Thick Description and Embodied Analysis of Digital Visual Artefacts: The Visual Repertoire of #SisterIDoBelieveYou

Patricia Prieto Blanco; Elisa  García-Mingo; Silvia Díaz Fernández

doi:10.21814/vista.4132

Authors

Patricia Prieto Blanco Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Unitedx Kingdom https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6283-3129
Elisa García-Mingo Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8448-1849
Silvia Díaz Fernández Departamento de Comunicación, Facultad de Humanidades, Comunicación y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9118-8090

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.4132

Keywords:

visual analysis, affect, protest, hashtag ethnography, feminist media studies

Abstract

In this work, we explore the relationship between affect and the use of aesthetics by feminist digital activists to communicate their ideas and protest against sexual violence. Our focus, therefore, lies on the visual culture of digital protest. We consider visual artefacts a visual repertoire of protest (Jenzen et al., 2020, p. 420) that can both be articulated in a specific local context whilst simultaneously echoing global sentiments. In this paper, we analyse the visual repertoire of protest of Spanish feminist digital activism against sexual violence. To do so, we analysed 696 visual artefacts linked to the hashtag #HermanaYoSíTeCreo (#SisterIDoBelieveYou) shared on Twitter between May 1, 2018, and August 31, 2020. Our methodological framework incorporates a collaborative triangled analysis based on social semiotics (Ledin & Machin, 2018; Van Leeuwen, 2005), socio-hermeneutic analysis (Knoblauch & Schnettler, 2012; Serrano Pascual & Zurdo Alaguero, 2010), hashtag ethnography (Bonilla & Rose, 2015), and interpretative thick description (Geertz, 1973, pp. 3–30). Additionally, we also developed an ethnographic sensibility towards the corpus, which engaged us in a constant dialogue to overcome the positivist trend of data-driven visual digital analysis.

Our work here addresses the understanding of how visual discourses can create the affective unification of social media users (Stage, 2013) as a key feature of feminist politics and online activism (Keller et al., 2018). We analysed the use of visual artefacts by the "virtual" community of sisterhood and concluded that these processes served as a basis for (a) establishing distinctive while versatile visual branding; (b) weaving an affective community; (c) articulating the desire to connect and to gather through love, hope, outrage and disgust; and (d) linking past and present as well as geographically distant feminist struggles.

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Author Biographies

Patricia Prieto Blanco, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Unitedx Kingdom

Patricia Prieto Blanco lectures in digital media practice at the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Her areas of expertise are visual research methods, photographic practices, and migration. She is the vice-chair of the European Communication Research and Education Association Visual Cultures, serves on the International Visual Sociology Association board as a technology advisor, and co-manages the Biographical Narrative Lifecourse Research group of the Sociological Association of Ireland. Furthermore, she currently participates in the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf research network "Transformative Bildlichkeit", as well as in the research project DIVISAR: Online sexual violence. Studying the relation between digital technologies and sexual violence practices between in the Spanish youth. Patricia advocates for interdisciplinary, practice-based, and collaborative research.

Elisa García-Mingo, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Elisa García-Mingo is an associate professor of social research methods at the Faculty of Sociology and Political Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). She got her PhD in 2011 from Universidad de Deusto with a dissertation called "Peace Waves. Congolese Women Journalists' Activism Against Sexual Violence". She has been a visiting fellow at Universidad Católica de Chile, McGill University, University of Brighton, and Aarhus University. She belongs to a research group on sexual assault and another on technocultures and social movements at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is an associate member of the Centre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender at the University of Brighton.

Silvia Díaz Fernández, Departamento de Comunicación, Facultad de Humanidades, Comunicación y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Silvia Díaz Fernández is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellow at the Department of Communication at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She gained her PhD from Coventry University (2020) with her thesis exploring misogynistic campus cultures. She has been a visiting researcher at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2021). She is a member of the research network postdigital intimacies. Her current work involves digital culture, sexual violence and algorithmic-enabled gender discrimination.

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