#SisterIdobelieveyou: Performative hashtags against patriarchal justice in Spain

ABSTRACT

In recent years, anti-rape culture and anti-rape communication have taken new forms, including the diverse use of tweets and hashtags, prompting so-called hashtag feminism. In this article, we examine digital and analogue discussions propelled by a notorious case of gang-rape in Spain in 2016, which became known as “La Manada”/The Wolf Pack” (hereafter TWP). Hundreds of thousands of Spanish women took to the streets in protest during the three years of the case and their chants also flooded social media. This article is the result of a hashtag ethnography of the hashtag #SisterIdobelieveyou. We argue that the synchronized performative action of “believing” undertaken by thousands of Twitter users, along with mass demonstrations on the streets, had a triple effect: it gave rise to a “virtual” community of sisterhood, challenged prevalent rape culture and gender stereotypes in Spanish society, and provided social media users with a new framework to conceive of and express themselves about sexual violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber-activism
• rape culture
• hashtag ethnography
• hashtag feminism
• “wolf pack”
• Spain

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Centre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender (CTSG), and the School of Media, both at University of Brighton, for financially supporting this research, as well as for providing a platform for collaboration and short study visits.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Digital visual artefacts (McGarry 2019) as the visual repertoire of protest have a major impact on the creation and modification of frames to conceive of and understand sexual violence. However, the results of this analysis will be published in another piece of work.

2. Note that in this article we only partially develop the analysis that emerged from applying all these sensitising concepts, because it exceeds by far the length and aim of a scientific communication of this sort.

3. Note that although, methodologically, we follow Bonilla and Rose, our analysis didn’t include racialization. At the same time, Bonilla and Rose’s idea of performativity of hashtags is central to our understanding of the #SisterIdobelieveyou movement, as we consider hashtagging behaviour as a resistance practice in an oppressed social group.

4. When we say “meaning-aggregator hashtag”, we mean a hashtag that attracts many messages, meaning that it becomes thicker as meaning is aggregated to the hashtag. This sort of hashtag requires more interpretive analysis, as it is more polysemic than other hashtags and has more layers that simple hashtags, such as referential hashtags that frame the conversation in time and place.

5. This insight was gain after carrying out a qualitative analysis of messages related to the hashtags #PatriarchalJustice, #Justice, and #WolfPackFreedJusticeUndone, and words such as patriarchal justice, courts, judges, institutions, sentence, jail, and bail.

6. This argument can apply to other relevant cases, such as #BlackLivesMatter. The action of publicly stating that Black Lives Matter simultaneously highlights the existence of systemic racism and defies a regime of hierarchisation of the value of lives.

7. The narrative of sisterhood was intended to create a sentiment of proximity and familiarity amongst women to unite them against the enemy they all shared—patriarchy. However, the term has been met with some criticism (Farnush Ghadery 2019, 265). For our case study, we follow Jenny Gunarsson Payne, who proposed that sisterhood serves to build a sense of commonality, solidarity and shared purpose, but provides no fixed meaning, functioning as an “empty signifier” (Jenny Gunarsson Payne 2012, 189). The author compels us to investigate through systematic empirical analyses the various ways in which the signifier of sisterhood has come to function in different feminist contexts. We therefore decided to create the analytical category of sisterhood and to revise how it has emerged and evolved in our hashtag landscape.

8. The full letter can be viewed here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/28/wolf-pack-rape-victim-writes-public-letter-three-year-ordeal/.

9. We have completed in-depth analytical work in this area, but we do not develop it here to remain concise.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the School of Media University of Brighton.

Notes on contributors

Elisa García-Mingo

Elisa García-Mingo is a lecturer in Social Research Methods in the Faculty of Sociology and Political Science, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has been a visiting fellow at the Universidad Católica de Chile (2015), McGill University (2018) and the University of Brighton (2019). She is an associate member of the Centre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender (UoB) and Cibersomosaguas, a research group on technocultures and social movement (UCM). She is currently working on a research project about digital sexual violence and misogynistic digital cultures. E-mail: [email protected]

Patricia Prieto Blanco

Patricia Prieto Blanco is a lecturer in Digital Media Practice at the Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster. Her areas of expertise are visual research methods, photography, and migration. She is a member of the steering group of ECREA Section Visual Cultures, serves on the IVSA board as Technology Advisor, and currently participates in the DFG research network “Transformative Bildlichkeit”, as well as in two international research projects: “Post-photography” at Luzern University of Applied Sciences; and “WhatsInApp” at University of Jyväskylä. Patricia advocates for interdisciplinary, practice-based, and collaborative research. E-mail: [email protected]