Performing citizenship through digital media. Exploring online harassment of feminist academics

This chapter examines how feminist academics in Italy experience and resist online harassment, situating these dynamics within broader struggles over knowledge, legitimacy, and citizenship in digital public spheres. Drawing on in-depth interviews with scholars across different institutional positions, the study conceptualises harassment not only as a personal attack but as a political act of silencing that undermines feminist and gender studies by framing them as illegitimate or ideological. The analysis highlights how digital environments, deeply intertwined with offline political and institutional contexts, both reproduce gendered violence and create spaces for resistance. Building on the notion of “digital acts of citizenship”, the chapter interprets scholars’ responses – ranging from solidarity networks and collective petitions to strategic withdrawal and ambiguous forms of visibility – as political acts of rights claiming. These practices are agonistic and solidaristic at once: they contest exclusionary discourses while fostering alliances with colleagues, students, and activist communities. At the same time, the neoliberal university emerges as an ambivalent structure, often complicit in reproducing silencing through demands for “neutral” scholarship, yet also a site where sub-political spaces of resistance can be cultivated. The findings show that online harassment, while experienced as alienating and destabilising, also compels feminist scholars to renegotiate their public presence and reassert their authority as knowledge producers. Acts of resistance thus extend beyond individual survival strategies to constitute forms of digital citizenship that redefine academic legitimacy. The chapter highlights the democratic stakes of safeguarding feminist scholarship against systemic harassment and delegitimisation.