Hostility in high definition: Gendered aggression against female politicians on X in Spain

This study examines gendered aggression against female politicians in Spain on X through a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), operationalised through Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. Drawing on 800 replies directed at Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Irene Montero, two ideologically opposed yet similarly targeted figures, the study investigates how digital hostility is linguistically, visually, and discursively constructed to undermine women in power. Analysis identified five recurring discursive strategies: infantilisation and interactional downranking, sexualisation and sexual-moral shaming, delegitimisation of competence and authority, emotional pathologisation and tonal policing, and humour, irony, and mock civility. These were distributed across both subcorpora at varying rates ( n = 231–412 instances per strategy; categories non-mutually exclusive, with individual replies receiving multiple labels where strategies co-occurred). Scripts directed at Ayuso and Montero exhibit structural identity at the level of underlying gendered logic despite ideologically opposed targets, divergent surface narratives, and uneven distributional intensity. This study theorises this cross-target convergence as a transideological repertoire, defined here as a culturally available set of discursive resources for disciplining female political visibility. The transideological repertoire is inferred from convergence at the target side: comparable gendered scripts appear in replies to a conservative regional president and to a left-wing former minister, despite their different political positions and public profiles. These practices perform sustained ideological work by reasserting gender hierarchies, fuelling postfeminist backlash, and displacing political agency through gendered causality.