INTRODUCTION
The presence of digital technologies on contemporaneous routines, triggered a social practice reorganization, because these tools reduce distances and interconnect people and places, as well as redefine production and consumerism process, modify conceptions regarding teaching and learning and, above all,restructure a communication’s ecosystem. Among many technologies which articulate and materialize these relations, one must me be mentioned, Web 2.0, that reset the field of communication when it established a participative logic (PINHEIRO, 2014; RUFINO, 2010).
Thus, at Web 2.0, “internetusers do not only search to find information; they also create and publish content, generating, therefore, a change on the communication’s model” (PINHEIRO, 2014, p. 144), since they act in a participation logic, interactivity and agency, as described by Pinheiro (2014). In this context (and as a consequence), the quantity of information is huge and ideas easily become public and accessible. Although Web 2.0 users are not totally free from the control spheres and still are subject to influences and sanctions of great powers and institutions. (JENKINS; FORD; GREEN, 2013; PINHEIRO, 2014), it’s undeniable that the internet has become an important democratic space, in which more voices can be projected and listened, and ideas and claims find strength and support.
So, it can be said that, as Coelho says (2016, p. 219), “we live in the digital visibility era which instigate subordinated demands, gestures of women, gays and blacks”, for example. Such instability can destabilize structures and lead to dislocations of ideas and convictions. In a context of strong and traditional powers,significant inequalities and entrenched prejudices, the urging of these voices of provocation and rupture is what Castells (2013) calls “counter-power”, since they are challenging many dominating structures. Thus, “a room and a computer connected to the network can be constituted as instruments of work, resistance and subversion.” (COELHO, 2016, p. 219).
Parallel to this, we must also consider some notions that comprises what is understood as social movements. According to sociologist James Jasper (2016, p.23), such movements are persistent and intentional efforts “to promote or obstruct far reaching legal and social change, basically outside the normal institutional channels sanctioned by the authorities”.The author emphasizes the importance of persuasion that underlies the social movements, since, if they are based on physical force, they can be confused with criminal groups; on the other hand, if sustained by financial forces, they will be seen as self-interested and opportunist group. In this way, there is a fundamental role of language and rhetoric used in these movements, and hence the historical importance of speeches, audiences, performances and speakers. (JASPER, 2016).
However, although the power of persuasion remains as essential to the organization of contemporary social movements, there is a difference in the way they organize and mobilize their resources: whereas, in the past, these movements depended on communication mechanisms such as pamphlets, manifests and sermons, today’s virtual social networks function as faster, autonomous and interactive tools that amplify history and are constituted by somewhat more horizontal structures, as suggests Castells (2013). This current communication paradigm based on the internet and wireless networks is called “mass self-communication” (CASTELLS, 2011). The author’s definition is interesting because it is an alternative to traditional ideas of communication: while it is understood that interpersonal communication is interactive and mass communication is unidirectional, mass self-communication is understood to be endowed with bulky output and scope while maintaining autonomous production and reception.
From this scenario, we can understand that there is currently an expansion of the voices that circulate socially. Even though, as already pointed out, powerful and ideological institutions of control are still in force among the media, the possibilities brought by the mass self-communication promote ruptures and widen spaces for ideas to be exposed and struggles to be fulfilled. As summarized by Castells,
engaging in the production of mass media messages and developing autonomous networks of horizontal communication, citizens of the information era have become able to invent new programs for their lives with the raw materials of their suffering, their tears, their dreams and hopes. (CASTELLS, 2013, p. 11).
This inventiveness is responsible for a significant increase in the production of information, which, in turn, in addition to expanding the interactions between users and interfaces, inserts new needs in the social, technological, informational and linguistic contexts. One of the emerging tools of this current reality are the virtual tags, also known in Brazil as the name in English.These tags facilitate the classification and the organization of contents in the immensity of the web, while giving users a way of participation and authorship. The hashtags, which are today the main representatives of these tags, have occupied an importance space with regard to the participation and manifestation of specific groups and social movements on the internet.
From this, my goal, in this study was to analyze the use of four hashtags that were highlighted in the agenda of the Brazilian feminist movement: #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) e #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) -popularized in 2015 and 2016, and #elenão (#nothim) - that came on the scene during the period of the Brazilian presidential elections of 2018. From an analysis of the specificities that involved the uses of the first three tags and the women’s perception about these tags, I tried to establish a relationship with the characteristics and the visibility reached in 2018 by the tag #elenão (#nothim),which echoes still resonate from.
For this purpose, I discuss in the next section about the theories of folksonomies, which circumscribe the hashtags. In sequence, I discuss the issue of Brazilian feminism in virtual environments and the tools from which this movement is used. In the fourth section, we present the methodological procedures of data collection and generation of data, whose results are discussed in the fifth section.
1. FOLKSONOMIES AND HYPERTEXT
The folksonomies refer to classification systems that are elaborated by groups in a free and less official way than the institutionalized taxonomies of the scientific community. Thus, folksonomies define situations in which members of society create words and categories to describe the world in a way that seems relevant to them (NEAL, 2007).
The term was coined in 2004 by the information architect Thomas Vander Wal in order to designate the creation of descriptors (tags) from the language of the web users themselves, to classify and characterize texts, photos, videos and information generally. Wal (2006) defines folksonomies as the result of the free and personal assignment of labels to information or objects available at any electronic address for retrieval.
In a complementary sense, Neal (2007) explains that the folksonomies are a result of the users’ ability to alter and modify the web from their own words and concepts, without restrictions to terms previously used or pre-defined by the systems. Indexers work as context anchors (RECUERO, 2014) and can be related to web content, according to the possibilities offered by each media, environment or digital media.
From the perspectives of Wal and Neal, we can expand our understanding about this theory. In the basic perspective of the term, the purpose of information retrieval was emphasized, however, although this function is in fact useful and relevant, the process and the product of folksonomies currently present greater complexities and specificities, because, as I defended in Siqueira (2018), in addition to supporting research and being a way to organize collections from an idiosyncratic and personal mental model, the tags materialize and enable an interaction and an approach between an interface and its users and, above all, in virtual social networks, which are environments whose architecture stimulates and depends on interactions among the users, folksonomies organize many of the nodes of these networks, since, if
the social networking sites have as fundamental element the public presentation of the connections, from the moment in which is introduced as clickable tags tool, that is, tags that are hyperlinks, these tags start to function, also, no longer just as classifier tags, but as visualizations of connections - between contents and information, between users and users with interfaces. (SIQUEIRA, 2018, p. 58-59).
There are several sites that have already appropriated tagging resources.The notorious Pinterest and the functional Pocket are some examples of platforms that based on folksonomies, allow users a personalized content and interest organization. Buying and selling sites also use indexing features by encouraging, for example, product ratings with notes or stars (SIQUEIRA, 2018). In the context of photography, according to Beaudoin (2007), Flickr also presented significant resources for users to add details to the photos through the attribution of tags. However, the tagging procedures have indeed become popular among the users when they have been associated with the use of hashtags.
By the definition of Caleffi (2015), the hashtag is a sequence of characters preceded by the symbol of hash sign (#), which tends to be short and objective. The use of hashtags was introduced on Twitter in 2007, as a way to sort messages (tweets) according to their themes. According to the platform itself, “people use the hashtag (#) symbol before a relevant keyword or phrase on their Tweet to categorize the Tweets and help them appear more easily in Twitter search” (TWITTER, 2007).
In 2011, Instagram incorporated the feature into its interface, presenting the hashtags as an extension of what already existed on Twitter. According to Instagram (2011), its hashtags
work in a similar way to Twitter hashtags, but reinvented from the perspective of an Instagram user. Now, you can add hashtags to any of your own photos,including a hashtag in the caption of your photo or in a comment. Anyone can click on the hashtag in their comment to see all photos with the same hashtag. (INSTAGRAM, 2011).
Finally, in 2013, the feature was also incorporated by Facebook, which launched it as follows:
Hashtags transform topics and phrases into clickable links into your posts in your Timeline or page. This helps people find posts on topics they are interested in. To make a hashtag, write # (the number sign) along with a topic or a phrase and add it to your post. (FACEBOOK, 2013).
The definitions of hashtags presented by the three virtual platforms mentioned above highlight both the operation of the hashtag as a link and its use as a strategy for visibility of related content. It’s interesting to note that both Instagram and Facebook mention the “clickable look” of the hashtag, evidencing its navigation redirection of functionality. Therefore, it’s possible to think of hashtags as conventional hyperlinks whose specificity is the use of the initial hash sign.As a consequence, hashtags are also encompassed by theories and reflections about hypertexts, since they behave like the hyperlinks themselves.
According to Levy (1993), early hypertext theories defended the idea that the human mind does not function hierarchically, in classes and subclasses, but rather by associations. In order to contemplate all possible associations and mental connections that an individual can make from a single term or idea, it would be necessary to “create an immense multimedia reservoir of documents, covering at the same time images, sounds and texts” (LEVY, 1993, p. 28), since each node can contain an entire network. Folksonomies and, more specifically, hashtags indicate the possibility that, instead of thinking of the impossible task of creating an infinite repositor of materials and contents in order to contemplate all possible mental and interpretative references that can be made by the mind human beings, the individuals themselves designate the contents of that immeasurable repository that is the internet, according to the connections that their minds make when they encounter each object. Thus, if users have the ability to insert hashtags into their own posts as well as commenting on someone else’s posts, it is possible to say that the meanings and interpretations of tagged content are often mutable.
Based on these complexities, it seems inappropriate, in the current panorama, to design folksonomies and hashtags as strategies restricted to the search and retrieval of information. Today’s hashtags are used to comment, praise, and criticize ideas and people, to promote brands, events, spread News, attract more followers, keep users involved and engaged in certain subjects, and facilitate information dispersal (CALEFFI, 2015). Morrison (2007) points out the usefulness of hashtags to increase content exposure in web traffic and Neal (2007) argues that communities are built around hashtags, since it is very common for groups of followers to be engaged by specific tags and to end up approaching content of interest from the use or interaction with these tags.
In this sense, the organization of people in a virtual environment may be enhanced by folksonomies, since, as described by Pilz (2016), the tags start from a decentralization to a centralization of contents. In addition, hashtags are tools that group themes and have the potential to generate narrative axes and visualize meanings and conflicts (HENN, 2014). In these virtual spaces, then, there are multiple interactions of people, groups and institutions, which have their specific interests. In the midst of such diversity of content and opinions, hashtags are able to group inclinations, points of view and behaviors, functioning as textual elements that reflect individual and social practices. Among them, the use of hashtags in feminist campaigns on the internet is fundamental in this work.
2. FEMINISM ON THE INTERNET: A PERSPECTIVE OF THE CURRENT BRAZILIAN SCENARIO
According to the report of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in 2017, approximately 70% of Brazilian women had access to the internet, by microcomputer, tablet or cell phone (IBGE, 2018). As Silveira (2018) warms, it is important not to interpret this data with astonishment, nor to see it focusing on emancipations and homogeneous and horizontal scenarios only, since, as the author reminds us, a large part of the Brazilian population still has significant limitations on digital literacy, Brazil faces technical lags concerning signal and the feasibility of the cost of network access, and most census respondents, even if they have access to the Internet, may not be able to do it so frequently or constantly.
Despite this, the data show that the presence of users in virtual environments has become increasingly larger and more expressive, since in the survey of 2016 the IBGE pointed out that 65.5% of the women had access to the web (IBGE, 2017), and in 2013 the number was just over 50% (COELHO, 2016). Consequently, some changes in patterns of content and interactions begin to appear in virtual environments.
It is worth remembering that female users do not constitute a homogeneous group, with necessarily common interests and convictions, since, as Coelho (2016, p. 217) explains, “feminist questions do not surround themselves with “a woman” as a single subject, but as “women”: White, black, domestic, indigenous, wealthy, housewives, artists, lesbians, trans, among many others”.
On the other hand, all these distinct subgroups are women who, unhappily and undoubtedly, have at some point (or probably many) been victims of various oppressions and harassment throughout their lives. In the social, communicational and technological context already described in this paper, this violence begins to be opened, exposed and debated in virtual environments, which provokes criticism: there are accusations that “this movement only generates dissonant echoes. They can accuse feminists of cybernetic militancy of passivity and incarceration on the couch itself” (COELHO, 2016, p. 223). However, through virtual instances, these women create communities of proximity, which is fundamental for resistance forces to be acquired; in addition, on the internet, they organize to transcend virtual spaces and place themselves in urban locations and, in the midst of these negotiation and action processes, constructed more horizontal, more public and more political spaces (CASTELLS, 2013). As Coelho reinforces (2016, p. 223), “using the digital platform is breaking with this cycle of violence and attempts to silence. It is to transcend space itself and form infinite connections.”
Many blogs are driven by feminist themes that stand out on the internet. Facebook pages are even more popular and reach millions of users. In Brazil, “Think Olga”, “Geledés - Instituto da Mulher Negra” (“Geledés - Institute of Black Women”), “Arquivos Feministas” (“Feminist Archives”), “Nós, mulheres da periferia” (“We, women from the suburbs”) and “Nós, Madalenas” (“We, Magdalenes”)are examples of Facebook pages that daily discuss and expose feminist movement guidelines. The work of Silveira (2018) also brings important contributions to the mapping of feminist and Brazilian content on YouTube: in August 2016, the author identified about 3000 channels linked to the Portuguese terms to “feminism”, “feminist” or “feminists”.
Among these contents, more specific guidelines are also organized, from localities, interests or strands. There are, for example, from restricted groups to denunciations and support for cases of physical and moral violence, to groups specialized in body and hair care. In relation to ideological alignments, the mapping of Silveira (2018) also contributes to identify virtual niches related to black feminism, radical feminism, intersectional feminism, Marxist feminism, queer feminism, among other ramifications of the movement.
This range of demands that women’s groups and feminist pages seek to provide demonstrates how networks of contact and collaboration among women on the internet have spread and become widespread. For Freire (2016), these virtual initiatives are responsible for the collective dimension that the guidelines acquire and are capable of mobilizing and impacting people and generating public debates about the themes.
The strength brought by the internet to the contemporary Brazilian feminist movement was intensified by the use of hashtags, because, especially during the year 2015, many feminist guidelines were identified on the internet from the use of specific hashtags. According to Pilz (2016, p. 5),
the hashtags have an eventful potential in the sense that their relevance, through their scattering and visibility, draws attention from social actors, who insert themselves in their process, or reproduce it in new messages of perpetuation in the networks or legitimations in discourses of contextualization and criticism. Its uses, however, extrapolate its functionality, acquiring an aesthetic character. Still, the hashtag has been a valuable resource for marking, reproducing and spreading movements, activism, and other demands. (PILZ, 2016, p. 5).
Some of the most striking hashtags for the feminist movement in Brazil were #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife).
The tag #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) began to be used on October 21, 2015, as an indignation at the sexist and violent comments posted on social networks regarding Valentina, a 13-year-old girl who participated in Masterchef Kids program broadcast by Rede Bandeirantes. This hashtag was launched by the collective “Think Olga”. About a month later, the collective “Não me Khalo” launched the hashtag #meuamigsecreto (#mysecretfriend), which took advantage of the closeness to the holiday season, which commonly happens games known as “secret friend” or “invisible friend” to launch posts that denounced macho, prejudiced and violent attitudes of friends, partners, colleagues and family members. According to Coelho (2016), after the explosion of these two hashtags, there was a 40% increase in complaints on disk 180 (Brazilian phone number for complaints against domestic violence).
In April 2016, Veja magazine released a story about Marcela Temer, wife former president Michel Temer, in which it described the, then, first lady as beautiful, restrained and “homey” woman. Excerpts from the text underscored the value of a woman seen as beautiful and discreet, who takes care of the home and family while the man works. The conservatism of the magazine in publishing the story was immediately rejected by feminist organizations, but in that case, without any collective launching the hashtag (as in the other two cases mentioned), the internet was largely hit by posts associated with hashtag #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife).
In the period 2016 to 2018, other hashtags have obtained adhesion on the internet and stand out in diverse medias. Some examples that may be cited are the hashtags #metoo and #niunaamenos, which, although launched abroad, came with an impact in Brazil, and Brazilian hashtags #nãosejaumporquê (#donotbeareason), #mexeucomumamexeucomtodas (#messwithonemesswithall) and #motoristaassediador (#stalkerdriver). In spite of the importance and expressiveness of the content associated with these tags, none of these tags achieved such popularity as hashtag #elenão (#nothim), which became available on the web in September 2018.
The #elenão (#nothim) movement, responsible for popularizing the hashtag with the same name, appeared in Facebook group titled “Mulheres unidas contra Bolsonaro” (“Women united against Bolsonaro”). The group, founded in late July 2018, began to achieve visibility especially from the beginning of September and quickly reached the mark of 2 million users. This motivated uprising by supporters of then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who invaded the account of two of the moderators of the group, posted offenses to the members and renamed the group as “Mulheres COM Bolsonaro” (“Women WITH Bolsonaro”) (original highlight). After necessary intervention of Facebook for the recovery of the accounts of the moderators and reestablishment of the original name of the group, the number of members began to multiply even more and, soon after, the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) has reached its peak.
According to a survey done by the Studies Laboratory Imagine and Cyberculture (LABIC/UFES) and published by the newspaper El País, the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) had two peaks: one between 14 and 16 September 2018 and the other between 20 and 22 September 2018. In addition, the survey shows that #elenão (#nothim) shared web space with related hashtags like #elenunca (#neverhim), #elejamais (#nevereverhim) and #mulherescontrabolsonaro (#womenagainstbolsonaro). Conversely, hashtags Bolsonaro supporters were also launched as #elesim (#yeshim), #eleno1oturno (#heonthefirstturn) and #mulherescombolsonaro (#womenwithbolsonaro), however, compared to the volume of hashtags contrary to the then candidate hashtags of their supporters became opaque network. (EL PAÍS, 2018). It is also worth mentioning that the diffusion of the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) did that the organizations and virtual protests also occupied the streets of cities of all Brazil and some other countries. The acts, led by women under the slogan #elenão (#nothim), were massive and concentrated voters from various parties and supporters of the most eminent stakes.
The popularity gained by the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) and #elenão (#nothim) can be explained by Freire’s view that hashtags attached to the feminist movement “are endowed with a persuasive capacity characterized by a collective construction of meaning, mobilizing the common citizen” and, therefore, “ constitute themselves as influencers of behaviors, making other users also want to engage and replicate such behaviors” (FREIRE, 2016, p. 28).
It is important to notice how, in this context, the boundaries between the online and offline universes have been blurred. Events that took place outside the digital networks, in the daily experiences of women, were addressed and discussed on the web, as well as guidelines that emerged on the internet occupied non-virtual environments, such as face-to-face discussions with peers, for example. These relationships established between these two living spaces - the virtual environment and face-to-face interactions - are not unidirectional or linear, but rather cyclical, as what emerged online has become an issue in offline spaces and then it was discussed again on the internet, as well as what originated offline was themed online and, again, based offline. Thus, in order to visualize these movements, I establish a parallel with the way Signorni (2012) understands the relationships between grapholinguistics literacies and multiliteracies and multi-media based literacies. For the author,
Frontiers and delimitations become (…) often unclear and of little significance for the apprehension of ongoing processes. In this sense, the spatial metaphor of the border (common and fluid space between domains) seems to be more productive, instead of frontier (clear line of demarcation between domains). (SIGNORINI, 2012, p. 286)
In the case of #myfirstharassment and #mysecretfriend most of the reports shared online referred to situations that happened offline, with co-workers, friends and family or in circumstances in which the victims moved around the urban space, for example. The standards of beauty and behavior imposed on women that generated the revolt centered on #restrainedbeautifulhousewife, even today, are equally propagated and reflected online and offline. And, in relation to #nothim, after the launch of the hashtag on-line, what happened offline, in the streets - protests against and in favor of Bolsonaro -, and the contents conveyed in the electoral campaigns and in the press were quickly appropriated in content again in the online sphere. This way, the four hashtags addressed in this work, more than virtual objects of thematic concentration and dissemination of content, also became important elements in the offline life, which, in turn, returned to the virtual sphere being again discussed. Therefore, these hashtags studied here and their characteristics and effects reveal how borders are no longer suitable categories to understand the relationships of which these tools are part.
In order to better understand how the struggle of Brazilian women is related to the use and circulation of hashtags in virtual spaces, this investigation was based on the methodological procedures explained below.
3. METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES
The methodological bases for data collection, data generation and analyzes of the results of this research were developed in two different moments: one in 2016 and another in 2018. In 2016, I applied a survey and collected hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife). In 2018, I collected postings containing the hashtag #elenão (#nothim).
The first procedure for the collection of records consisted of the elaboration of a questionnaire (from the Google Forms platform), of public opinion research, anonymous and voluntary. This questionnaire was disseminated through my personal profile in groups exclusively for women on Facebook, in order to collect responses only from users who identify with the female gender1. The questionnaire received 200 total answers and 199 valid answers in the period of October 23, 2016 and November 3, 2016.
In this questionnaire, I first asked the participant’s age, occupation and place of residence; then the questions were related to the contact with the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife): I asked if the participant had posted or encountered any content marked with these hashtags, in which virtual social networks had occurred the visualization or posting and which languages had been used in the posts in question. Finally, I also asked about the perception of the importance and impact of hashtags for the feminist movement2.
The answers were automatically organized into an Excel template sheet, from which data could be generated for quantitative analyzes. At the same time, the records in which the participants had a dissertation on some aspect were selected for the qualitative-interpretative analyzes.
Simultaneously with application of the questionnaire, in this first phase of the research, I collected posts through the Netlytic tool, which tracked posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram published during the period from October 2015 to October 2016 and indexed (not simultaneously) with the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife). The delimitation of this collection period stipulated to the tool is due to this time to understand the emergence on the web of the three hashtags in question. The research delivered 300 posts tied to each tag in each of the cited virtual social networks (100 posts of each hashtag on each platform), totaling 900 records.
In 2018, at the second moment of investigation, the Netlytic tool was used again for a post indexed search with the hashtag #elenão (#nothim), shared between September 11 and October 7, 2018. These dates are covered by the main moment of its passed opposition movement to Jair Bolsonaro during the electoral period of the Brazilian presidential campaigns of 2018. However, in the second phase of research only posts hosted on Twitter or Facebook were delivered by Netlytic, since there were changes in the rules of the Instagram that did not allow more collections like those in 2016, in the first phase of this research. Thus, 200 posts were delivered by Netlytic in the second collection stage, with 100 issues shared on Twitter and another 100 on Facebook.
To suppress Instagram posts indexed with the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) that could not be collected by Netlytic, “manual” searches were made by me on the Instagram platform itself, through the hashtags search feature. So that the collection of these records contemplated the same collection period as Netlytic, it was necessary that the 100 desired posts be collected on four distinct days: September 16, September 23, September 30 and October 7. On each of these days, the last 25 public posts presented as search results by Instagram were recorded using screenshot or screen-recording techniques.
I consider it worthwhile to comment, as I have already pointed out in Siqueira (2018), that currently, research involving the use of Instagram and its contents faces many methodological difficulties, posed by the code barriers that the platform stipulates. Thus, collecting available postings in this virtual space implies procedures considered rudimentary, such as screen captures and the description and the manual and slow organization of the records. On October 8, 2018, the search for the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) on Instagram presented a total of over 300 million public posts. If I had not done the collection weekly - as I described, finding in this vastness of posts the dates related to the wanted dates would be a practically unfeasible task, because Instagram, unlike Twitter, for example, does not offer any filter which searches are refined by. In addition, if it was necessary to obtain considerably more than 100 posts, the viability of the work could also have been affected.
In both 2016 and 2018, the records collected by Netlytic were first organized in different digital folders and then described in Excel spreadsheets. In the description worksheet, I created distinct tabs for each analyzed virtual environment (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and columns in which I filled up which languages (static image with visual or textual content, moving image, video, written verbal text or link to external content) made up the content posted so that later information about the languages could be quantified and crossed with the digital media information from the post.
Finally, it should be pointed out that, in some cases, the same post presented more than one type of linguistic resource in use. It was possible to find, for example, memes (static image with visual content) preceded by short captions (verbal written text). However, these cases were not a majority among the records collected and, when this occurred, all languages present were counted in the spreadsheet - which explains some total sums exceeding 100%. In cases where the only element consisting of verbal written text present in the post was the hashtag itself analyzed, the tag was not counted as a verbal written text, since, if it were done, all posts of all hashtags in all virtual social networks studied would accuse occurrence of written verbal text in the content, since it would not have been possible to locate those contents if the hashtags were not included.
4. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
4.1. The participants and their posts
The answers provided by female participants in the questionnaire revealed a variation of age, at the time of application of the research, from 11 to 49 years old, with a significant concentration in the range of 20 to 25 years, as the chart below illustrates.
[Image omitted; see PDF]
Chart 1 Age of the participants
In relation to the locality where the participants lived, the majority of the answers came from the state of São Paulo, but are also included among the results, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, Bahia, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Pernambuco, Paraíba e Mato Grosso, as well as some responses from women who said they lived, also in the collection period, in France, Netherlands and Germany. A number of professional activities have been reported: students and teachers of various levels of education, cleaning services, nannies, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, saleswomen, geologists, historians, engineers, dancers, photographers, theater directors, actresses, singers, tattoo artists, among others.
Given the diversity of participants’ profiles, it is evident that the feminist movement is even heterogeneous and based on different perspectives and needs. However, this also reveals that, even with distinct realities and trajectories, these women encounter challenges and interests in common that make them focus on the same virtual groups and be willing to participate in research related to feminism, for example.
Regarding the uses and interactions with the hashtags focused in this work, according to the answers of the questionnaire, 86% stated that they had encountered the hashtag #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) in virtual social networks and 34% stated that they had posted some content indexed with this hashtag. As Chart 2 illustrates, among the 34% who reported having published #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), 91% reported having made the post on Facebook, 20% on Twitter and only 1,4% on Instagram, with intersections, especially between posting on Facebook and also on Twitter.
[Image omitted; see PDF]
Chart 2 #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend)
These numbers are interesting because they allow associations between tagged content and the virtual social networks in which they were served to be elaborated. In this sense, #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) was a hashtag designed to denounce everyday cases of misogyny, often committed by men close to women who shared their experienceson Twitter, such as those shown in image 2 and translated to English by me in box 1, below.
[Image omitted; see PDF]
Image 1 Examples of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend)
[Table omitted; see PDF]
This post reproduced, both through the image and the caption, opens up the behaviors that were expected of a woman in the 50s and 60s, but which were also extolled in 2016 by the Veja magazine article, which valued the beautiful, demure woman and a “house wife”. However, this post was not tagged with the hashtag #restrainedbeautifulhousewife, but, as you can see at the end of its caption, with the hashtag #nothim. This case, therefore, shows how an agenda in one campaign can be recovered in another. Like this example, there are many others that, using #nothim, resume discussions of #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife. However, #nothim movement, online and offline, was not only constituted by reiterations of guidelines already raised, but also disseminated different others.
This context can be understood by analyzing some of the phrases found among the 300 posts indexed with #nothim that belong to the corpus of this research, transcribed in the list below:
1.
“If it hurts my existence, I will be resistance.”
2.
“How many failures does it a revolution make?”7
3.
“Together we are stronger.”
4.
“Girl power”
5.
“Democracy is feminine word.”
6.
“Women will defeat Bolsonaro”
7.
“Women united against him”
8.
“John became Mary and what does it change for you?”
9.
“I am a girl and I have two daddies #nothim.”
10.
“Boys who play with dolls become… parents who do not abandon their children.”
11.
“#Nothim because he is homophobic.”
12.
“At the time of lesbian porn, nobody is homophobic #nothim.”
13.
“I am Jewish, I am LGBT, I know my history and I do not vote for a fascist.”
14.
“I do not vote for misogynist sexist and homophobic Thing.”
15.
“For black lives #nothim.”
16.
“Fight like Marielle Franco.”
17.
“Deficient women say #nothim.”
18.
“#Nothim because he defends torture.”
19.
“#Nothim because he makes apology to rape.”
20.
“Nobody deserves to be raped.”
21.
“Not him, even if I were drunk.”
22.
“No means no.”
23.
“My body, my rules.”
24.
“My uterus is not your speaking space.”
25.
“We are not all, the dead are missing.”
26.
“Your little jokes kill.”
27.
“Prejudice is not an opinion.”
28.
“Everything you do, I do bleeding.”
29.
“I do not vote for anyone who does not respect me.”
30.
“Military for me is a verb #nothim.”
From these samples, we can see that some of the agendas mobilized by #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife were also present in the protests based on #nothim. #mysecretfriend, as already discussed, showed machismo and inconsistencies in daily life, which were recovered in #nothim, for example, in “Your little jokes kill” (26) and “Prejudice is not an opinion” (27). The demand for respect and freedom for the bodies, much commented on #myfirstharassment, appeared again in #nothim through the phrases that oppose the rape culture (19, 20, 21 and 22) and that defend autonomy over the body itself (18, 23 and 24). Anyway, the fight for the deconstruction of gender stereotypes disseminated by #restrainedbeautifulhousewife was present in #nothim, among the samples listed above, in the manifestation of the family composed of a homosexual couple (9), in the questioning about the gender transition (8), in the mention of boys playing with dolls (10) and in the enhancement of female power (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 28).
However, #nothim brought expansions to these guidelines that had already mobilized previously by the feminist movement. Among the samples presented, we can also identify the appreciation for democracy in the phrases cited in 1, 29 and 30. This democratic bias can also be identified in the plurality of other demands expressed in #nothim, which expanded the agendas that had been mobilized in the 2015 and 2016 campaings. The anti-racist struggle (15 and 16), feminicide (16 and 25), the fight against homophobia (9, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15) and inclusion (17) are just some of the examples in the chorus of voices that shouted #nothim.
In view of this, we can understand that the experiences lived in the campaigns of #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife not only encouraged the movement #nothim, but were also expanded by it.
Regarding the electoral impacts, the unprecedented proportions reached by the movement #elenão (#nothim) added to data that revealed the dimensions of rejection to the Liberal Social Party candidate among female voters. Biroli (2018) explains that in September 2018, 49% of the women interviewed by Datafolha said that they would not vote for Bolsonaro at all. For the author,
#elenão which appears in the results of voting intentions surveys and in social networking movements that brought together in a single Facebook group more than 2 million women is expressive of the low identification of broad segments of the female electorate with those who do not recognizes them as political subjects and ignores the specific challenges they face.
These conditions, however, were not sufficient for the campaign mobilized by the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) to achieve its main success, the electoral defeat of Bolsonaro. Today, more than a year after the first peak of #elenão (#nothim) on the Internet, Bolsonaro is President. However, the expression continues to circulate in virtual social networks, it was again stamped in posters in the acts of March 8 for International Women’s Day and March 14 for the year of the murder of Marielle Franco and, above all, seems to have been elected as the great symbol of opposition to Bolsonaro.
CONCLUSION
Considering the context of authorship and participation in Web 2.0, as well as the volume of information derived from it, I have tried to discuss in this work how folksonomies and the use of hashtags relate to the Brazilian feminist movement and some of its campaigns.
From the analyzes of the answers provided by the participants of the first stage of the research, I was able to conclude that, for most of them, hashtags are important tools for feminism, mainly to increase the visibility of the movement and to add forces to the group. However, through these analyzes, I have also been able to reflect on the limitations of hashtags and feminist campaigns on the internet in general, since these actions are still insufficient to reach women who are in social contexts of primary needs and live in exclusionary conditions. I consider in this question a way for future studies that can, in turn, contribute to a better understanding of these disparities and to the desired reductions of inequalities of access and of gender.
At the same time, the quantitative and qualitative analyzes carried out using the materials collected on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provided further insights on the use and circulation of hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) and #elenão (#nothim). The results seem to indicate an inversely proportional relationship between the degree of intimacy and personal exposure demanded by the theme of the hashtag and the number of users who are willing to make a publication.
In addition, it became clear that Twitter and Facebook were more chosen spaces for the publication of written verbal texts and hyperlinks to external content, while in Instagram, the sharing of static images with visual contents prevailed. But it is also worth noting that Instagram found posts whose contents, even if they were in the digital format of an image, showed written verbal information, which demonstrates that all the users (female and male), also appropriate the possibilities of a social network with the intention of subvert them, in creative and authorial ways. As for Facebook, it was interesting to note how this network, while at the same time sharing great attention with others, is still a space in which more diverse languages and contents can be hosted, circulated and obtained audience.
Among the aspects addressed in this study, many paths and challenges arose for future analyzes. There are many perspectives that can still be discussed. The morphosyntactic characteristics of the hashtags (CALEFFI, 2015) and their consequences in the popularization of the posts, the positions of the journalistic and advertising media before these campaigns, deepening about the architectural of each of the virtual social networks addressed and its consequent relations with the languages employed in the postings and chart studies of mapping of us and actors involved with the tags analyzed here are some examples of developments that this data can provide.
The complexity of the practices of the feminist movement on the internet serves as an incentive for all these issues to be thought and debated by researchers in various areas of knowledge. Although gaps and deepening need to be addressed within this theme, the many data that reinforce the dissemination of feminist guidelines in society are comforting, in order to reduce inequalities, injustices and prejudices that still permeate gender relations in Brazil.
** This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.
1Once the search link has been posted to Facebook groups, it is possible that participants who have had access to the document have disclosed it to people outside these groups, however, this is not likely, since no evidence is found in the responses of leakage, nor of male participation. In addition, Facebook groups restricted to women are often understood by the participants as secrecy environments, whose information and discussion should not be exposed.
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Elis Nazar Nunes Siqueira* **
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8899-0883
*Doutoranda na Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Unicamp, Campinas, SP, Brasil. [email protected]
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Abstract
Based on the contemporaneous context of authorship and participation on the internet and the theories about folksonomies, this paper aims to discuss the uses and circulation of four significant hashtags for the Brazilian feminist movement: #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), all of them disseminated in 2015 and 2016, and #elenão (#nothim), in 2018. Through quantitative and qualitative-interpretative analysis based on responses to a questionnaire and on a sample of shared posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it was possible to understand how a group of women feels about the use of hashtags in feminist campaigns, what are the specific characteristics of each of these hashtags, regarding language of the indexed contents and the virtual environments in which they circulate, and how the experience and the repercussion of the campaigns of 2015 and 2016 were important for the 2018 campaign.