Vernacular practices in digital feminist activism on Twitter: deconstructing affect and emotion in the #MeToo movement

Nau, Charlotte; Zhang, Jinman; Quan‐Haase, Anabel; Mendes, Kaitlynn

doi:10.1080/14680777.2022.2027496

Cited by 17 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…More importantly, the affective elements within networked acknowledgment can be an important driver of calls to action. Acknowledgment posts recognize and echo other people’s sufferings and vulnerabilities and contain a wide range of emotions like sadness, sympathy, trust, and love (Nau et al, 2022; Suk et al, 2021). Though some emotional expressions might be short-lived (Margolin & Liao, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019), they in general encode and disseminate social information (Van Kleef et al, 2010), trigger emotional contagion (Kramer et al, 2014), and prompt action (Margolin & Liao, 2018).…”

Section: Networked Acknowledgment and Calls To Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Personal Becomes Political: Unpacking the Dynamics of Sexual Violence and Gender Justice Discourses Across Four Social Media Platforms

Suk

Zhang

Yue

et al. 2023

Communication Research

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We propose a three-pronged framework to study discourses surrounding social media activism initiated by networked counterpublics: personalized expressions that share stories and support, demands for changes that address systematic problems, and contentions between various actors and perspectives. Situating our analysis in discourses related to sexual violence and gender justice activism on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, we use supervised machine learning to quantify three discourses—networked acknowledgment, calls to action, and feminism contention—and apply time series analysis to model their interrelations. Results show that networked acknowledgment stimulated both calls to action and feminism contention and that calls to action predicted feminism contention across all platforms. These discourses were more sensitive to real-world events on Twitter and Facebook, but more ephemeral and cyclical on Instagram and more persistent and coupled on Reddit. Our findings speak to the opportunities and challenges in social media activism and underscore cross-platform similarities and differences.

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Section: Networked Acknowledgment and Calls To Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Personal Becomes Political: Unpacking the Dynamics of Sexual Violence and Gender Justice Discourses Across Four Social Media Platforms

Suk

Zhang

Yue

et al. 2023

Communication Research

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“…The girl in #MeToo can, at her best, function as such a figure constructed in narratives, by the technological affordances of the social and digital media she appeared though and the bodily experiences and responses of the feminist publics she appealed to. The figure of the girl was central for what the #MeToo movement could achieve politically by stirring up affect through the narratives of SSSR (Nau et al, 2022). The figure of the girl in #MeToo is here used as a lens, an idea to think with, by me to highlight affective subjectivities in feminist digital media activism and the feminist political change these can bring.…”

Section: The Girl In #Metoo – a Feminist Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, perpetrators were both fired and sent to jail. In the #MeToo movement affect was therefore the driving force of the narratives and for the (feminist) publics pursuing feminist change regarding SSSR (Nau et al, 2022). Affect was also here co-created with the spreadable social possibilities of digital media technology in contemporary culture.…”

Section: The Affective Girlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whatever happened to the girl in #MeToo?

Werner

2023

European Journal of Women's Studies

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Through #MeToo social media feminist digital grassroot activism, in tweets, threads, and groups, in petitions and in the intermedial debates following the hashtag, a girl took shape. This girl was constructed as vulnerable, ambitious, naïve, or duped and was central for bringing on feminist social change in policy and practice in the 2010’s. The figure faced intra-feminist critical questions about whiteness, heteronormativity, cis femininity, class, ability, and Western-ness. A few years later, this girl has magically disappeared from public debate. This article poses the question; Who was she, and what does her disappearance mean for future feminist activist struggles against sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape, other discrimination and bullying in the workplace? The girl is analysed by considering the Swedish #MeToo petition #NärMusikenTystnar (#WhenThe MusicStops), a petition and hashtag that gathered narratives of sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape on social media and presented them in the daily press in 2017. The article draws out both strengths and weaknesses of the girl as a figure for feminist digital activism. In the conclusion the case of the missing girl in 2023, and the possible impacts her disappearance may have on feminist digital activism, is discussed.

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“…As it spread across national boundaries, #MeToo was fueled by various forms of participation (Nau et al, 2022), but also triggered unexpected engagement orientations such as “hijacking” the hashtag to promote far-right agendas and expressions that willfully misunderstood the movement (Boyle & Rathnayake, 2020; de Maricourt & Burrell, 2022), as well as broad anti-feminism backlash (Kay, 2020). #MeToo is also a hashtag that has been taken up across different languages and geographical contexts—an aspect that has to date not been fully explored (Quan-Haase et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There were two main reasons for the choice of languages. The first was theoretical, as our previous research had investigated the vernacular practices of the first 24 hr of the English-language Twitter activity related to #MeToo (Nau et al, 2022). While we therefore had a sense of the vernacular practices in English, we did not know if or how these might shift across languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of #MeToo: A Comparative Analysis of Vernacular Practices Over Time and Across Languages

Mendes,

Hollingshead,

Nau

et al. 2023

Social Media + Society

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Drawing from a thematic analysis of 960 tweets for English, 960 tweets for German, and 753 tweets for Mandarin, this article explores how the #MeToo movement was taken up and used in different ways in the first 12 months. The article achieves this by drawing on the concept of platform vernacular, identifying three new, at times overlapping, vernacular practices: spotlighting, interconnectivity, and meta conversations. We argue that these vernacular practices function more than simply as the dominant “grammars of communication” in #MeToo but connect individual experiences of sexual violence to broader political structures such as patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism. Yet, as our analysis uncovered, while the vernacular practices enabled #MeToo to be politicized, these systems of oppression were not always challenged, but at times, reinforced. As such, while previous research has shown how (affective) vernacular practices shape what we know and feel about sexual violence, this article highlights how vernacular practices fundamentally shape how the public contextualizes and (mis)understands sexual violence as a political issue. Overall, the article contributes to scholarship in the field of new media, feminism, and communication by showing how hashtags are taken up by the public in different ways and how shared vernacular practices emerge across languages, even when the content, focus, or rhetoric may diverge.

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Vernacular practices in digital feminist activism on Twitter: deconstructing affect and emotion in the #MeToo movement

Cited by 17 publications

References 43 publications

When the Personal Becomes Political: Unpacking the Dynamics of Sexual Violence and Gender Justice Discourses Across Four Social Media Platforms

When the Personal Becomes Political: Unpacking the Dynamics of Sexual Violence and Gender Justice Discourses Across Four Social Media Platforms

Whatever happened to the girl in #MeToo?

The Evolution of #MeToo: A Comparative Analysis of Vernacular Practices Over Time and Across Languages

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