This is a special chapter devoted to a selection of activist causes to improve the lives of women. We look closely at two online movements outside of the US, one in each hemisphere. Both integrate the global and the local; both work to liberate women from systematic violence. Then we look at a few movements in the US.

But first let's back up.

People who identify as "men" and people who identify as "women" have lived in the same neighborhoods and households across cultures and time periods. This quality makes gender relationships and activism distinct among activist movements. Issues that arise between groups of different ethnicities, races, and classes are often clearly expressed out in the open; but gender issues are not expressed as openly. Because men and women co-exist so closely in every community, issues between people of different gender identities tend to leak out in whispers and remain more hidden.

Women as a gender identity: A disclaimer

In order to look closely at two important online movements for women, I have had to exclude many other movements, moments, and identities from this chapter. The premise of chapter admittedly works against complex understandings of gender, by presenting "women" as a fixed identity group - also called ciswomen. As the Wikipedia page on gender reflects, deep understanding of gender and sexuality must also consider where the boundaries between genders come from, and what we don't talk about when we rely on easy gender categories. The fight for transgender rights has also played out online; and readers of this book are encouraged to more deeply explore this and any other online activism you seek to learn more about, and share your analyses.

In a better world, activism would not need to center on gender. But simplistic gender identity is imposed on women all too frequently during incidents of sexual violence and harassment. My goal in chapters 5 and 6 is to give you a selection of histories, tools, and examples to help you understand online activist movements. While I don't like simplistic understandings of gender, those protesting the treatment of women have too much historic significance to leave out.

Saudi women: Online and driving change

In Saudi Arabia, being a woman means being controlled by men in countless aspects of your life. Saudi Arabian laws and culture enforce a system of male guardianship over women, whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage. Online activism is helping women resisting the system of male guardianship connect with fellow activists, read the climate for what they are asking, and connect with specific publics who may support their causes.

#savedinaali

Like campaigns for other identity groups, many social media campaigns for women are branded as leaderless or have masked leadership. A particular feature of social media campaigns for women is the naming of the campaign after a woman who has been persecuted, even though she is not organizing the campaign. Sadly, due to the violence women face that leads to these campaigns, the woman the campaign is named after is often already dead.

One example is the campaign to #savedinaali. Dina Ali fled Saudi Arabia but was detained in the Philippines and returned to her family, whom she said would kill her. It is unknown if Dina Ali is severely injured or even alive, but organizers started the #savedinaali campaign to help her and women in similar situations, and draw attention to the human rights abuses of Saudi women. Raising awareness around the situations of particular imprisoned women may lighten the punishment inflicted on them - though it does not guarantee safety or survival.Recognizing the small beginnings of large media campaigns

Recognizing the small beginnings of large media campaigns

Activist movements that become large usually began as small, local efforts for change. This is especially true around women's rights, as whispers about abuse in women's usually come first, then lead to social movements once it's clear that abuse is systematic. Take for example the extensive Human Rights Watch campaign (also linked above) to end Male Guardianship in Saudi Arabia. It was many small campaigns like the one to save Dina Ali that led Human Rights Watch produced a 2016 report entitled Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabia’s Male Guardianship System; the campaign uses the hashtag #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship along with video and other content.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a large, global organization, but small movements gave them key examples and networks on which to build a larger campaign. HRW's decision to focus on Twitter as a platform in the campaign depended monitoring smaller movements to make sure Saudis would really use Twitter and hashtags for activism. And those small movements provided the core of the larger networks HRW would use in their campaign.

One prior online network example for campaigns for Saudi women is the campaign to allow them to drive. Women have been putting themselves on the front lines and driving - and celebrating this civil disobedience online. In 2011-13 the hashtag #W2drive (women to drive) was used by Saudi activists to gather a public interested in women’s right to drive, as did the account @SaudiWomenSpring on Facebook.

Meming of hashtags and more

The use of any hashtag can expand and complicate the spread of a message across a global audience, particularly if the meme flips to become sarcastic or changes direction.

Yet in this case, hashtags Hashtags relating to Saudi women's rights led to numerous memes, but most just added force to the movement. #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship was of course translated - you might also say, imitated or memed - into Arabic, and it is that tag which Arabic-speaking social media users began spreading prolifically. #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen is another tag channeling similar publics; like #HandsUpDontShoot in the Black Lives Matter movement, it is a phrase speaking directly to an oppressing force, telling them to change their behavior.

However, there is some evidence of the spread of misinformation through hashtags related to Saudi women. For example, a story about Saudi male scientists declaring women "not human" started out on a satirical website, but it spread to publics other publics - including some who believed it was true, and others who found it useful in spreading fear of Islam. As this example shows, hashtags are easy targets for appropriation - use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended - and tags in online activist movements are highly susceptible to appropriation.

How social media can help women's causes in particular

To understand women's online movements including those for Saudi women and women in the Americas (in the next section), it is important to consider relationship communication. First, let's consider whom Saudi women can and cannot talk to and when those conversations take place. In traditional Saudi society, women have limited face to face contact. They are not allowed to see many people, and their communications are under surveillance of male guards. This limits the communication of women activists with those who are geographically close to them and to moments of low surveillance.

With online communication, groups and communities devoted to women's activism can interact on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and other social media platforms. So the most important affordance of social media for women's movements is this: Movement organizers can orchestrate gatherings and strategies through the use of social media. An example of this is the campaign #women2drive, which Saudi women have been pushing for several years to challenge male guardianship incrementally, through focus on one aspect of male guardianship: Being allowed to drive.

Some of the publics gathered by social media include large organizations with resources to support movements, leading to a fourth affordance in creating a global movement: Social media connects activists with their publics. Saudi women can feel the support of women activists across the globe with the hashtag #suffrage, and I imagine that is important at moments when the national culture seems to be changing too slowly. Connecting with supportive publics can also lead to organizational and financial support.

The publics gathered through hashtags around Saudi women’s rights and specifically the push to end male guardianship in that country demonstrate how publics can build on and connect to one another, through hashtags among other tools. Saudi women have pushed to end male guardianship in the past, and the gathering of publics by these early movements led to the taking up of the cause by larger organizations.

Demonstrations online and across the Americas against gender violence

Ni Una Menos, Vivas Las Queremos

Beginning in 2016, a new hemispheric movement is underway expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas. Ni Una Menos began in summer 2014 in Argentina, culminating in an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru. It was reactivated in South American cities including Buenos Aires and Rio Di Janeiro in October 2016, in response to the drugging, rape, and murder of a 16-year-old Argentinian girl.

Hemispheric hashtags coordinating these movements include #niunamenos (not one less or not one fewer) and #vivaslasqueremos (we want them alive) - proactively worded demands that not a single woman or girl be killed by the systematic violence against them in many nations in the Americas. The proactive strategy makes every death cause for further protest.

One striking strategy in this movement is its theatricality. From dressing as death in Mexico to applying makeup to simulate bruised and bloodied faces and crotches in this demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Latin American women in particular are demonstrating for visual impact. In protests in the US it is common to embody the unjustly dead - in #blacklivesmatter, the #icantbreathe hashtag for Eric Garner and hoodie-posing to say “we are Trayvon Martin” are two of many examples of resurrection through performance. But this practice of embodiment of a bruised, bloodied woman in such a visual way is distinct from most feminist protests seen in the US.

The performative, graphic strategies in the Latin American #niunamenos demonstrations were not replicated in the massive Women's March in the US in January 2017, although many women face violence in the US. Perhaps in the US women marchers were embodying the “they go low, we go high” approach - as in Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC following the recording of Trump boasting of using his wealth and stature to grab women “by the pussy.” But the difference may come down to class more than nationality.

The performative demonstrations in Latin America reflect the grim reality of being unable to "go high" and hide abuse for many of its survivors. Many abused women wear their visible bruises on their faces in shame. The sounds of abuse are more evident on city streets and in smaller apartment buildings than in large houses and suburbs. Abuse of poor women is more visible than abuse of wealthier women - even when poor women don’t live on the streets, lower class status is generally accompanied with lack of personally owned or controlled space. As Margaret Rodman has written, “The most powerless people have no place at all.” In these hemispheric demonstrations, the streets become women's place, with demonstrators of all classes increasingly marching them. By making the marks of women's abuse and murder public, they drag into the public eye what has long been understood as a feature of women's private lives in the Americas.

Update: #metoo

After this book was released, the #metoo movement ensued, in late 2017. As I write this update, the #metoo movement is sweeping the US and other nations, as charges and evidence of long histories of sexual harassment and abuse circulate in the media and online. The movement has pervaded the academic and political spheres in the US and other nations as well. ​

​Critiques of the #metoo movement are also circulating. One example is the response #whataboutus by working class women that draws attention to limits of #metoo in telling their stories. Another critique complains of discomfort among feminists with #metoo's simplistic image of women as victims, and of the collapsing of such a vast range of behaviors into one term, "harassment."

The creative online activism explored in these chapters is remarkable for its inclusiveness and complexity in the face of these critiques. Branding is hard. Oversimplification is a threat faced by any spreading movement for its complex causes to be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads. Oversimplification of a message seems inevitable for it to gain national or global traction, as critiques of the #metoo movement charge. Yet the Black Lives Matter movement has remained complex, so why not #metoo?

​In tentative conclusion, while I see the #metoo movement's value, as of this writing I do not include the US-based #metoo in the movements I label creative online activism - yet. Although the Hollywood actresses whose accounts received the most attention are very visible, the movement's strategies are not highly visual, or performative; rather, the movement has gained traction through the voices of people who already have access to significant public attention and national platforms. Imagine if they used their skills at performance and visibility to redirect the attention of their audiences to working class women and women in nations with oppressive regimes? I hope #metoo advocates where the movement is most visible will turn attention to the women who need help most, rather than celebrating #metoo as a simple success.

Social and activist movements take time. Decades may pass before the effects of a movement are in full view.

Exposure

The affordance of social media to draw matters society guards as private into the public sphere.

male guardianship

The system in Saudi Arabia whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage.

Appropriation

Use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended.

staircase thoughts

The affordance of social media to allow people who will be gathering in person also to get a sense of what others are thinking before they meet face to face, and continue sharing their ideas after they leave the meeting.

Ni Una Menos

Translated from Spanish as "not one less", this is a hemispheric movement expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas, this movement began in Argentina and led to an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru.

oversimplification

The threat faced by any spreading movement for complex causes to be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads.

Did you get all that?

Let's see if this is all getting through.

According to this chapter, what is salient about online campaigns for women?

1. They are nothing like other online protests.
2. They are exactly like all other online protests.
3. They enable public awareness, conversations, and protests about situations women often face privately.
4. They succeed when women look sexy or use their attractiveness to gather publics.
5. All of the above

Which of the following is NOT emphasized in this chapter as an affordance of social media campaigns for women?

1. Social media can gather and focus supportive global publics including larger organizations.
2. Social media campaigns guarantee safety and survival for women in oppressive regimes.
3. Social movement organizers can orchestrate activist gatherings and strategies through the use of social media.
4. Social media can extend and deepen communication among activists.
5. Social media can connect activists with resource support by supportive global publics.

What are staircase thoughts and what do they have to do with online activism?

1. Staircase thoughts are thoughts that occur once you have left a meeting; sharing them can deepen interactions including those among activists.
2. Staircase thoughts are thoughts that head downhill toward depression.
3. Staircase thoughts reflect increasing optimism and positivity, as a way of thinking upward.
4. All of the above.
5. A and B only.

What does this chapter say about the graphic, performative strategies in women's movements in the Americas, in relationship with the US?

1. These strategies are often used in US protests because the US is part of the Americas too.
2. These strategies are not used in US protests because women are not threatened by violence in the US.
3. These strategies are not common in US protests even though women are threatened by violence in the US.
4. All of the above.
5. B and C only

What online activist movements would you like to learn more about?