Putas, histéricas y maricones Violencia de género en reseñas cinematográficas publicadas online por españoles

The main objective of this work is to condemn the presence of different verbal forms of gender-based violence in anonymously written film reviews published in Filmaffinity.comby users who identified themselves as Spaniards in their profiles. It also intends to explore the use and frequency of pejorative constructions, insults and nicknames related to gender identity. With these objectives in mind, a corpus with 376,285 words from 1,472 reviews has been compiled and analysed. All the reviews are based on the 20 fiction films co-produced by Spain together with the UK and/or the USA between 2005 and 2015 that include at least one Spanish actress or actor in their casts. Among the 1,472 reviews analysed, 105 (7,1%) contain a minimum of one example of a pejorative construction, one insult or one nickname related to gender identity. More precisely, insults have been found in 18 reviews (1,2%), nicknames in 32 (2,2%) and pejorative constructions in 56 (3,8%). The most frequent insults have qualified female subjects as prostitutes (83,3%) and male subjects as homosexuals (16,7%). Pejorative constructions revolve around the conception of homosexuality as abnormal (10,7%) and around female subjects as valueless, not serious and uncontrolled on the one side (67,8%) and as objects (21,4%) on the other. The significant homophobic, misogynistic and heteronormative burden found in this study proves that keeping on working on active policies to eradicate any form of gender-based violence in Spain is still much needed nowadays. Moreover, it is also necessary to create control mechanisms to avoid that this type of violence continues to use the anonymity offered by the Internet and social nets to keep on normalising its discriminatory discourse, especially among the groups of people more exposed to their messages as youngsters.