Negotiating the challenge of #ChallengeAccepted: transnational digital flows, networked feminism, and the case of femicide in Turkey

ABSTRACT

In summer 2020, social media feeds were flooded with black-and-white selfies of women, shared under the hashtag #ChallengeAccepted. While the images quickly became ubiquitous, the reason for them did not. This case study analyzes #ChallengeAccepted from the perspective of feminists in Turkey, who began posting the hashtag/selfie sequence on July 26, 2020. We performed a thematic analysis on datasets of 5,510 Turkish-language tweets, 28,527 English-language tweets, and transcripts from 26 semistructured interviews with women in Turkey who participated in the hashtag campaign and sought to answer the question: How do transnational digital flows impact local and global uptake of feminist ideals? We found three stages of the hashtag, through which meaning was negotiated, defended, and re-established. Applying W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg’s “logic of connective action,” we saw #ChallengeAccepted as operating as a “personal action frame,” which we argue provided a refractive effect that changed the trajectory of the discourse. Our findings suggest that other cases of hashtag activism would benefit from imagining the local/transnational dimensions as a collection of locals, or the translocal.

KEYWORDS:

• hashtag feminism
• digital activism
• transnational feminism
• #ChallengeAccepted

Notes

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3 Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-first Century (London: Routledge, 2004).

4 Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, “Thematic Analysis,” in APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology, Vol. 2: Research Designs: Quantitative, Qualitative, Neuropsychological, and Biological, ed. Harris Cooper et al. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012), 71.

5 Christina Scharff, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Maria Stehle, “Digital Feminisms: Transnational Activism in German Protest Cultures,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–16.

6 W. Lance Bennet and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739–68.

7 David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 2 (2006): 145–58.

8 Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009).

9 Ibid.

10 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill, and Catherine Rottenberg, “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in Conversation,” Feminist Theory 21, no. 1 (2020): 5.

11 Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147.

12 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

13 Banet-Weiser, Gill, and Rottenberg, “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism?”

14 Ibid.

15 Jess Butler, “For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 35–58.

16 Carolyn Zerbe Enns, Lillian Comas Díaz, and Thema Bryant-Davis, “Transnational Feminist Theory and Practice: An Introduction,” Women & Therapy 44, nos. 1–2 (2021): 11–26.

17 Ibid., 12.

18 Carolyn Zerbe Enns, “Locational Feminisms and Feminist Social Identity Analysis,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 41, no. 4 (2010): 333–39.

19 Pinar Tuzcu, “‘Allow Access to Location?’: Digital Feminist Geographies,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 150–52.

20 Rosemary Clark-Parsons, Networked Feminism: How Digital Media Makers Transformed Gender Justice Movements (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

21 Bennet and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action,” 742.

22 Bennet and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action.”

23 Ibid.

24 Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–46.

25 Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (New York: Macmillan, 2010).

26 Ellen Riordan, “Commodified Agents and Empowered Girls: Consuming and Producing Feminism,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 25, no. 3 (2001): 279–97.

27 Lara C. Stache, “Advocacy and Political Potential at the Convergence of Hashtag Activism and Commerce,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 1 (2015): 162–64.

28 Sarah J. Jackson, “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375.

29 Carrie A. Rentschler and Samantha C. Thrift, “Doing Feminism in the Network: Networked Laughter and the ‘Binders Full of Women’ Meme,” Feminist Theory 16, no. 3 (2015): 331.

30 danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications,” in A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (London: Routledge, 2011), 39.

31 Yılmaz, Sezen Ravanoglu, “The Role of Social Media Activism in New Social Movements: Opportunities and Limitations,” International Journal of Social Inquiry 10, no. 1 (2017): 141–64.

32 Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture,” 188.

33 Kitsy Dixon, “Feminist Online Identity: Analyzing the Presence of Hashtag Feminism,” Journal of Arts and Humanities 3, no. 7 (2014): 34.

34 Octavia Calder-Dawe and Nicola Gavey, “Authentic Feminist? Authenticity and Feminist Identity in Teenage Feminists’ Talk,” British Journal of Social Psychology 56, no. 4 (2017): 784 original emphases.

35 Ibid., 792.

36 Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 17–34.

37 Tuzcu, “‘Allow Access to Location?’” 152.

38 Braun and Clarke, “Thematic Analysis,” 71.

39 Ibid.

40 Cammaerts, “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure,” 120.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Tuzcu, “‘Allow Access to Location?’” 150.

45 ZeynepTufekci, “‘Not This One’: Social Movements, the Attention Economy, and Microcelebrity Networked Activism,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (2013): 850.

46 Elizabeth Ellcessor, “‘One Tweet to Make So Much Noise’: Connected Celebrity Activism in the Case of Marlee Matlin,” New Media & Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 263.

47 Red Chidgey, “Postfeminism™: Celebrity Feminism, Branding, and the Performance of Activist Capital,” Feminist Media Studies (2020): 11.

48 Tufekci, “‘Not This One,’” 857.

49 Çiğdem Yilmaz, “365 gün 367 ölüm! Tablo değişmedi,” Milliyet, January 3, 2022, https://www.milliyet.com.tr/gundem/365-gun-367-olum-6673230.

50 Zerbe Enns, “Locational Feminisms and Feminist Social Identity Analysis”; Tuzcu, “‘Allow Access to Location?’”

51 Bennet and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action,” 7.

52 Ibid.

53 McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism.

54 Tuzcu, “‘Allow Access to Location?’” 150.

55 Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 5.

56 Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, “Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 15 (2019): https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/ada.2019.15.6.

57 boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics,” 39.