Twitter as a Feminist Resource: #YesAllWomen, Digital Platforms, and Discursive Social Change

Estudi comparat de les posicions a Twitter dels polítics espanyols sobre el feminisme

“…The use of the hashtag "#feminism" has been critically analysed by Lopez et al (2019: 7), who concluded that it is used to discuss understandings of feminism, describe perceptions, respond to misogyny and express the perceived relevance of feminism as a social movement. Hashtag feminism has also been studied by Dixon (2014) and, in general, several investigations have dealt with the topic of feminist identity or digital feminist activism through an analysis of different hashtags (Lommel et al, 2019;Mendes et al, 2018;Jouët, 2018;Zimmerman, 2017;Barker-Plummer and Barker-Plummer, 2017).…”

A Tale of Two Hashtags: More Than Absolute Opposition in an Affinity Space Formed by Sexual Harassment

“…Due to the inadequate intersectionality of the hashtag, "some trans women, gay women, and women of [colour]" created parallel hashtags like #EachEveryWoman and #YesAllWhiteWomen to both better represent them and "critique […] the 'white feminism' they came to see as dominating the hashtag" (p. 24). Like Gallagher et al's (2018) study, Barker-Plummer and Barker-Plummer (2017) also discover that tweets with #YesAllWomen were crosstagged with politically opposite hashtags like #NotAllMen, #YesAllMen, and #YesAllPeople. They suggest that the oppositional stances and "'internal' feminist critique" indicate that "the conversation about rape culture was taking place on multiple fronts at the same time" (p. 26).…”

“…Firstly, while a hashtag generally refers to one topic or discursive event, there can be many key themes within these discourses. For example, with the hashtag #YesAllWomen, researched via content and discourse analysis methods by Barker-Plummer and Barker-Plummer (2017), the topic of the hashtag is the act of sharing stories of misogyny and violence against women. On the other hand, key themes within the discourse include terms "that [support] the description of #YesAllWomen as a conversation about a rape culture," including "man, woman, rape, misogyny, fear, sex, violence, and feminism" (p.…”

“…Also, Barker-Plummer and Barker-Plummer's study shows that scholars can compare the key terms of a corpus against a reference corpus to investigate if these terms belong to general discourses or not. Barker-Plummer and Barker-Plummer (2017) discovered "a very specific, political (feminist) discourse" in the hashtag #YesAllWomen. D'Ambrosio (2019) found that tweets with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter included the frequent lexical items white and black, which pointed to "how the discourse pertaining to race in this case is presented as a dichotomy" (p. 12).…”

“…One such discursive strategy (relating to discourse) is indexing, where a hashtag creates a meaningful connection between a tweet and the social issue that the hashtag references (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). For example, tweeting about the action of 'holding car keys like a weapon when walking at night' along with the hashtag #YesAllWomen makes the connection between that it is terrifying as a woman to be living in a rape culture and emphasizes the social issue that women are constantly living in a rape culture (Barker-Plummer & Barker-Plummer, 2017).…”