Internet memes and a female “Arab Spring”: mobilising online for the criminalisation of domestic abuse in Hungary in 2012-13

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how social media and internet memes transformed public discourse on domestic abuse in Hungary during 2012–13, and how they have been used to mobilise protests and articulate a much wider social feeling against the issue than had previously been thought to exist. More closely, it discusses these anti-domestic abuse protests through Bennett and Segerberg’s connective action analytical framework, and studies internet memes as acts of personalised bottom-up political opinion-expressing that enabled netizens to connect to a feminist movement goal, that of standing up to domestic abuse, in flexible ways, which was important in a country that had traditionally been seen as sharing strong negative sentiments about feminism. It also argues that feminist digital mobilisation and large-scale meme circulation, both articulated primarily through Facebook and against the existing governmental discourse on domestic abuse, worked in tandem as bottom-up pressure on the government to introduce a new policy tool, a law, against domestic abuse. The paper also discusses the contribution of these protests to rebooting various stages of the legislation process of Hungary’s Law on Domestic Abuse, entering into force in July 2013.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet memes
• digital feminist activism
• connective action
• domestic abuse
• Hungary
• social media

Acknowledgments

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Data collection originally took place in August 2017, through Google, with the following search terms: “Balogh + komondor”, “Balogh József”. “Balogh + családon belüli erőszak” [i.e. the Hungarian equivalent for “Balogh + domestic abuse”]. A repeated search in January 2020, with the same search terms, did not bring any new data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gyorgyi Horvath

Gyorgyi Horvath is a media, literature and gender scholar with a PhD in Media from the London School of Economics.