Hashtag feminism: an analysis of #JustiçaPorMariFerrer’s cyberactivism

Abstract

Hashtag feminism is a recent phenomenon, however, increasingly recurrent in the network society, connected by the Internet. One of the examples of this type of activism began in 2019 when a young woman named Mariana Ferrer used her social media to report that she had suffered sexual violence. Since then, her case has become increasingly known and several hashtags have been created to refer to the case, such as #JusticePorMariFerrer. Engagement with the hashtag reached a large number of engagements in November 2020, when the acquittal of the accused was reported and the term 'wrongful rape' was used by the portal that shared more details of the process. The indignation at what happened was so great that it invaded the streets of Brazil, with protests and demonstrations. Thus, the objective of this study is to identify the structure and aspects of the representation of feminism by hashtag, the semantic contexts, and common sense knowledge that permeate this type of manifestation. For this analysis, the KDD methodology was used, extracting 198,009 tweets with the hashtag #JustiçaPorMariFerrer in November 2020. Among the findings, the categories that reveal the discourse of rejection in relation to the system and digital solidarity stand out. Through the categories, it is possible to perceive that there is a distrust of official institutions and that women create connective solidarity networks.

Keywords:
feminism; hashtag; cyberactivism; KDD; Iramuteq