Keywords
gender based violence in Russia
#IamNotScaredToSpeak
digital activism
How to Cite
Abstract
Digital or hashtag activism in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has gained popularity around the globe. Campaigns such as #MeToo and #YesAllWomen have drawn much needed attention to the problems of gender based violence and misogyny. This article is dedicated to a similar, but unique, campaign – #ЯнеБоюсьСказать (#IamNotScaredToSpeak) – that took place in Facebook’s Russian speaking community in July 2016. (It followed an identical campaign started in Ukraine, which subsequently crossed over into other former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan.) The objective of this article is twofold. First, utilizing Discourse Analysis, I analyze posts associated with #IamNotScaredToSpeak, and argue that the campaign raised the visibility of the problem of sexual violence largely as a result of women’s active participation in it. A number of women who decided to reveal their personal experiences and others who stood with them against rape culture, helped increase the significance of women’s linguistic agency and made #IamNotScaredToSpeak the first large-scale feminist movement in Russia to date. Second, I will examine the specificity of the #IamNotScaredToSpeak campaign and argue that it was predominantly of a grass-roots nature with the self-organization and participation of ordinary people being crucial to the movement. By way of comparison, the #MeToo campaign, operating in the western context, was largely initiated and led by celebrities.
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