Usos políticos y activismo feminista de las páginas web sobre violencia contra las mujeres en España: una visión a partir de las potenciales usuarias

Abstract

The use of the internet and New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT) is transforming methods of political representation and mobilization in feminist praxis. Their uses, both institutional and civic, configure and alter the public sphere and work to situate this sphere within the fundamental objectives of feminist activism. In this sense, given that violence against women is one of the principal objectives of current feminist praxis, it is necessary to examine the formation of feminist virtual communities – and online feminist praxis itself – as tools for debate and mobilization in the concrete case of the fight against gender-based violence. Although what we are proposing is a case study, of web pages dedicated to the fight against gender- based violence and the consequent formation of virtual communities based on feminist praxis, we adopt a multi-disciplinary perspective: the only one capable of shedding light on the potential of the internet and NICTs in defensive and participatory dimensions of Spanish online feminist praxis. We seek, in the first place, to identify a typology of female users of the aforementioned feminist virtual communities and their web pages, and also to systematize their patterns of consumption. We will attempt to explain ourselves in relation to the articulating characteristics of online collectives oriented toward Spanish feminist praxis and the ways in which these online communities have achieved important political gains, as in the case of the approval of the Organic Law of Measures of Integral Protection against Gender- Based Violence. Toward this goal, we will apply various categories of analysis – quantitative and qualitative ¬– of users and managers, as well as the techno-political mechanisms at play, both of the web pages themselves as well as the social fabric in which they are imbricated. The primary objective is carrying out a survey on a representative population of female users of web pages dedicated to the fight against gender-based violence, regarding the uses for politics and feminist activism of such web pages, which maintain different online collectives dedicated to the fight against gender-based violence. We will attempt to achieve a level of detail that until now has not been tackled, regarding the frequency and type of websites visited, the exchange of messages and feminist praxis material via the web, and the knowledge and use of alternative electronic media.