DIPARTIMENTO CULTURE E SOCIETÀ Gaia Giuliani – Júlia Garraio – Sofia José Santos ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SEXUAL MO- RAL PANIC AROUND MIGRANTS IN EUROPE http://dx.doi.org/XXXXXXXXXXXX Abstract Keywords The authors address the role played by digital media in developing an ideological and iden- online social media, titarian discourse characterized by fear and moral panic about Others across Europe. In intersectional represen- “Online social media and the construction of sexual moral panic around migrants in Eu- tations, “migrant and refu- rope”, they begin with analysing the securitization devices introduced in many countries gee crisis”, sexual crimes, of the EU and their work along specific gendered, sexual, and racialised lines. The article Germany and Italy examines the role of digital media in amplifying the “sexual moral panic” about migration. Taking Italy and Germany as case studies-sites, we argue that digital media have strongly contributed to the dissemination and escalation of fears of invasion and of dangerous sex- ualities framed by constructions of race and gender. Their contribution unveils the ways in which colonialist and racist legacies that are historically sedimented in both Italy and Germany get reorganised “online” (i.e. through social media). These, in turn, produce a very specific post-colonial dimension reinforcing widespread hatred of the Other and new processes of racialisation, which include, among others, gender stereotyping. About the authors Gaia Giuliani is permanent researcher at the Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Co- imbra. Italian pioneer in critical whiteness studies, she is also anti-racist feminist activist and scholar. Among her many publications Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani co-authored with dr. Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Monnier 2013), First prize 2014 in the 20th-21st century category by the American Association for Italian Studies. In 2020 she will publish Environmental Disasters, Migrations and the War on Terror: A Postcolo- nial Investigation of Cultural Constructions of Monstrosity (Routledge). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9535-6875 Contact: [email protected] Sofia José Santos is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Faculty of Econom- ics, University of Coimbra, and a Researcher at the Center for Social Studies, where she coordinates the DeCodeM project as a Principal Investigator. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9300-7452. Contact: [email protected] Júlia Garraio is researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Her current research interests include sexual violence, masculinities, feminisms, national- ism, populism, comparative literature and media. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5342-8391 Contact: [email protected] Socioscapes. International Journal of Societies, Politics and Cultures 161 IainGaia Chambers Giuliani, Júlia Garraio, Sofia José Santos Introduction logne, and the rape-murder of a student in Freiburg in 2016 by an asylum seeker). The article argues that In the context of the production of a “European gender, sexuality, race and other categories of differ- identity”, in the face of the migrant and refugee cri- ence were crucial in the social media construction of sis which occurred from the period 2015/2016 on, these events as political crisis and threats to Europe- digital media have contributed widely to shaping an an identity. In this sense, it is a contribution to the ideological and identitarian discourse based on fear wide range of research which examines the processes and moral panic. The massive arrival of refugees, the of making sexual violence (in)visible andthe cultur- terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, the New Year’s Eve al-political entanglements underlying the racialization sexual assaults in Cologne – to name just a few – were of rape in contexts of social tensions around migration perceived as serious challenges to the very idea of Eu- and multiculturalism.2 Furthermore, it exposes the rope as a welcoming and inclusive “imagined commu- pervasiveness of femonationalism – the exploitation nity”. Several individual member states, often pushed and co-option of feminist agendas and, specifically, by major advances in their anti-immigration parties, the fight against gender violence by Islamophobic and have been key actors in leading the reintroduction of anti-immigration political actors3 – in contemporary European national border controls, the monitoring Western European politics. of non-Europeans, the Othering of bodies according Our reflection on how circulating discourses and to gender, race, sexuality and religion, the construc- images in Italy and Germany recall what Ann Lau- tion of walls and fences, the development of systems ra Stoler4and Gloria Wekker5have respectively called of detention and securitization and the promotion of the “colonial” and “national archive” building on Ed- anti-immigration policies. Digital media and particu- ward Said’s definition of cultural archive6; moreover, larly online social media have played a major role in the “figures of race”7 that spring from colonial and creating subjectivities around the crisis and promoting national archives are based on the idea that sexual processes of Othering, leading to the successful secu- moral panic has a long genealogy and that its more ritization of specific groups and the creation of moral recent recurrences need to be read against the grain of panic concerning those same groups. a postcolonial mentality that today reinforces wide- This essay examines the role of digital media in am- spread claims of national primacy. Also, we argue that plifying the “sexual moral panic” around migration. the online social media environment is particularly We argue that digital media strongly contributed to efficient in producing, validating and disseminating the dissemination and escalation of phobias of inva- these “figures of race” and more broadly the “colonial” sion and dangerous sexuality framed by constructions and “national archive” from whence they spring. As of race and gender coming from widely shared orien- such, the moral panic around migrants and refugees talist and colonial archives of racialized rape. These ar- – Blacks and Muslims in particular – the gendering chives sustain the representation of male Muslim and and racialization of threat and fear, intertwined with Black migrants and refugees as subverting the sexual phobias framed by the dichotomy of “us versus them”, order of the European “imagined community”.1 Two cannot be understood without critically examining European nations, Italy and Germany, will be at the online social media. core of our analysis. We examine digital media circu- lation of images and videos regarding sexual crimes committed by migrants (namely the rape and murder 2. For instance: Grewald, Racialised Gang Rape and The of young woman in Macerata by a Nigerian migrant in Reinforcement of Dominant Order: Discourses of Gender, Race and Nation. 3. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. January 2018, the rape and murder of young woman 4. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 90; in Rome by a Nigerian migrant in October the same Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. year, the 2015 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Co- 5. Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, 2. 6. Said, Orientalism. 7. Giuliani, “Monstrosity, Abjection and Europe in the War on 1. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Terror.” 162 © S.IJSPC vol. 1 Issue 1, pp. X-XX Online social media and the construction of sexualBroken moral archivespanic around in a migrating migrants modernityin Europe By “figure of race” we refer to a figuration that has tion. Other examples which exemplify how «tropes of been sedimented nationally and transnationally along the radical right… moved into centrist discourses»9 are colonial and postcolonial times and that refers, spe- the famous Focus cover and the Südeutsche Zeitung’s cifically, to the construction of the postcolonial male frontpage about Cologne representing «the white Other as uncivilized, violent, hypersexualized and so- German woman’s body as the nation that is being cially dangerous. In our cases, the male Other is the violated by “borderless” Europe and “failed Willkom- black migrant and asylum seeker (Nigerian and Sen- menskultur”».10 In our opinion, such examples testify egalese in the two deadly rapes occurred in Italy) and for a European “imagined (national) communities” the Middle Eastern and Muslim refugee (in the cases dangerously exposed to a mentality that, up until very analyzed in Germany). These figures, in their funda- recently, was thought to belong exclusively to very few mental differences (deriving the one from anti-black ultra-nationalists. and the other from anti-Muslim stereotypes) converge This essay is part of an on-going transdisciplinary in a discourse that, by contrast, sustains the claim of project at the Center of Social Studies, University of the “color of the nation”, whose whiteness is threat- Coimbra: (De)Othering: Deconstructing Risk and Oth- ened by the “invasion” of the “uncivilized” former col- erness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on mi- onized and/or a barbaric and violent East. grants/refugees and “internal Others” in Portuguese and As we will show, the “color” of the nation is invari- European mediascapes. This project sets out to critically ably claimed by the right-wing constellation