‘I Am Woman,Hear Me Roar!’: #March4Justice and the Desire for Law to Listen

Abstract

In speaking to a particular moment in time, when women are increasingly frustrated that their stories are not heard by the law, this article analyses comments posted to the hashtag March4Justice, to offer a contextualist account of how women are locating themselves in (and against) the law by means of social media. It suggests that the use of this hashtag contributes to, and is evidence of, an overarching rallying discourse that pleads for law reform. The article showcases an empirical analysis of social media narratives to demonstrate that emotionality, narrativity, and communal identity weave together to represent (and constitute) a critique of law's ability to listen to the needs of women.

Keywords

social media legality gender

Introduction

Social media is deeply embedded in everyday social interactions, and research is increasingly demonstrating that social media hashtags and trends have significant power in unifying communities in response to social justice issues and in amplifying voices. In contemporary culture, the various platforms of social media have substantially intensified the capacity for public interpretation of political events and cultural crises, and significant social movements and hashtags have increasingly become viable modes for behavioural responses to those events (Dawson, 2020; Yang, 2016). From studies of communal sense-making in relation to crisis communication (Shaw, 2013) to projects that investigate the amplification of less powerful voices on social media in the pursuit of social justice, many scholars have undertaken research concerning public collective responses to key events through social media (see Blevins et al., 2019). Several studies have demonstrated that social media posting intersects with, and amplifies, justice-driven narratives. For example, Salter has examined online abuse and justice-seeking on social media in relation to gender and crime (Salter, 2016), and Serisier has asserted in relation to victims of sexual violence that ‘an increased belief in the necessity and power of speaking out may be one of the largest effects of social media’ (Serisier, 2018: 96). More recently, political and social issues as divisive as race and gender have also played out over social media through the hashtag mechanism. With #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo amplifying public criticism of police brutality and workplace sexual harassment, respectively, the dynamic and widespread impact of the hashtag for generating a groundswell for offline activism and protest was illustrated in stark detail.

In my previous work, I have argued that social media narratives are a useful tool for evaluating and critiquing law as deeply constituted in culture because the allocation of a hashtag performatively frames a context that might not otherwise be apparent and that the construction of social media narratives through hashtags helps to shape forms of implicit legalities in response to key social and political events (Sharp, 2022). In this article, I demonstrate that it is the combination of the hashtag itself and its accompanying affective narrative which catalyses an event, thereby enabling the public to coalesce around familiar narratives of anger and solidarity that are critical, yet also deeply constitutive, of explicit forms of legality.

Over the space of two weeks in early March 2021, a grassroots uprising on social media led to a unified series of physical protests across Australia. The clarion call of the March4Justice hashtag (#March4Justice) was birthed from a deep and overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction, experienced and articulated by women in response to consistent and unabating sexism, sexual harassment, and violence within homes, workplaces, and institutions. The claim for ‘justice’ for women in their everyday existence was embedded within the hashtag itself, as it exhorted women to protest the silencing, ignorance, and delegitimating of women by the law. This article describes and analyses this moment in time when women were so frustrated that their stories were not being heard by the law, that they were roused to utilise social media as a direct and explicit protest and rallying cry for action.

Through analysis of comments posted on Twitter, I argue that the use of #March4Justice contributed to, and is evidence of, an overarching contagious narrative that pleads for law reform and social action. In what I have called the ‘hear me roar’ narrative, the hashtag facilitated critical reflection on our legal system's response (or lack thereof) to violence against women. It contributes to what I have previously labelled a ‘hashtag jurisprudence’, which provides an account of how forms of legality are constructed, legitimised, and critiqued within social media storytelling (commenting, posting, or tweeting) (Sharp, 2022). As individuals use the hashtag to participate in democratic deliberation and debate, the collective narrative of this hashtag exposes the tension between the formalist expression of laws and regulations and the complicated, nuanced, and personalised lived experience of legality (Travis, 2009). As I will argue in the following sections, this tension has the potential to productively challenge the status quo of (ir)responsible listening by the law. My aim is to draw attention to the intersection of feminist digital activism, narrative meaning-making, and emotion evident within #March4Justice as a mechanism for driving legal change.

Feminists have long understood that predominant stories and speech in our socio-political landscape are ‘always a question of power and authority – about who is entitled to speak, and who claims the authority to decide the meanings of words and actions’ (Wånggren, 2016: 402), and so more recently, the sharing of stories through feminist digital activism has been a purposeful challenge to wider narratives related to the protection of ‘all’ women (see Serisier, 2018). Moreover, commensurate with what has come to be known as the ‘affective turn’ in many disciplines, feminist scholarship has also devoted much attention to the role of emotion in the mobilisation of feminist political activism (Nau et al., 2023). Recent studies have demonstrated that emotion has a significant part to play in creating solidarity and enlisting supporters for both online and offline protests (Mendes et al., 2019a; McDuffie and Ames, 2021). Of note, in tracing the diverse ways that ‘hashtag feminism’ has been enacted in contemporary discourse, Dixon has argued that it is emotion that facilitates the construction of community to challenge those discourses (Dixon, 2014) while McDuffie and Ames have argued that digital feminist activism captures, archives, and reflects a ‘powerful collective affective moment’ (McDuffie and Ames, 2021).

In demonstrating that emotional narratives on social media play a role in shaping law and legal change, the article is divided into two key parts. The first provides the context for the #March4Justice historical moment where the choice to use the hashtag #March4Justice was to inscribe affiliation with a co-present community and to signify an exhortation to take part in collective protest (both online and offline). Following an argument that it was the socio-political story of #March4Justice that became the rallying motivator to demand progressive legal change, this first part also briefly outlines the methods by which the research was undertaken. The second part demonstrates that the affective ‘hear me roar narrative’ embodied in the hashtag is an active, yet hopeful demand for alternative forms of listening and is driven by a desire for the law to responsibly ‘hear’ the voices of women.

#March4Justice – the Context

In Australia, the issue of gendered violence has recently seized public attention through the highly publicised statements of several ‘public survivors’ (Loney-Howes et al., 2024). Fuelling discussion and debate, the predominant question centred on the capacity and agency of women to speak and be heard about the prevalence of violence against women and about law's response (or lack thereof) to that speech. Despite the historical suspicion and disbelief that usually accompanied public victim statements (Serisier, 2022), Loney-Howes, O’Neill, and Oldfield point out that social media-facilitated speech in the last decade has precipitated a shift in cultural attitudes towards listening and believing survivors who ‘speak out’ (2024: 8). A few survivors have thus recently risen to prominence in making significant public claims demanding justice in relation to violence against women, and their ‘voices’ were provided with a metaphorical megaphone by social media.

One public survivor, Grace Tame, had for several years been advocating for the right of child sex abuse victims, including herself, to speak about their experiences, which at the time was against the law in Tasmania. Sexual assault victim gag laws had existed in some Australian jurisdictions for many decades, and despite initially intended to protect survivors from media exploitation, these laws prohibited sexual assault victims from being identified, even with their full co-operation and consent. This, of course, had several unintended consequences including ‘silencing victims and stripping them of the right to be heard’ and preventing them from taking control of their own story (Funnell, 2018). The #LetHerSpeak/#LetUsSpeak campaign launched by Nina Funnell in 2018 provided direct legal assistance to 17 individual survivors, including Tame, who had been impacted by the gag laws. The advocacy resulted in four legislative reforms across three jurisdictions (see https://www.letusspeak.com.au/) and continues to be an ongoing campaign that believes that all sexual assault survivors should have the right to tell their own stories without risk of prosecution to themselves or others. Since winning her own court order as part of that campaign, Grace has used her platform to ‘speak out’ about the impacts of sexual assault, grooming, and trauma, and her advocacy earned her the award of Australian of the Year in 2021. In discussing the role of ‘public survivor speech’ in a political debate about sexual violence in Australia, Loney-Howes, O’Neill, and Oldfield argue that ‘survivors often make explicit calls demanding to be heard and listened to’ (2024:9). This is unequivocal in the rhetoric used by Grace in her acceptance speech where she juxtaposes silence with noise (Tame, 2021):

I remember him saying, “Don't tell anybody.”

I remember him saying, “Don't make a sound.”

Well, hear me now, using my voice, amongst a growing chorus of voices that will not be silenced! Let's make some noise, Australia!

Although the #letherspeak campaign is only referenced here for context, it is interesting to note that the gag laws effectively silenced some Australian women. That is, inscribed on the mouth and on the tongue, it was the law itself that suppressed the voices of women, and Tame's speech reinforces a perspective that the law's oppressive force must therefore be countered with noise. This was exemplified when, three weeks after Grace's speech, former Liberal party employee Brittany Higgins contributed to the sound of ‘speaking up’ by coming forward with allegations that she had been raped by a former colleague in the Australian parliamentary offices in 2019 (Maiden, 2021a). It was reported that Higgins hoped that ‘telling her story would drive change in the parliamentary work culture’ (Maiden, 2021a) and that she had ‘resolved’ to do so after seeing the image of the Prime Minister presenting the award to Grace Tame: ‘I was sick to my stomach. He's standing next to a woman who campaigned for ‘Let Her Speak’ and yet in my mind his government was complicit in silencing me. It was a betrayal. It was a lie’ (Maiden, 2021b).

Higgins’ claims about the federal government's response of silencing her following the reporting of the alleged incident reflected the larger socio-political reality that institutions wield significant power to ‘solicit, enable, and constrain different narratives’ (McAleese and Kilty, 2019). Her allegations sparked widespread public anger at the government for its perceived inadequate response to the issue. As Chris Wallace summarised, the controversy was well founded given ‘the Morrison Government's weak response to Higgins’ internal representations at the time of the alleged attack; its inaction on the substance of the allegations after they were made public; [and the] backgrounding against Higgins by the Government in political damage control’ (Wallace, 2021: 23).

In the days following Higgins’ public revelations, a snowballing of complaints against the same alleged perpetrator was reported by ABC News (Wallace, 2021: 21–22), and there was an ‘ongoing reckoning of inappropriate behaviour in the halls of Parliament’ (Cooper, 2021) such that no less than five independent reviews into Parliamentary culture were quickly established (Rachwani, 2021). Notably, the Independent Review of Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces, spearheaded and released by Kate Jenkins of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in March 2021 (AHRC, 2021) identified systemic power imbalances and a highly gendered culture across Parliament (AHRC, 2021). It is little wonder that Wallace argues it became part of ‘the most intense focus on gendered violence in the Australian parliamentary workplace ever witnessed’ (Wallace, 2021: 24). Doubtless, a growing unease, both individually and collectively, began to percolate because of the allegations and these inquiries, with one Sydney newspaper headline tapping into the rhetoric of noise, by describing this ‘howl of pain [as] the soundtrack to millions of women's lives’ (Mostyn, 2021). Across both news and social media platforms the narrative became about the importance of women speaking up and demanding action.

Taking up this mantle, one Sunday afternoon in late February 2021, one woman (Janine Hendry) was so outraged by the stories she was repeatedly reading of government inaction related to violence against women (including the treatment of Higgins, and the revelations of historical allegations of rape against the Australian Attorney-General at the time, Christian Porter) that she is reported as saying: ‘I kept hearing people saying let's march on parliament, so that's exactly what we are going to do’ (Gorman, 2021). As a result, she tweeted about an idea of protest:

Ok here's my thought – is it possible to form a ring of people around the perimeter of Parl Hse? Then all of us extremely disgruntled women could travel to Canberra …and form a ring linking arms and with our backs turned toward the parliament and stand in silent protest.

Very quickly, Hendry's tweet garnered overwhelming support, and she received the specific answer for how many people would be needed to surround Parliament House: ‘4000 women – that's what it will take to circle Parliament House on March 15 and to make it clear to this Govt. that we have had enough’. Following these initial tweets, a full-blown movement across Australia gained momentum and by 2 March 2021, women were encouraged to muster support for the protest using #March4Justice on social media:

And use social media. Take a selfie with a sign saying #EnoughIsEnough & #March4Justice & #FedUp and spread it far and wide at 12 noon. Join the live stream. Post the demands from the petition you want actioned. (Dent, 2021)

When Parliament resumed on 15 March 2021, events in 40 major Australian cities and over 200 towns nationwide hosted more than 110,000 women (and their allies) as they ‘stood up, spoke up and were heard around the world’ (see www.march4justice.org.au/janinehendry). The concept of actively calling out violence was again clearly articulated by Brittany Higgins in her speech at the Canberra March4Justice protest where she discussed the ‘significant failings in the power structures within our institutions’ and encouraged women to ‘speak up, share their truth and …take ownership of their story’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 2021). Ironically, #March4Justice thus became more than the original call to attend ‘a silent protest’ circling Parliament House – it morphed into a collective forum for women to simultaneously share their story and to loudly demand an audience in both digital and physical spaces. Provoked by the strong emotive pull of anger, frustration, and disappointment in our governing institutions, Janine's initial suggestion of protesting in silence had transformed into a collective movement associated with noise. She tweeted:

We’re angry, we're amassing and we're getting organised. Our voices will not be silenced. On March 15 at 12 noon the women of Australia and their supporters will #March4Justice We will no longer be silenced on the injustices that you continue to think is our birthright.

It is this connection between anger, noise, and listening with which this article is concerned. The analysis that follows is drawn from a study of the hashtag #March4Justice as used on Twitter from the date of Hendry's first tweet (February 25) until the end of April 2021. Adopting the social media analytics framework (Stieglitz et al., 2014), a topic-based approach was employed for retrieving and collecting the tweets: delimited only by the date range and the hashtag using the advanced search function of Twitter's ‘application programming interface’ (API). These tweets were saved, coded, and allocated a number. In this article, all tweets (other than those that have been reproduced by mainstream media) are anonymised and, in some cases, paraphrased. This is to adopt an ethical position towards the use of social media data from Townsend and Wallace. (2018) who suggested that (a) informed consent from Twitter users is not necessary where specific hashtags have been utilised for their tweets to be publicly visible to a broader audience and (b) it is nevertheless important to refrain from publishing individual usernames with the quoted tweets.

To explore the nuanced patterns of attitudes, values, and expectations across the data, the coding was undertaken manually according to a constructivist grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), which exemplifies and appreciates the intersecting discourses of law, narrative, and public perception that occur on social media. This was achieved through repeated readings of the data, with emerging themes informing the identifications of codes to apply in subsequent stages. NVivo analysis (a word frequency linguistic concordance) was also used to identify patterns in the meaning-making that occurred within the hashtag during this time. My central argument in this article is that the hashtag not only facilitates, but also constitutes, an ‘overarching narrative message’ (McAleese and Kilty, 2019: 823) that women were unified in their angry demand to be heard by the law. The next section outlines and illustrates the construction of what I have termed the ‘hear me roar’ narrative.

Hear Me Roar!

Listen carefully @ScottMorrisonMP. Hear us roar!!

Recent feminist scholarship has recognised the utilisation of social media engagement on both survivor speech and listening audiences. Gilmore, for example, has demonstrated that the #MeToo moment created a new ‘openness to survivor testimony’, such that the democratisation of survivor speech has facilitated the emergence of ‘new forms of listening and understanding’ (Gilmore, 2023: 101). Serisier has also argued that #believewomen became an ‘important marker of receptivity’ to stories and speech surrounding sexual violence in the wake of #mtetoo (Serisier, 2022: 342). Significantly Serisier argues that the core feminist strategy of ‘speaking out’ can only achieve political effects if the ‘narratives are heard, believed and responded to’ (Serisier, 2022: 343). In this special issue, Loney-Howes, O’Neill, and Oldfield further argue that the construction of ‘public survivors’ in the current socio-political landscape points to a real willingness to listen and hear their speech and advocacy (2024). At the same time, however, there is also a recognition that while some small successes have been effected in the capacity of law to listen to women, very little has been achieved in the way that law reform practically responds (Ailwood et al., 2023). The tweet at the top of this section, urging the then Prime Minister to listen, is paradigmatic of the ‘hear me roar’ narrative which combines emotion, desire, and critique to demand that lawmakers pay attention. Each of the examples below contributes to this collective plea (emphasis of underline and italics added):

now is the time for Australia to hear the collective ROAR

may the roar at noon on March 15 be thunderous. Heard around the nation

Alone we have one voice – together we roar. Women's voices must be heard

we stand in solidarity with everyone marching today. We roar in fury together. It is time for our voices to be heard loud and clear.

I have named this overwhelming message the ‘hear me roar’ narrative, because although seemingly singular in its grammatical urging, the roar of collective ‘woman’ has a unifying and communal effect that is powerful. The repetitive use of the word roar in this narrative is significant. Etymologically, a roar typically speaks of a loud deep sound uttered by a person or crowd, generally as an expression of pain/anger or a loud continuous outcry of emotion from a person in distress or rage, and this accentuates well the emotion that fuels the speech occurring through this protest. Yet symbolically, it also takes up Australian artist Helen Reddy's declaration from her chart-topping 70s song I Am Woman:

I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore

And I know too much to go back an’ pretend

‘Cause I've heard it all before

And I've been down there on the floor

And no one's ever gonna keep me down again

Reddy's lyrics squarely challenge the hearer to dare ignore the roar of collective woman, and it was blasted across loudspeakers at the commencement of many of the rallies, including the one taking place in the nation's capital. Unified in ferociousness, strength, and courage, this ‘hear me roar’ narrative confidently asserts that the collective voice cannot be ignored. In contradistinction to the silence and passivity historically associated with victims of violence in the past, the ‘hear me roar’ narrative demands that women be acknowledged, respected, and heard. As constructed and proliferated on social media, this narrative is amplified by emotion, which, of course, pervades our conceptions of justice and legal norms (Sharp, 2022), and so the next section draws connections between contagious emotions and earnest desires for reform.

‘Hear me roar’ – contagious pleading for change

Emotions are an active component of identity and community. They help us to make sense of the world around us and help us to locate our identity as part of a collective. It is our emotions that inform our everyday decisions, structure our experiences, and importantly, help to inform how we perceive our position in the world (Duncombe, 2019). Duncombe argues that when public displays of emotion are shared, they become ‘socially and politically powerful precisely because they are recognized as sites of emotional resonance’, constituting the parameters of identity and circumscribing political potential in relation to specific actors and events (Duncombe, 2019: 415). The connective affordances of social media, such as the hashtag, facilitate a public context in which individual affective responses are therefore allocated a wider social and cultural significance (Bleiker and Hutshison, 2008) primarily because they tap into generative patterns of relating to others. Papacharissi argues that it is not just the connective affordances of a platform that foster connection among disparate online publics – but crucially, emotion also has a significant role to play through ‘affective feedback loops’ (Papacharissi, 2014). As individuals comment on a particularly provocative issue, they ‘produce and circulate affect as a binding technique’ (Dean, 2010: 95) and inscribe themselves into the story. This reflects the concept of contagious emotions that have long been acknowledged by the social sciences as a central mechanism of individual and collective behaviour (Durkheim, 1912; Hatfield et al., 1994). Over a century ago, Durkheim explained that emotions had significant transformative potential for creating collective ‘effervescence’ (Durkheim, 1912). Exposure to others’ expressions of emotions via verbal or textual communication primes the activation of similar emotional experiences and appraisal (Moors et al., 2013). In the context of social media research, digital emotion contagion thus refers to the process by which posted and shared individual emotions can spread and cultivate group emotions (Goldenberg and Gross, 2020). The #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements are explicit examples of provocative affective engagement (Penney, 2015), and #March4Justice is yet another situation in which publicly sharing and repeating tweets fuelled by anger hastens a narrative through contagious effervescence. In #March4Justice, the individual comments of affective witness weaved together an account of collective anger that punctuated the level of discontent women were experiencing with the law. As the examples below demonstrate, tweets in the ‘hear me roar’ narrative followed a pattern of rephrasing and endorsing similar experiences of anger that is justified by a well-founded shared dissatisfaction with the current legal system.

The PM & this government has utterly failed #women. Performative behaviour is unacceptable & serves only to fuel our anger & determination for change.

the moral decay of trampling on rape victims is so grievous, the seething anger of woman collectively is volcanic and seismic

These last few weeks have made every woman in the country angry, sad and exhausted. The government's reaction to allegations of sexual assault in Parliament House and allegations of rape against the Attorney-General have left us disgusted and fed up.

In these tweets, the collective ‘hear me roar’ narrative was engaging not only cognitively but also emotionally and with ‘increasing affective input’ (Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012: 278). In doing so, they demonstrated Ahmed's theory that emotions are ‘spaces in which bodies and worlds meet and leak into each other’ (Ahmed, 2004: 2). Building upon Judith Butler who suggests an intimacy between materialisation and intensification, Sarah Ahmed suggests that bodies and worlds materialise, take shape, and collide through the intensification of feeling (Ahmed, 2004: 29). It is a bodily process of affecting and being affected by something, and judgement arises by the intensity of affect in relation to that thing (Ahmed, 2014: 209). In moments of uncertainty or fear, ‘the world presses against the body’ and emotions embody the space where we become aware of its impact upon us (Ahmed, 2014: 2) The affective encounter is one that leaves behind an impression, and as I have argued elsewhere, emotional judgments function within social media narratives to frame and contextualise normative expectations of the law and provide an arena for judgment of how regimes of truth are produced and sustained (Sharp, 2022). As such, hashtags could be viewed as yet another form of biopolitical technology, through which the substance of life is contained, valued, and constituted (Agamben, 1995). The biopolitical subject, as Foucault describes it, is a life that invests in and interweaves subjectivity, emotions, and legal norms (Foucault, 1976). To use Michel de Certeau's words, ‘a body is itself defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes it. There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies’ (de Certeau, 1984: 139). In the context of #March4Justice, women described their affective and embodied collision with an inattentive legal system through emotions of anger, frustration, and rage. In many comments, these emotions were materially experienced and described as ‘palpable’ by those attending the march. The contagious experience of anger was so fervent that protestors commented that they could feel the ‘powerful pent-up rage’; that the ‘anger was palpable’; and that there was a tangible ‘sense of “the time for change is now”’. Another stated: ‘Rage and grief – the air is thick with it down here …right now, where a force of thousands have turned out for the #march4justicePerth’. Characterising emotions as tangible is part of a natural attempt to understand human experience, and while individual comments can be intensely personal, they can also contribute to a collective expression of the affective encounter.

The strong and recurring emotion of anger in the ‘hear me roar’ narrative was often given further amplification by the logic of binary opposition, where women were described as existing outside the protection of, or even as dissentient with the ‘law’ or ‘legal system’. The utilisation of first-person plural pronouns ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’ within the hashtag signals not only that the response of anger and frustration is shared but also that those shared emotions are directed at legal institutions and actors as ‘enemies’. Research indicates that the shared experience provided by the first-person plural pronoun is significant when coping with stressful events or collective trauma, by suggesting to others that they are not alone in experiencing struggle. In the #March4Justice narrative, the use of an ‘us v them’ perspective was operationalised to expose the law as the ‘perpetrator’ that is distinguishable from the unified community of aggrieved people (women everywhere):

Our anger is everywhere, at the local Cafe, at the hairdresser's, at the school gate, at my quilting group! All ages, married, single, in a relationship or like me an elderly widow. The anger is everywhere and touches every woman! #VoteHimOut #VoteThemAIlOut #March4Justice

This affective community, networked through the hashtag and its resonant chants, contributes to the political function of the ‘hear me roar’ narrative, which is to reinforce identity, unity, and solidarity in exposing the law as complicit in a process of exclusion and dehumanisation by ‘othering’ women with its practices of marginalisation and silencing. As de Beauvoir long ago recognised, woman ‘is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other’ (de Beauvoir, 1974: xvii-xix). This was exemplified in the ‘hear me roar’ narrative:

This is not just about parliament, this is about the way women of all backgrounds are treated as lesser, harassed & assaulted because of our gender. I hope real change can come from this watershed moment.

Note that in this comment, there is a craving for ‘real change’ – by marching for justice, women are demonstrating that their hopeful investment in undertaking the protest would produce a change in the way the law responds to them. In the next section, I argue that the conscious identification with the #March4Justice campaign is an emotional appeal that demonstrates a unified investment in womanhood, which, in turn, importantly connects listening with change. It demonstrates how this ‘hear me roar’ narrative concomitantly reflects a critique of the law's exclusion and a hopeful desire for change.

Noise = listening = ‘real change’

The more people who speak out, speak up and support us, the less likely we are to be ignored (emphasis added)

Tweets such as the above are indicative of the exhortation to challenge the efficacy of the current legal system in its protective role of women – that with just the right amount of amplification, the collective voice of women can equal change because it cannot be ignored. Each tweet contributes to, and represents, the collective ‘we’ of women in a proud and determined opposition against our governing institutions fuelled by emotion (such as anger). This affective collective becomes ‘real as an effect, shaping different kinds of actions and orientations’ (Ahmed, 2014: 13). The almost exclusive use of this first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ across the ‘hear me roar’ narrative denoted the urgent individual imploration to the collective to be unified and was frequently paired with making noise:

Women – we’ve got this! Time to stand up, make our voices heard and shout #enoughisenough!

Good luck today everyone, make it so loud that nobody can fail to hear.

we must make our collective voice loud, we must through our actions become a political force to reckon with & we CAN together change the future.

Importantly, this adjuration to be collectively loud is also intricately linked with being ‘heard’ or successful listening. Demonstrating Ahmed's theory that ‘emotions do things, and work to align individuals with collectives …. through the very intensity of their attachments’ (Ahmed, 2004b: 26), the ‘hear me roar narrative’ was replete with examples of the coupling of volume with change (emphasis added):

An inspiring nationwide ROAR that gives us a ray of hope that real change might be coming. … keep pushing hard & make a whole lot of noise.

We must all give a voice to our lived experience. Only then will we see real change.

We are going to keep making noise until we get real change.

We need deep, genuine and real change to the way that sexual abuse and domestic violence is dealt with across the board.

Repetition is a rhetorical device that when used within a frame has the impact of naturalising and transforming interpretations of events into facts (Faucher and Boussaguet, 2018). Each tweet above echoes the declarative outcome of ‘real change’ to indicate expectations of future success, and it was a frequently deployed exhortation within the ‘hear me roar’ narrative to beseech solidarity in that cause. It is noteworthy that the collective desire for reform is predicated on ‘real’ change, which can be attributed to the lack of success in the past. As Ahmed argues, the affective experience is connected to the way our bodies ‘record past impressions’ or past encounters and align our emotions with what we already know (Ahmed, 2004: 29). This is illustrated by one tweet which stated: ‘It is no wonder that women are bloody angry. Angry for things that happened to them and angry about the assault on other girls/women. Stay angry, fight back and let’s see some REAL change! #March4Justice’.

This entanglement of emotion, law, and justice through the concept of ‘real change’ provides a critique of normative concepts of legality and serves a political function. The jurisprudential anchor at work here is a historical and hegemonic exertion of the power to legislate for the good of society. The demand for effective reform that is ‘real’ works against the hierarchical normative accounts of how the law is operating to protect and serve society: ‘#march4justice: action and change - real change - so that walking home does not require a risk assessment’. Such an articulated demand compels the audience to comprehend the operation of the law in alternative ways and to no longer consent to its current operative stance. This desire to amplify the roar of collective women stems from the perspective that a political shift must be enacted before change can occur. As has been argued: ‘Women must first invent a way to speak in the context of being silenced and rendered invisible as persons’ (Ritchie and Ronald, 2001: xvii). The last section thus demonstrates that #March4Justice is an example of the use of social media to subvert ‘normal avenues of speech and embodying [the] feminine voice’ (Lane, 2015: 5), through an emotionally hopeful narrative that implicates noise with effective listening as the only means to achieve reform.

Contagious Hope for Responsible Listening

Thanks to all at #march4justice today for raising your voices against misogyny and violence against women…I hope today's decision makers hear #enoughisenough [and] its time for lasting change and real justice.

That the ‘hear me roar’ narrative was hopeful is exemplified by the above tweet from Julia Gillard following the physical march in 2021. In common parlance, the term ‘hope’ is used as a mantra to express a wish, dream, or even optimistic thinking to make the experience of the world ‘more liveable’ (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019), and the dictionary definition is ‘to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or to be true’ (Meriam Webster). In Greek etymology, however, the word for hope is elpis – an expectation, trust, and confidence – which conveys more than just wishful thinking or mere optimism. It represents the transformative expectation of a positive outcome, and it is often metaphorically expressed as a beacon of light in the darkness. Indeed, Desmond Tutu has said: ‘hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness’. It is argued that the possession of hope is one of the key desires in life and that it is facilitative of strength, which in turn brings change. Here we can see that the repetition of a simple utopian impulse to believe in the power of women's voices creates an emotional pattern for the hope of change to prevail. As discussed above, the narrative becomes unifying because the individual messages are ‘characterised by repetition [and] restating’ (Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012: 278), and they evidence a contagious transformation from anger towards the promise of hope. The potential of hope embraced and pursued, because of sustained exposure to others who express sentiments of hope, is cumulatively significant:

Women and men supporters, please use your voice…to change who gets to make the rules/laws of this land. Get loud as we will no longer be silenced. Things need to change

On Monday I will go to #march4justice filled with anger & frustration about how our laws fail women. Inspired by so many women I will also march with great hope & renewed commitment to make the changes we must make to ensure women can live free from violence.

Just back from attending #March4Justice An inspiring nationwide ROAR that gives us a ray of hope that real change might be coming.

The tweets above demonstrate that while anger persists, hope is articulated as a movement of the body towards renewal – to a place of safety. At the surface level, these tweets may reflect the optimism associated with popular visions of hope, with a ring of inspiration. However, at a deeper level, they also reflect an understanding of hope that is Aristotelian in nature: hope is ‘the expectation associated with a mental picture of the nearness of what keeps us safe and the absence or remoteness of what is terrible’ (Aristotle: 1383a). The idea of tomorrow bringing hope engages a narrative of futurity where fear is expected to dissipate and be more remote and/or absent. When darkness and adversity surround us, it is hope that binds the present to the future; it implicates a promise to reach an end goal (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019). That end goal is a society where women are listened to, believed, and protected. But what does it mean for the law to ‘responsibly hear’ the voices of women?

When Will the Law Listen?

The ‘hear me roar’ narrative is judgment beyond the juridical nature – it is collective emotional storytelling that seeks justice for the law's failure to listen. As the analysis has demonstrated, emotions narrated through hashtags is one process through which individuals contribute to the collective shaping of desire in relation to social, political, and legal processes. For White, ‘the reality which lends itself to narrative representation is the conflict between desire . . . and the law’ (1980: 16), and social media provides a breeding ground in which this conflict proliferates. The hoped-for change expressed through the ‘hear me roar’ narrative highlights social media as an alternative site for responsible listening. As a distinctive mode of paying attention online, the hashtag facilitates ‘considered practices of listening’, by (at a minimum) enabling women to listen to each other as they ‘claim agency and rearticulate problematic norms’ (McDuffie and Ames, 2021). But more than this minimum is required to provoke the type of ‘seachange in the mode of law's presence’ (Delage et al., 2019) that would mean the law could truly ‘listen’. Recent scholarship has pointed out that inadequate listening practices within Australia's legal institutions involve a refusal to listen by silencing women's voices; eliciting stories but failing to listen; and selective listening that resists change (Ailwood et al., 2023). It is this refusal to listen, which the ‘hear me roar’ narrative addresses:

Today we marched for justice. The voice for change is loud. When will they listen?

This tweet expresses a common lament within the hashtag: ‘When will they listen?’. The question belies the weariness in demanding change. And yet, ironically, the then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison refused to attend the march4justice rally at Parliament House, and instead sparked controversy by commenting that in other countries, this kind of protest may have been ‘met with bullets’. These comments are the opposite of what it means to ‘responsibly hear’ women which is grounded in a willingness to embrace change and an openness to transformation (Ailwood et al., 2023). Dreher and Mondal have argued that the key aspects to the ‘politics of listening’ are ‘openness, receptivity, attentiveness, and responsiveness’ (2018, 5), and as such, the importance of contesting and challenging dominant, yet ‘inadequate’, listening practices in relation to violence against women becomes all the more stark. To understand listening as a form of ‘response-ability’ is to fulfil an ethical obligation to both listen and respond to the experiences and needs of the other in a meaningful way (Loney-Howes et al., 2021). It is this concept of ‘responsibly hearing’ the voices of women that lies within the ‘hear me roar’ narrative. It connects having a voice, with being heard, and with institutional responses that effect ‘real change’. The ‘hear me roar’ narrative within the hashtag of march4justice has the potential to shift or disrupt traditional power hierarchies exercised through appropriate listening practices. The ‘hope’ is that future scholarship can harness the potential of listening to the rhetorical power of social media narratives and open avenues to challenge the structural and historical conditions that are preventing these stories from being properly heard and endorsed at law in the first place.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cassandra Sharp

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