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

2020年7月，埃及掀起了一波有影响力的社交媒体激进主义浪潮，挑战基于性别的暴力(GBV)，其中一个动员标签是#(我们不会沉默)，这就是这篇论文的名字。在这场特定的埃及运动中创建和激活的账户，代表着整个地区反性别暴力数字行动生态系统的一小部分，但却是重要的一部分。自2011年以来，该生态系统的可见度一直在增长，并在新冠肺炎的背景下加剧了这一生态系统，本文试图探索这一生态系统。在其中，我们看到一些账户引导着地方的动态，一些账户几乎完全专注于当地问题，根据当地妇女的具体斗争用当地口语化的方言制作内容，而其他账户，包括来自埃及的例子，仍然以当地变化为中心，但同时旨在参与关于女性身份的更广泛的对话，并寻求创建跨国界社区。这些差异不仅影响制作的内容，还影响账户的身份；他们如何理解和框定他们面临的问题以及他们提出的解决方案；以及他们在其中形成和运营的网络。在这样做的过程中，他们复制和挑战(往往同时)从地方到国家、区域到跨国的各种规模的现有地方结构。这项研究承认了(主要)年轻的、(主要)女性活动家的本体论机构，在围绕地点和地点的这些话语中，她们经常被构建为被动的接受者。这篇论文试图利用这些充满活力和创新，但到目前为止还没有得到充分研究的激进主义场所，来加深我们对数字空间中地点和地点如何塑造以及如何被女权主义激进主义塑造的理解。这项研究提供了一个及时的干预，挑战了关于全球公众的普遍互联网的话语，经常与#MeToo有关，同时也使我们在网络女性主义文学中看到的西方主导的跨国和特定的本地化的二元化存在问题。我的研究使这些框架变得复杂，展示了数字性别激进主义中地点和地点运作的复杂和多样的性质。我将我的研究重点放在中东和北非(MENA)，特别是摩洛哥、阿尔及利亚、黎巴嫩和埃及，在研究期间，所有这些国家都看到了重大的行动浪潮，以开始解决当前学术以西方为中心的性质，这种性质与全球南方正在出现的过多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85个活跃的社交媒体账户，使用多模式方法，结合对20名活动人士的观察和对社交媒体内容的分析，利用社会运动理论框架阐明本地化、非本地化和地点创造的动态过程。

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.