Project description
Potential and risks of the #MeToo movement
The #MeToo movement spread rapidly worldwide in the autumn of 2017 following the exposure of sexual abuse allegations in the United States movie industry. It soon became a viral hashtag on social media. The EU-funded FEMONMETOO project will study the potential and risks of the #MeToo campaign as a specific repertoire within a wider digital transnational feminist wave. The project proposes its research as part of the field of the theory of contentious collective action and social movements in the digital era. It will study how and why the #MeToo movement spread so successfully around the world. The project will also examine the dangers related to public sharing of personal experiences, including the identity of the aggressor.
Objective
"In recent years, the interplay of online interaction and female bodies presents an emergent feminist politics that moves away from legal and institutional channels for fighting sexual abuse and gender violence, finding great potential in digital communication and on platforms of the Web 2.0. The goal of this study is to analyze the potentials and pitfalls of the #MeToo campaign that spread around the world as a specific online action repertoire within a broader wave of feminist transnational mobilizations using digital networks. This research is framed in the theory of contentious collective action and social movements in the age of digital communication. How and why has #MeToo spread around the world? Which are its specificities in different national settings? How do women enunciate their experience as part of the #MeToo campaign? What are the semantic frames built in Twitter around #MeToo? Which are the risks and threats of making visible personal sexual aggressions and naming the aggressor online? To discuss the ambivalences in which the #MeToo campaign is embedded for understanding sexual violence as a structural rather than a personal problem is also an objective of this study. Trough qualitative methods, mainly digital ethnography and Social Network Analysis of digital interaction, the frames, ways of organizing and the new threats of this online feminist repertoire of action will be analyzed."
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Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
17004 Girona
Spain