FOLKSONOMIES, HASHTAGS, AND FEMINIST CAMPAIGNS ON THE INTERNET: HOW #MEUAMIGOSECRETO, #BELARECATADAEDOLAR AND #MEUPRIMEIROASSÉDIO LED US TO #ELENÃO

FOLKSONOMIAS, HASHTAGS E CAMPANHAS FEMINISTAS NA INTERNET: COMO #MEUAMIGOSECRETO, #BELARECATADAEDOLAR E #MEUPRIMEIROASSÉDIO NOS LEVARAM A #ELENÃO

ABSTRACT

Based on the contemporaneous context of authorship and participation on the internet and the theories about folksonomies, this paper aims to discuss the uses and circulation of four significant hashtags for the Brazilian feminist movement: #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), all of them disseminated in 2015 and 2016, and #elenão (#nothim), in 2018. Through quantitative and qualitative-interpretative analysis based on responses to a questionnaire and on a sample of shared posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it was possible to understand how a group of women feels about the use of hashtags in feminist campaigns, what are the specific characteristics of each of these hashtags, regarding language of the indexed contents and the virtual environments in which they circulate, and how the experience and the repercussion of the campaigns of 2015 and 2016 were important for the 2018 campaign.

Keywords:
folksonomies; hashtags; feminism

RESUMO

A partir do contexto comtemporâneo de autoria e participação na internet e das teorias sobre folksonomias, este artigo discute os usos e a circulação de quatro hashtags significativas para o movimento feminista brasileiro: #meuprimeiroassédio, #meuamigosecreto, #belarecatadaedolar, que circularam em 2015 e 2016, e #elenão, lançada em 2018. Por meio de análises quantitativas e qualitativo-interpretativistas realizadas com base em respostas a um questionário e na coleta de postagens compartilhadas no Facebook, no Twitter e no Instagram, foi possível compreender como um grupo de mulheres enxerga o uso de hashtags em campanhas feministas, quais as características específicas de cada uma dessas tags em relação às linguagens dos conteúdos indexados e aos ambientes virtuais em que circulam e como a experiência e a repercussão das campanhas de 2015 e 2016 foram importantes para a campanha de 2018.

Palavras-chave:
folksonomias; hashtags; feminismo

INTRODUCTION

The presence of digital technologies on contemporaneous routines, triggered a social practice reorganization, because these tools reduce distances and interconnect people and places, as well as redefine production and consumerism process, modify conceptions regarding teaching and learning and, above all,restructure a communication’s ecosystem. Among many technologies which articulate and materialize these relations, one must me be mentioned, Web 2.0, that reset the field of communication when it established a participative logic (PINHEIRO, 2014; RUFINO, 2010).

Thus, at Web 2.0, “internetusers do not only search to find information; they also create and publish content, generating, therefore, a change on the communication’s model” (PINHEIRO, 2014, p. 144), since they act in a participation logic, interactivity and agency, as described by Pinheiro (2014). In this context (and as a consequence), the quantity of information is huge and ideas easily become public and accessible. Although Web 2.0 users are not totally free from the control spheres and still are subject to influences and sanctions of great powers and institutions. (JENKINS; FORD; GREEN, 2013; PINHEIRO, 2014), it’s undeniable that the internet has become an important democratic space, in which more voices can be projected and listened, and ideas and claims find strength and support.

So, it can be said that, as Coelho says (2016, p. 219), “we live in the digital visibility era which instigate subordinated demands, gestures of women, gays and blacks”, for example. Such instability can destabilize structures and lead to dislocations of ideas and convictions. In a context of strong and traditional powers,significant inequalities and entrenched prejudices, the urging of these voices of provocation and rupture is what Castells (2013) calls “counter-power”, since they are challenging many dominating structures. Thus, “a room and a computer connected to the network can be constituted as instruments of work, resistance and subversion.” (COELHO, 2016, p. 219).

Parallel to this, we must also consider some notions that comprises what is understood as social movements. According to sociologist James Jasper (2016, p.23), such movements are persistent and intentional efforts “to promote or obstruct far reaching legal and social change, basically outside the normal institutional channels sanctioned by the authorities”.The author emphasizes the importance of persuasion that underlies the social movements, since, if they are based on physical force, they can be confused with criminal groups; on the other hand, if sustained by financial forces, they will be seen as self-interested and opportunist group. In this way, there is a fundamental role of language and rhetoric used in these movements, and hence the historical importance of speeches, audiences, performances and speakers. (JASPER, 2016).

However, although the power of persuasion remains as essential to the organization of contemporary social movements, there is a difference in the way they organize and mobilize their resources: whereas, in the past, these movements depended on communication mechanisms such as pamphlets, manifests and sermons, today’s virtual social networks function as faster, autonomous and interactive tools that amplify history and are constituted by somewhat more horizontal structures, as suggests Castells (2013). This current communication paradigm based on the internet and wireless networks is called “mass self-communication” (CASTELLS, 2011). The author’s definition is interesting because it is an alternative to traditional ideas of communication: while it is understood that interpersonal communication is interactive and mass communication is unidirectional, mass self-communication is understood to be endowed with bulky output and scope while maintaining autonomous production and reception.

From this scenario, we can understand that there is currently an expansion of the voices that circulate socially. Even though, as already pointed out, powerful and ideological institutions of control are still in force among the media, the possibilities brought by the mass self-communication promote ruptures and widen spaces for ideas to be exposed and struggles to be fulfilled. As summarized by Castells,

engaging in the production of mass media messages and developing autonomous networks of horizontal communication, citizens of the information era have become able to invent new programs for their lives with the raw materials of their suffering, their tears, their dreams and hopes. (CASTELLS, 2013, p. 11).

This inventiveness is responsible for a significant increase in the production of information, which, in turn, in addition to expanding the interactions between users and interfaces, inserts new needs in the social, technological, informational and linguistic contexts. One of the emerging tools of this current reality are the virtual tags, also known in Brazil as the name in English.These tags facilitate the classification and the organization of contents in the immensity of the web, while giving users a way of participation and authorship. The hashtags, which are today the main representatives of these tags, have occupied an importance space with regard to the participation and manifestation of specific groups and social movements on the internet.

From this, my goal, in this study was to analyze the use of four hashtags that were highlighted in the agenda of the Brazilian feminist movement: #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) e #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) -popularized in 2015 and 2016, and #elenão (#nothim) - that came on the scene during the period of the Brazilian presidential elections of 2018. From an analysis of the specificities that involved the uses of the first three tags and the women’s perception about these tags, I tried to establish a relationship with the characteristics and the visibility reached in 2018 by the tag #elenão (#nothim),which echoes still resonate from.

For this purpose, I discuss in the next section about the theories of folksonomies, which circumscribe the hashtags. In sequence, I discuss the issue of Brazilian feminism in virtual environments and the tools from which this movement is used. In the fourth section, we present the methodological procedures of data collection and generation of data, whose results are discussed in the fifth section.

1. FOLKSONOMIES AND HYPERTEXT

The folksonomies refer to classification systems that are elaborated by groups in a free and less official way than the institutionalized taxonomies of the scientific community. Thus, folksonomies define situations in which members of society create words and categories to describe the world in a way that seems relevant to them (NEAL, 2007).

The term was coined in 2004 by the information architect Thomas Vander Wal in order to designate the creation of descriptors (tags) from the language of the web users themselves, to classify and characterize texts, photos, videos and information generally. Wal (2006) defines folksonomies as the result of the free and personal assignment of labels to information or objects available at any electronic address for retrieval.

In a complementary sense, Neal (2007) explains that the folksonomies are a result of the users’ ability to alter and modify the web from their own words and concepts, without restrictions to terms previously used or pre-defined by the systems. Indexers work as context anchors (RECUERO, 2014) and can be related to web content, according to the possibilities offered by each media, environment or digital media.

From the perspectives of Wal and Neal, we can expand our understanding about this theory. In the basic perspective of the term, the purpose of information retrieval was emphasized, however, although this function is in fact useful and relevant, the process and the product of folksonomies currently present greater complexities and specificities, because, as I defended in Siqueira (2018), in addition to supporting research and being a way to organize collections from an idiosyncratic and personal mental model, the tags materialize and enable an interaction and an approach between an interface and its users and, above all, in virtual social networks, which are environments whose architecture stimulates and depends on interactions among the users, folksonomies organize many of the nodes of these networks, since, if

the social networking sites have as fundamental element the public presentation of the connections, from the moment in which is introduced as clickable tags tool, that is, tags that are hyperlinks, these tags start to function, also, no longer just as classifier tags, but as visualizations of connections - between contents and information, between users and users with interfaces. (SIQUEIRA, 2018, p. 58-59).

There are several sites that have already appropriated tagging resources.The notorious Pinterest and the functional Pocket are some examples of platforms that based on folksonomies, allow users a personalized content and interest organization. Buying and selling sites also use indexing features by encouraging, for example, product ratings with notes or stars (SIQUEIRA, 2018). In the context of photography, according to Beaudoin (2007), Flickr also presented significant resources for users to add details to the photos through the attribution of tags. However, the tagging procedures have indeed become popular among the users when they have been associated with the use of hashtags.

By the definition of Caleffi (2015), the hashtag is a sequence of characters preceded by the symbol of hash sign (#), which tends to be short and objective. The use of hashtags was introduced on Twitter in 2007, as a way to sort messages (tweets) according to their themes. According to the platform itself, “people use the hashtag (#) symbol before a relevant keyword or phrase on their Tweet to categorize the Tweets and help them appear more easily in Twitter search” (TWITTER, 2007).

In 2011, Instagram incorporated the feature into its interface, presenting the hashtags as an extension of what already existed on Twitter. According to Instagram (2011), its hashtags

work in a similar way to Twitter hashtags, but reinvented from the perspective of an Instagram user. Now, you can add hashtags to any of your own photos,including a hashtag in the caption of your photo or in a comment. Anyone can click on the hashtag in their comment to see all photos with the same hashtag. (INSTAGRAM, 2011).

Finally, in 2013, the feature was also incorporated by Facebook, which launched it as follows:

Hashtags transform topics and phrases into clickable links into your posts in your Timeline or page. This helps people find posts on topics they are interested in. To make a hashtag, write # (the number sign) along with a topic or a phrase and add it to your post. (FACEBOOK, 2013).

The definitions of hashtags presented by the three virtual platforms mentioned above highlight both the operation of the hashtag as a link and its use as a strategy for visibility of related content. It’s interesting to note that both Instagram and Facebook mention the “clickable look” of the hashtag, evidencing its navigation redirection of functionality. Therefore, it’s possible to think of hashtags as conventional hyperlinks whose specificity is the use of the initial hash sign.As a consequence, hashtags are also encompassed by theories and reflections about hypertexts, since they behave like the hyperlinks themselves.

According to Levy (1993), early hypertext theories defended the idea that the human mind does not function hierarchically, in classes and subclasses, but rather by associations. In order to contemplate all possible associations and mental connections that an individual can make from a single term or idea, it would be necessary to “create an immense multimedia reservoir of documents, covering at the same time images, sounds and texts” (LEVY, 1993, p. 28), since each node can contain an entire network. Folksonomies and, more specifically, hashtags indicate the possibility that, instead of thinking of the impossible task of creating an infinite repositor of materials and contents in order to contemplate all possible mental and interpretative references that can be made by the mind human beings, the individuals themselves designate the contents of that immeasurable repository that is the internet, according to the connections that their minds make when they encounter each object. Thus, if users have the ability to insert hashtags into their own posts as well as commenting on someone else’s posts, it is possible to say that the meanings and interpretations of tagged content are often mutable.

Based on these complexities, it seems inappropriate, in the current panorama, to design folksonomies and hashtags as strategies restricted to the search and retrieval of information. Today’s hashtags are used to comment, praise, and criticize ideas and people, to promote brands, events, spread News, attract more followers, keep users involved and engaged in certain subjects, and facilitate information dispersal (CALEFFI, 2015). Morrison (2007) points out the usefulness of hashtags to increase content exposure in web traffic and Neal (2007) argues that communities are built around hashtags, since it is very common for groups of followers to be engaged by specific tags and to end up approaching content of interest from the use or interaction with these tags.

In this sense, the organization of people in a virtual environment may be enhanced by folksonomies, since, as described by Pilz (2016), the tags start from a decentralization to a centralization of contents. In addition, hashtags are tools that group themes and have the potential to generate narrative axes and visualize meanings and conflicts (HENN, 2014). In these virtual spaces, then, there are multiple interactions of people, groups and institutions, which have their specific interests. In the midst of such diversity of content and opinions, hashtags are able to group inclinations, points of view and behaviors, functioning as textual elements that reflect individual and social practices. Among them, the use of hashtags in feminist campaigns on the internet is fundamental in this work.

2. FEMINISM ON THE INTERNET: A PERSPECTIVE OF THE CURRENT BRAZILIAN SCENARIO

According to the report of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in 2017, approximately 70% of Brazilian women had access to the internet, by microcomputer, tablet or cell phone (IBGE, 2018). As Silveira (2018) warms, it is important not to interpret this data with astonishment, nor to see it focusing on emancipations and homogeneous and horizontal scenarios only, since, as the author reminds us, a large part of the Brazilian population still has significant limitations on digital literacy, Brazil faces technical lags concerning signal and the feasibility of the cost of network access, and most census respondents, even if they have access to the Internet, may not be able to do it so frequently or constantly.

Despite this, the data show that the presence of users in virtual environments has become increasingly larger and more expressive, since in the survey of 2016 the IBGE pointed out that 65.5% of the women had access to the web (IBGE, 2017), and in 2013 the number was just over 50% (COELHO, 2016). Consequently, some changes in patterns of content and interactions begin to appear in virtual environments.

It is worth remembering that female users do not constitute a homogeneous group, with necessarily common interests and convictions, since, as Coelho (2016, p. 217) explains, “feminist questions do not surround themselves with “a woman” as a single subject, but as “women”: White, black, domestic, indigenous, wealthy, housewives, artists, lesbians, trans, among many others”.

On the other hand, all these distinct subgroups are women who, unhappily and undoubtedly, have at some point (or probably many) been victims of various oppressions and harassment throughout their lives. In the social, communicational and technological context already described in this paper, this violence begins to be opened, exposed and debated in virtual environments, which provokes criticism: there are accusations that “this movement only generates dissonant echoes. They can accuse feminists of cybernetic militancy of passivity and incarceration on the couch itself” (COELHO, 2016, p. 223). However, through virtual instances, these women create communities of proximity, which is fundamental for resistance forces to be acquired; in addition, on the internet, they organize to transcend virtual spaces and place themselves in urban locations and, in the midst of these negotiation and action processes, constructed more horizontal, more public and more political spaces (CASTELLS, 2013). As Coelho reinforces (2016, p. 223), “using the digital platform is breaking with this cycle of violence and attempts to silence. It is to transcend space itself and form infinite connections.”

Many blogs are driven by feminist themes that stand out on the internet. Facebook pages are even more popular and reach millions of users. In Brazil, “Think Olga”, “Geledés - Instituto da Mulher Negra” (“Geledés - Institute of Black Women”), “Arquivos Feministas” (“Feminist Archives”), “Nós, mulheres da periferia” (“We, women from the suburbs”) and “Nós, Madalenas” (“We, Magdalenes”)are examples of Facebook pages that daily discuss and expose feminist movement guidelines. The work of Silveira (2018) also brings important contributions to the mapping of feminist and Brazilian content on YouTube: in August 2016, the author identified about 3000 channels linked to the Portuguese terms to “feminism”, “feminist” or “feminists”.

Among these contents, more specific guidelines are also organized, from localities, interests or strands. There are, for example, from restricted groups to denunciations and support for cases of physical and moral violence, to groups specialized in body and hair care. In relation to ideological alignments, the mapping of Silveira (2018) also contributes to identify virtual niches related to black feminism, radical feminism, intersectional feminism, Marxist feminism, queer feminism, among other ramifications of the movement.

This range of demands that women’s groups and feminist pages seek to provide demonstrates how networks of contact and collaboration among women on the internet have spread and become widespread. For Freire (2016), these virtual initiatives are responsible for the collective dimension that the guidelines acquire and are capable of mobilizing and impacting people and generating public debates about the themes.

The strength brought by the internet to the contemporary Brazilian feminist movement was intensified by the use of hashtags, because, especially during the year 2015, many feminist guidelines were identified on the internet from the use of specific hashtags. According to Pilz (2016, p. 5),

the hashtags have an eventful potential in the sense that their relevance, through their scattering and visibility, draws attention from social actors, who insert themselves in their process, or reproduce it in new messages of perpetuation in the networks or legitimations in discourses of contextualization and criticism. Its uses, however, extrapolate its functionality, acquiring an aesthetic character. Still, the hashtag has been a valuable resource for marking, reproducing and spreading movements, activism, and other demands. (PILZ, 2016, p. 5).

Some of the most striking hashtags for the feminist movement in Brazil were #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife).

The tag #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) began to be used on October 21, 2015, as an indignation at the sexist and violent comments posted on social networks regarding Valentina, a 13-year-old girl who participated in Masterchef Kids program broadcast by Rede Bandeirantes. This hashtag was launched by the collective “Think Olga”. About a month later, the collective “Não me Khalo” launched the hashtag #meuamigsecreto (#mysecretfriend), which took advantage of the closeness to the holiday season, which commonly happens games known as “secret friend” or “invisible friend” to launch posts that denounced macho, prejudiced and violent attitudes of friends, partners, colleagues and family members. According to Coelho (2016), after the explosion of these two hashtags, there was a 40% increase in complaints on disk 180 (Brazilian phone number for complaints against domestic violence).

In April 2016, Veja magazine released a story about Marcela Temer, wife former president Michel Temer, in which it described the, then, first lady as beautiful, restrained and “homey” woman. Excerpts from the text underscored the value of a woman seen as beautiful and discreet, who takes care of the home and family while the man works. The conservatism of the magazine in publishing the story was immediately rejected by feminist organizations, but in that case, without any collective launching the hashtag (as in the other two cases mentioned), the internet was largely hit by posts associated with hashtag #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife).

In the period 2016 to 2018, other hashtags have obtained adhesion on the internet and stand out in diverse medias. Some examples that may be cited are the hashtags #metoo and #niunaamenos, which, although launched abroad, came with an impact in Brazil, and Brazilian hashtags #nãosejaumporquê (#donotbeareason), #mexeucomumamexeucomtodas (#messwithonemesswithall) and #motoristaassediador (#stalkerdriver). In spite of the importance and expressiveness of the content associated with these tags, none of these tags achieved such popularity as hashtag #elenão (#nothim), which became available on the web in September 2018.

The #elenão (#nothim) movement, responsible for popularizing the hashtag with the same name, appeared in Facebook group titled “Mulheres unidas contra Bolsonaro” (“Women united against Bolsonaro”). The group, founded in late July 2018, began to achieve visibility especially from the beginning of September and quickly reached the mark of 2 million users. This motivated uprising by supporters of then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who invaded the account of two of the moderators of the group, posted offenses to the members and renamed the group as “Mulheres COM Bolsonaro” (“Women WITH Bolsonaro”) (original highlight). After necessary intervention of Facebook for the recovery of the accounts of the moderators and reestablishment of the original name of the group, the number of members began to multiply even more and, soon after, the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) has reached its peak.

According to a survey done by the Studies Laboratory Imagine and Cyberculture (LABIC/UFES) and published by the newspaper El País, the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) had two peaks: one between 14 and 16 September 2018 and the other between 20 and 22 September 2018. In addition, the survey shows that #elenão (#nothim) shared web space with related hashtags like #elenunca (#neverhim), #elejamais (#nevereverhim) and #mulherescontrabolsonaro (#womenagainstbolsonaro). Conversely, hashtags Bolsonaro supporters were also launched as #elesim (#yeshim), #eleno1oturno (#heonthefirstturn) and #mulherescombolsonaro (#womenwithbolsonaro), however, compared to the volume of hashtags contrary to the then candidate hashtags of their supporters became opaque network. (EL PAÍS, 2018). It is also worth mentioning that the diffusion of the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) did that the organizations and virtual protests also occupied the streets of cities of all Brazil and some other countries. The acts, led by women under the slogan #elenão (#nothim), were massive and concentrated voters from various parties and supporters of the most eminent stakes.

The popularity gained by the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) and #elenão (#nothim) can be explained by Freire’s view that hashtags attached to the feminist movement “are endowed with a persuasive capacity characterized by a collective construction of meaning, mobilizing the common citizen” and, therefore, “ constitute themselves as influencers of behaviors, making other users also want to engage and replicate such behaviors” (FREIRE, 2016, p. 28).

It is important to notice how, in this context, the boundaries between the online and offline universes have been blurred. Events that took place outside the digital networks, in the daily experiences of women, were addressed and discussed on the web, as well as guidelines that emerged on the internet occupied non-virtual environments, such as face-to-face discussions with peers, for example. These relationships established between these two living spaces - the virtual environment and face-to-face interactions - are not unidirectional or linear, but rather cyclical, as what emerged online has become an issue in offline spaces and then it was discussed again on the internet, as well as what originated offline was themed online and, again, based offline. Thus, in order to visualize these movements, I establish a parallel with the way Signorni (2012) understands the relationships between grapholinguistics literacies and multiliteracies and multi-media based literacies. For the author,

Frontiers and delimitations become (…) often unclear and of little significance for the apprehension of ongoing processes. In this sense, the spatial metaphor of the border (common and fluid space between domains) seems to be more productive, instead of frontier (clear line of demarcation between domains). (SIGNORINI, 2012, p. 286)

In the case of #myfirstharassment and #mysecretfriend most of the reports shared online referred to situations that happened offline, with co-workers, friends and family or in circumstances in which the victims moved around the urban space, for example. The standards of beauty and behavior imposed on women that generated the revolt centered on #restrainedbeautifulhousewife, even today, are equally propagated and reflected online and offline. And, in relation to #nothim, after the launch of the hashtag on-line, what happened offline, in the streets - protests against and in favor of Bolsonaro -, and the contents conveyed in the electoral campaigns and in the press were quickly appropriated in content again in the online sphere. This way, the four hashtags addressed in this work, more than virtual objects of thematic concentration and dissemination of content, also became important elements in the offline life, which, in turn, returned to the virtual sphere being again discussed. Therefore, these hashtags studied here and their characteristics and effects reveal how borders are no longer suitable categories to understand the relationships of which these tools are part.

In order to better understand how the struggle of Brazilian women is related to the use and circulation of hashtags in virtual spaces, this investigation was based on the methodological procedures explained below.

3. METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES

The methodological bases for data collection, data generation and analyzes of the results of this research were developed in two different moments: one in 2016 and another in 2018. In 2016, I applied a survey and collected hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife). In 2018, I collected postings containing the hashtag #elenão (#nothim).

The first procedure for the collection of records consisted of the elaboration of a questionnaire (from the Google Forms platform), of public opinion research, anonymous and voluntary. This questionnaire was disseminated through my personal profile in groups exclusively for women on Facebook, in order to collect responses only from users who identify with the female gender¹. The questionnaire received 200 total answers and 199 valid answers in the period of October 23, 2016 and November 3, 2016.

In this questionnaire, I first asked the participant’s age, occupation and place of residence; then the questions were related to the contact with the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife): I asked if the participant had posted or encountered any content marked with these hashtags, in which virtual social networks had occurred the visualization or posting and which languages had been used in the posts in question. Finally, I also asked about the perception of the importance and impact of hashtags for the feminist movement².

The answers were automatically organized into an Excel template sheet, from which data could be generated for quantitative analyzes. At the same time, the records in which the participants had a dissertation on some aspect were selected for the qualitative-interpretative analyzes.

Simultaneously with application of the questionnaire, in this first phase of the research, I collected posts through the Netlytic tool, which tracked posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram published during the period from October 2015 to October 2016 and indexed (not simultaneously) with the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife). The delimitation of this collection period stipulated to the tool is due to this time to understand the emergence on the web of the three hashtags in question. The research delivered 300 posts tied to each tag in each of the cited virtual social networks (100 posts of each hashtag on each platform), totaling 900 records.

In 2018, at the second moment of investigation, the Netlytic tool was used again for a post indexed search with the hashtag #elenão (#nothim), shared between September 11 and October 7, 2018. These dates are covered by the main moment of its passed opposition movement to Jair Bolsonaro during the electoral period of the Brazilian presidential campaigns of 2018. However, in the second phase of research only posts hosted on Twitter or Facebook were delivered by Netlytic, since there were changes in the rules of the Instagram that did not allow more collections like those in 2016, in the first phase of this research. Thus, 200 posts were delivered by Netlytic in the second collection stage, with 100 issues shared on Twitter and another 100 on Facebook.

To suppress Instagram posts indexed with the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) that could not be collected by Netlytic, “manual” searches were made by me on the Instagram platform itself, through the hashtags search feature. So that the collection of these records contemplated the same collection period as Netlytic, it was necessary that the 100 desired posts be collected on four distinct days: September 16, September 23, September 30 and October 7. On each of these days, the last 25 public posts presented as search results by Instagram were recorded using screenshot or screen-recording techniques.

I consider it worthwhile to comment, as I have already pointed out in Siqueira (2018), that currently, research involving the use of Instagram and its contents faces many methodological difficulties, posed by the code barriers that the platform stipulates. Thus, collecting available postings in this virtual space implies procedures considered rudimentary, such as screen captures and the description and the manual and slow organization of the records. On October 8, 2018, the search for the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) on Instagram presented a total of over 300 million public posts. If I had not done the collection weekly - as I described, finding in this vastness of posts the dates related to the wanted dates would be a practically unfeasible task, because Instagram, unlike Twitter, for example, does not offer any filter which searches are refined by. In addition, if it was necessary to obtain considerably more than 100 posts, the viability of the work could also have been affected.

In both 2016 and 2018, the records collected by Netlytic were first organized in different digital folders and then described in Excel spreadsheets. In the description worksheet, I created distinct tabs for each analyzed virtual environment (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and columns in which I filled up which languages (static image with visual or textual content, moving image, video, written verbal text or link to external content) made up the content posted so that later information about the languages could be quantified and crossed with the digital media information from the post.

Finally, it should be pointed out that, in some cases, the same post presented more than one type of linguistic resource in use. It was possible to find, for example, memes (static image with visual content) preceded by short captions (verbal written text). However, these cases were not a majority among the records collected and, when this occurred, all languages present were counted in the spreadsheet - which explains some total sums exceeding 100%. In cases where the only element consisting of verbal written text present in the post was the hashtag itself analyzed, the tag was not counted as a verbal written text, since, if it were done, all posts of all hashtags in all virtual social networks studied would accuse occurrence of written verbal text in the content, since it would not have been possible to locate those contents if the hashtags were not included.

4. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS

4.1. The participants and their posts

The answers provided by female participants in the questionnaire revealed a variation of age, at the time of application of the research, from 11 to 49 years old, with a significant concentration in the range of 20 to 25 years, as the chart below illustrates.

Chart 1
Age of the participants

In relation to the locality where the participants lived, the majority of the answers came from the state of São Paulo, but are also included among the results, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, Bahia, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Pernambuco, Paraíba e Mato Grosso, as well as some responses from women who said they lived, also in the collection period, in France, Netherlands and Germany. A number of professional activities have been reported: students and teachers of various levels of education, cleaning services, nannies, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, saleswomen, geologists, historians, engineers, dancers, photographers, theater directors, actresses, singers, tattoo artists, among others.

Given the diversity of participants’ profiles, it is evident that the feminist movement is even heterogeneous and based on different perspectives and needs. However, this also reveals that, even with distinct realities and trajectories, these women encounter challenges and interests in common that make them focus on the same virtual groups and be willing to participate in research related to feminism, for example.

Regarding the uses and interactions with the hashtags focused in this work, according to the answers of the questionnaire, 86% stated that they had encountered the hashtag #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) in virtual social networks and 34% stated that they had posted some content indexed with this hashtag. As Chart 2 illustrates, among the 34% who reported having published #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), 91% reported having made the post on Facebook, 20% on Twitter and only 1,4% on Instagram, with intersections, especially between posting on Facebook and also on Twitter.

Chart 2
#meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend)

These numbers are interesting because they allow associations between tagged content and the virtual social networks in which they were served to be elaborated. In this sense, #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) was a hashtag designed to denounce everyday cases of misogyny, often committed by men close to women who shared their experienceson Twitter, such as those shown in image 2 and translated to English by me in box 1, below.

Image 1
Examples of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend)

Box 1
Examples of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend)

#mysecretfriend: changes the profile picture, saying that he fights rape culture, but he is a stalker, abuser and rapist. #mysecretfriend: says football is a man's thing, but he is crazy to find a woman who understands about football and supports the same team as he. #mysecretfriend: speaks in every corner that feminism is just whiny. I mean... in every corner, except for essay of Enem. What a great bald-faced. #mysecretfriend says: the biggest advantage of working with women is that they are more organized. #mysecretfriend: grab me by the waist in the party, see that I'm accompanied and apologize to the guy. #mysecretfriend: thinks that feminists must fight for them to end the military enlistment, since we want equal rights. #mysecretfriend: betrays his girlfriend and when he goes out alone and finds someone he knows; he asks not to tell her that he has seen him.

The fact that the publication of this hashtag requires personal reporting and the intention to convey a clear message (although sometimes “indirect” in the popular sense of the term) seems to explain why, according to analyzes of the posts collected, 99% of the posts marked with #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and shared on Twitter and 97% of the posts with #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and shared on Facebook presented only written verbal messages. In addition, among all responses in the questionnaire, a single participant claimed to have posted the hashtag #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) using a gif, with no written verbal messages. This explains, therefore, that only 1.4% of the participants in the research claim to have posted any content on Instagram with this tag, since Instagram is essentially a virtual social network aimed at the publication of photographs (MANOVICH, 2016).

Among samples collected by Netlytic from Instagram postings with #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), I found some posts related to the exchange of gifts from a conventional secret friend, which had nothing to do with the feminist campaign, and especially posting that, even though they were in one image format -necessary condition for sharing on Instagram, had their principal content based on written verbal language, as in the samples reproduced below:

Image 2
#meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) on Instagram

(“#mysecretfriend checks everything his wife says about her day” and “pretends to be deconstructed, but he’s an abuser”, my translation)

These two posts indexed with #mysecretfriend reveal different strategies of appropriating verbal language written on a platform aimed at sharing images. In the case of the post reproduced on the left, typed content was transformed into an image file so that it could be shared; in the post on the right, even if it is a photograph, the focus is directed to a poster, also with written verbal content. This reinforces how the guidelines mobilized in #mysecretfriend were associated by the users essentially to verbal reports. In addition, it is clear that users distinguish the particularities of each virtual environment and find ways to appropriate the resources of these spaces according to specific interests.

Besides that, on #mysecretfriend, both in samples taken from Twitter and Instagram, there are evident criticisms of women directed at the inconsistent attitudes of the men they denounce (putting a filter against the culture of rape in their profile photo or “pretends to be deconstructed, but actually being an abuser”) the reproduction of sexist clichés (believing that women are more organized or that football is not for them), possessive postures (watching over the wife’s routine; apologizing for harassing the companion of the victim, not the victim) and the delegitimization of the feminist movement (to think that feminism in everyday life is “whiny”, but to value it in the ENEM essay; to wish feminism to fight for the end of the mandatory military conscription for men).

In relation to the hashtag #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), 84% of respondents said they had seen posts on their social networks associated with this tag, but only 10% said they had posted some indexed content. Of the group of participants who posted a message, 89% used Facebook, 10% Twitter and 26%, both; mentions to the publication of this hashtag in Instagram did not appear in the search, as the following chart demonstrates.

Chart 3
#meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment)

Again, the specifics of the Instagram platform, focused on the publication of images, remove posts that are essentially narration and verbal written personal reports, as also occurred in the uses of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend). Since the contents related to the #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) involved reports of very intimate situations, referring to the first time that women suffered harassment in their lives, users used mainly verbal written language to construct their narratives. From the analyzes made from Netlytic, I could note that when the reports were posted on Facebook, the written verbal text was organized into a first-person narrative, with no space constraints; when on Twitter, the verbal written text was also used in the construction of the first-person narrative, but the reports were, in this case, much shorter and direct, since in this social network there is a restriction of the use of only 140 characters by Tweet. In Instagram’s posts, the content related to #meuprimeiroassédio mainly exposed photographs of the girl Valentina, whose case served as motivation for the campaign, news related to her and posts also based on written verbal language, as in the example below:

Image 3
#meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) on Instagram

(“527 thousand people are raped a year in Brazil. 89% are women. 70 % are children and teenagers. Education needs to approach machismo and genders issues. IPEA data.”, my translation)

The contents tagged with #myfirstharassment, in general, show unfortunate and touching data and memories of women who, when they were very young, suffered abuse by family members or other people with whom they lived closely, or were harassed while attending public spaces such as bus stops, cinemas and even their schools. The repercussions of this hashtag, therefore, showed that violence against women seems to be neither age nor local, it happens even when the victim is still a child and is in the company of those who should protect her. Thus, this campaign claimed, above all, the rights to have the body and childhood respected and exposed the huge number of women who had these rights violated.

The #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) was, for sure, the most expressive hashtag among the tags studied in the first phase of this research. According to the responses of the questionnaire applied, 98% of the participants saw the circular hashtag in virtual social networks and 54% claimed to have posted some content with this hashtag. It is interesting to note that, among the participants of the research, engagement in the #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) post was much higher than that of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment). Of the 54% of the cases in which the tag was posted, 2% of the users said they had posted only on Instagram; 2.5%, only on Twitter; 2.5% on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter; 12% Facebook and Instagram and, finally, 31%, only on Facebook, as the chart below illustrates.

Chart 4
#belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife)

Regarding the language used in these posts, more than 90% claimed to have published some photography. Thus, unlike the results regarding the posting of the hashtags #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), the contents associated with the #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) were considerably less focused on the use of written verbal language and their shares occurred in a more diverse way in the virtual environment, since the data indicate a greater recurrence to Instagram, which was practically not mentioned among the users who shared the other two hashtags.

As Pilz (2016, p. 8) comments on #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), “the two hashtags circulated in Brazil come close to bringing something from the intimate, from the personal to the public space”. This may explain, therefore, that not so many survey participants have published these two tags. In the case of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), which presupposed publications depicting personal scenes of daily life, the percentage of women who claimed to have published is more than three times greater than the percentage of women who said they had posted #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), whose degree of intimate and personal life exposure was even louder, because it mobilized stories of harassment often experienced in childhood and often understood as more serious, uncomfortable and painful. In #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), although the photographs shared by the users may be understood as fragments of their private lives, these images - for the most part, portraits of relaxation - seem to be easier to expose and share publicly than written verbal reports that usually involve past trauma and recognition of harassment.

In addition to the questions about the intimacy exposed in the accounts of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), there are still other specifics related to #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife): because it is a hashtag that arose in response to the journalistic media and had as fundamental construction of meaning irony, this tag was related to less intimate posts, where no specific harassment episodes were reported in dense stories, nor was anybody denounced; the publications sought mainly to subvert the standards of the “beautiful”, “demure” and “housewife” women who were exposed by Veja Magazine. This subversion can be manifested, for example, as shown in image 5, in the images of women who practice shooting, make barbecue and use tools, or in the manikin in a position understood as opposed to the sense of modesty, all indexed with #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife).

Image 4
Examples of #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife)

This way, we can understand that the movement associated with #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) sought, through posts, to tell the media and society that women, currently, no longer accept being reduced to the conservative image propagated by Veja magazine article. When sharing images in which they appear opposing these standards or carrying out activities that, under a sexist logic, are typical of men, women engaged by #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) expose how backward concepts do not match their realities. It is worth mentioning that some users also appropriated the sound of #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) and published their photos with #belarecatadaedobar (#restrainedbeautifulfromthepub) showing the breaking of the standards praised by Veja from the image of Marcela Temer.

In relation to the virtual social networks in which the postings were made, it is interesting to note that although some years ago Facebook is losing audience, as already pointed by authors like Wortham (2013) and Miller (2013), this network still concentrated the majority of the posts focused on this research. Twitter and Instagram appeared in the background and received more or less adherence from users according to the purpose and content of the hashtag: in cases of reports and denunciations, Twitter prevailed; in cases of protest through images, Instagram was prioritized. But in all cases, Facebook has remained as a central environment for the circulation of such content.

Finally, in a group of nearly 200 women, about 20 of them wrote personal reports on their virtual social networks about the first harassment they suffered, almost 70 shared situations of daily machismo and more than 100 published content with the idea of “beautiful”, “demure” and “housewife” women. Therefore, the numbers are significant because they demonstrate that as early as 2016 - when the first stage of this research was carried out, many women were manifesting themselves in virtual spaces and engaging in certain patterns of the Brazilian feminist movement. These guidelines related mainly to the macho attitudes suffered in daily life (including those that are understood, according to Lopez’s definition (2018), as “micromachismos”); to disguises and inconsistencies in the attitudes of acquaintances; to harassment and abuse suffered throughout their lives - some, very early; gender stereotypes, sexist standards and roles delegated to women, disseminated by the media and praised by society; and the various disrespects suffered due to the condition of being a women.

Thus, their perceptions regarding the use of hashtags in feminist campaigns on the internet are also relevant to greater understandings of diverse political articulations, such as the use of the three tags analyzed so far and the emergence of the hashtag #elenão (#nothim).

4.2. Perceptions about the use of the hashtags

Another discussion addressed in the questionnaire applied in the first phase of the research is related to the importance of using hashtags for the feminist movement. First, I asked whether this use was considered important or not, and then, I asked for a justification. From an initial analyzes of these responses, I established five categories of data organization:

1. hashtags are not important for the feminist movement.

2. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they strengthen the group and women themselves.

3. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they broaden the visibility of the movement.

4. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they aid in the search and organization of information in digital environments and

5. hashtags are important for the feminist movement for other reasons.

3.5% of participants’ responses were in the category “a. hashtags are not important to the feminist movement” and 2.5% in the category “e. hashtags are important to the feminist movement for other reasons.” 6% of responses pointed to the importance of hashtags in relation to search and organization of information (d). Ideas associated with strengthening the group and the women themselves (b) were pointed out by 18% as justification for the importance of using hashtags for the feminist movement, while 70% of the responses linked this importance to the increase in visibility of movement (c). Table 1 illustrates these proportions, while in table 2, some examples of responses and the respective categories to which they were attached are presented, translated from Portuguese to English by myself.

Table 1
The importance of hashtags for the feminist movement

Category the response was assigned to	Percentage of responses
a. hashtags are not important for the feminist movement.	3.5%
b. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they strengthen the group and women themselves.	18%
c. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they broaden the visibility of the movement.	70%
d. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they aid in the search and organization of information in digital environments	6%
e. hashtags are important for the feminist movement for other reasons.	2.5%

Table 2
Samples of answers

Category	Responses
a. hashtags are not important for the feminist movement.	"I do not think it will reach the large share of poor women who are far from the movement."
	"Hashtags on social networks are joking, they are hardly taken seriously."
	"In facto, I do not like hashtags. I think I was annoyed to see posts on my social network full of hashtags, in that it had a photo and a bunch of caption hashtags. I find it boring!"
b. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they strengthen the group and women themselves.	"Because it makes it easier to identify who struggles the same as you, and expose harassment or a man in a campaign is quieter than doing it alone, being part of a campaign seems to take some of the pressure to do on your own"
	"Because they will realize that they are 'ordinary' women who are fighting for a cause that will help all."
	"Since hashtags end up uniting women who have gone through the same situation, in the same virtual place, delimited and without judgments."
c. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they broaden the visibility of the movement.	"Hashtags can generate curiosity and cause other women to look into the subject."
	"When the controversy grows in social networks, news portals begin to spread and more people have acess to the questions feminism brings."
	"I think hashtags have a worldwide reach, so their use is important to increase moviment"
d. hashtags are important for the feminist movement because they aid in the search and organization of information in digital environments	"I do not usually use hashtags as search tags really, but they can help organize a repertoire of reports, scale the amount of people talking about it."
	"It's a quick way to find content related to the subject you want."
	"Because they help you find posts on a certain subject."
e. hashtags are important for the feminist movement for other reasons.	"I think we have to be more conscious about what we publish. Always going after more information and trying to know the opinion of the other side. And hashtags help in that. And we do have to resell our rights, but always respecting the rights of others."

Based on the responses of the participants, it is interesting to remember folksonomies as tools whose function goes beyond the recovery and organization of information. In fact, Table 1 presents comments that use hashtags as ways of “organizing a repertoire”, “searching for content” and “finding posts”, however, many other effects besides these were remembered by users.

The opinion of the participant who believes that the use of hashtags does not contribute to the arrival of the feminist movement to the poorest women is very important, because it reminds us that, for many groups in Brazilian society, access to the Internet and discussions such as of the guidelines presented in these campaigns are distant, since these groups, unfortunately, still face basic needs, such as access to decent and safe housing, sanitation, electricity, and so on. In unfair social conditions like these, it seems even pertinent to believe that the feminist campaigns on the Internet and their hashtags become an opaque issue. Saving the importance of this understanding, as Silveira (2018, p. 48) I consider that

despite the social inequality and the consequent digital exclusion existing in Brazil, the advent of the Internet structurally impacts the multiple forms of sociability and the dynamics of the culture of the time. The precariousness or scarcity of connection to significant portions of the population does not prevent research efforts in the field of cyberspace from producing socially and scientifically relevant information capable of exposing class contradictions. (SILVEIRA, 2018, p. 48).

Regarding the importance of hashtags for strengthening the group of women, some opinions of the participants reveal that this strengthening can happen through the perception that there are many other women who have already gone through similar situations, which can encourage exposure or reporting of a case. In addition, it’s important to notice how a larger group reduces pressure on a single female agent, how common goals are met by women who think alike, and how rights must be claimed.

As for using hashtags to be important to feminism because it broadens the visibility of the movement, I highlight the responses that have indicated that these tools can make feminist agenda reach more people, either by the global reach that the massive circulation of hashtags can attain, or by instigating oneself about the subject in question or by its placement attract attention from the news media such as news portals, which may then give greater projection to the agenda and movement. In fact, when hashtags associated with any topic gain massive engage from users on the internet, more people, of course, will have contact with hashtags and with content indexed to them, as well as, depending on the projection of each campaign, these hashtags appear among the Twitter Trending Topics and gain space on the news. In the case of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), the three tags entered the Trending Topics and were covered by websites, magazines and newspaper.

Based on the these considerationson the hashtags #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), I believe that their specificities related to the mobilized guidelines, the virtual social networks in which they circulated, the languages used and the users’ perception are important so that similar digital movements and their consequences can be analyzed, especially, in the case of this work, the diffusion of the hashtag #nothim.

4.3. #elenão

First of all, it must be acknowledged that in the protests mobilized by the hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), expressions of rejection to Jair Bolsonaro had already been identified. This is due to the fact that the period in which these three hashtags emerged coincides with a time when the figure of the then congressman also achieved greater visibility.

In December 2014, Bolsonaro, as Federal Deputy, led the following speech, transcribed and published by the Speeches and Shorthand sector of the Chamber of Deputies:

MR. JAIR BOLSONARO (Block / PP-RJ, without the speaker’s review) - Do not leave, do not, Maria do Rosário; stay there! Stay there, Maria do Rosário! A few days ago, you called me a rapist in the Green Room, and I said I did not rape you because you do not deserve it. Stay here to listen. (BRAZIL, 2014; my translation).

The speech of the then congressman of the Progressive Party (PP) motivated the release of a shoot of Rede TV from a discussion in 2003 between Bolsonaro and Maria do Rosário, in which Bolsonaro, for the first time, says he would not rape her because she did not deserve it. The video³ had great circulation in many digital media and generated outrage especially among women. After that, many online petitions were circulated against the then deputy from Rio de Janeiro, the hashtag #forabolsonaro (#outbolsonaro) came to be released, but it did reach exceptional visibility, and the hashtag #nãomereçoserestuprada (#Idonotdeservetoberaped), which had already been published in early 2014, returned to circulate for a short period.

After that, Bolsonaro was involved in more controversies that have been criticized by many women, such as controversial statements, in which the then congressman commented the disadvantage that the employer suffers when hiring a woman who can get pregnant⁴, and his speech in the vote of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, in which he extolled Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a colonel recognized by Justice as a torturer.

In saying that Maria do Rosário was not raped because she did not deserve - and, thus, imply that some women, therefore, deserve to be raped - and in extolling a recognized torturer, Bolsonaro ended up speaking out against the principle that every woman has the right to the safety of her body, directly injuring the ideals defended by the movements #myfirstharassment and #mysecretfriend. In addition, his statement about a possible lower salary for women because they could be mothers reinforced the gender roles that #restrainedbeautifulhousewife sought to deconstruct. That is why, it is possible to understand how, in the actions carried out by women in 2015 and 2016 in the campaigns of #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), protests against Jair Bolsonaro were already identified in these demonstrations, as the photos below⁵ show:

Image 5
Opposition demonstrations in deeds in Rio de Janeiro

Moreover, it is necessary to consider that in the questionnaire applied in 2016, in the first stage of this research, 70% of the participants already believed that hashtags were tools that could attract more visibility to feminist campaigns, and 18% saw hashtags as a means of strengthening the group and women.

Thus, I attribute to the context of growing anti-Bolsonaro manifestations by women in the years 2015 and 2016 and women’s perception of the role of hashtags in the feminist movement on the internet some of the significant motivations for the popularization of hashtag #elenão (#nothim) in 2018.

It is important to say, that just as #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), #elenão (#nothim) was not a hashtag launched by a collective. The tag came from a group of women on Facebook who recognized themselves as defenders of democracy and opponents of Bolsonaro. The autonomous and spontaneous nature of the creation of the hashtag by these women seems to be another relevant factor for the popularization of #elenão (#nothim), since, among the participants of this research, the #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) post was more common than the #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) and #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), who have been hashtags officially launched by feminist collectives.

In addition, I attributed the greater popularity of #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) among participants to the degree of exposure that each associated content demands. In this sense, the content articulated to the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) also did not presuppose the publication of intimate reports, nor of stories permeated by traumas; these contents have always been quite open, in other words, #elenão (#nothim) reached since its first publications, different languages and topics, including texts explaining the reasons for saying “#elenão” (#nothim), memes, gifs, videos of the then candidate Jair Bolsonaro, videos of other candidates, posters, jokes, ironies, and often simply the hashtag was shared on its own, as a way of resonating with those voices, without any other content being present in the post.

So, unlike what I have shown about #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife), the presence of #elenão (#nothim) in virtual social networks seems to have been equally prevalent on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. While in the networks of the participants in the first stage of this research #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment) and #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) had more concentration on Facebook and Twitter and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) was more widespread on Facebook and Instagram in 2018, it was possible to observe that #elenão (#nothim) was constantly present in these three environments virtual communities.

The conclusions obtained from the analyzes of the languages used and the virtual social networks that hosted the #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend) and #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) posts are supported when we peruse the languages used in #elenão (#nothim) posts in these same networks. Analyzes of samples collected from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram reveal that, in the case of content associated with #elenão (#nothim), Facebook hosted mainly share of links and verbal written texts; Twitter was also an extension used for the publication of written verbal texts, some links and some static images with visual content. In Instagram, static images with visual content prevailed. For video posting, Instagram was also the priority space. Facebook, as had already occurred in other campaigns, housed the widest range of languages and content. The chart below illustrates these proportions and the pictures exemplify the cases of the post that use the most recorring modelities in each analyzed social network.

Chart 5
#elenão (#nothim) on Facebook

Image 6
Examples of #nothim posts on Facebook

(“Cher demonstrates support for the movement #elenão (#nothim) on Twitter” and “The #elenão (#nothim) who lives in me greets the #eleNUNCA (#NEVERhim) who lives in you”, my translation)

Chart 6
#elenão (#nothim) on Twitter

Image 7
Examples of #nothim posts on Twitter

(“The #elenão (#nothim) was not ineffective. It was insufficient. The left made N shits in this process and then wanted women to solve everything? This lack of strategy is what needs to be evaluated, instead of this crazy victim-blaming that is going on” and “Strong, brave and explanatory text by Eliane Brum [.] it shows in all letters why #EleNao (#nothim)”, my translation)

Chart 7
#elenão (#nothim) on Instagram

Image 8
Examples of #nothim posts on Instagram

In this way, it is clear that the users actually establish relationships between the virtual social network in which they are located, their respective functionalities and characteristics and the content that will be published.

The campaign mobilized by the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) exceeded the virtual environments to occupy, also, urban spaces. On September 29, 2018, protests organized by women on the Internet were held in all states and in the Federal District and were considered the largest women’s demonstration in Brazilian history (see BBC, 2018). In these acts, it was common to migrate the hashtag from the virtual pages to the T-shirt prints and to the posters.This fact confirms how the boundaries between virtual and non-virtual environments are blurred by movements and interests that go beyond these definitions. As the online movement around #nothim gained adherence, the excitement in the streets started to be organized and, due to these manifestations, more content was produced and commented on the internet, configuring, then, a cycle of online expression and offline.

The #elenão (#nothim) movement has also gathered many famous personalities, including international celebrities, and has achieved wide coverage in the news media. This confirms the idea that the massive use of a hashtag can generate visibility for the feminist movement and its campaigns, as most participants of the first stage of the research believed. This visibility in turn, may be responsible for strengthening the group of women and the woman herself, a factor also pointed out in part of the participants’ answers, since, certainly, many women who did not identify with Jair Bolsonaro and kept their positions silenced, when they realized the proportions reached by #elenão (#nothim), they felt more supported to express themselves in different ways.

So far, I have tried to demonstrate in this section how elements found in #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife campaigns were important for #nothim movement. I contextualized the rejection of Jair Bolsonaro already present in 2015 and 2016, considered the opinions of the research participants regarding the hashtags as important generators of visibility and grouping, related the autonomy of the appearance of the tags and their required degrees of exposure, and, finally, I explained how each virtual social network was used. But, in order to conclude about the importance of #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife for #nothim, it is also important to analyze how the guidelines of the first three campaigns resonated and were expanded in 2018.

For that, in image 8, I present a post shared on Instagram and identified with the hashtag #nothim. In the table below, I reproduce the caption that accompanies the post, without changes.

Image 9
#nothim recovering #restrainedbeautifulhousewife

Box 2
Transcription of the image 9 caption

Magazines from the 50s and 60s "Women should not irritate men with jealousy and doubts" (Jornal das Moças Newspaper, 1957). "If she suspects her husband's infidelity, the wife must redouble her affection and proof of affection, without questioning him" (Cláudia Magazine, 1962). "Disorder in a bathroom arouses in the husband the desire to go showering outside the house" (Jornal das Moças Newspaper, 1965) "If your husband smokes, don't fight for the simple fact that ash falls on the carpet. Have ashtrays scattered throughout the house" (Jornal das Moças Newspaper, 1957). "The woman must be aware that it is difficult for a man to forgive a woman for not having resisted prenuptial experiences, showing that she was perfect and unique exactly as he had idealized her" (Cláudia Magazine, 1962). "Even if a man manages to have fun with his girlfriend or fiancee, in fact he will not like to see that she gave in" (Querida Magazine, 1954). "Long engagement is a danger, but never suggest marriage. He's the one who decides - always." (Querida Magazine, 1953). "Whenever the man goes out with friends and comes back late at night, wait for him beautiful, fragrante and docile." (Jornal das Moças Newspaper, 1958). "It is essential to always keep your appearance impeccable before your husband" (Jornal das Moças Newspaper, 1957). "The place of woman is in the home. Working outside the home masculinizes her." (Querida Magazine, 1955). "The woman must make her husband rest in his spare time, serving him a very cold beer. Nothing to bother him with services or domestic news" (Jornal das Moças Newspaper, 1959). How do you say feminism is not important? From Pense, é grátis #nothim #nothim

This post reproduced, both through the image and the caption, opens up the behaviors that were expected of a woman in the 50s and 60s, but which were also extolled in 2016 by the Veja magazine article, which valued the beautiful, demure woman and a “house wife”. However, this post was not tagged with the hashtag #restrainedbeautifulhousewife, but, as you can see at the end of its caption, with the hashtag #nothim. This case, therefore, shows how an agenda in one campaign can be recovered in another. Like this example, there are many others that, using #nothim, resume discussions of #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife. However, #nothim movement, online and offline, was not only constituted by reiterations of guidelines already raised, but also disseminated different others.

This context can be understood by analyzing some of the phrases found among the 300 posts indexed with #nothim that belong to the corpus of this research, transcribed in the list below:

1.

“If it hurts my existence, I will be resistance.”

2.

“How many failures does it a revolution make?”⁷

3.

“Together we are stronger.”

4.

“Girl power”

5.

“Democracy is feminine word.”

6.

“Women will defeat Bolsonaro”

7.

“Women united against him”

8.

“John became Mary and what does it change for you?”

9.

“I am a girl and I have two daddies #nothim.”

10.

“Boys who play with dolls become… parents who do not abandon their children.”

11.

“#Nothim because he is homophobic.”

12.

“At the time of lesbian porn, nobody is homophobic #nothim.”

13.

“I am Jewish, I am LGBT, I know my history and I do not vote for a fascist.”

14.

“I do not vote for misogynist sexist and homophobic Thing.”

15.

“For black lives #nothim.”

16.

“Fight like Marielle Franco.”

17.

“Deficient women say #nothim.”

18.

“#Nothim because he defends torture.”

19.

“#Nothim because he makes apology to rape.”

20.

“Nobody deserves to be raped.”

21.

“Not him, even if I were drunk.”

22.

“No means no.”

23.

“My body, my rules.”

24.

“My uterus is not your speaking space.”

25.

“We are not all, the dead are missing.”

26.

“Your little jokes kill.”

27.

“Prejudice is not an opinion.”

28.

“Everything you do, I do bleeding.”

29.

“I do not vote for anyone who does not respect me.”

30.

“Military for me is a verb #nothim.”

From these samples, we can see that some of the agendas mobilized by #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife were also present in the protests based on #nothim. #mysecretfriend, as already discussed, showed machismo and inconsistencies in daily life, which were recovered in #nothim, for example, in “Your little jokes kill” (26) and “Prejudice is not an opinion” (27). The demand for respect and freedom for the bodies, much commented on #myfirstharassment, appeared again in #nothim through the phrases that oppose the rape culture (19, 20, 21 and 22) and that defend autonomy over the body itself (18, 23 and 24). Anyway, the fight for the deconstruction of gender stereotypes disseminated by #restrainedbeautifulhousewife was present in #nothim, among the samples listed above, in the manifestation of the family composed of a homosexual couple (9), in the questioning about the gender transition (8), in the mention of boys playing with dolls (10) and in the enhancement of female power (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 28).

However, #nothim brought expansions to these guidelines that had already mobilized previously by the feminist movement. Among the samples presented, we can also identify the appreciation for democracy in the phrases cited in 1, 29 and 30. This democratic bias can also be identified in the plurality of other demands expressed in #nothim, which expanded the agendas that had been mobilized in the 2015 and 2016 campaings. The anti-racist struggle (15 and 16), feminicide (16 and 25), the fight against homophobia (9, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15) and inclusion (17) are just some of the examples in the chorus of voices that shouted #nothim.

In view of this, we can understand that the experiences lived in the campaigns of #mysecretfriend, #myfirstharassment and #restrainedbeautifulhousewife not only encouraged the movement #nothim, but were also expanded by it.

Regarding the electoral impacts, the unprecedented proportions reached by the movement #elenão (#nothim) added to data that revealed the dimensions of rejection to the Liberal Social Party candidate among female voters. Biroli (2018) explains that in September 2018, 49% of the women interviewed by Datafolha said that they would not vote for Bolsonaro at all. For the author,

#elenão which appears in the results of voting intentions surveys and in social networking movements that brought together in a single Facebook group more than 2 million women is expressive of the low identification of broad segments of the female electorate with those who do not recognizes them as political subjects and ignores the specific challenges they face.

These conditions, however, were not sufficient for the campaign mobilized by the hashtag #elenão (#nothim) to achieve its main success, the electoral defeat of Bolsonaro. Today, more than a year after the first peak of #elenão (#nothim) on the Internet, Bolsonaro is President. However, the expression continues to circulate in virtual social networks, it was again stamped in posters in the acts of March 8 for International Women’s Day and March 14 for the year of the murder of Marielle Franco and, above all, seems to have been elected as the great symbol of opposition to Bolsonaro.

CONCLUSION

Considering the context of authorship and participation in Web 2.0, as well as the volume of information derived from it, I have tried to discuss in this work how folksonomies and the use of hashtags relate to the Brazilian feminist movement and some of its campaigns.

From the analyzes of the answers provided by the participants of the first stage of the research, I was able to conclude that, for most of them, hashtags are important tools for feminism, mainly to increase the visibility of the movement and to add forces to the group. However, through these analyzes, I have also been able to reflect on the limitations of hashtags and feminist campaigns on the internet in general, since these actions are still insufficient to reach women who are in social contexts of primary needs and live in exclusionary conditions. I consider in this question a way for future studies that can, in turn, contribute to a better understanding of these disparities and to the desired reductions of inequalities of access and of gender.

At the same time, the quantitative and qualitative analyzes carried out using the materials collected on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provided further insights on the use and circulation of hashtags #meuprimeiroassédio (#myfirstharassment), #meuamigosecreto (#mysecretfriend), #belarecatadaedolar (#restrainedbeautifulhousewife) and #elenão (#nothim). The results seem to indicate an inversely proportional relationship between the degree of intimacy and personal exposure demanded by the theme of the hashtag and the number of users who are willing to make a publication.

In addition, it became clear that Twitter and Facebook were more chosen spaces for the publication of written verbal texts and hyperlinks to external content, while in Instagram, the sharing of static images with visual contents prevailed. But it is also worth noting that Instagram found posts whose contents, even if they were in the digital format of an image, showed written verbal information, which demonstrates that all the users (female and male), also appropriate the possibilities of a social network with the intention of subvert them, in creative and authorial ways. As for Facebook, it was interesting to note how this network, while at the same time sharing great attention with others, is still a space in which more diverse languages and contents can be hosted, circulated and obtained audience.

Among the aspects addressed in this study, many paths and challenges arose for future analyzes. There are many perspectives that can still be discussed. The morphosyntactic characteristics of the hashtags (CALEFFI, 2015) and their consequences in the popularization of the posts, the positions of the journalistic and advertising media before these campaigns, deepening about the architectural of each of the virtual social networks addressed and its consequent relations with the languages employed in the postings and chart studies of mapping of us and actors involved with the tags analyzed here are some examples of developments that this data can provide.

The complexity of the practices of the feminist movement on the internet serves as an incentive for all these issues to be thought and debated by researchers in various areas of knowledge. Although gaps and deepening need to be addressed within this theme, the many data that reinforce the dissemination of feminist guidelines in society are comforting, in order to reduce inequalities, injustices and prejudices that still permeate gender relations in Brazil.

• **
  This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.
• 1
  Once the search link has been posted to Facebook groups, it is possible that participants who have had access to the document have disclosed it to people outside these groups, however, this is not likely, since no evidence is found in the responses of leakage, nor of male participation. In addition, Facebook groups restricted to women are often understood by the participants as secrecy environments, whose information and discussion should not be exposed.
• 2
  Original questionnaire available at: https://goo.gl/forms/h1iOotwVFZWGQrDg2. Accessed on Jan 29, 2019.
• 3
  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_z6qU0DqB8. Accessed on Jan 25, 2020.
• 4
  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAZn7bUC8A. Accessed on Jan 25, 2020.
• 5
  Originally published and in color by the digital newspaper Esquerda Diário and available at: https://www.facebook.com/pg/esquerdadiario/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1733302590258284. Accessed on Mar 24. 2019.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 May 2020
• Date of issue
  Jan-Apr 2020

History

• Received
  07 July 2019
• Accepted
  23 Jan 2020
• Published
  21 Feb 2020