"We will not be silent": unpacking the identities of online anti-sexual harassment movements in the MENA region

2020年7月，埃及掀起了一股挑战性别暴力（GBV）的社交媒体行动主义浪潮，其中一个动员标签是#（我们不会沉默），这篇论文也因此得名。在这一特定的埃及运动期间创建和激活的账户代表了区域范围内反对性别暴力的数字行动生态系统的一小部分，但这一生态系统的知名度自2011年以来不断提高，并在2019冠状病毒病背景下加剧，这是本文试图探讨的生态系统。在其中，我们看到了引导地方动态的账户，其中一些几乎完全关注当地问题，用当地方言制作内容，参考当地妇女的具体斗争，而其他的，包括埃及的例子，仍然以当地变革为中心，但同时旨在参与有关女性的更广泛对话，并寻求创建跨境社区。这些差异不仅影响了所生产的内容，也影响了账户的身份；他们如何理解和构建他们所面临的问题以及他们提出的解决方案；以及他们形成和运作的网络。在这样做的过程中，他们复制和挑战（通常同时）现有的跨尺度的地方结构，从地方到国家，到区域，到跨国。这项研究认识到（大多数）年轻的、（大多数）女性积极分子的本体论代理，她们经常被构建为被动的受体，在这些围绕地点和地点的话语中。本文试图利用这些充满活力和创新，但尚未被充分研究的行动主义场所来发展我们对数字空间中女权主义行动主义如何塑造和塑造地点和地方的理解。这项研究提供了及时的干预，挑战了全球公众的普遍互联网话语，这些话语经常与#MeToo有关，同时也对我们在网络女权主义文学中看到的西方主导的跨国与特定的地方二元对立提出了问题。我的研究使这些框架变得复杂，展示了地方和地方在数字性别行动主义中运作的复杂性和多重性。我的研究重点是中东和北非（MENA），特别关注摩洛哥、阿尔及利亚、黎巴嫩和埃及，这些国家在研究期间都发生了重大的行动浪潮，以便开始解决当前以西方为中心的学术本质，这种学术本质与全球南方出现的大量令人兴奋的案例研究存在紧张关系。在数字人种学的框架下，我选择了在中东和北非地区运营的85个活动家社交媒体账户，使用多模式方法，将观察与对20名活动家的采访和社交媒体内容的分析相结合，利用社会运动理论框架阐明本地化，非本地化和场所制作的动态过程。

July 2020 brought a wave of impactful social media activism challenging gender-based violence (GBV) in Egypt, with one of the mobilising hashtags being, #(We will not be silent), giving this thesis its name. The accounts created and activated during this specific Egyptian campaign represent a small, but significant part of the region-wide ecosystem of digital activism against GBV that has been growing in visibility since 2011 and was exacerbated in the COVID-19 context, an ecosystem that this thesis seeks to explore. Within it, we see accounts navigating dynamics of place, with some focusing almost exclusively on local issues, producing content in local colloquial dialects with reference to specific struggles of local women, while others, including the example from Egypt, still centring local change, but simultaneously aiming to participate in broader conversations about womanhood and seeking the creation of cross-border communities. These differences impact not only the content produced, but also the accounts' identities; how they understand and frame the problems they are facing and the solutions they are posing; and the networks that they form and operate within. In doing so, they reproduce and challenge (often simultaneously) existing constructions of place across scales, from the local, to the national, to the regional, to the transnational. This research recognises the ontological agency of (mostly) young, (mostly) female activists who are all too frequently constructed as passive receptors, within these discourses surrounding place and locality. This thesis seeks to use these vibrant and innovative, but as of yet understudied, sites of activism to develop our understanding of how place and locality shape and are shaped by feminist activism in digital spaces. This research offers a timely intervention that challenges discourses of a universal internet with a global public, frequently presented in relation to #MeToo , while also problematising the binary of the Western-dominated transnational vs. the particular situated local that we see across cyberfeminist literature. My research complicates these frameworks, demonstrating the complex and multiplicitous nature through which place and locality operate in digital gender activism. I focus my research on the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) with a particular focus on Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt, all of whom saw significant waves of action during the period under study, in order to begin to tackle the Western-centric nature of the current scholarship that exists in tension with the plethora of exciting case studies that are emerging in the Global South. Under the framework of a digital ethnography, I have selected 85 activist social media accounts operating across the MENA, using a multi-modal approach that combines observations with interviews with 20 activists and analysis of social media content to elucidate upon the dynamic processes of localisation, delocalisation and place-making using a Social Movement Theory framework.