Online Feminist Collective Action: A Linguistic Analysis of Stance in the Egyptian Twittersphere

Abstract

This dissertation examined how 18 Egyptian feminist activists affiliated with the Egyptian Twittersphere navigated their stance towards women-related issues. It also explored the nature of their communities and the nature of their activism. The study employs a purpose-built dataset compiled using Python scripts to scrape all the tweets available from a selected group of Egyptian feminist Twitter accounts between 2009 and 2020. The study identified the themes they addressed in their Twitter accounts and how the activists negotiate their individualist, relational, and collectivist feminist voices when engaging with these topics. Data were manually coded and thematically analysed using Triandis’ (1998) Individualist/ collective framework and then linguistically analysed to identify stance linguistic devices using Hyland’s (2005) stance model. The study also drew on Downing and Roush’s (1985) analytical approach to feminist identity development. Together these frameworks enabled insight into how these accounts reported the lived (and memorised) experiences of Egyptian feminists in this timespan. Findings showed that these Egyptian feminists discussed multiple aspects of their identities as Egyptian feminists in the Twittersphere, including issues around activism, women, and the use of hashtags, to report and combat sexual harassment while expressing their Egyptian feminist identities. These feminists mainly focused on collectivist themes and oriented their feminist identity development towards “active commitment” (Moradi et al., 2002). The most frequently used linguistic stance device was singular self-mentions, which testifies to the individualist aspect of their feminist identity. The coexistence between the collectivist and the individualist shows complex understandings of their identities as Egyptian feminists. Their second highest stance device is neutral “attitude markers, " highlighting a subtle need for validation and approval. Egyptian identification was an important factor that influenced how the feminist activists related to different themes, attitudes, and potential actions.