Traveling metaphors in a feminism without borders: Analyzing metaphors and floating signifiers in the tweets of the ‘Non una di meno’ feminist network in Italy

Abstract

The advent of commercial social media provided social movements with new opportunities but also new challenges. Some of these challenges arise in the process of developing the frames through which social movements articulate their demands and communicate them to their members as well as their audiences. An extensive literature documents that, before the advent of social media, social movements used to frame their messages in fairly centralized decisionmaking processes and then convey them via alternative media (e.g. leaflets) as well as mainstream media (e.g. TV, radio). Large scale adoption of commercial social media substantially complicated the picture. Claiming that social media swiped away the need for centralized framing by social movement leaders would be largely misguided. However, it is fair to say that social movements had to re-adjust their framing strategies in order to convey its messages to a public that seems to be relatively unwilling to engage in social mobilization, increasingly exposed to globalized news, and particularly eager to communicate via commercial social media platforms. Based on the above, this paper sets off to offer an analysis of the narratives that the Italian feminist network ‘Non una di meno’ shares with the public via its official Twitter account (@nonunadimeno). Firstly and based on offline ethnographic engagement, this paper will argue that Non una di meno operates as an ‘institutionally enabled network’ that frames its message through a combination of centralized decisionmaking and social media crowdsourcing. Secondly and based on a combination of online and offline ethnographic observations, this paper will argue that one of the processes of frame production in the context of Non una di meno involves concertation and coordination with other feminist movements and networks elsewhere in the world. Thirdly and connectedly, this paper will argue that these two processes often result in the production of social media narratives that privilege affect and that tends to be rather unspecific regarding the actual objectives of Non una di meno as a network. Fourthly and finally, this paper will argue that all of the above trends manifest themselves in language through frequent deployment of metaphors and/or floating signifiers that are oftentimes borrowed from other feminist movements elsewhere in the world.