Talk by CDMC Visiting Fellow Elisa Garcia

Tuesday 2 July 2019, 1-2pm.

How are social media and mobile technologies reshaping sexual violence? Why do perpetrators film sexual assaults? Why do people watch and share these violent sexual contents? One of the consequences of the widespread of social media and mobile technologies is the digitalization of rape; this is the photographing, filming and sharing of the sexual assault. In the past, I studied the media representations of rape for the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo war sexual crimes, considering issues such as the embodiment of memory and the political uses of rape narratives. Now, I am focusing on studying these issues through the case-study of two filmed gang-sexual assaults that have taken place in Spain (2016-2018). In this talk, I reflect about both cases and their connections in order to discuss about the politics of visual representations of rape and the visual regimes of rape in the digital era.

The 30-minute talk was followed by a 30 minute Q&A/discussion.

Please note that this was part of an (optional) double bill with the 1-2pm talk ‘Digital Media, Visual Narratives of Illness and Public Self-Representation’ by CDMC Visiting Fellow rebeca Pardo, see https://www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-media-visual-narratives-of-illness-and-public-self-representation-tickets-64163105576

Elisa Garcia-Mingo was a Visiting Research Fellow hosted by the Centre for Digital Media Cultures and the Centre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender at the University of Brighton.

Elisa Garcia-Mingo is Associate Professor in Media and Communications based at the Universidad Internacional Villanueva (Madrid, Spain) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Digital Media Cultures and theCentre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender, University of Brighton. She got her PhD in 2011 from Universidad de Deusto (Bilbao) with a dissertation called Peace Waves. Congolese women journalists’ activism against sexual violence and, since then, she has researched and published about women’s political activism (Congolese activists, indigenous women in Chile), narratives of sexual violence in the media (Journal of African Media Studies, 2017) and women journalists careers (Comparative Sociology, 2019). She has been a visiting fellow at the Universidad Catolica de Chile (2015) and McGill University (2018). Since 2018 she belongs to a research group about Sexual Assault in Universidad Complutense de Madrid.