“I’ll throw acid on your pretty little face […], so wrote a genteel fanatic antifeminist”

The discursive management of male gender‐driven aggression by eminent Greek female autobiographers of the 19th and early and mid‐20th century

Bibliographic Data

ID21235468
AuthorsOurania Hatzidaki (0000-0002-4752-3613, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume14
Issue1
Pages98-122
Publication date2026-04-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language Aggression and Conflict (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2213-1272 • E-ISSN: 2213-1280
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jlac.00123.hat
OpenAlexW4402926397
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited19

This paper examines autobiographical reports of acts of (non-)verbal aggression against four Greek women pioneers in education, medicine, art and dance. These aggressive acts had been launched by some of their male contemporaries against the women’s efforts to occupy authority or elite positions. The analysis, which falls within the scope of historical (im)politeness research ( Kádár and Culpeper 2010 ), focuses specifically on the rarely addressed issue of how the autobiographers discursively deal with the narrated incidents. The four women’s real-time reactions to, and post hoc appraisals of, the aggressive acts are categorized and discussed by applying and extending Bousfield’s (2007) model of responses to impoliteness. Furthermore, contemporary witness and third-party contributions, offensive and defensive, are analysed in the light of relevant models ( Dobs and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013 ; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014 ). It is found that all four women take a dignified and defiant stance towards the recorded female-exclusionary behaviours, evidencing a common, diachronically/intergenerationally consistent self-heroizing disposition

Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Humor Studies and Applications · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Psychology

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