Trans-Hispanic Networks of Feminist Solidarity: The Rise and Spread of #8M

On March 8 2019, Spanish-speaking Twitter communities erupted with a polyvocal outcry against gender violence, while simultaneous offline protests took place in cities across the globe. This paper presents the results of a multi-modal spatial and thematic analysis of regional appropriations of the hashtag #8M (8 March) to illustrate the carrefours/intersections of trans-Hispanic networks of feminist solidarity online. Through spatial, network, and word frequency analyses of #8M, we examine the hashtag’s intersections with existing transnational and regionally-specific feminist Twitter dialogues, including the #NiUnaMenos movement launched to combat femicide in Argentina and the hashtag #Cuéntalo used to protest the lenient sentencing of a group of men who raped a woman in Pamplona, Spain. By combining quantitative and geospatial analyses using Twitter Archiving Google Sheets, Voyant-Tools, and Carto with targeted close readings of tweets containing #8M, this paper traces the regional variations in a large, multinational online Spanish-language conversation about gender violence.