New Brazilian feminisms and online networks: Cyberfeminism,protest and the female ‘Arab Spring’

Introduction

New information and communication technologies have emerged as spaces for both local and global struggles in the last decades. Cyberspace has provided previously excluded and marginalized non-political actors with the possibilities of engaging in the political scene in a way which contrasts to the difficulties encountered offline and in everyday life (Sassen, 2002). Young women and other third wave feminists throughout the world have increasingly resorted to the web to express political views, engage in civic action and mobilize against their oppression. Research has focused on how online platforms can assist in political and feminist campaigns, as well as in the struggle against patriarchy and other conventions and in favour of women’s rights.

The debates around the ways in which women use new technologies for social change, amid the paradox of the ‘masculine’ character of ICTs and the exploitation of much of the labour force which works with it, have been grouped around a series of theoretical perspectives known as cyberfeminism, which have developed into an important research area for feminist and scholars working in the social sciences (e.g. Everett, 2004; Haraway, 2000 [1991]; Harcourt, 2000; Plant, 1995; Sandoval, 2000; Sunden, 2001; Sutton and Pollock, 2000; Wajcman, 2000 [1991]; Wakeford, 2000). These theories have also inspired discussions on the relationship between women and technologies throughout the world.

The article is an attempt at theorizing cyberfeminism, engaging with how women make use of new technologies for empowerment from a particular local context, mainly the new contemporary feminist movements in Brazil who have emerged with greater strength in the last years. As I have argued elsewhere (Martinez et al., 2016; Matos, 2017), research in the field of gender and the media in Brazil is still growing slowly and has been produced sporadically, with most of the work on gender coming from the fields of political science and sociology. Women and technologies nonetheless has attracted more interest from scholars in Brazil in the last years, with a series of studies (e.g. Ferreira, 2015; Gomes and Sorj, 2014; Natansohn, 2013) examining contemporary Brazilian feminisms and the phenomenon which Alvarez (2014, cited in Ferreira, 2015) has called the ‘return to the streets’ of feminist groups. Since mainly 2011, in the context of the explosion of the Slut Marches in Brazil, a variety of feminist groups have actively turned to new technologies to mobilize protests and articulate discourses in favour of gender equality.

Many Brazilian women, who do not feel well represented in the mainstream media and who struggle to have a voice in the Brazilian public sphere, have increasingly made use of new technologies for self-expression. The gap between women and men’s use of the Internet has decreased significantly, with the 2009 census data in Brazil underlining that 37.5% of women and 38% of men had accessed the web, while the 2013 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostras de Domicilio (National Household Sampling Research – PNAD) underscored how the use of the Internet by the population grew from 49.2% in 2012 to 50.1% the following year (Ferreira, 2015: 206–207). Feminists blogs such as Blogueiras Feministas and the NGO Think Olga, and the Brazilian version of the Slut Walks, are providing spaces for debate for various groups of Brazilian women, who have the opportunity to publish online and debate political issues which have overwhelmed the public agenda in the last years, from political representation, to changes in the abortion law and sexual harassment. The everyday activities of these feminist groups, that in principle many would classify as being either banal or trivial, I believe are actually under-researched and under-theorized within feminist media studies in overall (Sarikakis, 2014), and are slowly beginning to be the focus of sporadic research in Brazil.

I aim to examine mainly these two important portals here for online feminism praxis in Brazil. Are women constructing new identities and empowering themselves in these spaces? What are the discourses that are being articulated here? This article aims to offer an initial contribution to the research on women and new technologies by situating the local struggle within transnational feminisms, and amid the context of the debates on a supposed ‘end of feminism’ (e.g. Gill, 2012; McRobbie, 2009), in order to argue that such vibrant local struggles can help revive the feminist movement globally, offering new pathways for transnational feminisms – at a moment when in the West feminism has become more associated with women’s lifestyles and liberty to shop.

Gender equality is an important component of the democratization project in Brazil. The increase of studies on contemporary Brazilian feminisms, and the ways in which these groups make use of the media in a highly fragmented environment, can contribute to strengthen the gradual growth of work in the field of feminist media studies in Brazil (Martinez et al., 2016; Matos, 2017). It can serve to raise more awareness of such struggles, offering contributions to the growing debates on how gender interacts with race (Daniels, 2009), as well as with ethnicity and nationality, within the blogosphere – albeit a few classic studies in the field have sought to articulate the feminist cyborg with an attention to difference and to Third World US feminisms (e.g. Haraway, 2000 [1991]). The year of 2015 was chosen here as the focus of the investigations because it was particularly relevant in the contemporary political history of Brazil: first, for having been a year of intense offline and online mobilizations, with protests against the attempts of conservative sectors to criminalize abortion, as well as having been the year when the pressures for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff were intensified amid a highly misogynist conservative campaign. The blogs and interviews referred to here in this article are part of a wider research project on gender, globalization and the media in Brazil (Matos, 2017).

As I make evident here, in the Brazilian case, it is not yet possible to talk about a post-modern, post-feminist sensibility, or a dominance of feminism in the media (Gill, 2012), within a reality that mingles elements of the ‘pre’ with the ‘post’ and where the ‘new Brazilian (career) woman’ has slowly gained space within Brazilian society in the re-democratization phase but who nonetheless still struggles to be fully accepted within the mainstream. Online networks thus emerge as a breath of fresh air, a place of hope and refuge from the hardships and marginalization of the offline environment, offering possibilities for the strengthening of avenues of transnational global feminisms of solidarity and cooperation around the advancement of women’s rights.

Cyberfeminism and online activism: An assessment

The potential of the Internet for active citizenship and the strengthening of multiple virtual public spheres of debate, wider political engagement and resistance against offline oppressions has attracted the attention of many scholars. Various debates have examined the capacity of online activism to have a genuine impact and reach the ‘real’ political world and make a difference. Various perspectives have looked at the relationship between both offline and online political activities as well as the capacity of the web to enhance political participation (e.g. Lance Bennett, 2007, cited in Schuster, 2013: 10). Making reference to Howard (2011), Khamis (2015) has defined cyber-activism as the use made of new technologies to push forward a political cause that encounters resistance offline.

The Internet can arguably provide spaces for alternative content as well as offer possibilities for mobilization and empowerment of less privileged groups. Writing about the challenges posed to sociology by the complexities and ambiguities of new technologies in a highly commercialized environment, Sassen (2002: 382) stressed how cyberspace could be seen as being a ‘far more concrete space for social struggles than that of the national political system’, further stating how it could ‘facilitate the emergence of new types of political subjects’ which lie outside the formal political system. As Kahn and Kellner (2004) note, a lot of what we define as being part of an Internet subculture consists in personal or political blogging as well as social media activism on platforms such as Facebook. Blogs have particularly emerged as networks for debate and dialogue, alternative information, democratic self-expression and political criticism of issues such as globalization and anti-war resistance (Kahn and Kellner, 2004). Della Porta (2012: 49) has also contended that new technologies have boosted the communication confidence of social movements, who have mainly utilized them to engage in forms of mobilization.

Women have increasingly made use of the Internet for political purposes, attracting a variety of research on the contradictions between the ‘masculine’ and exploitative labour conditions attached to the computer environment and technologies, and their potential for liberation and emancipation from gender oppression (e.g. Daniels, 2009; Haraway, 2000 [1991]; Plant, 1995; Schuster, 2013; Sutton and Pollok, 2000). Plant has defined cyberspace as being ‘global webs of data and nets of communication’ (Plant, 1995: 46, cited in Wakeford, 2000: 353). These electronic networks have significantly shaped our lives, from online shopping, to professional and personal networking and political engagement. It would be naive though to overemphasize the role of new technologies in social change; rather, it is more appropriate to conceive of cyberfeminism as being something which is fraught with contradictions within the reality of societies’ offline structural inequalities. Particularly in the case of developing countries and other semi-authoritarian national contexts, online networks, however constrained by problems of access, can in fact offer real spaces and possibilities for oppressed groups to build new democratic narratives. They provide the opportunity for the articulation of ideas and for networking with other feminists in order to mobilize around agendas that can influence the public sphere around gender equality.

Cyberfeminism began to emerge in the decade of the 1990s, although discussions date back to the 1970s and the radical criticism of science and technologies due to the domination of men in these fields, with the technological culture seen as being inherently masculine and exclusive of the feminine (Wajcman, 2000 [1991]). Cyberfeminism can thus be understood as being a range of theories on the relationship between gender and digital culture (e.g. Flanagan and Booth, 2002, cited in Daniels, 2009). In her evaluation of cyberfeminisms, Daniels (2009) underpinned the contradictions here, stressing the limits of the ‘subversive’ potential of the web due to the material reality of the global political economy of new technologies, such as the digital divide in computer use and access between men and women as well as between the North and the South, together with the generally exploitative labour conditions of those who work with these technologies. There is also a distinction which can be made between the ‘old’ cyberfeminism, seen as supported by a version of a ‘postcorporeal woman corrupting patriarchy’, against a newer framework, which is ‘about confronting the top-down from the bottom-up’ (Fernandez et al., 2003, cited in Daniels, 2009: 102).

Quoting Gill (2005) and underlining the limitations of online activism in the North due to commercialization, Daniels (2009: 102–103) argues that these views fail to fully acknowledge how women can make use of digital technologies in innovative ways, and how the web can facilitate race and gender equality. Khamis (2015) also makes use of Daniels (2009) to define cyberfeminism as the ways in which women use new technologies to raise awareness about women’s issues, seeking to overcome their experiences of exclusion by including themselves within these online platforms and making interconnections with global feminism. Harcourt (2000) has also underlined the important role that ICTs can have as political tools for women, although acknowledging the fact that online networks can also be negative and provide spaces for pornography. Like Plant, Harcourt (2000: 693) is enthusiastic about the Internet, even providing a personal account of how the web shaped her everyday activities, providing her the opportunity to work more closely with women who are part of her personal space or ‘glocality’ (a concept used to describe a politics based on place-based needs, where ‘the global is closely mapped onto the local’).

Cyberfeminism has been closely associated with third wave feminism, and the ways in which young women and feminist groups have stressed diversity and taken on board the criticisms from post-colonial feminist theorists regarding the limitations of second wave feminism, thus resorting in different ways to popular culture and online networks to advocate for women’s rights (Matos, 2017). Studies have also attempted to map out the characteristics of these online activities in terms of gendered (or genderless) spaces (e.g. Westfall, 2000). If Haraway sees the activities in cyberspace as ‘networking’, Plant sees the web as intrinsically feminine, talking about the process of ‘weaving’, an activity traditionally associated with femininity. Seen as a leading figure in popularizing cyberfeminism, Wajcman (2000 [1991]) has argued that Plant’s excessive optimism about women in cyberspace is a reaction to previous depictions of technology as inherently masculine (cited in Daniels, 2009). Daniels (2009: 104) also states that her writing is characteristic of the field, which has provided, albeit exceptions, still little discussion of the intersection of gender with race.

Concerns over the persistence of the digital divide throughout the world, and especially in developing countries, where groups of less privileged women, the old and the unemployed are the ones who still have less access to online communications, are among the reasons stated for the limits of online networks in influencing politics. Various studies have been concerned with social inclusion within the technological environment (Shade, 2015 [2001]). Research has examined the correlation between digital rights with those of women’s rights, as well as feminist perspectives on political economy and demands for policy to be gender-sensitive (Gallagher, 2011, cited in Shade, 2015 [2001]: 225). The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 underlined the importance of the Internet for women’s equality (Shade, 2015 [2001]: 223). Quoting Morahan-Martin, Sutton and Pollock (2000: 700) remind us that women’s access to ICTs has essential economic, educational and social benefits, having been included in section 239 of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (PFA). ¹

Transnational feminist movements, which operate through networks that link local, national and international groups together, are adopting new forms of civic action and making use of the Internet for networking, mobilizing politically and creating awareness around themes such as gender violence (e.g. Desai, 2009; Harcourt, 2013). Transnational activism is seen as a core political development in global politics, with transnational feminist action operating on three fronts: in international UN forums, transnational grassroots activism and transnational activism around global justice (Desai, 2009). The second level, which interests me most here, is what Harcourt (2013) has defined as transnational networking across regional and national borders in support of community demands around issues such as reproductive rights and education. Online networks thus emerge as political tools that can assist in pushing forward change.

There is sufficient evidence to prove that the Internet has been positive for various groups of women throughout the world. In Nigeria, as Harcourt (2000: 695) noted, the regional coordinator of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) for Anglophone Africa used the web to gather international support against female genital mutilation. Harcourt (2013: 623–635) has further examined the case of AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development), which provides a space for transnational feminist networking in the struggle for women’s agency in political and economic processes and is active online.

Women’s groups also got together to create global awareness of the repressive Taliban regime through the website of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (www.rawa.org) (Daniels, 2009: 108). Wakeford (2000: 354) has also examined various electronic networks of support for women’s groups, underlining global initiatives set up alongside the United Nations Fourth Conference on Women, including the World’s Women Online, an electronic art networking project. In the case of Brazil, online websites, activism and civic engagement from various groups across the political spectrum have expanded rapidly. Since the 1990s, the Brazilian blogosphere has emerged as a pluralist and also alternative space of debate for various groups. Various women and feminist movements have made wide use of these new communication technologies in their struggles against discrimination and for advancement of women’s rights – issues examined next.

Contemporary Brazilian feminisms and the year of the country’s female ‘Arab Spring’: A case study

Feminism debates and perspectives have seen a significant revival in the last five to ten years in Brazil, particularly throughout 2015, which was seen as vital for cyberfeminism and for online (as well as offline) feminist political activism. This can be understood in the light of the re-democratization process of Brazil over the last 30 years, which saw the entry of the country into globalization and the expansion of social welfare programmes, followed by the slow inclusion of a series of social movements and other groups in Brazilian society, albeit with serious setbacks in 2016 with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Since the 1990s, Brazil has seen the growth of critical news commentary websites and online networks, from political partisan blogs to journalistic and academic ones, as well as blogs from social movements and civil society pressure groups (Bailey and Marques, 2012: 396).

As Khamis (2015) has argued, in the 2011 Arab Spring thousands of women throughout the region played a visible role, having taken to the streets to call for an end to dictatorship, demanding freedom and defying traditional gender roles, thus appearing in ‘the frontline of resistance and risking their lives’ (2015: 565). In the Brazilian case, the political mobilization of women has slowly grown in the last few years, including various Slut Marches throughout Brazil in 2011 (Ferreira, 2015) and other demonstrations during the 2013 June protests. The year of 2015 was particularly exceptional with regard to strong offline and online feminist activity, in a context of resistance of feminist groups against the criminalization of abortion and the stereotyping of women in the media and of female politicians. The 2013 UNESCO report on broadband and gender, Doubling Digital Opportunities, underlined how new technologies have had an impact in countries like Brazil in the fight against gender violence. ²

Women appear as significant users of online technologies. Studies have shown that women from the lower classes are the main group which are mostly connected, using the web for shopping and other activities, as well as to seek entertainment. As Gomes and Sorj (2014) have argued, the new face of feminism in Brazil is again mixing the personal with the political. Brazilian feminists and academics have started to research more the ways in which women are using new technologies. Recent studies such as Natansohn (2013) and other academics’ comparative work between Brazil, Argentina and Spain have provided important pathways for initial debate and research in the field. Alvarez (2014, cited in Ferreira, 2015: 208) for one has preferred to talk about discursive fields of action instead of feminist movements, underlining three moments in the history of contemporary feminism: the first during the dictatorship of the 1970s, which was responsible for the creation of the feminist movement; the second during the re-democratization years, which paved the way towards the pluralization of feminism; and the third starts at the beginning of the 21st century, marking a more ‘horizontal flow of discourses’, with plural feminist practices which have culminated in a further multiplication of feminist fields.

It is this highly fragmented and contradictory contemporary period of Brazilian feminism that is of interest to me here. Many Brazilian feminists have managed to have some influence, however contradictory, in the struggle against the reactions of more conservative sectors of Brazilian society to the advancement of gender equality and attempts at criminalising abortion by approving a law (5069/2013) which made it more difficult for health professionals in the country’s national health service (SUS) to assist women in need of abortion. ³ Feminists reacted angrily to the changes pushed forward by the then president of the lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, and which consisted in the demand for medical examination for victims. ⁴

Among the popular blogs and Facebook home pages are Blogueiras Negras, Geledes, Escreva Lola Escreva, Blogueiras Feministas, Think Olga and Nao me Kahl, Ventre Feminista, Arquivos Feminista, respectively (see Figure 1). The Escritorio Feminista (‘Feminist Office’) is a blog included in section of the magazine Carta Capital, and functions as a space where professional Brazilian women gather to debate gender issues. ⁵ This is a quintessential example of the political use of the web by many groups of disempowered women, and evidence of the ways in which cyberspace in Brazil is becoming increasingly feminized and as a space for social networking across regional and even class differences (e.g. Haraway, 2000 [1991]; Harcourt, 2000). Many of these websites include various personal stories and testimonials, providing spaces for self-expression and liberation for women outside the everyday hierarchies of Brazilian society. Different groups of Brazil women from different classes and social background, ranging in age from 18 to the over forties, are increasingly making use of these online networks, blogs and Facebook pages.

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Figure 1.

Priscila Ferrari, Think Olga.

Escreva Lola Escreva, created by Professor Lola Aronovich in 2008, paved the way for many young girls to get acquainted with feminism for the first time. As of 2014, it has had approximately 250,000 visits per month and is being considered one of the most popular in the field, together with Blogueiras Feministas. One of the key aims of the site is to break down stereotypes, including alerting to the fact that feminism should not be understood as the opposite of chauvinism. Feminist blogs like Blogueiras Feministas and the new NGO Think Olga are articulating many debates on women’s issues that are yet to be fully included in mainstream Brazilian society and the media. Blogueiras Feministas has over 37,000 followers, and is situated in the capital, Brasilia, counting with a series of collaborators throughout the country. They have demanded of the government the construction of nurseries and shelters for the victims of violence, among others.

One of the strengths of Blogueiras Feministas has been precisely its stream of discussions in the forum section, an initiative of Cynthia Semiramis, but which has also migrated to the social media platform Facebook. According to Bia Cardoso, the coordinator of Blogueiras Feministas, the main purpose of the blog, a grassroots initiative run by eight people but which also participates in institutional events, is to encourage debate and stimulate Internet activism within an editorial policy that favours intersectional feminism. The home page of Blogueiras Feministas highlights the main themes of the blog, including women’s bodies, reproduction and abortion rights, and legislation such as the Maria da Penha law. It also discusses issues of intersectionality, emphasizing how patterns of gender oppression are interlinked with other forms of constraint (e.g. race and class). The blog states how its aim is to achieve a more just and equal society and has as its main objective to discuss feminism, adding that its focus is on the articulation of critiques of institutions and structures in order to combat prejudices.

The text stresses the fluidity of feminism, signalling the inclusion of multiple identities in what it means to be a feminist in Brazil: ‘We do not believe in stereotypes, in absolute truths, our feminism is political and is always in constant construction.’ It thus acknowledges the fact that the discussions that take place in such spaces are not totally immune from the prejudices which exist within Brazilian society. Cardoso underscores a growth in the debate on feminism and gender inequality, stating nonetheless that the process has occurred slowly:

The representation of women is still very limited not only in the mainstream media, but in other contexts. It is difficult for people to think beyond the box and the tendency is to reinforce stereotypes, be it of the women, mother. … The debate on gender is happening but change has been slow. It is also not just a question of electing more women, as the ones who are elected are committed to conservative agendas. To see more expressions of diversity would require not only changes in the companies, but also in the consumer. … I also believe that there is resistance in showing the diversity of the Brazilian women. … To keep women in the same social roles is always interesting.

The most read stories on the blog have included those which focused on the body, and the stress placed on women’s own control of it, such as ‘Our support for women, prostitutes, feminists and trans-feminists from the Marcha das Vadias of Rio de Janeiro’ and ‘Anatomy of pleasure: Clitoris and orgasm’, although themes also include the oppressions of race and gender, feminist thought and sexual harassment, e.g. ‘The conquests of the black population and the value of their identity’; ‘Simone de Beauvoir: what is it to be a woman?’; ‘The dictatorship of the ideal body and the hidden prejudice’; and ‘How to approach women without being filthy’. Other links also provided a connection to the Think Olga sexual harassment campaign, and to others with a focus on how to denounce domestic violence.

Blogueiras Feministas has given support to the Brazilian version of the Slut Walks, the Marcha das Vadias, which has been seen by some academics as a symbol of the new articulations around women’s issues in the country (e.g. Ferreira, 2015). Blogueiras Feministas has encouraged attention to the images and styles of the demonstration being played out during the marches, as well as stimulating debate. A strong component of the action of the Marcha das Vadias movement has undoubtedly been its appeal to imagery, to the visual and the body. During 2015, the series of protests held by the Marcha das Vadias, alongside other feminist groups, continued to employ an element of playfulness and strong visual images. These were used in the posters with an aim to mobilize other women, calling on them to participate.

The many posters for the Marcha das Vadias have played with language and words using irony, humour and provocativeness, subverting the use of the word ‘slut’ (see Figure 2). The Marcha das Vadias has regional versions across 25 states, from Sao Paulo, to Brasilia and Belo Horizonte. These also post on home pages and on social media. Each region has their own blog and they organize their own meetings, with different grassroots feminist groups in each state adopting various types of provocative slogans for each protest. Much of the focus of the Marcha das Vadias’s different regional pages on Facebook and on Wordpress has been on discussions about feminism, ranging from the importance of women taking control of their bodies, to the liberty that women can give to their bodies, from protest to pleasure. This is one of the reasons why women protesters are encouraged to appear topless during the demonstrations. They also play on the word ‘slut’, stating that the term is used in a pejorative way to shed light on the ‘patriarchal’ character of Brazilian society; thus emphasizing some of the traditional social norms and codes which exist, and which condemn some women to be merely ‘slept with’ from those who are ‘for marrying’.

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Figure 2.

Marcha das Vadias poster. Accessed from the website www.marchadasvadiasdf.wordpress.com

One of the posters for their third march, which took place in Fortaleza during 2013, ahead of the World Cup in 2014, adopted a slogan which stressed the right that women should have over their own bodies. This could be read as being either an allusion to abortion rights or sexual pleasure. The slogan was: ‘O meu corpo e meu. Nem da Copa, nem da igreja e muito menos seu!’ (‘My body is mine. It is neither of the World Cup, or the Church or yours!’). The tone here made less political connections and strived to influence party politics or state feminism from a policy perspective, similarly to the case of other feminist movements, and emphasized more individual freedom, subversion from the established order and emancipation.

Other posters included slogans such as ‘Cansei! – Se ser livre e ser vadia, entao somos todas vadias’ (‘I am tired – If to be free is to be a slut, then we are all sluts!’) and ‘Venha para a Marcha Nacional das Vadias − 26 de Maio’ (‘Come to the national march on the 26th of May’). Similarly to the ways in which third wave feminists have provocatively made use of pejorative words like ‘slut’ to denounce discrimination and the workings of patriarchal society (e.g. Bordo, 2003 [1993]; Budgeon, 2011), here the word was turned on its head and used in their battle against society’s control over their bodies and against overall female oppression. The use of the term can thus be seen as inclusive of women and their multiple identities. The reference to the expression ‘Cansei!’ (‘I am tired’) can be read as an indication of the exhaustion in trying to conform to rigid identity roles or stereotypes assigned by society to women, denying them their own true individuality and creative expression beyond the limited permissions assigned by the traditional conventional codes of Brazilian society.

Another feminist movement which has proven to be successful in making inroads into the mainstream, and influencing public debate on women’s rights across a variety of platforms, has been the NGO Think Olga. In its review of the year 2015, Think Olga in January 2016 underlined it as being the year of the ‘never ending spring’ for women, in a direct reference to the Arab Spring of 2011. It published the story ‘Mulheres em 2015 ocupam as redes para exigir direitos e pedir o fim do assedio sexual e da intolerancia’ (‘Women in 2015 took to online networks to demand rights and ask for the end of sexual harassment and intolerance’). It went on further to argue that 2015 was the year when ‘feminism’ ceased to be a ‘dirty word’, having managed to be incorporated into the mainstream.

In a text published on its website on 18 December 2015, ‘Uma primavera sem fim’ (‘A spring without end’), Luise Bello of Think Olga affirmed how 2015 was the year of online feminism. As she noted, between January 2014 and October 2015, the web search for the words ‘feminism’ and ‘female empowerment’ grew 86.7%, moving from 8100 to 90,500 searches, or an increase of 354.5%, respectively. Among the popular campaigns and hashtags throughout the year were Lei do feminicidio (‘Femicide law’) in February 2015, which received 12,822 hits, the protest movement Marcha das Margaridas (‘March of the Daisies’), with 28,633 hits in August, the realization of the Enem exam (with the controversy surrounding Simone de Beauvior) and the sexual harassment campaign #PrimeiroAssedio (‘First harassment’), with 252,101 hits.

Similarly to Blogueiras Feministas, Think Olga is also interested in stories on intersectionality, and likes to publish personal testimonials about women and their everyday life experiences of oppression and harassment. The website affirms that it aims to promote the achievements of women within Brazilian society, including a link for the public to access women experts (‘Entreviste uma mulher’ [‘Interview a woman’]). The story ‘Claudete Alves e a solidao que nao e so dela’ (‘Claudete Alves and the loneliness of black women’, 14 December 2015) was an interesting piece which examined the rejection by black men of black women, underpinning the double oppression that the latter encounter.

Given the focus on similar topics, including discourses on feminism, representations of women in the media, discussions of everyday sexism and the body, as well as the concern with violence against women and legislation such as the Maria da Penha law, it is possible to see both Blogueiras Feministas and Think Olga as being quintessential examples of what Brazilian new contemporary third wave feminism is all about. These feminist blogs frequently reference each other, including images from other blogs, such as the Marcha das Vadias posters in Blogueiras Feministas. Think Olga also has links which encourages women to report abuse and violence against them, such as the ‘Manda Prints’ section (‘Send your prints’), which refers to online sexual harassment. One of its key aims is to boost the skills of women entrepreneurs, including a link called ‘Olga Mentoring’, where women can sign up for weekly courses on business training. It also includes information and up-to-date journalistic stories on current national and international conferences on women’s rights.

Feminists groups have also turned widely to Facebook, and particularly to Twitter, to criticize sexism in Brazilian society and gender inequality. The NGO Think Olga has managed to engage in a creative manner with Twitter through the successful Chega de Fiu Fui (‘Enough wolf whistling’) campaign. Launched in July 2013, it was set up to tackle sexual harassment in public spaces. It was initially met with a lot of resistance, but afterwards managed to engage various people. The campaign was also supported by research findings conducted by the journalist Karin Hueck, who interviewed 8000 people to discuss sexual harassment in public spaces. The results showed that 98% of them suffered from some form of sexual harassment, with 83% not in agreement with it and another 90% deciding to change their clothes before leaving the house to avoid problems.

The campaign on Twitter started after a young 12-year-old girl, who had appeared on the Brazilian television programme Master Chef Junior, suffered later from sexual harassment comments on social media. This lead to the launch of the campaign #PrimeiroAssedio: voce nao esta mais so (‘First sexual harassment: you are not alone anymore’) by Juliana de Faria, founder of Think Olga. The hashtag had 82,000 mentions. The main reason behind the campaign was to provide women victims of harassment as a child a voice to speak of their experiences. This was a ground-breaking moment in Brazilian history, as for the first time various groups of women took to Twitter to talk. Women were invited to speak about personal issues such as their first sexual harassment experience, of which there is little discussion in the public sphere. The hashtag would be retweeted more than 100,000 times, culminating in 11 million searches and being the highlight of Google in 2015. An important link was made here between the existence of sexual harassment with the high statistics on rape and violence against women. According to the NGO Forum Brasileiro de Seguranca Publica (Brazilian Forum for Public Security – FPSB), which conducts research on statistics of violence, a women is raped in Brazil every 11 minutes.

The NGO Think Olga also found out, through an analysis of 3111 tweets, that the average age of the first sexual harassment experience was 9.7 years old. Juliana de Faria’s quote below, which expressed her own personal experience of sexual harassment as a young girl, is evidence of the naturalization of the practice in Brazilian society, and its acceptability by many women of an older generation, who have been brought up to see these attitudes as being part of society’s norms and conventions. As she stated:

The first time I was harassed I was 11 years old. I was returning from the bakery, and a car passed next to me and started to swear loudly. I did not understand it and I started to cry. An old women stopped me in the street and said: ‘do not be silly, accept it as a form of praise’.

Another influential Twitter campaign was #AgoraeQueSaoElas (‘Now it is them! [Her]’), which took place between the end of October and start of November 2015. This campaign saw mainly male columnists ceding their space in the mainstream media for women. The hashtag received a total of 5000 mentions. Promoted by the journalist Manoela Miklos, the hashtag proved to be widely successful already by the second day (2 November 2015). Many texts by women of different backgrounds where published in the mainstream newspapers across the country, such as the philosopher Djamila Ribeiro in the Blog of Sakamoto (on the UOL website, of the Folha group). These dealt with a variety of issues relating to gender inequality in Brazil. The campaign had the main purpose of highlighting women’s exclusion from debate. It also provided women with more visibility at the same time that it shed light on the lack of voice and the few opportunities that women have in the newsroom and their overall lack of representation in the mainstream media.

The Brazilian mainstream media are controlled by fewer than 10 families, including the Marinhos of Globo Organisations, who retain a total of 80% of the nation’s media content. Despite the growth of professionalism and balance in the newsroom since the 1990s in the context of the country’s re-democratization, the Brazilian media, represented mainly by the newspapers O Globo, Folha de Sao Paulo, the magazines Veja and Isto E and TV Globo, still struggle with partisanship practices and are not sufficiently plural (Matos, 2017). Thus the recent political mobilization, offline and online, of the Brazilian feminist ‘Arab Spring’ has been crucial in highlighting the need to attend to the interests of multiple groups of women who do not see themselves included in the political public sphere and within the Brazilian mainstream media and society.

The importance of new communication technologies for gender and development in such a context has thus become all the more relevant. A crucial factor in this debate is not only the problem of granting more access to online communications to diverse groups of women, but to have them participate and design and be encouraged to be technological entrepreneurs, as well as to learn to make better use of these communication platforms for political mobilization. Unfortunately, it is the case that many of these websites operate within a highly fragmented public space. Alvarez (quoted in Vargas, 2010: 321) has argued that these strategies have however become more diverse and, to a certain extent, more democratic. She has classified these as being: ‘a broad, heterogeneous, polycentric, multifaceted and polysemic field of discourse and action’.

Interviewed for this research, Lucia Hanmer, leading economist in gender and development at the World Bank Group (WB), has also underpinned the need to increase the use of ICTs for the advancement of women’s rights in developing countries. She sees an important role for governments in promoting some of these measures, in possible alliance with the private sector: ‘Developing countries can take steps to ensure women’s participation in political and other institutions in society, including promoting measures to ensure their equal representation in parliament and other legislative measures at the national and local levels. Developing country governments can invest in programs that have specifically designed components to support women and girls acquire new skills, information and training that enable them to take up new economic opportunities.’

Governments do have an important role to play here, something which I discuss elsewhere (Matos, 2017), however feminist activism needs to come above all from the grassroots and be guided by bottom-up processes, as the ones examined here. If, on the one hand, we need to acknowledge the limits of online networks, avoid the hype, we must also recognize the significance that web technologies can have in stimulating debate within the public sphere, shaping elites’ perceptions and attitudes towards women’s rights and social inclusion. Moreover, despite differences, most of the discourses which circulated in these blogs were similar in scope and tone, with many focusing on either stimulating protests and mobilizations, or criticizing violence towards women and the practice of sexual harassment. Issues of political representation, sexism in political campaigning, the Dilma impeachment process and the treatment of women politicians, women in the workplace and gender stereotyping were also widely debated in many of the texts.

The intensity of these offline and online feminist protests has also attracted the attention of the international press, contributing to a revival of energy for contemporary Brazilian feminism and making it look out again to the international sphere. Since 2000, there has been a shift within Brazilian feminism away from transnational engagement, beyond the UN and governmental spheres, but there are also increasing signs of new possibilities of dialogue that can be forged between these new Brazilian feminist and diverse groups of grassroots women activists and other scholars, NGOs and policy groups, both nationally and internationally.

There is much more scope to expand on these themes, as they have not yet taken on a wider discussion within the country’s public sphere. Here I have provided a brief sketch of some of the debates that are occurring within the Brazilian feminist blogosphere, which are pressuring for gender justice and both recognition (i.e. cultural values and representations) and as well as wider redistribution of resources (Fraser, 2013), thus contributing to bring these concerns to the mainstream, albeit slowly and within a scenario of setbacks and enormous challenges.

Conclusion

Since the creation of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, women in Brazil have managed to secure rights and occupy more positions in the marketplace, government, businesses and the media. In the last three decades, Brazilian women have slowly become more empowered. Contemporary Brazilian feminists are slowly beginning to benefit from the opportunities offered by cyberspace (e.g. Harcourt, 2000; Plant, 1995). Despite the limitations on the capacity of the web to increase democratization, the fact is that the web is offering opportunities, however contradictory, for different groups to engage in critical debate, to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses which go against traditional representations of gender, as well as to demand a wider voice in Brazilian society. This is taking place in a context which has seen a rise of conservative forces within Brazilian society, and a backlash against minority and women’s rights, culminating in Dilma’s impeachment in 2016. Feminist groups like Blogueiras Feministas and Think Olga have been influential in bringing to the public debate important discussions such as sexual harassment.

New technologies in themselves cannot do all the work in paving the way to more progressive change, but they can play an important role in helping shape debate, depending on how these online platforms are put to use. To grant another equality in worth requires changes in perceptions and attitudes in relation to particular social groups, culminating in improvements in their material conditions (Fraser, 2013). This however cannot depend on legislation alone, and needs to be secured through continuous questioning of traditionally ingrained power structures. For it is within the cultural and social sphere that ideas around the inferiority of women are upheld and reinforced.

It is fundamental to recognize that the media need to make a greater contribution to the advancement of women’s rights (Matos, 2017), and in this absence of wider commitments, it is new communication technologies that emerge as powerful platforms which can contribute to give women a stronger voice, particularly in developing countries, thus empowering different perspectives from the mainstream, assisting in the building of transnational feminist networks and bringing together local and global quests for gender justice, which are destined to become more pressing issues for concern in the years to come.