is in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin