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ABSTRACT
This article explores the role that hashtags play in maintaining the prevailing socio-political underpinnings of inequality. It is written in response to the 2019 terror attacks on Muslim communities in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. The attacks called into question many previously held assumptions about the non-discriminatory nature of Aotearoa New Zealand politics and society, necessitating a greater attentiveness to the grounds upon which claims to solidarity are made. I argue that “collectivizing hashtags” – that is, social media hashtags characterized by their use of pronouns to inclusively identify with Others – afford new opportunities for self-expression that may simultaneously empower and compromise certain individuals. I demonstrate how the collectivizing hashtags #TheyAreUs and #ThisIsNotUs involve forms of appropriation on the part of privileged subjects, reinforcing unequal social hierarchies and silencing marginal subjects. Following the feminist traditions of Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson, and Kate Schick, my analysis incorporates an ethic of vulnerability to interrogate underlying power relations and our location within them. This analysis encourages people to think critically about assuming the identity of vulnerable Others; otherwise, we risk obscuring our own complicity in the wider relations of power in which discrimination, oppression, and violence fester.
Acknowledgments
A special thanks to my advisors Kate Schick and Michael Daubs for always encouraging me to think deeply and critically about this important topic. Their grounded and thoughtful feedback throughout the writing of this article has been invaluable. I would also like to thank my two anonymous reviewers, who generously offered valuable reflections that strengthened the positionality of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 There is a rich body of literature from media studies and critical race theorists on hashtag use as political performance and for building communities and counterpublics. Notable contributions include those of Berents (Citation2016), De Cock and Pedraza (Citation2018), Florini (Citation2019), Jackson, Bailey, and Welles (Citation2020), Kuo (Citation2018), and Papacharissi (Citation2015b). For the purpose of this article, I have limited the scope to two case studies: #TheyAreUs and #ThisIsNotUs.
2 The dataset used for this article is part of the broader dataset collected as part of my PhD research, which uses Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis as method following Brock (Citation2018), Sweeney (Citation2013), Kuo (Citation2018), and Maragh (Citation2018). I collected over 200 unique #TheyAreUs and #ThisIsNotUs hashtags from Twitter, additionally looking at their individual retweets and comments immediately following the mosque attacks.
3 The term “Pākehā” originally referred to early European settlers of Aotearoa New Zealand. With time, the term has come to commonly refer to people born in Aotearoa of non-Māori descent (whereas the term “Tauiwi” refers more broadly to foreigners or New Zealand immigrants of non-Māori descent). In this article, “Pākehā” signals advantages that stem from colonialism: the systemic dispossession of Indigenous Māori land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which established the preconditions necessary for capitalism in Aotearoa New Zealand and created lasting patterns of inequality between Māori and Pākehā that continue to the present day (Bell et al. Citation2017, 10).
4 The idea of an impoverished form of solidarity is based on Schick’s (Citation2016, 30) idea of an “impoverished conception of recognition,” which, she argues, “accumulates knowledge about and superficially ‘consumes’ the other without reflecting critically on our own role in promoting continued misrecognition.”
5 Ward and Liu (Citation2012) found that while New Zealanders value a strong multicultural society, with 89 percent agreeing that it is a good thing for a society to be made up of people from different races, religions, and cultures, only 10 percent were prepared to change aspects of their own culture to integrate the culture of migrants.
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Claire Fitzpatrick
Claire Fitzpatrick is currently an International Relations PhD student at Victoria University of Wellington. Her professional experience as a digital diplomacy officer at a foreign embassy led her to interdisciplinary research bridging feminist studies, media studies, and international relations. Her thesis contributes to burgeoning feminist conversations on the embodied and affectual workings of vulnerability, ignorance, and precariousness in digital atmospheres.