Post-Truth Politics, Women Academics and the Brexit Debate

In this article, I explore the role of post-truth discourse in the marginalisation of women – especially women academics – from the public sphere, taking Brexit as a case study. Women were under-represented in the Brexit debates prior to the referendum, both as politicians / campaigners and as experts (Harmer, 2016; Guerrina et al., 2016). Women voters were found to have discussed the referendum primarily in the private sphere (Guerrina et al., 2018). After the referendum, women MPs – particularly those who were pro-Remain – reported being subject to sustained online abuse including death threats that in some cases led to their decision to stand down. Gina Miller, the businesswoman and campaigner who took the UK Government to court over Parliament’s right to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, has reported receiving both racist and misogynistic abuse so concerning she had to employ 24-hour security. Brexit has therefore involved a high level of violence directed at women in the public sphere. Such abuse can be interpreted not just as misogynistic discourse but as the exclusion of women’s expertise from public debates. The Council of Europe has recognised hate speech and harassment as ‘mal-information’, part of the broader ‘information disorder’ (2017). Such forms of harassment are not distributed equally, but targeted particularly at marginalised groups, particularly those at the intersection of different forms of oppression. Feminist scholars have noted the gendered and racialised dynamics that shape post-truth politics (O’Dwyer, 2018; Burke & Carolissen, 2018; Read, 2018). While European public sphere scholars have explored the impact of post-truth politics on public deliberation (Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Pfetsch, 2018), however, there has been little work to-date that explores the gendered impacts of post-truth politics on the public sphere. That the public sphere is gendered has been established by feminist philosophers: Nancy Fraser, for example, argues that Habermas’ conception of the public sphere privileges a ‘masculine style’ of deliberation that relegates women to the domestic realm (1990, p. 60). This paper will explore the role of gender in shaping patterns of inclusion and exclusion in public deliberation in the post-truth context.