Collectivism and Reasoning: The Role of Feminist Hashtags in the 'Struggle for Recognition' of Women's Rights in Brazil

In the last years, the widespread use of hashtags as a political strategy has increased in feminist movements. Therefore, online activism has gained attention within researchers from different fields such as communications and political science. Issues raised by women’s struggle have appeared through the hashtags, bringing to light topics that were non-spoken in mainstream media. In Brazil, plenty of these hashtags have become visible lately and in this paper we look more specifically at three of them that had a big impact and has reached the public sphere broadly: #PrecisamosFalarSobreAborto (We Need To Talk About Abortion), #MeuPrimeiroAssedio (First Time I was catcalled) and #BelaRecatadaEDoLar (Pretty, maidenlike and a housewife). In general terms, the first hashtag raised the discussion about legalization of abortion in Brazil; the second hashtag uttered experiences of women with sexual harassment in the country; and the last one criticized and broke down female stereotypes that appeared in local mainstream media about female social roles. Hence, this paper aimed to answer the following question: what was the potential of these hashtags to women's 'struggle for recognition' (Honneth, 2003) and to insert and develop feminist issues in the public sphere? To answer this query, we first revisited some important moments of feminist struggle in Brazil, based on the work of Marlise Matos (2010). After it, we explain the Habermasian (Habermas, 1987; 1988; 1995) conception of political participation process, followed by the notion of struggle for recognition and collective semantics with the theory of Axel Honneth (2003). The corpus of the research was constituted by Facebook posts that mentioned one of the three tags. We analysed 3.000 posts and conclude the potential of these three campaigns according to three variables: reasoning and controversy; collectivism and personal experiences.