Feminist Political Discourses in the Digital Era: A new materialist discursive analysis of the #BringBackOurGirls cyber-campaign

Abstract

Increasing use of cyber-campaigns is being made by social movements and political groups. Nevertheless, this popularity is often accompanied by undesirable consequences for social movements such as the violence denounced by contemporary feminism. Thus, some digital mobilisations create a rift between the physical and digital worlds — something that often gives rise to homogenisation of socio-cultural categories such as gender, race, and age. In this paper, we analyse the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, which sprang to life five years ago. Its path reveals the success of these cyber-campaigns in the field of contemporary feminism. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) is used to take a feminist genealogical approach to new materialisms. In doing so, it examines the temporal and spatial trajectory of the campaign to reshape affirmative feminist politics. These politics involve reconfiguring pre-established notions such as ‘girl’, ‘agency’, and ‘otherness’ to provide social movements with the capacity to respond. We therefore undertake an ethnographic examination of the hashtag (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015) to compare the beginning of the campaign with the situation now. We draw on these results to localise the shift from the local scale to the global one, in which structural powers, individual agency, and ‘glocal’ [local-global] and feminist affirmation policies become diluted.

Enseñar y aprender en el ciberespacio: Aportes desde las pedagogías ciberfeministas a la educación virtual. Revisión sistemática de literatura

“…La Internet ciberfeminista propone que las personas y colectivos que habitan la red generen nuevos compromisos éticos-políticos que les permitan constituirse como sujetos/as políticos/as a partir de la apropiación crítica y subversiva de las tecnologías (Reverter-Bañón, 2013). Esto cimentaría las bases de, por ejemplo, una Internet sin sesgos ni desigualdades de género que visibilice y supere el rol de la mujer y otros colectivos sometidos a la violencia virtual patriarcal (Hanash, 2020;Revelles-Benavente, 2020).…”

Performative Writing as a Method of Inquiry With the Material World: The Art of the Imperative

“…It is becoming well recognized that qualitative research needs to reflect the importance of environmental and ecological conditions entwined in human narratives (Bennett, 2010;Revelles-Benavente & Cielemecka, 2016;Kershaw, 2012). The notion of an intra-active pedagogy is described by Roder (2011) where learning is seen to take place in an ongoing material-discursive flow of agency (p. 61).…”

“…As demonstrated in Figures 1,2,3,and 4, the page became an entanglement of thought, words, shapes, lines, and plasticine. A performance of writing through "an entangled creation of knowledge that "breaks through" pre-established notions of non/human agencies in order to produce encounters in which political and material intra-act to be "part of that nature that we seek to understand" (Barad, 2007, p. 26;Revelles Benavente & Cielemecka, 2016). In the tension between Human and material agency New and unpredictable Possibilities occur…”