Discourse Circulation and Affective Economies of Feminist Social Media Activism: Case Studies of Two Incidents of Violence Against Women

Abstract

When an event evokes public sentiment, the resulting intense emotion needs “to do something”. An “affective public” is formed when the intense emotion of grief, fear, anger or pride circulates through messages online. (Ahmed, 2004, Papacharissi, 2016).

In 2021, such affective publics were created when two separate but similar incidents of violence against women took place a year apart in Pakistan´s capital city, Islamabad. The brutal murders of Noor Mukadam and Sarah Inam sent shock, grief and anger throughout the nation and affective publics came into form through the hashtags #JusticeforNoor and #JusticeForSarah.

This paper analyzes these two cases of feminist activism on social media in the wake of these incidents. Following Ahmed (2004), the analysis of the two hashtags reveals that the affective economies of the emotions of grief, shock, pain, trauma and anger at the horror of the murders brought together and aligned feminist activists, and the online communities and publics. Just as these emotions were capable of sliding between these two figures sideways, they could also move backwards and stick to other figures who met a similar fate in the past. Thus the emotions did the work of binding together figures and gathering together people online and offline as they called for action and justice. Their affective force pushed online feminist activism to consolidate the larger feminist movement which then rallied behind the social media activism. This made the feminist counterpublic stronger.

The online calls for justice in each case coincided with the unprecedentedly speedy trials and convictions of the murderers.