Multimodal analysis of the construction of sexual violence narratives on YouTube

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ContextThe #MeToo Movement has transformed sharing sexual violence narratives into a form of feminist activism on social media. Existing literature on #MeToo primarily focuses on Twitter, paying limited scholarly attention to YouTube, despite it offering as a hub for the communication of such narratives (Almanssori & Stanley, 2021). Sexual abuse is often linked to an altered relationship with the survivor's self, disconnection from their bodies, loss of trust, or dissociation (Herman, 2015). Additionally, Almanssori & Stanley (2021) and Gay (2018) found that victims were conflicted about how they perceived their experience of sexual violence due to conflicting internalised ideologies. Therefore, having access to longer form of videos on YouTube and multimodal elements associated with the videos allows for a deep insight into the victims' experiences and how they view themselves and their surrounding environment. This project analyses sexual violence narratives as an artefact of personal healing and social importance on a platform that is host to both community support and anonymous trolling (Colliver & Coyle, 2020). This project has the scope for a thorough and holistic analysis of the videos and narratives by unpacking multiple facets of the videos and narratives, including multimodality. It has goals of exploring and understanding sexual violence narratives to add to a discussion of dismantling rape culture (Van Dijk, 2001). Research QuestionsUnder the broader goals of the project, I will seek to answer the following questions:1) How are ideologies reproduced or rejected?2) How are the narratives structured linguistically and visually?3) How do the victims or video publishers accommodate, or not, towards their audience?MethodologyThe corpus of videos will be analysed from a feminist critical discourse analysis perspective and a multimodal perspective. Lazar (2007) explains feminist discourse analysis as understanding 'how gender ideology and gendered relations of power get (re)produced, negotiated, and contested' (p. 150). Van Dijk (2001) claimed that 'critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality' (p. 352), which is central to the aims of this research. This stance alongside the core of Lazar's (2007) FCDA paradigm, results in the analysis revolving specifically around the gender-related issues in sexual violence discourse. More broadly than the FCDA theoretical framework, the project shall draw from Fairclough's (2013) dialectal relational approach (DRA) framework. Crucially, this framework relies on the analysis of both discursive elements as well as social elements. This incorporation of social actions is naturally transdisciplinary in nature, enabling analysis of the curation of the videos as artefacts, and the impact of social ideologies that circulate. Within the field of forensic linguistics, the presence of multimodal analysis is important, especially in cases of sexual violence, as multimodal elements 'forge identity, orchestrate epistemic stance and distribute responsibility in the sociolegal organization of sexual assault' (Coulthard & Johnson, 2010, p. 542).I shall explore the lexical choices, paralinguistic features, and multimodal features that the victim employs to reproduce ideologies, create identities, and interact with an audience. ImplicationsQuantitative analysis has demonstrated that videos on gender-related topics increase young people's knowledge of sexual violence prevention (Maryanah, Masitoh, & Dzikar, 2022); therefore, understanding how sexual violence narratives on YouTube have been constructed multimodally can be used to inform resources on sexual violence prevention for schools, therapeutic settings, or law enforcement settings, as well as highlighting the theoretical importance of multimodal analysis in sexual violence research.