‘She felt incredibly ashamed’: gendered (cyber-)bullying and the hypersexualized female body

Cyberbullying has become an ever-pressing topic for young people in a time of ubiquitous media. Some the existing, mostly quantitative studies reveal that (cyber-)bullying is gendered and female genderqueer are bullied more often differently than males. However, there lack qualitative look into specific reproduction dynamics discourses bullying stretches across entangled socio-material-technological spaces. Informed by insights from digital geographies, gender(-queer) interdisciplinary research on (cyber-)bullying, taking feminist perspective, this article investigates adults’ narratives about (cyber-)bullying. The analysis based upon 42 written produced adults attending upper secondary schools Austria describing they were involved as (co-)perpetrators, targets or bystanders. (Cyber-)bullying reported ranges early undesired reception sexual content to hypersexualized harassment (by peers) grooming unknown adults). Rather focusing narrators’ active passive roles practices themselves, through narrative we how, their accounts attacks, our participants—often unintentionally—reproduce gender ideals femininity masculinity, therewith deeply ingrained heteronormative prevail Austrian society. For people, persistent complex ‘sexual double standard’ particularly harmful serving legitimize hypersexualization bodies online while simultaneously prohibiting right self-determined online.