#NastyWomen: Reclaiming the Twitterverse from Misogyny

Abstract

Using the lens of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, this chapter explored how Twitter is both a dangerous space for women and a digital sphere that women have reclaimed from rampant misogyny. We qualitatively analyzed 1,390 tweets that used the hashtags #NastyWomen or #NastyWoman that were posted after President Donald Trump, a presidential candidate at the time, called his opponent Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during the final debate of the campaign. Using a discourse analysis of the tweets that use these hashtags, we probed how hashtags are used to shame and silence women but are also a potent tool of women’s digital empowerment. We found that women, particularly women of color, used these hashtags to symbolically reroute the conversation about “nasty women” into something productive, rather than dwell on the hateful words. Thus, the hashtags drew women together into intimate publics, where they felt emboldened being political together. As a result, these hashtags enabled women who supported Clinton to challenge the patriarchy in the collective digital space of Twitter. We believe these hashtags about Clinton offer a microcosm of the types of experiences average women have online, as they also face digital misogyny and have the power to reclaim this sphere through the use of hashtag feminism.