#YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #TheEmptyChair, #WhyIStayed, #MeToo—each of these hashtags highlights women’s experiences with interpersonal and institutionally enabled violence, and each was precipitated by high-profile events involving male perpetrators.
Gendered violence has been framed as an individual problem in public discourse in a multitude of ways. From questions about women’s dress and behavior to laws that eschew the possibility that wives can be raped by their husbands, U.S. culture is rife with narratives that blame victims and normalize violence against them. On social media, victim blaming can intensify. But the #YesAllWomen network and those that followed it are part of what has come to be known as “Feminist Twitter,” where misogyny is challenged online in the tradition of the early feminist press.
Ultimately, these hashtags are embodiments of the feminist demand that “the personal is political,” and illustrate how storytelling on Twitter raises consciousness, creates solidarity, promulgates new cultural narratives, and articulates demands for change. What has become known as the “#MeToo moment” was not so much a moment but a loud chorus of voices that had for years been using Twitter and other social networks to tell the stories about women’s experiences with violence that were not and had not been told in mainstream media, by politicians, or by most journalists. In these networks, unlike in most other public spaces, women told their own stories, women were believed, male allies helped elevate women’s voices, and women—experts in their own lives—added nuance to the all too often oversimplified and inaccurately reported systemic issues of gender, violence and victimhood.
Each hashtag, from #YesAllWomen to #MeToo, did different work as part of a larger movement, creating cultural interventions in response to particular news stories and events that reached the public sphere. These hashtags provided a source of discursive and collective energy that catalyzed both online and offline movement work, leading to powerful cultural repercussions—and, yes, change.
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