The Pluralization of Feminist Hashtag Landscapes: An Exploratory Mapping of Feminist Hashtags on Portuguese Instagram

Abstract

Feminist hashtags are often studied in the context of concise and highly visible hashtag movements. However, most social media and hashtag use exist outside the narrow confines of such movements. This article broadens the scope of exploration of hashtag feminisms, encompassing not only well-defined hashtag movements but also generic hashtags where feminist action might not be overtly or strategically mobilized. It grounds these explorations on the mapping of the Portuguese landscape of feminist hashtags on Instagram. Starting from four hashtags—#feminismoportugal, #igualdadedegénero, #naopartilhes, and #portugalmaisigual—this study explores hashtagging practices in 294 posts created by 101 users. Combining the analysis of a hashtag co-occurrences network with qualitative close readings, this article explores how these online practices incorporate varied typologies of fourth-wave feminist action, how a focus on intersectionality can be conducive to a heterogeneous and differentiated hashtag landscape, and how questions of effectiveness of hashtag activism can be problematized by low metrics of engagement. As such, this exploration of the Portuguese feminist hashtag landscape serves as an entry point for a critical reflection on the everyday uses of feminist hashtags, illustrating the tensions, complexities, and contradictions that such pluralized hashtag landscapes can encompass.

Introduction

As digital and social media has become ever-more integral to our contemporary quotidian lives and experiences of everyday politics (Highfield, 2016), feminism has also seen an online turn, with many activists and academics framing this digital resurgence as a fourth-wave of feminism (e.g., Aitken, 2017; Chamberlain, 2017; Dean & Aune, 2015; Munro, 2013; Pruchniewska, 2019).

Recent scholarship has studied this enmeshment between feminisms and digital technologies from a range of perspectives—exploring feminist body politics of social media (e.g., Mahoney, 2020), the connection between social media’s attention economy and activist practices (e.g., Tufekci, 2013), the relationship between existing feminist organizations and online activism (e.g., Fotopoulou, 2016), or even how feminisms can inform critical data practices (e.g., D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). Among these approaches, a significant line of research has focused on the analysis of feminist hashtags (e.g., Jackson et al., 2020). Hashtags and their political potential have long been a topic of interest for social research, in part due to their ability to place individual posts in the context of broader public conversations and their potential wide reach (Bruns & Burgess, 2015, p. 15). Scholarship can thus explore hashtag practices as a form of discursive activism (e.g., Clark, 2014; Kettrey et al., 2021; Myles, 2019).

A lot of the existing research focuses on the study of particular hashtags—often hashtags closely related to specific issues, topics, or key events (Bruns et al., 2016, p. 21, 36). These can include, for example, “acute events”—such as moments of political unrest or natural disasters—or “media events”—with hashtags that focus on concrete moments of media coverage, ranging from major sports events to entertainment broadcasts (Bruns et al., 2016). We can find examples of this focus on particular hashtags in the context of the large-scale mobilizations in the early 2010s, such as the protests of the Arab Spring or the global antiausterity movements (e.g., Dumitrica & Felt, 2020; Tufekci, 2017), as protests often became indissociable from their hashtags, for example, #occupywallstreet (Tufekci, 2017, p. xxvi). A similar focus can also be felt in the study of online feminisms, with researchers exploring a wide range of hashtag movements, such as #MeToo, #YesAllWomen, #SayHerName, or #EverydaySexism (e.g., Jackson et al., 2020; Portwood-Stacer & Berridge, 2014; Pruchniewska, 2019; Quan-Haase et al., 2021).

However, most social media use, and by consequence, most hashtag use, does not occur within the context of concise and highly visible hashtag movements. Although studies often foreground highly visible, newsworthy, or exceptional cases, most social media practices tend to take place in relatively unremarkable, everyday, and often much messier contexts (Brabham, 2015). As such, this article aims to broaden the scope of exploration of hashtag feminisms, encompassing not only well-defined hashtag movements but also more generic hashtags where feminist actions might not be overtly or strategically mobilized. It does so through an exploratory analysis of the Portuguese landscape of feminist hashtags on Instagram—starting from four hashtags concerned with issues of feminism and gender equality: #feminismoportugal (i.e., feminism Portugal), #igualdadedegénero (i.e., gender equality), #naopartilhes (i.e., don’t share it), and #portugalmaisigual (i.e., a more equal Portugal). Using a combination of digital methods and qualitative feminist analysis, which will be expanded on the methodological section, this approach enables the exploration of a vast hashtag landscape, questioning, on a first level, how does this landscape look like and what dynamics does it encompass, and on a second level, how this heterogeneous landscape relates to the potential and fragilities of social media use for fourth-wave feminism. This local mapping of the Portuguese feminist hashtag landscape will serve as a starting point for a critical reflection on the use of feminist hashtags beyond specific movements or campaigns, illustrating the tensions, complexities, and contradictions that such pluralized uses can encompass.

This focus on broader feminist social media uses calls forward the necessity of a more comprehensive understanding of everyday politics (Highfield, 2016), as within social media spaces, understandings of politics are not confined to the traditional realms of governments and established political actors. Rather, everyday politics encompasses the experiences of “ordinary” people in their everyday social media uses and the ways their political concerns become framed around and alongside personal interests and concerns. Building on this notion, Urszula Pruchniewska (2019) puts forward the concept of everyday feminism—which focuses on the exploration of feminist practices in online everyday settings, including actions carried by individuals who may not openly self-identify as feminists or actions that fall outside the scope of explicit political contestation.

This article explores Instagram as a site of everyday feminism, recognizing that within this platform, political and feminist contents coexist and are deeply enmeshed with more personal, mundane, or aesthetically oriented content. Instagram is currently one of the most popular social media platforms both worldwide, where it counts more than 1 billion users (WeAreSocial, 2021a), and in Portugal, the geographical locus of this research, where Instagram is the third most used social media platform (excluding direct messaging platforms such as WhatsApp) (WeAreSocial, 2021b). Despite this popularity, a lot of the existing research on hashtags has been centered on Twitter, rather than on visual platforms like Instagram (Highfield & Leaver, 2015), in part due to the technical ease of collecting Twitter data, facilitated by its application programming interface (API) policies (Bruns et al., 2016, p. 21). While the logic of hashtagging on Instagram follows some of the central tenets of hashtag use on Twitter, serving as markers for topics, events, locations, or emotions, it is important to consider how hashtag cultures can differ across platforms (Highfield & Leaver, 2015). For example, Instagram does not highlight trending hashtags in its platform, and hashtags can be used more liberally on Instagram than Twitter, with up to 30 hashtags being allowed on a single post. Even though hashtags are not a central feature on Instagram, they can nonetheless be an important methodological tool for constructing theme-oriented data sets for analysis (Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019, p. 1991). Furthermore, as different social media platforms, with distinct affordances and vernacular use cultures, facilitate different modes of political expression (Keller, 2019), it is important to expand the scholarship to explore the feminist cultures present within Instagram.

It must also be noted that most scholarship on online feminisms has tended to center around anglophone feminisms despite the rich insights that can be brought by scholarship based on other geographical and linguistic contexts (e.g., Jouët, 2018). The focus of the present article on Portugal as a site of study aims to contribute to expand this scholarship, bringing forward an understudied context with emerging feminist dynamics. In Portugal, online feminist movements and international hashtag campaigns, such as the #MeToo movement, have, until recently, failed to gain wide public expression nationwide (Garraio et al., 2020). For most of the 21^st century, Portuguese feminism has largely been dominated by practices of “state feminism,” with guidelines and laws being imposed top-down, both from the national and European Union legislators (Santos & Pieri, 2020), rather than by the kinds of grassroots movements and bottom-up mobilizations that can be seen as predecessors to online feminist mobilizations. As such, even though Portugal has implemented important gender equality policies, this has not necessarily been accompanied by cultural change—there is still a noticeable degree of societal resistance and skepticism toward feminism (Simões & Silveirinha, 2019, p. 2).

In this context, research about online feminist and activist practices in Portugal is still sparse. Among the emerging scholarship, researchers such as Campos et al. (2018) have explored how young Portuguese activists have critically incorporated digital and online tools into their political practices, and Marôpo et al. (2017) have investigated the significant presence of pages promoting women’s rights and gender equality on Facebook in Portugal, noting, however, their tendency to generate low metrics of engagement. However, addressing this topic is increasingly necessary because of the growing prominence of feminist discourses in Portuguese society, in part motivated by the resurgence of the #MeToo movement, motivated by a recent series of celebrity accusations of sexual harassment (Ropio et al., 2021). However, it must be reiterated that even though this article focuses on feminist practices on Portuguese Instagram, these local contexts are always enmeshed with wider transnational feminist histories and practices, thus eliciting reflections that can be significant at wider scales.

Methodology

This article starts from exploratory mapping of the landscape of feminist hashtags on Portuguese Instagram, based on the exploration of four Portuguese hashtags: #feminismoportugal, #igualdadedegénero, #naopartilhes, and #portugalmaisigual. These hashtags were purposefully selected because they reflect a clear connection with the topic under study—feminist online practices—and had a significant number of posts. The selected range of hashtags sought to ensure diversity of scope within this topic, containing different typologies of hashtags with different use cultures (Bruns et al., 2016). This included generic hashtags that encompass bottom-up uses, such as #feminismoportugal; movement-specific hashtags, like #naopartilhes; and hashtags created by institutional participants, such as #portugalmaisigual which was created in the context of the National Strategy for Equality and Non-discrimination 2018-2030. Finally, as Portugal shares linguistic proximities with other Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking contexts, it was also important to ascertain that the chosen hashtags were used in a specifically Portuguese context. This was ensured, for example, through the presence of the word Portugal in the hashtag itself, the use of specific graphic accents that are predominant in Portuguese from Portugal, as in #igualdadedegénero, or the incorporation of hashtags referent to national movements or campaigns, as in #naopartilhes, and #portugalmaisigual.

The selected hashtags were queried weekly, during 5 consecutive weeks between April and May 2021. On the first query, we identified the 100 most recent posts present on each hashtag. The following weeks, all new posts were identified. All users who posted on these hashtags were contacted via Instagram Direct Message; informed about the research, its objectives, and the extent of their participation and of the data collection; and asked for their informed consent. A total of 101 users have agreed to participate in the research, and 294 posts were collected, dating from October 2020 to May 2021. We must highlight that this is not a representative or generalizable sample but rather an illustrative sample suited for exploratory analysis.

For each post, we collected information on the publication date; type of profile; likes, views, and comments counts; captions; hashtags used; location of the hashtags; type of post; and a screenshot of the post. These data were systematically collected manually to circumvent Instagram’s restrictive API policies, abide by its terms of service, as well as to ensure ethically conscious practices of data minimization.

This research sought to center “ethics as methods” (Markham et al., 2018), following the Lusófona’s University Code of Ethics, the ethical recommendations put forward by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR, n.d.), and integrating feminist principles for ethical research with social media (e.g., Franzke, 2020; Leurs, 2017) which focus on the participants’ wellbeing and safety and seek to minimize risks. In addition to the aforementioned processes for ensuring voluntary informed consent and manual data collection, this ethical approach also focused on the analysis of aggregate data (hashtags) rather than individual data (e.g., particular users). To ensure the participants’ privacy, no Instagram content is reproduced, and no usernames are referenced in this article.

The analysis of this data set combines the use of digital tools and methods (Rogers, 2013) with qualitative in-depth readings grounded on a feminist media studies perspective (van Zoonen, 1994). The data collected and organized on csv files were converted to gefx network files using Table 2 Net (Jacomy, n.d.). A hashtag co-occurrences network was constructed using Gephi Version 0.9.2 (Gephi Consortium, 2017), an open-access tool of data visualization, to explore the relationships between different hashtags. Inspired by the approach of Omena et al. (2020), the analysis was attentive to different layers of the research object, including the hashtagging activity, its content, and the actors involved. This was complemented by qualitative close reading (Ruiz de Castilla, 2017) of each collected post and its caption, to add further depth to the analysis. The close reading was accompanied by taking notes and analytical memos with emerging interpretations. This mixed approach allowed us to take advantage of the potentialities of digital methods to map a vast landscape of feminist hashtags, giving us an overview of its wide scope, while still allowing for a critical exploration of its particularities, pluralities, and contradictions.

Fourth-Wave Feminism(s), Embracing Varied Typologies of Feminist Actions

The notion of a fourth-wave of feminism has by now entered the contemporary cultural imaginary (Chamberlain, 2017, p. 3). This fourth-wave builds upon earlier feminist practices, drawing on second-wave ideas of raising consciousness through sharing personal experiences (Aitken, 2017, pp. 6–7), and also on third-wave interests on the micropolitics of everyday life and its focus on questions of intersectionality (Dean & Aune, 2015, p. 379). Intersectionality recognizes that gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and other social features work together to shape unique experiences of oppression and domination (Crenshaw, 1991). In this light, women’s experiences (and by extension feminisms) are understood as plural and impossible to reduce to universalized and single definitions (De Lauretis, 1987). This recognition thus opens space for less-monolithic feminist movements where a variety of voices and points of view can coexist (Aitken, 2017, p. 7).

However, the use of digital and online tools is often pointed as the key distinctive feature of fourth-wave feminism (e.g., Aitken, 2017; Chamberlain, 2017; Munro, 2013). While feminist online practices have been present since the inception of the internet (e.g., Marwick, 2019)—from early bulletin boards to personal websites or blogs—the shift from a third to a fourth wave of feminism is often pinpointed in the first decades of the 21^st century, when the extensive everyday adoption of the internet, and particularly of social media, seemed to coincide with a resurgence of feminist discourses and activism on digital platforms (Aitken, 2017, p. 1). The uses of digital and social media enable a varied typology of fourth-wave feminist actions—allowing feminists to engage in dialog, educate and disseminate information, establish feminist communities, organize feminist actions across geographical boundaries, call out injustices, or organize petitions and fundraisers (e.g., Aitken, 2017; Chamberlain, 2017; Munro, 2013). Alongside these more overtly political fourth-wave practices, social media also created spaces for expressions of popular feminism ideas grounded on contemporary pop cultures (Banet-Weiser, 2018), as well as for more personal, individualized, and tangential expressions of gendered politics (e.g., Caldeira et al., 2020).

We can observe these varied typologies of fourth-wave feminist digital action in digital practices of everyday feminism (Pruchniewska, 2019), as in the case of the 294 posts collected in the studied sample. First, many of the posts in the studied sample took advantage of Instagram to establish structures of nonformal education, which takes place outside the structures of institutionalized learning (Simões et al., 2021). These posts sought to introduce and define feminist concepts, dispel misconceptions about feminism, or deconstruct established gendered narratives promoted by traditional media. This educational content was presented in the long captions that often accompany posts, in the images themselves, or through a combination of both. Echoing fourth-wave concerns, these posts sought to make feminist discourses more “accessible,” in terms of their reach, visual presentation, and the language used (Munro, 2013, p. 25). However, many posts also showed a concern with sharing credible data and statistics to ground their claims, making references to academic authors, or presenting lists of sources (at times even following academic referencing conventions), thus reproducing some of the structures of formal learning and drawing on the perceived credibility these carry.

Extending the classic feminist idea that “the personal is political” to digital platforms, some of the posts took advantage of Instagram as a space for sharing lived personal experiences of gendered inequalities. These posts offered personal testimonies of gendered discrimination, victimization through nonconsensual sharing of intimate content, or experiences of domestic violence. These testimonies could then be linked to broader societal issues, as exemplified by the case of a user who linked her testimony as a survivor of domestic violence to efforts to create awareness of the laws in Portugal that frame domestic violence as a public crime, calling on the viewers to #sesabesdenuncia (i.e., if you know something, report it). Going beyond individual experiences of discrimination and harassment, many posts also call for empathy as a feminist act, for users to put themselves in the shoes of those victimized by such injustices, and use this affective experience as a starting point to mobilize for further political actions (Papacharissi, 2016).

Finally, while the use of digital tools is often framed as the central fourth-wave feature, these practices often complement online education and consciousness-raising with mobilizations of offline protests or other in-person actions (Fotopoulou, 2016). These overt mobilization efforts were also noticeable in some of the studied posts, which included direct calls to action, circulation of petitions on the platform—including petitions to take gender equality issues to Portuguese parliament in an endeavor to enact legislative change—or calls to engage in civic actions, such as going to vote. Various posts also sought to mobilize feminist communities through the promotion of feminist events, including both in-person events, such as marches for International Women’s Day, and (in the context of the COVID crisis) a multitude of online events, ranging from art festivals, talks, round-tables, and so on. These posts often had very straightforward informational purposes, providing practical information about the events, such as its invited guests, dates, times, locations, or alternatively, Zoom links.

#Feminism(s), Intersectionality and the Pluralization of Hashtag Landscapes

As was introduced earlier, hashtags have become important political tools for fourth-wave feminism and mobilization of online campaigns. We can understand the adoption of this social media affordance, alongside the fourth-wave focus on intersectionality, as contributing to pluralization and diversification of the contemporary feminist landscape. Supported by the use of digital methods, this pluralization can be observed in the studied sample of feminist hashtags on Portuguese Instagram. With the data collected from the 294 posts in the sample, we created an undirected co-hashtag network in which unique hashtags are linked by their appearance in a same post. The network was spatialized using the Gephi Force Atlas 2 algorithm, its nodes were sized according to degree (i.e., the larger nodes represent hashtags that appeared more often in the data set), and the Gephi Modularity Class algorithm was used to identify clusters of hashtags connected by their coappearance in posts. This network revealed the existence of 1,341 unique hashtags used in conjunction with the four queried hashtags, visually represented as nodes in the network (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Co-occurence network of Instagram hashtags #feminismoportugal, #portugalmaisigual, #naopartilhes, and #igualdadedegénero. Visualization created with Gephi, layout: Force Atlas 2. The size of nodes indicates the most frequently used hashtags. Colors indicate different clusters.

The disparate sizing of the four clusters organized around the queried hashtags reflects the number of posts collected for each hashtag. For #feminismoportugal (the largest cluster, represented in red in the network), 117 posts were collected; for #igualdadedegénero (in yellow), 101 posts; for #naopartilhes (in purple), 66 posts; and for #portugalmaisigual (in green), only 18 posts. ¹ This unequal balance in the number of posts collected resulted, in part, from difficulties in contacting and receiving consent from the institutional users who dominated the posts shared using #portugalmaisigual. These clusters are thus not representative of the full scope or the size of the hashtags as they are searchable on Instagram, rather of the sample of users who consented to participate in this research.

Instagram hashtags can be used for a wide variety of purposes, not only for assembling the public around key issues but also as points of emphasis or as vehicles to seek attention and viral distribution across social media networks (Bruns et al., 2016). Hashtags can also have highly personal meanings, illustrating the diverse ways in which individual users can engage with a topic or issue (Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019).

These multiple orientations and diverse usages are noticeable when looking at the network of co-hashtags, particularly in the larger red and yellow clusters that are organized around the queried hashtags #feminismoportugal and #igualdadedegénero, respectively. We can think of these hashtags as keyword hashtags (Bruns et al., 2016, p. 35)—somewhat generic terms that offer too broad a scope to prompt focussed topical discussions or communities. In this way, these hashtags can group diverse feminist concerns, reflected by the wide range of hashtags that co-occur in these clusters—with hashtags on topics as distinct as pregnancy and parenting, toxic masculinity, fitness and healthy lifestyles, business, anti-racism, anti-discrimination of Roma people, feminist literature, LGBTQ+ rights, workers’ rights, body positivity, feminist history, mental health, anti-gendered violence hashtags, anti-sexual harassment hashtags, sex-positive hashtags, and more descriptive hashtags referring to moods or locations.

Smaller and more peripheral clusters in the network further illustrate this diversification of feminist concerns. As the modularity class algorithm used on Gephi identified clusters based on the coappearance of a set of hashtags in the same posts, a number of small clusters emerged, organized either around a few users who shared specific use conventions or, in some cases, around single posts. These clusters can reflect quite specific concerns or understandings of feminism, as the powder blue cluster on the bottom-right of the network exemplifies. This cluster represents a single post made on the occasion of the international day for elimination of violence against women (signaled by an extremely long hashtag), emphasizing the need for women to learn self-defense and accompanying the post with multiple hashtags related to #mma, #boxing, and other martial arts.

We can understand the diversification observed in the studied hashtag landscape in light of the cultural imaginary that frames fourth-wave feminism as particularly prone to intersectional awareness (Pruchniewska, 2019, p. 28). In this context, digital and social media platforms are seen as entities providing a space for diverse feminist concerns, shared by people with different backgrounds and lived experiences, many of which were previously excluded from the White and middle-classed notions of dominant feminisms, and thus largely invisibilized (Aitken, 2017, p. 7). This pluralization opens space for foregrounding differences among, and within, women’s experiences, thus disrupting fictions about presumed “universal” and common experiences (De Lauretis, 1987), which can often default on the narrow concerns of White, middle-classed, able-bodied, western feminisms. This concern with plurality and intersectionality was, at times, overtly recognized in the studied posts, with hashtags like #interseccionalidade or #feminismointerseccional being used several times. It also emerged in more indirect ways, as in posts that openly addressed the intersecting specificities of the struggles for equality of minoritized communities in Portugal, for example, those of Portuguese Roma women, or, occasionally, in more practical concerns with the accessibility of the shared posts, through efforts like adding textual descriptions of visual content or captioning videos that sought to address the diverse needs and lived realities of feminist users.

However, we must note that the diversity within the studied sample also revealed the coexistence of varied, and at times contradictory, visions of feminisms. We could see this, for example, in terms of the different gradations of alignment with a feminist position or identity: While some hashtags quite straightforwardly align the posts and their creators with feminism, such as the hashtag #soufeminista (i.e., I am a feminist), others point to more diffuse notions of female empowerment, using hashtags like #girlpower or #womenempoweringwomen. This opens spaces for the coexistence with postfeminist views (e.g., Gill, 2016), as seen, for example, in the enmeshment of feminism with beauty concerns, with body-positive hashtags, such as #influencerplussize, or as exemplified by a post where a user identifies herself as a #feministhairdresser and frames #instabeauty choices, like embracing one’s gray hair, in empowering terms. This postfeminist and neoliberal understanding of feminism (Rottenberg, 2014) also allows for the integration of commercial content in feminist discourses, for example, in posts using the hashtag #igualdadedegénero to advertise manicures and pedicures for “both men and women, because everyone deserves to have well-cared-for hands and feet.” In this postfeminist light, feminism can be presented as a personal exercise of self-improvement and assertion of self-worth, with calls to “be determined in realizing your dreams” and “practice self-care.” These views frame feminism as a personal choice and responsibility, glossing over structural inequalities and collective efforts needed to address them (Rottenberg, 2014, p. 420) and, as such, clashing with the overtly political calls for feminist action noted in some of the posts explored earlier. The positive tone of these messages fits particularly well with the dominant culture of Instagram, which often privileges idealized and aspirational content that can be presented according to Instagrammable aesthetics (Leaver et al., 2020). As Kettrey et al. (2021 p. 1842) note, this embeddedness of hashtag feminisms in a context of inherent postfeminist contradictions enables the visibility and potential popularity of these practices, while also constraining their meanings and impacts.

We can further observe the pluralization of this vast feminist hashtag landscape—with over 1,000 different, if at times interchangeable, hashtags—at a linguistic level. This was especially noticeable in the context of Portuguese hashtags, as the use of the Portuguese language prompted considerable semantic variation, with small differences between synonymous hashtags, like #igualdadedegénero and #igualdadedegenero, emerging because of the use (or lack thereof) of graphic accents. These small changes can also signal shifts between different linguistic contexts—for example, with género being almost exclusively used by Portuguese-speaking users from Portugal, gênero by Portuguese-speaking users from Brazil, and genero presenting posts from varied contexts. These competing hashtags can thus divide users’ attention and scatter potential feminist communities (Bruns & Burgess, 2015, p. 17–18).

As was seen, although the studied hashtag landscape was built from four thematically consistent hashtags, the hashtag co-occurrences network revealed the existence of interconnected and yet heterogeneous clusters, aggregating a wide variety of purposes and orientations around a shared topic (Bruns et al., 2016; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019), which can hold contradictions and tensions. This pluralization of orientations seems particularly prevalent in hashtags that are widely used in uncoordinated manners—that is, hashtags that are not linked to one specific creator or movement. In these contexts, there is no way to ensure control over the central message of such hashtags, thus risking the dilution of presumedly shared frames of understanding and feminist identities (Dumitrica & Felt, 2020, p. 1826). This understanding parallels some of the critiques directed at fourth-wave feminism, which frame its increasing diversity and complexity as going beyond a mere recognition of intersectionality and as a risk of verging into a fractured movement (Rivers, 2017, p. 24).

This diversified and pluralized hashtag landscape thus contrasts with the single-hashtag-focused case studies that dominate much of the existing scholarship. Hashtags strongly connected with a concrete campaign, with narrow and actionable goals, can offer a cleaner narrative, which may be reflected in a more consistent hashtag use and posts’ content. In the case of the studied data set, this was exemplified by the purple cluster visible in the network (see Figure 1). This cluster, formed around the queried hashtag #naopartilhes, is quite theme-specific, belonging to a movement to address issues of nonconsensual sharing of intimate content online. The co-occurring hashtags largely reflect this, focusing on issues like #revengeporn, #nudes, #cyberbullying, or posts dedicated to raising awareness of the risks and negative consequences for the victims of revenge porn, using hashtags linked to #suicideprevention. The movement headed by the hashtag #naopartilhes is also linked to activist efforts to change Portuguese law—seeking to make the sharing of nonconsensual porn a public crime in Portugal—through petitions that aimed at taking this issue up for discussion in the Portuguese Parliament. The successful collection of the necessary signatures to take this issue to parliament was celebrated with the hashtag #vaiserlei (i.e., it will be law).

As this exploration suggests, the contrast between single-hashtag movements and the analysis of broader hashtag landscapes can reveal compelling dynamics of diversification and pluralization, but it can also raise pressing questions regarding the possible political “effectiveness” of such generic and all-encompassing hashtags. This pluralized hashtag landscape can help to raise visibility to a wide range of feminist issues, thus drawing on and expanding the potential of discursive activism (e.g., Clark, 2014; Kettrey et al., 2021; Myles, 2019)—normalizing diverse feminist concerns, expanding the scope of social discourse and feminist media representations, and helping to change the cultural consensus. However, broad feminist hashtags can end up becoming mere repositories of parallel, and at times diverging, conversations on a shared topic, with users who fail to engage with each other. These observations point toward a lack of concerted and centralized efforts to strategically use hashtags to create a unified feminist community on Instagram. As Tufekci (2017, p. 77–78) observed in the context of Twitter hashtag movements, uncoordinated and seemingly leaderless mobilizations often lead to a “tactical freeze,” lacking in established decision-making processes and mechanisms for collective action. Similarly, many of the posts within the studied hashtags seem equally unlikely vehicles to coordinate collective feminist action to affect structural changes. This question of effectiveness is further exacerbated by the difficulties in mobilizing engagement with such posts, as will be explored in the following section.

Fleeting Feminist Engagements

While the studied hashtags are broadly aligned with a feminist, and thus political, theme, they are nonetheless embedded within the commercially oriented ecosystems of social media platforms like Instagram, which are largely ruled by logics of popularity that often demand the strategic pursuit of attention and visibility (Hutchinson, 2021; van Dijck & Poell, 2013). Tacitly acknowledging these dominant logics, we can see that some of the posts in the studied sample incorporated various attention-seeking strategies in their production (Hutchinson, 2021, p. 35)—for example, the use of multiple hashtags (on an average of 12 per post) can be read as an attempt to boost exposure on social media (Bruns et al., 2016), and some posts even include direct instructions to viewers to like, comment, and share the content. These efforts can be understood as practises of algorithmic activism (e.g., Treré, 2018; Tufekci, 2013), which recognize the importance of social media metrics for gaining widespread reach and granting a sense of “legitimacy” to contemporary political messages, thus relying on the strategic “gaming” practices of these social media platforms to trigger algorithmic promotion, increasing the posts’ visibility and traction.

However, despite these overt strategies, most posts in the sample tended to attract quite low amounts of engagement, with a median number ² of 24 likes and 1 comment per post. Although we recognize that social media engagement metrics do not directly correlate with the general acceptance and visibility of the political messages carried within posts, metrics such as numbers of retweets and replies (which on Instagram can find their indirect analogs in number of likes and comments) can nonetheless serve as indicators of hashtag community building and participation (Bruns & Burgess, 2015, p. 21). As such, these observations suggest most posts in this hashtag landscape have limited reach and connective potential.

As was seen earlier, generic hashtags like #feminismoportugal and #igualdadedegénro, more prone to pluralization, tend to lack the kind of central coordination that is necessary to practices of algorithmic activism. By contrast, theme-specific hashtags like #naopartilhes seemed to be able to better mobilize attention, as the top 15 most-liked posts in the sample were all found under this hashtag, created by a single user who spearheads the movement, and directly referring to the issue of nonconsensual sharing of intimate content. Posts related to the #naopartilhes movement were widely shared, including by elected politicians who took the issue to parliament, thus increasing the media visibility and political legitimacy of the movement. The studied posts made by the creator of #naopartilhes garnered consistently high visibility metrics—all with over 1,000 likes, and the most liked post with over 80,000 likes, in a clear disparity with the low median number of likes per post in the studied sample. This reflects the importance of not only practises of algorithmic activism (Treré, 2018; Tufekci, 2013) but also hashtag movements being circulated in wider media ecologies and in mainstream media (Tufekci, 2013, p. 856). In contrast, without this level of strategic and collectively mobilized algorithmic action, the diverse range of feminist concerns brought forward by the studied pluralized hashtag landscape can remain unheard.

In a similar vein, the 50 most-liked posts in the studied sample were created by 14 unique users, many with accounts specifically dedicated to activist efforts—among them was the aforementioned creator of #naopartilhes. These observations echo the findings from previous studies on social media platforms like YouTube, which highlight how attention tends to be concentrated around a small minority of highly visible key users (Hutchinson, 2021, p. 40). These highly visible users can, at times, be seen as unofficial spokespersons for these otherwise leaderless feminist movements (Tufekci, 2017, p. 79). These underlying logics of popularity and the power imbalances they create complicate utopian claims that social media participation has democratically leveled the playing field, allowing everyone an equal platform.

While there is significant scholarship on the negative impacts of online attention, including online hate and harassment (e.g., Shepherd et al., 2015), less attention seems to have been dedicated to the possibility that such feminist posts online can often be simply met with general inattention, reflected in low popularity metrics. The issue of lack of engagement is often connected to the literature on slacktivism (e.g., Glenn, 2015) that often posits the lack of “effectiveness” of online activism against other “more effective” forms of political participation—more often than not offline action. However, as was shown, this threat of inattention is often more closely linked to specific kinds of online feminist engagements—namely those produced by “ordinary” users and outside the scope of highly visible hashtag movements. As such, it should not be seen as negating the political potential of all online feminist action. Instead, this recognition calls for a greater attention to the specificities of distinct uses and different typologies of action central to fourth-wave feminism, rather than addressing it as a homogeneous movement.

Conclusion

While a lot of the existing scholarship on feminist hashtags focuses on specific and highly visible hashtag movements, this article sought to expand the exploration of feminist practices to the wider social media cultures that exist beyond these spaces of strategic and deliberate coordination. Through its analysis of the wide landscape of Portuguese feminist hashtags and their co-hashtag networks, this article foregrounds both the varied typologies of fourth-wave feminist actions that can be adopted on Instagram and the diversity and possible pluralization of feminist concerns that can occur within its feminist hashtags landscape.

These explorations and resulting insights were facilitated by the critical adoption of digital methods, enabling an expanded analysis that allowed for an overview of vast amounts of data and complex relationships established between different elements under study. This approach also allowed us to study hashtag practices beyond the high-visibility users and movements that can dominate our understanding of platforms like Instagram, being attentive to the practices of “ordinary” users who are often overlooked by social media research (Omena et al., 2020 p. 3) despite comprising the majority of users.

Using four Portuguese hashtags concerned with issues of feminism and gender equality as the starting point, this article identified over 1,000 unique feminist and feminist-adjacent hashtags used in conjunction with them. In part linked to the fourth-wave focus on intersectionality, the hashtag co-occurrences network revealed the existence of interconnected and yet heterogeneous clusters, addressing a wide range of feminist perspectives and concerns—ranging from intersectional views on feminism that acknowledge the crosscutting struggles for LGBTQ+ rights or worker rights, among others, to addressing concrete issues of nonconsensual sharing of intimate content, even incorporating postfeminist and neoliberal understandings of feminism (Gill, 2016; Rottenberg, 2014). These observations revealed that the Portuguese hashtag landscape of Instagram is plural and even messy, as the hashtags aggregate a wide variety of purposes and orientations around a shared topic (Bruns et al., 2016; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019), thus revealing a set of feminisms that resist an easy definition and solidification into any single community. This opens space to a wide range of feminist concerns, including intersectional concerns that can often be excluded from dominant White and middle-classed notions of feminism.

Although it is not necessary that online feminisms fit into unified and simple definitions, nor is that possible in the context of contemporary feminisms which are (or should strive to be) intersectional, it is still important to question whether the kind of pluralization that was observed in studied hashtag landscape could risk diluting the collective and overtly political nature of feminist activism, verging instead into neoliberal views that anyone and anything can be “feminist” as long as they feel like it (Favaro & Gill, 2018, pp. 61–62). Moreover, this pluralization, lacking a unified concern or key actors, can limit the possibilities to organize collective action and strategically mobilize campaigns (Tufekci, 2017, p. 77–78), thus potentially limiting the reach and range of action of these feminist hashtags. This pluralized hashtag landscape thus allows for discursive activism that raises much needed (albeit limited) attention to a wide range of problems. However, it can struggle to offer tangible solutions and agendas, thus limiting its transformational potential (Kettrey et al., 2021). This contrasts with hashtags strongly connected with concrete campaigns and with clearly identified central key actors, like #naopartilhes, which offer a clear shared frame of understanding and a well-defined feminist target, which can be helpful to mobilize collective action (Dumitrica & Felt, 2020, p. 1826).

However, recognizing the tensions and nuances contained within feminist hashtagging practices, we must acknowledge that unified and thematically consistent hashtags are also not without their perils. These unified hashtags risk falling into the same homogenizing tropes that reduce women’s multiple experiences to a single voice and concern (Myles, 2019, p. 519), thus abandoning the core tenet of intersectionality that underlies fourth-wave feminism. Once again, this highlights the inherently contradictory space occupied by hashtag feminism (Kettrey et al., 2021), which must find a delicate balance between creating awareness and visibility for a wide range of feminist issues and strategically mobilizing toward sustained collective action.

The recognition of both the possibilities and fragilities of contemporary political uses of social media platforms complicates simplistic and utopian views of social media as an empowering tool. Showcasing the diversity, plurality, and contradictions that can be embedded in feminist hashtag landscapes highlights how different practices and different typologies of action within digital fourth-wave feminism can hold different types of political potential, recognizing, for example, that generic hashtags and thematically oriented hashtags potentiate different degrees of engagement and possibilities for strategic uses of social media for activist mobilization. Although we cannot deride the discursive and symbolic power of social media and hashtag feminism to raise visibility to feminist issues and normalize these conversations in the online public sphere (Papacharissi, 2016), we must recognize that not all use of feminist hashtags is necessarily conducive to high levels of political engagement, both on the part of those using feminist hashtags and those interacting with them, as exemplified by the overall low metrics of engagements observed in this study.

Furthermore, although this exploratory mapping of the landscape of feminist hashtags on Portuguese Instagram has brought valuable insights, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of using hashtag-based data sets for social media research. As Bruns et al. (2016, p. 21) note, hashtags provide data that are easy to track and capture. However, not all relevant feminist posts and conversations on Instagram occur in the context of hashtagged posts, much less, given the pluralization of the Portuguese hashtag landscape, within the context of the queried hashtags. The choice to accompany a post with a feminist hashtag may be seen as signaling a desire to perform these political conversations for wider audiences (Bruns & Burgess, 2015, p. 19). As everyday uses of Instagram are often directed at smaller audiences of friends and acquaintances, these feminist conversations might occur outside the public visibility of hashtags, in nonhashtagged posts or through the use of ephemeral features like Instagram Stories. Not using hashtags can also be a deliberate strategic choice to deflect attention (Gerrard, 2018), especially given the sensitive nature of certain feminist topics and the backlash they can incite (Harvey, 2020, p. 125).

Newer Instagram affordances, like the possibility to search for keywords, already being implemented by Instagram in several English-speaking countries (Carman, 2020), can help to extend future research beyond hashtagged content. Furthermore, as different social media users might have different comfort levels to engage with feminism online (Marwick, 2019, p. 322), it is also important to consider varied forms of engagement beyond posts themselves, including below-the-radar practices, such as the use of private groups or ephemeral content (Artieri et al., 2021) or the prevalence of small acts of engagement, such as liking, commenting, or resharing content (Picone et al., 2019). Research on fourth-wave feminism and, particularly, feminisms on Instagram thus continues to call for innovative methodological approaches.