“A new feminist turn?” communication, social media, and feminist digital activism in Brazil today

• Carolina Brandão Piva ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidade Federal de Goiás

     Universidade Federal de Goiás

     Brasil

     
• Localización: Unidos por la comunicación: Libro de Actas del Congreso Internacional Latina de Comunicación Social 2020 / coord. por David Caldevilla Domínguez, 2020, ISBN 978-84-09-25842-0, pág. 37
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • Digital projects of recent years conducted by women have become importantinstances of contemporary feminist activism to oppose gender inequality and fight forsocial justice. Taking place at the crossroads of digital communication, media art, andnew feminist epistemologies, the genesis of feminist digital activism builds on thenotion of an online organization through the use of various platforms such as blogsand social networking sites to raise awareness for issues related to systemic oppression.This article focuses on the intensification of feminist digital activism in Brazilparticularly in the last two years with the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro to thepresidency.His ultraconservative, far-right positions have targeted women, black people,marginalized groups such as poor workers, and LGBTQIA+ communities. As a directresponse to this, feminist collectives have endeavored to instrumentalize their dissentinto a digital communication agenda in order to address and resist intersectionalcategories of oppression—including gender, race, class, and heterosexism—openlyproclaimed by Bolsonaro since his inauguration.The study is based on a two-year ethnographic online observation of threeBrazilian feminist groups operating online through multiples spheres of actions, fromalternative forms of journalism to video activism. It thus includes content analyses ofInstagram and Facebook posts as well as of texts, images, and videos uploaded by theseactivists to alternative media websites.Firstly, social media platforms can be significant sites for the reconfiguration offeminist repertoires of knowledge production and circulation. Consequently, the webenvironment can be a locus of empowering reflections and actions for women, bothindividually and collectively. Assuming, in this sense, that ICTs have brought changeto feminist ways of organizing and working, I finally examine the extent to whichdigital communication may have been leading to a “new feminist turn,” morereticulated and participatory in the 21 st century.