Seventeenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

This empirical study explores the affective dimension of digital feminist activism. Prior studies have indicated the complexity and nuance of affects released in digital feminist practices. However, we still know little about how intricate emotional fabrics are interwoven, thus forming an emotional network that contributes to shaping the “surface” of the collective sharings around sexual violence. This study analyzes Twitter conversations under the hashtag #whyididntreport, which women have been using since 2018 to share their reasons for not reporting experiences of sexual violence. We pose two research questions: 1. what emotions are expressed in the public conversation around sexual violence on Twitter under the #whyididntreport hashtag; 2. how the intricate emotions form a network during the public sharing in the #whyididntreport campaign. To address these questions, we first apply dictionary-based sentiment analysis to extract emotional words from the Twitter data (N = 11,004) collected; secondly, we perform a network analysis to map out the entangled emotions displayed in this collective sharing campaign. The proposed study offers insights into how individuals affectively engage in digital feminist activism against sexual violence with social media affordances. It also provides an option to explore how the emotional fabrics that reflect people’s lived experiences are interconnected to form a online network that delineates the boundaries of the public conversations around sexual violence. Moreover, this study adds to the existing literature on the affective dimension of digital feminist activism by using the technique from natural language processing to understand the ambiguous but nuanced emotional sharing.