Authors

Saara Ratilainen¹;  ¹ Tampere University, Finland

Discussion

Feminist hashtag campaigns have a significant role in popularizing feminism around the world during the 2000s. While viral hashtag campaigns demonstrate feminist collective action across digital media spaces, they also have the potential to reach out to and engage non-activist media users and make feminist issues and vocabulary known to wider publics. Feminist media scholar Rosemary Clarck, for instance, discusses feminist hashtags as “feminist conversation-expansion tactics that politicize personal experiences with all forms of patriarchy” (2014, 1109). She places feminist hashtags within the broader framework of feminist discursive activism “directed at promoting new grammars, new social paradigms, through which individuals, collectives, and institutions interpret social circumstances and devise responses to them (Young 1997 cited in Clarck 2016, 791).

Feminist hashtag activism peaked in Russia between the years 2016 and 2020. The most visible Russian-language feminist hashtag campaigns during this period include the transnationally and globally circulating hashtags against gendered violence and sexual abuse #IAmNotAfraidToTell (2016) and #MeToo (2017); the more locally circulating campaigns around shocking femicide cases #NotAReasonToKill (2018) and #IDidNotWantToDie (2019), a commercial campaign problematizing gender stereotypes (#невкакиерамки, 2019), and a solidarity campaign in support of activist and artist Yulia Tsvetkova (#МыЗаЮлию, 2020).

The paper investigates these campaigns in a timeline, detecting and analyzing their sequenced dynamic, connections, and the key feminist issues and concepts they introduced to Russian speaking publics across platforms. The paper argues that while Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022 suppressed the most visible and popular forms of online feminist engagement, these hashtag campaigns, however, play an important role in making feminism a well-known topic across Russian media spaces during the decade preceding Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. Thereby they contributed significantly to the growing presence of feminism in Russia’s public sphere, cementing some significant feminist ideas and conceptions as part of the wider media discourse, as well as provided increasing numbers of Russian media users with the language and concepts necessary to understand and unpack the patterns of systemic domination, violence, and injustice. Against this backdrop, the paper suggest that hashtag feminism functioned as a vital mobilizing force to later forms of feminist activism following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and which will be discussed by other presenters on this panel). An analysis of Russian hashtag feminism, therefore, will broaden our understanding of the role of media and discursive activism for feminist collective action in Russia.