A gender perspective on social media tagging: The case of Twitter hashtags of Gezi Park protests
Main Article Content
Abstract
Gezi Park Protests are undoubtedly one of those recent mass protests occupying an important place in the global agenda. The protests were initially to oppose the construction of the 19th century Ottoman Artillery Barrack within the area of Gezi Park without reconstruction permit. Upon police’s severe intervention to the tens of people keeping cave in the park to save the trees to be cut, the number of those who interacted with each other in social media increased rapidly, turning Gezi Park into a place for contrarian forces to unite. During the protests, all kinds of support, help and cooperation calls are made through social media. The solidarity in Gezi Park became apparent in social media content, showing a general attitude against every kind of discrimination. In this study, we argue whether the sexist discourse used by the protesters related to Gezi Park Protests has been reconstituted by the Twitter hashtags. The Twitter hashtags such as #kirmizilikadin (lady in red), #gazdanadam (gasman), #direnayol (resist ayol), #duranadam (standing man) have been studied, in the context of gender, by the technique of discourse analysis, which is one of the qualitative research methods. People use social tagging with their own words in the way how they conceive the state. The study concludes that the Twitter hashtags on Gezi Park Protests emphasize the power and sovereignty of men while focusing on the appearance and
body of women, who are commonly perceived to be an aesthetic object as indicated by the discourse analysis. Hence, this study provides a significant contribution to the field on how the actual attitude against sexual discrimination in Gezi Park Protests was reflected in social tagging.
Downloads
Article Details
An open-access CREATIVE COMMONS copyright license is used. Those authors whose works are published by this journal, accept the following terms:
- Authors will retain their copyright and guarantee the Journal the right to first publish their work, which will simultaneously be subject to the Creative Commons Recognition License CC BY SA that allows third parties to share the work, provided that its author and first publication is indicated.
- Authors may adopt other non-exclusive license agreements for the distribution of the published version of the work (e.g., deposit it in an institutional telematics file or publish it in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this journal is indicated.
- Authors are allowed and recommended to disseminate their work over the Internet (e.g. in institutional telematics files or on their website) before and during the submission process, which can produce interesting exchanges and increase quotes of the published work.