Cyberfeminism in Action: Exploring Portuguese Instagram Profiles for Gender Equality and Political Advocacy

Especially since the Covid-19 pandemia, there was a boom of profiles and pages related to feminisms on the cyberspace, especially on Instagram, about female empowerment and fighting violence against women, inciting social and political action and advocacy. In this way, cyberfeminisms collaborate with what some authors (e.g. Gago 2020) call transnational feminisms, where national borders are shortened and the internationalization of feminist agendas become more consistent, cooperative and effective. Online digital activism serves as a powerful tool for empowering marginalized groups. In this digital landscape, individuals and communities who have traditionally been on the fringes of influence can now challenge established power dynamics, reshape dominant public spheres, and play a pivotal role in steering the course and success of broader social movements (Stubbs-Richardson et al. 2023). In recent years, feminist movements and organizations in Portugal have extensively used social media as strategic tools for communication, thereby mobilizing and promoting their activities and inciting action (Cerqueira et al., 2023). This research focuses on exploring the use of cyberspaces by cyberfeminisms as specifically social media network for the practice of feminist movements. Main research question is: how do cyberfeminist Instagram Portuguese profiles foster gender equality and political advocacy? Selected Portuguese profiles were @feministas.pt, @redejovensigualdade and @plataformageni. Goals are to identify main themes and subjects, to comprehend discourse construction and image use, to understand action incitement, and to characterize engagement levels to these Instagram profiles. This study departs from a netnographic approach using a quantitative content analysis of posts and engagement analysis. Time span for analysis was the post pandemic period, from January 2021 to May 2023 with a total of 259 analysed posts. Results show that though the potential of cyberfeminisms to foster political action has been established, through a diversity of subjects’ representation and discourse construction, but also that relatively low engagement levels defy this potential.