Les vidéos de gay bashing : des agresseurs à YouTube
This research will study the rise of gay bashing videos since 2013. We define gay bashing videos as videos documenting verbal or physical attacks against individuals perceived by the abusers as being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or queer. We will however concentrate our study on videos showing attacks against men. These videos can be recorded by the abusers themselves or by witnesses. This rise in gay bashing videos will be situated within a comeback or anti-LGBT feelings and laws in some of the countries where the videos come from and also within anthropological and socio-historical theories about the sources and motivations behind homophobic violence. The corpus will consist of three videos coming from Russia ((«Putin’s Crackdown on LGBT Teens in Russia»), Lybia («Gay torture and violent in Lybia») and the United States («Attack at gay pride event in Detroit») The analysis of the videos will be made in three steps: 1. The analysis of the form and content of the videos. 2. The analysis of their circulation and the different users circulating them online. 3. The analysis of their reception with a particular attention given to the users’ comments on YouTube. We will show how gay bashing videos are creating a rupture with a certain vision of YouTube and other social medias as liberating and sites of self-expression (especially for LGBT people) and how they transform them as sites of humiliations that are tripled by the recording of the event and its circulation on the web. We will then see how the circulation of those videos by different groups and users transforms them according to different political agendas and ideologies, to finally question ourselves, by following the Humiliation Triangle from Donald Klein, on the ambivalent role of the witness (physical or virtual) whose presence is necessary for a humiliation to take place. Finally we will focus on videos of gay bashing testimonies made by the victims themselves who narrate their trauma in front of the camera thus reviving the logic of avowal that we can find in coming out videos. This research will also be an opportunity to develop new methodological and theoretical tools for the study of new medias.
gay bashing homophobie humiliation YouTube homophobia new media queer theory