Queering Post-Truth Politics: Silencing, Violence and Resistance in Online Debates about EU Integration

Since the Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump in 2016, scholars and commentators have spoken of the emergence of a ‘post-truth era’ characterised by a decline in trust in expertise and circulation of disinformation. The election of populist authoritarian ‘strongmen’ in a range of contexts has coincided with continued attacks on immigrants, ‘experts’, and mainstream politicians. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated conflicts over scientific expertise and trust in ‘knowledge authorities’, and further encouraged the online proliferation of disinformation. The present moment is also one in which women, girls, people of colour and queer individuals are receiving an unprecedented amount of abuse facilitated by social media, with a significant amount of this abuse occurring online and being of a violent, sexualised and racist nature. Indeed, scientists who were launched into the public eye during the Covid-19 pandemic have reported sustained attacks and campaigns of harassment on social media. Online abuse is often understood as an act that is deeply rooted in the private sphere; it is often sent anonymously, is received on the laptop or phone of the recipient rather than in a public venue, and is obscured by the processes of silencing that it induces. Furthermore, it often constrains these individuals’ ability to engage in public discussion and debate, for fear of further abuse or threats of violence. Locating discrete acts of online violence within a global context in which the concepts of truth, trust and authority are being denigrated, we argue that existing frameworks struggle to capture the ways in ‘post-truth politics’ has particular effects on the most marginalised groups. Using Brexit as a case study and applying an intersectional feminist and queer theoretical lens, we explore the way in which different forms of expertise are given credibility or actively denigrated by ‘mainstream’ media and social media commentators. Analysing comments on UK right-wing newspaper social media pages under articles about academic/legal/scientific experts’ contributions to Brexit debates, this paper traces how (often violent) sexual, gendered and racialised discourses are deployed, and the extent to which this reflects colonial understandings of subjectivity that were exclusive to the white, European male. Drawing upon these themes, it unpacks how the figure of ‘the expert’ has been constructed and contested within these online spaces, with the ultimate goal of understanding how LGBTQ+ people, women and people of colour relate to and contest violent and exclusionary stereotypes of expertise. In so doing, we demonstrate the need for further theoretical and empirical work that unpacks the gendered, racialised and sexualised dynamics of ‘post-truth’ in a post-pandemic Europe.