Recently published: Domestic Violence on #qanda: The ‘‘Man’’ Question in Live Twitter Discussion on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A

Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz from the School of Justice, Faculty of Law and Professor Jean Burgess, Director of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and Professor of Digital Media in the Creative Industries Faculty recently published: Domestic Violence on #qanda: The ‘‘Man’’ Question in Live Twitter Discussion on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A in volume 28.1 of The Canadian Journal of Women and the Law.

Domestic violence is currently undergoing a period of heightened visibility in Australia. This article uses social media to analyze public discussions about this violence with respect to a specific theoretical frame, which Adrian Howe has called the “Man” question: where and how are men visible or invisible in narratives about their violence against women? The article presents a qualitative study of the Twitter conversation surrounding a special episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television program Q&A, themed around family violence, which aired in February 2015. We found that the place of men in this conversation was contested. Some tweets privileged men’s voices and concerns, as did the organization and production of the program. However, feminist voices were also highly visible via presenting facts, legitimating survivor voices, and recuperating anti-feminist memes to challenge hegemonic patriarchal discourses on men’s violence against women.

The article is part of a  special issue on Men’s Groups: Challenging Feminism, following a May 2014 workshop organized by Susan Boyd, former Professor of Law and Chair in Feminist Legal Studies and the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia. The workshop was generously sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, the Faculty of Law at Allard Hall, the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law.

Read more about the workshop here.

A second special issue of papers related to the workshop is forthcoming in The International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.