Feminist Hashtagging : the Intra-action of Feminist Strategies and Quantitative Platform Logics in #MeToo, #Kvinnostrejk and #JagVetVadEnSnippaÄr
Author(s): Lisa Lindqvist
Wednesday 14 | 15:20-15:40
Room: TP53
Session: Media and communication
The hashtag is a feature of social media platforms that brings disparate units of content together into an assembled feed. Discursively, the hashtag works as a co-created framing device that makes content instantly interpretable (Xiong, Cho & Boatwright 2019). When mobilized for social justice, hashtags can assemble individual experiences into collective witnessing (Serisier 2019), and via hashtag hijacking, activists can overtake corporate hashtags by tagging counter-discourse (Jackson & Foucault Welles 2015).
Conversely, scholars have claimed that ‘hashtag publics’ assemble ad hoc in disorganized ways, and that social media feminism works through messy affinities based on personalized narratives (Rambukkana 2015, Mitra-Kahn 2012). In this study of Swedish feminism on social media, I suggest that while audiences assemble around hashtags in seemingly messy ways, feminist hashtagging can be thought of as a strategic and intra-active practice entangled with the quantitative platform logic of engagement-based ranking, intentionally aimed at gaining attention.
To highlight this entanglement of feminist intentions and technical features, the study traces instances of feminist hashtagging in relation to #metoo on X, and to #kvinnostrejk and #jagvetvadensnippaär on Instagram, and combines discourse analysis of online content with interviews with key actors within feminist organizations. Preliminary results indicate that feminist hashtagging is; a way to increase reach for feminist content by reappropriating or hijacking already popular generic/non-feminist hashtags (Jackson & Foucault Welles 2015, Lindqvist 2023), a way to sloganize (Joersz 2015) and circulate feminist analyses of current news events, and an articulatory practice that performs framing work within feminist audiences (Lindqvist & Lindgren 2022). These examples illustrate how feminist resistance is strategized and articulated on social media where it gets entangled with the quantitative logic of engagement-based ranking.