Hashtag Feminism as Consciousness-Raising: Analyzing the Rhetorical Strategies and Affective Elements within Women’s March Tweets

• In Event: Digital Dissent

Abstract

On January 21, 2017, one day after President Trump’s Inauguration, over three million women across the U.S. and around the world participated in the Women’s March. The organizers gave sixteen values and principles for the March, ranging from reproductive rights to immigrant rights to LGBTQIA rights to voting rights. This paper investigates the digital component of this historic show of activism by examining hashtag movements facilitating, supporting, and otherwise engaging with the Women’s March on Twitter. By qualitatively analyzing samples of over 200,000 tweets collected about the March, this project seeks to identify the most prominent rhetorical strategies and effects evident in #WhyIMarch, and to determine what the findings suggest about digital activism, hashtag feminism, and the potential roles that Twitter can play as a pedagogical technology of dissent in our contemporary Trump-era society. Sharing the analysis of this collected data, this presentation discusses which rhetorical strategies were most effective for enacting hashtag feminism, which strategies were problematic, and what posters can learn for future digital activism.

Included in this talk will be a descriptive analysis of #WhyIMarch tweets from the Women’s March. By identifying the most common rhetorical tropes and themes, the speaker reports on the variation and common trends within the tweets and develops suggestions for how #WhyIMarch tweets can be both productive and problematic as digital protest (and, by extension, how the praxis of digital consciousness may be viewed as both productive and problematic). With these tensions in mind, the speaker identifies which rhetorical strategies were most effective for reframing the discursive framework from misogynistic discourse (Clark 2016) to one of solidarity for women’s rights.

The presentation also attends to the affective dimensions of these tweets and what they reveal about the pleasures (and pain) of online pedagogies of dissent. This hashtag resulted in a significant number of personal narratives, in addition to stating commitments to broader rights and movements. The speaker articulates how affect was used to state and further the goals of the activists, identifying which rhetorical strategies were most successfully leveraged affect to create solidarity and contribute to social change. The use of personal narratives as a technique is especially examined for its fruitful and challenging representations of feminism. This speaker concludes by suggesting what role emoting tweets played among the larger activism goals and how posters might build on this information for future digital activism.

As a whole, this inquiry builds upon recent discussions on hashtag feminism, from Losh’s (2014) investigation of metadata management in India to Clark’s (2016) analysis of storytelling in #WhyIStayed. This project is compelled by Clark’s (2016) explanation of the discursive possibilities of hashtag feminism “to deconstruct dominant discourse and, in its place, promote new interpretive frameworks for understanding and responding to social phenomena.” This study builds on this inquiry by articulating how hashtag movements related to the Women’s March engage in this discursive, rhetorical work – work that can be interpreted as a form of social education, as well as activism.

Author

• Melissa Ames, Eastern Illinois University