From #YoSíTeCreo to #SeAcabó: An exploration of the traces of the mobilization of rage in feminist digital activism in Spain

Abstract

The mobilization of Spanish feminist digital activism in April 2018, which followed the public sentencing of the five members of the so-called La Manada (The Pack) for sexual assault, was a milestone that marked the beginning of legislative and social changes in the frameworks of the intelligibility of sexual violence. The mediatization of feminist rage had concrete political, legislative and social effects that lead us to reflect on its politicizing and transformative power. This article analyses the hashtags linked to two fundamental moments in the mobilization of feminist rage in Spain: #YoSíTeCreo (I do believe you), related to the La Manada case in 2018; and #SeAcabó (It's over), which arose as a response to the former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, forcibly kissing national team player Jennifer Hermoso in 2023. We will explore both the mobilizing capacity of mediatized rage in Spanish feminist digital activism against sexual violence as well as its epistemic character. In this sense, we assert that the representation and expression of rage in the digital space is shown as a tool capable of revealing knowledge about violence that is not always visible. The rage articulated in the circulation of the hashtags analysed provides insight, this article argues, not only into the subjects who express rage but also into the context in which they express it. In this way, the discursive dimension of hashtags accounts for the genealogy of a digital counter-discourse. This type of counter-discourse destabilizes the frameworks of intelligibility of sexual violence in Spain through the shared expression of anger.