Feminist activism on Facebook: a comparative analysis of the pages Não me Kahlo (Brazil) and Capazes (Portugal)

Abstract

Taking into account feminism as a social movement and digital activism, we comparatively analyze the Brazilian and Portuguese feminist pages with the largest number of followers on Facebook, respectively Não me Kahlo e Capazes. In this exploratory study, we used the Netvizz tool to map the contents published in March 2016, in a quanti-qualitative analysis. The results underline similarities in the themes addressed that point to an identity link (Pereira, 2011) between the two profiles, but also different feminist ‘nodes’ (Tomazetti, 2015) depending on the characteristics of each page and the context of the countries. In the Portuguese page, individual and personal narratives prevail, in an intimate and confessional tone, with little explicit political-party positions, in a first-person feminism, close to what Galloway (1997) calls conservative cyberfeminism. In the Brazilian page, the discourses are strongly politicized, in reactive, demanding or denouncing tones, which refer to feminism as a collective cause, in what Boix and Miguel (2013) call social cyberfeminism.