Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the hashtag, #IamNotNext that trended in South Africa between October 2019 and July 2020, as part of the meaning-making process on Twitter around violence against women in the country. I demonstrate that #IamNotNext offered women activists a platform to make meaning from the periphery. As a digital assemblage, #IamNotNext allowed women to mobilize, express outrage, actively agitate for solutions to the scourge of violence against them and mobilize offline activities. The chapter notes that unknown voices, by faceless characters, invaded and hijacked the women’s activism on #IamNotNext, and promoted exclusionary, “weaponized,” and polarized ideologies with the intention to trivialize the women’s cause. These phantom voices, I argue, (re)produced militant and toxic discourses that weaponized the women’s activism, and in the process attempted to cloud the central issue of violence against women by sucking the activists’ hashtag into a maelstrom of pettiness.
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Notes
- 1.
Follow these statistics here: Crime Stats: www.iol.co.za//news//south-africa-crime-stats-seven-w/.
- 2.
South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation, signifying that it has people of many colors, but remains one nation.
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Munoriyarwa, A. (2023). “My Body is Not Your Crime Scene”: The Polarization and “Weaponization” of Women’s Online Activism on South Africa’s Twittersphere. In: Wiesslitz, C. (eds) Women’s Activism Online and the Global Struggle for Social Change. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31621-0_7
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