Women who protest – Media representation of women’s protest in Portugal and Spain in the 21st century

This paper used a mixed methods approach to study women´s protest movements in the Iberian Peninsula in the beginning of the 21st century. It first relies on Protest Event Analysis to characterise women’s protest – its organisers, its targets, its demands, and its repertoires, relying on a dataset that includes protest events between 2000 and 2022 in Portugal and Spain. It then applies critical frame analysis to study the discourse and framing of women’s protest movements, to uncover how women who take to the streets to demand gender equality are portrayed in the media, by vested actors. It uncovers two trends: the invisibilisation of women’s participation in the anti-austerity protest movement – and, consequently, the erasure of gender equality demands from the public sphere during the anti-austerity protest cycle – followed by the return of gender equality related demands to the Iberian protest sphere. These were ambiguously received – while framed as inherently political in Spain, the Portuguese media discourse continued to depict these demands as primarily private. It also addresses the emergence of TERF protest in Spain (with no correspondence in the Portuguese case).