Is #akademiuppropet a kind of digital counter-public?

Feminist solidarity and hopeful imaginings in the MeToo movement in Iceland

“…We thus refer to the participants as women. This strategy of naming the group 'women' excludes non-binary people (Salmonsson, 2020) and forms of violence outside heteronormative contexts.…”

“…Subsequently, a selected collection of those testimonies was published anonymously in the media, without naming the perpetrators. The closed Facebook groups thus worked as feminist counter publics (Fraser, 1990;Goker, 2019;Salmonsson, 2020) that collected and questioned the taken-for-granted understanding of gender relations that resulted in the women's discomfort, humiliation, pain and anger. In this regard, the Facebook groups provided a venue for the formation of affective feminist solidarities (Åhäll, 2018;Hemmings, 2012;Probyn, 1993) or 'feminism with attitude' (Probyn, 1993: 139), where the dissonance between how we feel in relation to dominant norms is placed in a political context (Hemmings, 2012;Probyn, 1993).…”

“…In Iceland, the MeToo movement started in November 2017 and dominated public discussion for months. It was inspired by the Swedish MeToo campaign (Alvinius and Holmberg, 2019; Salmonsson, 2020), where the published testimonies were anonymous, and the perpetrators were unidentified. This strategy was meant to ensure that individual men’s sexual violations would not dominate the much-needed discussion about how to reform a culture (Pétursdóttir and Rúdólfsdóttir, 2022).…”

Mapping an emerging hashtag ecosystem: connective action and interpretive frames in the Swedish #MeToo movement

“…In some cases, they developed into petitions that were published on opinion pages in news media and/or handed in to politicians, in which women demand an end to sexism, sexual harassment and assault in their workplaces (Lisa Salomonsson 2020). Many of them started out as closed Facebook groups, mailing lists and shared Google Docs where stories were collected and political demands negotiated (Pollack 2019;Karin Hansson, Malin Sveningsson, Maria Sandgren, and Hillevi Ganetz et al 2019;Salomonsson 2020). In an analysis of the initial 28 petitions published in Swedish news media, Hansson (2020) found that the groups employed particular, structural, feminist frames to construct sexual harassment as a structural problem.…”

“…Furthermore, the organisers and participants in the sector-specific #MeToo initiatives expressed strong feelings of trust in the technological tools used to connect and share stories (Hansson et al 2019). The participants noted the importance of particular technological properties, such as the ability to create closed Facebook groups, where participants could share experiences with one another while constructing a collective narrative that could be transformed into petitions (Salomonsson 2020). Thus, #MeToo seems to have dispersed in Sweden in a way that W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012, 755-757) refers to as hybrid between connective and collective action.…”