Using Social Network(ing) to Confront Conservativism: Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos

• In Event: Tweets, Posts, and Shares: Gender, Social Media, and Political Struggles

Abstract

In Argentina, feminist activists have achieved the much sought-after goal of fostering a highly diverse, mass women’s movement. An exemplary case is the NiUnaMenos massive yearly march, currently one of the most outstanding expressions of the feminist movement. Started in June, 2015, it consists of an annual street mobilization against femicide and gender-based violence that includes women from the most impoverished urban areas and a strong youth contingent. Since its onset, the NiUnaMenos movement crossed Argentine borders and exerted a profound influence on Latin America, with many countries following suit as seen in Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, among others.

The right to a life free of gender-based violence is a culturally accepted claim. Because of this, conservative groups have had a very difficult time opposing it, at least directly. However, they have developed a strategy of appropriation and reframing of femicide in a way that resonates with their anti-abortion stance. In fact, conservatives have reframed abortion as the ultimate expression of femicide. They circulate postings with the NiUnaMenos hashtag using the light blue colour of the anti-abortion movement in the country.

In this paper, we focus on how the NiUnaMenos movement counter-attacks and confronts this misappropriation by combining online practices and offline strategies of dispute. As one example, the movement added the hashtag #NiUnaMenosPorAbortoClandestino and addressed abortion issues in the most recent Manifestos of the yearly march. As another, the in the organizing work with popular women illegal abortion is framed as a form of patriarchal violence harming women’s bodies and, as such, is inseparable from the Catholic Church’s interference in state affairs. Our main theoretical argument is that digitally mediated social networking reconfigures political struggles over gender violence and abortion rights at the symbolic level. To so do, we rely on studies about the digital transformation of feminist counterpublics (Ollivier et al 2006, Friedman 2017). Such work insists on the contextual basis of digital media integration in movement spaces, and centers the lived reality of those who are involved in bridging online and in-person communications and mobilization (see also Barassi and Treré 2012, Wilding and Hernández 2002).

The research methods include field observations and 15-20 in-depth interviews with NiUnaMenos activists, as well as a thorough analysis of NiUnaMenos and conservative postings on social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, among others).

Authors

• Elisabeth Jay Friedman, University of San Francisco

• Ana Laura RODRIGUEZ GUSTA