Mediatisation of Women's Rage in Spain. Strategies of discursive transformation in digital spaces.

Abstract

The chapter aims to identify the ways in which digital feminist initiatives, which have mobilized to construct resistance through affects and emotions such as pain, anger, indignation, and rage, are articulated. It explores the mechanisms that either shut down or make discursively intelligible women's rage opposing the prevalence of different types of violence and current misogynistic backlash. We will address different axes of analysis that make up the mediatization processes of women's rage, such as the productive dimension of rage and its capacity for politicalizing discursive transformation, the construction of the subjects who enunciate rage in terms of credibility and their capacity for agency, or discourses in which the expression of rage reveals inequalities and oppressions. Through its interrogation of the mediatization of women's rage, the chapter raises critical questions not only about how and from which positions rage, anger and indignation are named, but also about how new narrative modes of occupying such rage in digital spaces are constructed. This will be addressed through the case study of the rape of an 18-year-old woman by a group of five men in Spain that became known as La Manada (The Pack), as the men called themselves. The first two court rulings, which convicted the group of sexual abuse, triggered the anger of women both on the streets and in the online environment where affective communities of digitally mediated resistance were created. The hashtag #YoSiTeCreo (I believe you) thus managed to mediate female rage and activate a political response that resulted in charging the men for rape, thereby revalorizing the victim's testimony. In this way, a challenge of patriarchal justice was initiated, provoking a revision of the penal code to meet the demands of the women.