Negotiating the challenge of #ChallengeAccepted: transnational digital flows, networked feminism, and the case of femicide in Turkey

Abstract

ABSTRACT In summer 2020, social media feeds were flooded with black-and-white selfies of women, shared under the hashtag #ChallengeAccepted. While the images quickly became ubiquitous, the reason for them did not. This case study analyzes #ChallengeAccepted from the perspective of feminists in Turkey, who began posting the hashtag/selfie sequence on July 26, 2020. We performed a thematic analysis on datasets of 5,510 Turkish-language tweets, 28,527 English-language tweets, and transcripts from 26 semistructured interviews with women in Turkey who participated in the hashtag campaign and sought to answer the question: How do transnational digital flows impact local and global uptake of feminist ideals? We found three stages of the hashtag, through which meaning was negotiated, defended, and re-established. Applying W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg’s “logic of connective action,” we saw #ChallengeAccepted as operating as a “personal action frame,” which we argue provided a refractive effect that changed the trajectory of the discourse. Our findings suggest that other cases of hashtag activism would benefit from imagining the local/transnational dimensions as a collection of locals, or the translocal.