This book examines how verbal and symbolic aggression and hostility directed at women and LGBT+ people operate across linguistic, multimodal, legal, and institutional domains, and how these practices contribute to discursive, democratic, and constitutional erosion. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from linguistics, discourse and media studies, gender and queer theory, constitutional law, and human-rights scholarship, the volume addresses forms of aggression and hostility ranging from insults, ridicule, and digitally mediated shaming to metaphors of contamination, symbolic erasure, administrative practices, and doctrinal silence.

Through comparative analyses of cases from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, China, and the European human rights system, the chapters show how these practices shape political communication, institutional behavior, and legal meaning-making, thereby affecting visibility, dignity, participation, and the practical enjoyment of rights. The volume highlights recurring mechanisms, such as purity and protection narratives, victim-perpetrator inversion, and multimodal amplification, that travel across platforms, political systems, and institutional settings.

The book demonstrates how verbal and symbolic aggression functions not only as an isolated speech act but as a cross-contextual mechanism with cumulative democratic and constitutional effects. The volume will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in law, linguistics, media and communication studies, gender studies, political science, and human rights.

Tímea Drinóczi is a professor at Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania.

Ana Larissa Oliveira is a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and the Institute of Communication, University of Münster, Germany.