‘Does she know how to read?’ An intersectional perspective to explore Twitter users’ portrayal of women Mapuche leaders

ABSTRACT

Social media offer new opportunities for women in politics, but also new ground for the expression of bias and stereotypes. Drawing upon literature about mediated representations of women in politics, gendered digital violence, and intersectionality, this study explores how Twitter users portray indigenous women leaders who were elected as representatives for Chile’s Constitutional Convention. We use a mixed-methods approach based on a manual content analysis of tweets (N = 6,000), aimed at comparing the main attributes associated to indigenous and non-indigenous women Convention representatives in users’ tweets, as well as the valence of these tweets and the engagement of Twitter users, in two time points – the inaugural and the closing days of the Convention. This is complemented with a qualitative thematic analysis focused on tweets directed toward Mapuche women (N = 3,352). Our findings show that indigenous and non-indigenous women’s capacities were discussed by Twitter users, and although both groups experienced online hostility while serving for the Convention, indigenous leaders received negative messages notoriously based on their ethnic background: tweets were mostly positive at the beginning of the process, but became more negative by the end, suggesting a narrative arc that went from an ephemeral moment of symbolic reparation to the restoration of prejudices and stereotypes.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• intersectionality
• political communication
• Twitter
• indigenous women

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank PhD students Claudia Ramírez (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and Catalina Farías (Northwestern University) for assisting in the quantitative coding for this study. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who helped improve this manuscript with their suggestions. A first version of this work was presented in an IAMCR pre-conference organized by Sally Osei-Appiah, Bruce Mutsvairo, and Kristin Skare Orgeret: we thank them and the other attendees for the space and feedback provided.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Convention had 77 female members, and 75 of them had a Twitter account. The full list of women representatives and their Twitter usernames is available in Appendix 1.

2 As we had tweets with zero likes and/or zero retweets, we log-transformed the DVs with log(y+1).

Additional information

Funding

The authors received funding from Chile's National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) through the Millennium Science Initiative Program - NCS2021_063 and ICN17_002.

Notes on contributors

Ximena Orchard

Ximena Orchard is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Alberto Hurtado and an Associate Researcher at the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion, and Politics in Chile (MEPOP). She holds an MA in Political Communication and a PhD (University of Sheffield). Her research addresses areas such as cultures of political communication, journalistic epistemologies, mediatization of politics, and communication and human rights.

Magdalena Saldaña

Magdalena Saldaña (PhD in Journalism, University of Texas at Austin) is associate professor in the School of Communications at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, associate director of the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion, and Politics in Chile (MEPOP), and associate researcher at Chile's Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). Her research looks at information disorders in digital environments, such as mis- and disinformation, uncivil language, and hate speech.

Isabel Pavez

Isabel Pavez (PhD in Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, MSc in Anthropology, Universidad de Chile) is an associate professor at the School of Communication at Universidad de Los Andes, Chile. She is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion, and Politics in Chile (MEPOP), and Millennium Nucleus to Improve the Mental Health of Adolescents and Youth. She has participated in numerous research projects on digital inequality and internet adoption.

Claudia Lagos

Claudia Lagos (PhD in Media and Communications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Master in Gender Studies, Universidad de Chile). Associate Professor and head of the department of Social Communication, Universidad de Chile. She is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion, and Politics in Chile (MEPOP), and in the Nucleus of Research on Television and Society (NITS). She has participated in several research projects on journalism studies, freedom of expression, and feminism and communication.