What are the dominant trends in narratives and discursive strategies surrounding femicides in Greek mainstream and social media from 2020 to 2024?
In the shadow of the femicide epidemic taking place in Greece today, with eighty femicides occurring between 2020 and 2024 alone, this research proposal focuses on Greek public discourse. It emphasises the rhetoric of mainstream and social media, aiming to examine the dominant trends in narratives and discursive strategies surrounding lethal violence against women, specifically focusing on femicides involving both Greek and non-Greek women. Current conversations on femicides, while very important, often disregard an intersectional (race and class) aspect of these crimes. This focus is crucial to explore which categories of women are deemed “worthy” of being victims, and therefore being visible in public discourse, and which ones are overlooked.
As we move into the era following the #MeToo movement in Greece (2021), the research adopts a longitudinal framework (2020-2024) that focuses on the dimensions of gender and race (but also inevitably class) in the mediated representations of femicide. The aim is to shed light on how these dimensions of identity are used to construct ideal victimhood in the context of gender-based violence. Specifically, through the use of both quantitative (quantitative content analysis and descriptive statistics) and qualitative approaches (discourse analysis), the study will analyse the mediated representations of ideal masculinity and ideal femininity, and how these ideals influence the portrayal of both victims and perpetrators across mass media and social media platforms.
The purpose of this research is to initiate a systematic effort to record and critically analyse the dominant communicative practices through which Greek society understands lethal violence against women, and particularly whether/how these communicative practices potentially legitimise and perpetuate hierarchical valuations of women’s lives (and deaths) along the axes of race and class.
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