Trending Participation, Trending Exclusion?

Abstract

gives the campaign visibility, allows people to follow the demonstrations organized across Turkey, facilitates the formation of new alliances, and creates an interactive online archive of feminicide and anti-feminicide activism. The hashtag has been received positively and has played a significant role in the debates on violence against women. Alongside the activists and independent users in Turkey and the European and North American diaspora from the country, many public figures, including survivors of domestic violence, have also supported the project and increased its visibility.Despite its many uses, the hashtag is not devoid of problems as a tool for activism. To begin with, direct participation in the Internet campaign is predetermined by literacy and access to technology. Moreover, the structure of the hashtag is monoscriptal and monolingual. First, while the original hashtag was created in Turkish script, many users have employed the English transliteration. This tendency, which reflects the internalization of the global power hierarchies embedded in Internet technologies, has led to a significant bifurcation that disrupts communication. Second, although the campaign initially offered hashtags in Arabic (, Armenian (#Կանանցկոտորածկայ), English (StopFemicideInTurkey), Greek (#Ypάrxeiswagήgynaikώn) and Kurdish (#QetlîamaJi-nanHeye) as well, their outreach has remained very limited. These hashtags in different languages were important because they demonstrated the campaign's multi-ethnic and diverse activist base and target population as well as the inter-ethnic and international alliances among feminists. The multilingual aspect of the campaign also operated as a strategy to avoid associating gendered violence with a specific ethnic group, as most commonly done with Kurds. Nevertheless, even in the promotional images and banners in other languages, only the Turkish hashtag was used. In fact, possibly because they were not aware of the original one, some Kurdish-speaking users created another hashtag, #JınTéNQetılkırın [sic], independently from the campaign's organizers, again resulting in a bifurcation. A major reason for this emphasis on Turkish is the operation of the hashtag as a metadata tag. Each hashtag connects the data users have associated it with, and the groups of data organized by different hashtags cannot be combined. Turkish has remained as the primary language of the campaign as a strategy to connect the highest amount of relevant data. Thus, in a sense, technology has limited the campaign's political possibilities. Still, especially because it is combined with social demonstrations, the campaign serves the struggle against feminicide effectively by raising public awareness and challenging the dominant discourses.We started out by asking ourselves what exactly a "feminist" hashtag is. We realised we did not know what exactly we would class as one. We then began to feel that the far more COMMENTARY AND CRITICISM 1103

Feminist activism in digital space: Postfeminist contradictions in #WhyIStayed

“…Hashtags also promise visibility to feminist issues and immediacy in responding to events in real time (Altinay, 2014; Latina and Docherty, 2014). Such visibility can allow for the construction and amplification of counter-narratives within digital spaces (Conley, 2014; Jackson et al, 2018; Thrift, 2014).…”

“…In this case, the hashtag not only made visible women’s lived experiences following a tragic news event, but it also provided the means of “critical, feminist intervention in how we conceptualize and choose to narrate misogynist aggression and gender violence in American culture” (Thrift, 2014: 1091). This is possible in part because hashtags, in addition to being searchable, can become highly visible through mechanisms that identify “trending” hashtags on social media platforms as well as through regular media coverage of hashtags as events in their own right (Latina and Docherty, 2014). In addition, co-occurring hashtags and celebrity influencers can further heighten this visibility, as in Jackson et al’s (2018) analysis of the ways #GirlsLikeUs contributed to extending and elevating the visibility of trans stories and concerns into the mainstream.…”

Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives

“…More specifically, while our study examines #MeToo disclosures in aggregate, it does not speak to what extent disclosures from various subpopulations were heard. For example, although there were likely a number of Black women, trans women, and men who disclosed their experiences with sexual violence despite the higher levels of stigma that they face, it is likely that those voices were not equally amplified through #MeToo [46,53,77]. Similar to how #MeToo may have failed to create a space that felt equally safe for disclosure among all those who could have disclosed, the hashtag campaign may have also failed to include the voices of those who did ultimately choose to disclose, inequitably highlighting particular experiences with sexual violence.…”

Digital Standpoints

“…Notably, public tweets from individual users containing a hashtagged phrase can be easily aggregated and retweeted, circulating messages to people outside of the original tweeter’s personal network and allowing for virality (boyd, Golder, & Lotan, 2010). While there is great potential on the platform to create horizontal, grassroots dialogue, scholars have also highlighted that Twitter’s structure allows for the reproduction of social hierarchies and exclusions (Latina & Docherty, 2014). For example, Kingston Mann (2014) notes that the ever-shrinking divide between public and private facilitated by online networks can pose as much risk as benefit to those already widely targeted for identity-based harassment, commodification, and surveillance.…”