Feminist Political Discourses in the Digital Era: A new materialist discursive analysis of the #BringBackOurGirls cyber-campaign

Abstract

Increasing use of cyber-campaigns is being made by social movements and political groups. Nevertheless, this popularity is often accompanied by undesirable consequences for social movements such as the violence denounced by contemporary feminism. Thus, some digital mobilisations create a rift between the physical and digital worlds — something that often gives rise to homogenisation of socio-cultural categories such as gender, race, and age. In this paper, we analyse the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, which sprang to life five years ago. Its path reveals the success of these cyber-campaigns in the field of contemporary feminism. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) is used to take a feminist genealogical approach to new materialisms. In doing so, it examines the temporal and spatial trajectory of the campaign to reshape affirmative feminist politics. These politics involve reconfiguring pre-established notions such as ‘girl’, ‘agency’, and ‘otherness’ to provide social movements with the capacity to respond. We therefore undertake an ethnographic examination of the hashtag (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015) to compare the beginning of the campaign with the situation now. We draw on these results to localise the shift from the local scale to the global one, in which structural powers, individual agency, and ‘glocal’ [local-global] and feminist affirmation policies become diluted.