Women activists’ strategies of online self-presentation

Abstract

Activists present themselves on- and offline using a diverse range of tools, discursive strategies, and means of self-presentation, all conducive to making both themselves and their cause well known. To that end, of paramount importance is their ability to make audiences and readers empathize, and a key factor all strategies have in common is the repetitive nature of their multiplatform, multimodal discourse. I build on previous research about platforms such as Twitter and TED talks as forms of self-narration to look at the ways human rights activists deploy such strategic communicative techniques to construct a public persona. I focus on young women from the Global South using English as a lingua franca. These tend to re-use rhetoric drawn from famous historical figures who stood for social justice in the past, and nuanced repetitive techniques characterized by emotion and affect to mobilize various constituencies. Both kinds of repetition, enhanced by the affordances of technology, create a new kind of ubiquity and can thus potentially influence policymaking. The article makes the case that the recent global viral popularity of young women activists such as Malala Yousafzai, Bana Alabed, and Nujeen Mustafa deserves deeper analysis. At stake is whether digital affordances of immediacy and reach can not only amplify such activists’ messages, but help them cross new borders and create new kinds of transnational solidarity.