Naming Performativity on Twitter

Antiracist Feminist Counterpublics in Brazil

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2021.34548

Keywords:

Contrapúblico, Antirracismo, Feminismo, Twitter, Estudos Digitais

Abstract

This article examines naming as a discursive performance deployed by antiracist feminists in Brazil. I analyze tweets referencing the names of three Black Brazilian women intellectuals: Marielle Franco, Lélia González and Djamila Ribeiro, seeking to unearth the way in which their names help to build counterpublic spaces of resistance involving notions of citizenship, belonging and democracy. Using platform studies and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis as a theoretical frame, I perform different operations of computational textual analysis to map most frequent users referenced and hashtags used, as well as most relevant topics. I conclude that naming grants a powerful role in building counterpublics’ identities, helping to constitute alternative intellectual traditions in Brazil. Linking a social media post with a name to a collective mobilization serves to establish and maintain cultural identity, combining ephemerality with a continuing legacy.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

BERGAMO, Mônica. Djamila Ribeiro denunciará Twitter no Ministério Público por ‘explorar o racismo e a misoginia’. Portal Gueledés. São Paulo, 27/07/2020. Available at : https://www.geledes.org.br/djamila-ribeiro-denunciara-twitter-no-ministerio-publico-por-explorar-o-racismo-e-a-misoginia/. Accessed on 15th November 2020.

BERGIS, Jules; SUMMERS, Ed; MITCHELL, Vernon. Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities and Recommendations. Documenting the Now. Available at:.https://www.docnow.io/docs/docnow-whitepaper-2018.pdf. Accessed on 15th November 2020.

BONILLA, Yarimar; ROSA, Jonathan. #Ferguson: Digital Protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist. v. 42, n. 1, p. 4-17, 2015.

BROCK, André. From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a cultural Conversation. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 56, n. 4, 2012, p. 529-549.

BROCK, André. Distributed Blackness. African American Cybercultures. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

CARNEIRO, Sueli. Enegrecer o feminismo: a situação da mulher negra na América Latina a partir da perspectiva de gênero. In: HOLLANDA, Heloisa Buarque de. Pensamento feminista: conceitos fundamentais. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar dos Tempos, 2019. P. 125-145.

COMITÊ GESTOR DE INTERNET NO BRASIL. PAINEL TIC. Pesquisa web sobre o uso da Internet no Brasil durante a pandemia do novo coronavírus – Painel TIC COVID-19. CETIC.br. São Paulo, 2021. Avialable at: https://cetic.br/media/docs/publicacoes/2/20210426095323/painel_tic_covid19_livro_eletronico.pdf. Accessed on 6th February 2021.

CLARK, Meredith. Black Twitter: Building Connection Through Cultural Conversation. In Rambukkana, Nathan (ed). Hashtag Publics. The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. P. 81-90.

CONNEL, Raewyn. Southern Theory. The global dynamics of Knowledge in social science. Sidney: Allen & Unwin, 2007.

D´ANDREA, Carlos. Pesquisando Plataformas Online: Conceitos e Métodos. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2020.

FRASER, Nancy. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, Social Text , n. 25/26, pp. 56-80, , 1990.

FRIEDMAN, Elisabeth Jay. Interpreting the Internet. Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2017.

FREELON, Deen; MCILWAIN, Charlton D.; CLARK. Meredith. Beyond the hashtags:# Ferguson,# Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice. Center for Media & Social Impact, American University, 2016.

FLORINI, Sarah. Tweets, Tweeps and Signifyin: Communication and Cultural Performance on “Black Twitter”. Television & New Media. V. 15, n. 3, p. 223-237, 2013.

FUENTES, Marcela. Ni una Menos. Hashtag Performativity, Memory and Direct Action against Gender Violence in Argentina. In: GUL ALTINAY, Ayse et al. (ed). Women mobilizing memory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2019. P. 110-135.

GO, Julian. Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016.

GONZALEZ, Lélia. A categoria político-cultural da amefricanidade. In: HOLLANDA, Heloisa Buarque de. Pensamento feminista: conceitos fundamentais. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar dos Tempos, 2019. P. 130-142.

HABERMAS, Jurgen. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. In: DURHAM, Meenakshi Gigi, KELLNER, Douglas M. Media and cultural studies. Keyworks. London: Blackwell Publishing. Oxford, 2006. Pp. 73-78.

INSTITUTO MARIELLE FRANCO. Pesquisa sobre violência política contra mulheres negras. 2020. Available at: https://www.violenciapolitica.org. Accesed on 15 January 2021.

KEMP, Simon. DIGITAL 2020: BRAZIL. 17 February 2020. Available at: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-brazil. Accessed on 15th January 2021.

KUO, Rachel. Racial justice activist hashtags: Counterpublics and discourse circulation. New Media & Society, 2016, p. 1-20.

LEE, Monica, MARTIN, John Levi. Coding, counting and cultural cartography. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, v. 3, pp. 1–33, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1057/ajcs.2014.13.

MASIELLO, Francine. Between civilization and barbarism. women, nation and literary culture in modern Argentina. Lincoln, NEB: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

MENDEZ, Mariela. Operación Araña: Reflections on How a Performative Intervention in Buenos Aires’s Subway System can Help Rethink Feminist Activism. Estudos Historicos. V. 33. N. 70, 2020. P. 20-34.

MILAN, Stefania et al. Datafication from Below: Epistemology, Ambivalences, Challenges. Crossing Boundaries. Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies. Vol. 10, n. 1, 2019, pp. 89–113

MOLLOY, Sylvia. Identidades textuales femeninas: estrategias de autofiguración. Mora, n, 12, Buenos Aires, 2006, p. 68-86.

MORETTI, Franco. Patterns and Interpretation. Pamphlet 15. Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab. 2017. Available at: https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet15.pdf. Accessed on 15th November 2020.

RAMA, Ángel. La tecnificación narrativa. Hispamérica, v. 10, n. 30, 1981. Pp. 29-82.

RIBEIRO, Djamila. Quem tem medo do feminismo negro? São Paulo: Ed. Companhia das Letras, 2018.

RISAM, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial digital humanities in Theory, praxis and pedagogy. Illinois: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018.

STEINSKOG, Asbjorn Ottesen, THERKELSEN, Jonas Foyn e Gamback, Bjorn. Twitter Topic Modeling by Tweet Aggregation. Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, pages 77–86. 2017.

TARCIZIO, Igor. Eleição tem recorde de candidatas mulheres; negros são maioria pela 1ª vez. Socialismo criativo. 28/09/2020. Available at : https://www.socialismocriativo.com.br/eleicao-tem-recorde-de-candidatas-mulheres-negros-sao-maioria-pela-1-vez/. Accessed on November 11, 2020.

TRINDADE, Luiz Valério de Paula. “My hair, my crown”. Examining Black Brazilian Women’s antiracist discursive strategies on social media. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. V. 45, n. 3. 2020. Pp. 277-296.

VAN DIJCK, José. The culture of connectivity. A critical history of social media. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.

VAN DIJCK, Jose.; POELL, T.; WALL, M. The Platform Society: public values in a connective world. London: Oxford Press, 2018.

WANG, YUAN, Liu, Jie, HANG, Yalou; FENG, Xia, Using Hashtag Graph Based topic model to connect semantically related words without co-ocurrence in Microblogs, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. :28, n. 7, 2016. P. 22-27.

Downloads

Published

2021-12-23

How to Cite

Josiowicz, A. (2021). Naming Performativity on Twitter: Antiracist Feminist Counterpublics in Brazil. Aletria: Revista De Estudos De Literatura, 31(4), 209–237. https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2021.34548

Issue

Section

Dossier: Culture and Public Spaces