Abstract This paper examines how violence against women in politics (VAWP) is enacted and normalised in Malaysia through online reactions to a media appearance by Young Syefura Othman, a Malay-Muslim politician in the Chinese-majority Democratic Action Party (DAP). Drawing on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) ( KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018 ; Esposito and KhosraviNik 2023 ), it analyses reaction-emoji metrics and 2,800 netizen comments following the recirculation of the clip by Utusan Malaysia Online . The findings identify three interlocking mechanisms of political violence: (1) affective disciplining organised through emoji-driven ridicule; (2) embodied degradation via animalisation and sexualisation that recode political agency as bodily subordination; and (3) moral-religious sanction, in which appeals to haram (religiously forbidden), kafir (infidel), calls for fatwa (religious rulings), and eschatological imagery authorise exclusion from political and religious community. Sexualisation functions as a key intensifier that binds gendered hostility to racialised and religious boundary-work. The paper argues that framing such attacks as mere “online misconduct” obscures their political function in deterring participation, eroding democratic voice, and policing the boundaries of political belonging.
Siti Nurnadilla Mohamad Jamil (Tue,) studied this question.