Femitags in the networks and in the streets: 50 hashtags for feminist activism in Latin America

The aim of this article is to characterize the main hashtags of Mexican feminist activism as part of the Latin American connected crowds, on the basis of a review of the most popular trends between 2016 and 2021 on Twitter . A total of 50 hashtags have been selected that, due to their repeated use, are characterized as femitags , that is, performative meta-discursive identifiers that mainly do three things: disseminate and tune in to frames of protest; extend women’s voices and slogans; and mobilize synchronic, diachronic, and transnational repertoires of collective action. These femit-ags appear in situated contexts, usually around events such as new cases of violence against women and calls to take to the streets, but with their extension, they become meta-communicative labels that articulate different activist practices. This study reveals not only their functions, but also their role as articulators of networked mobilizations, demonstrating the profound online and real-life intertwining of the fourth wave of Mexican, Latin American, and Spanish-speaking feminism.


Introduction
One of the most relevant transnational social movements in Latin America in recent years is the wave of feminist protests (García-González, 2021; Chávez-Rodríguez, 2017; Revilla-Blanco, 2019). This is a phenomenon of contentious collective action led by a very broad spectrum of women against patriarchal violences that is characterised by an overlapping and continuous occupation of online and in-person spaces. These "feminist connected crowds" (Rovira-Sancho, 2018) use hashtags not only to give meaning to their protests, but also as tools for collective action, which today is "connective action" Segerberg, 2012). In particular, the most used hashtags in Mexico, which in many cases correspond to the most used in Latin America, point to a common agenda that has at its core the fight against feminicide with a capacity for action and communication without strong leadership, in networks free of scale. Despite being owned by profit-ori-ented tech corporations, feminist crowds are appropriating the digital public sphere (Laudano, 2019; Ringrose; Keller, 2019;Portillo et al., 2022) and using hashtags to promote their demands and sustain their networked coordination. Understanding what these meta-discursive hashtags are and what functions they fulfil in the period of maximum effervescence of the fourth wave of feminism in Mexico is the aim of this study.
As has happened with other digital communication tools, hashtags may not last or may be replaced by other forms (Chen et al, 2018), which is why it is essential for academics to document their appearance, implementation and extension in the peak years of feminist protests in Mexico, between April 2016, with the first march of the cycle under the hashtag #VivasNosQueremos ("We Want Ourselves Alive"), and the present in which this study was conducted in 2022.

Theoretical framework 2.1. Feminisms in networks
In the so-called fourth wave of feminism (Munro, 2013;Cochrane, 2014;Varela, 2019;Zimmerman, 2017) organisations no longer structure communication in the feminist movement; on the contrary, as Clark (2016) points out, communication itself, from blogs to mailing lists to hashtags, has become an organisational infrastructure: networks convene and are the convening. Baer (2016, p. 19) notes that women's online activism re-establishes the basis for collective feminist politics.
Despite the gaps in access to technology, in digital networks women bypass the gatekeepers of speech: media, politicians, experts and any authorisation to speak. In the spaces of networked communication, voices and claims appear that raise "the violent encounter of the equality of the logos" (Rancière, 1996, p. 54), because what is said and denounced, for example, by victims of sexual violence, can no longer be interpreted as laments or babbling when a huge amount of testimonies reiterate and reveal a structural condition.
In no movement has the politicisation gained online been more important than in the wave of outraged women shaking the world in the second decade of the 21 st century (Kim, 2017;Thrift, 2014; Barker-Plummer; Barker-Plummer, 2015; Baer, 2016). The distribution of voices and peer-to-peer connection politicises women and makes them responsive to a broad, diverse, proliferating and translocal feminist agenda.
Digital activism is often analysed from a strictly network-centric perspective or as a minor resource of street action. This article assumes that activism today is simultaneously online and offline (Bonila; Rosa, 2015; Van-Laer; Van-Aelst, 2010). The web is not a "time out" for activism or "real action", but the place where campaigns and mobilisations take root, give feedback and spread, as co-presence is no longer necessary to activate a protest (Earl; Kimport, 2011).
In the age of digital networks, there is a trend towards "the personalisation of politics" , where organisations lose their power of representation and common people demand to speak in their own voice. People speak for themselves and "the personal becomes political", to use the famous slogan of the second wave of feminism. Women communicate, link, tell and protest in the first person and from their embodied experience. The prefiguration of another possible world, where all voices count and there are no hard leaderships, is part of the new logic of networked action of the connected multitudes.
In digital spaces, women expose their grievances and come together to form "intimate publics" (Khoja-Moolji, 2015). Activism through hashtags generates affective communities, appealing to common emotions and shared meanings (Papacharissi, 2016). Through these networked practices, the "feminisation of collective action" (Rovira-Sancho, 2018) is fostered, i.e., a growing sensitivity against overlapping forms of power and violence.
Against this view, Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller (2019, p. 74) show the "emotionally draining" labour and time effort of those who sustain feminist hashtag campaigns. Undoubtedly, the online dimension of social protest has expanded forms of participation and levels of involvement in political activism, some more intense and some less so. Activists combine in hashtags denunciations and testimonies, all kinds of images, from art to photographs or drawings, infographics, posters to call for participation, portraits of disappeared or murdered women to give them names and faces, sound and videos in songs, slogans, protests, in a multimodal repository of messages that constructs new "rules of sentiment" (Hochschild, 1979; Morales-Sánchez, 2022).
The most used hashtags in Mexico, which in many cases correspond to the most used in Latin America, point to a common agenda that has at its core the fight against feminicides, with a capacity for action and communication without strong leadership, in networks free of scale.
The aggregation of emancipatory connected crowds is often spontaneous and organic (as opposed to that promoted by the social influence industry and marketing), characterised by the articulation of weak ties (Granovetter, 1984). This implies difficulties in achieving continuity or generating stable organisation. Hashtags are precisely the discursive elements that for specific periods of time sustain this weak structuring that enables and makes protest possible.

Activism and hashtags
Digital networks offer communication and message exchange spaces between users, delimited by the protocols of their technical architecture and by algorithms, currently oriented towards the data economy.
However, communicative practices influence the shaping of technical devices, which are adapted to the demands of the market and its users. As Lomborg (2011) explains, Twitter started out as a space for expressing and reading opinions in "tweets". It was the users who started to spread tweets of others, which led to the directionality function of the @ sign and the RT (retweet) function being incorporated into the design. The hashtag or # tag was implemented as a means to help categorise information, but with its widespread use it became a "user-created metadiscursive convention" (Brock, 2012, p. 534).
Using hashtags, anyone can access content that has not been produced by the people they follow on Twitter and aggregate messages for a wider community than just their followers. Searching for a hashtag provides access to tweets that have used it. And at the same time, you can add something to that intertextual string. The meaning of a hashtag is not fixed, it mutates and diversifies in its iteration, it can expand as an "empty signifier" (Laclau, 1996) or lose its initial function and disappear, or even turn against its creators. In this way, the growing visibility of feminism has also put into circulation an online misogyny that is quickly propagated and normalized (Banet-Weiser;Miltner, 2016;Gill, 2016). The backlash against feminism often appropriates hashtags to change their meaning (Ganzer, 2014). Phenomena such as cyber harassment, trolling, dissemination of data and images of women "are some of the challenges that grow proportionally to the opportunities generated by technologies," explain Silva-Reis and Natansohn (2019, p. 394).
Hashtags, as elements of "semantic condensation" (Pfleguer, 2021), compress their meaning into a few words and are quickly recognisable. Some hashtags create around them a performative constellation or a "virtual settlement" (Jones, 1997), a conversation anchored in this discursive element that proliferates and diversifies. When shared by a broad community, hashtags are not only search terms but also frames of meaning, as they facilitate an "archival and semiotic" process (Bonila; Rosa, 2015, p. 5).
The tactical use of hashtags by women's struggles has allowed for framing, linking protests and extending agendas transnationally. Hashtags drive and shape connectivity (Sundén; Paasonen, 2019). As a strategy of connection, they enable "a second level of amplification" of feminist discourses to break into the public sphere (Barker-Plumer; Barker-Plumer, 2018).
Already since the cycle of protests that began in late 2010 with the Arab Spring (Castells, 2012), "the hashtag has become a tool for those trying to promote social or political change" (Chen et al., 2018, p. 199).
Papacharissi and Oliveira (2012) analyse the hashtag #Egypt that accompanied the revolution before and after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. During the protests in Turkey in defence of Gezi Park, the use of hashtags allowed the outrage to spread (Oz, 2016). Candón-Mena (2019) analyses the gestation of a global digital culture linked to the Internet, driven by creativity and technopolitics.
The strength of this cycle of feminist protests and their hashtags is rooted in the voice and agency of women, not in technological devices, which are precisely hacked 1 in their most predictable functions (consumer and entertainment oriented) to extend their technopolitical power. It is women who put feminist hashtags into circulation and turn them into an enabler, a piece of collective articulation that functions as a hinge for the online/offline, i.e. on-life (Briones, 2022) continuity of action and protest.

Femitags: the hashtags of feminism
From a pragmatic perspective, the most stable and repeated hashtags in the Mexican feminist community can be analysed in terms of their functions, as a toolbox for connective action.
As a versatile and multifunctional indicator, a hashtag can serve as a call for a march, documentation and reflection on what happened, a didactic instance for political concepts, a place to share experiences and show affection, evidence of violence and a case file, a complaint to the state and denunciation, a list of aggressors, motivation and enthusiasm to take to the streets.
It is women who put feminist hashtags into circulation and turn them into an enabler, a piece of collective articulation that functions as a hinge for the online/ offline The arsenal of hashtags most used by the feminist connected crowds (shared on feminist Instagram, feminist Facebook, as well as on blogs and other platforms) are what we call femitags. We do not use the word femtags, because they are not hashtags marked by the feminine condition of their enunciators, but femitags, because of their feminist character, as a political instrument available to anyone, making a parallel with the difference pointed out by Lagarde (2005) between femicide (the murder of a woman) and feminicide, the latter term being the legal marker of the ultimate violence against a woman for the fact of being perceived and treated as a "woman". 2 It is because of their reiteration and extension that femitags function, no longer as simple indexical elements, but as "metacommunicative tags" (Dear; Hoffman; Goodman, 2014). By becoming stable, femitags can be analysed as "rhetorical genres", discursive devices that help "communicating parties to reach an intersubjective understanding of the situation", according to Lomborg (2011).
A rhetorical genre is only realised to the extent that communicative practices, conventions, and expectations are socially shared and recognised among a group of users and are recurrently expressed. Femitags and their sub-genres are therefore a collaborative achievement, even if there are localised groups or individuals who initiated them. They are inappropriate and inapropriable, they do not respect author or authority, and their success or continuity depends on the crowd that sustains them. As a network act, they are a performance, not a programme: they occur and gain value the moment they are collectively activated.
Our analysis seeks to trace the small success story of some femitags as discursive markers of a protest campaign, beyond their appearance on digital social networks, as hinges or gears that sustain online/in-person action. The goal of this paper is to show the pragmatic versatility of the Mexican feminist crowds' arsenal of hashtags over a period of time, as a meta-communicative toolbox. We are interested in highlighting how they emerge, negotiate their meanings and establish their connective action-oriented functions.
Although the focus of this research is on agency and pragmatic use, it is imperative to reiterate that these hashtags circulate within the framework of applications such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, which are applications whose algorithms are designed to profit from data (Zuboff, 2015).

Some hashtags of global feminism
Hashtags for collective action enable "memetic disruption" (Thrift, 2014(Thrift, , p. 1091, breaking the silence and calling for the incorporation of new voices and protests. This is not to say that everyone has access to technology, nor that those who do have access to technology have successful conversations; marginalisation and silencing often stifle their power. As Crenshaw (1991, p. 1246) points out: "Where systems of domination of race, gender and class converge, as they do in the experiences of abused women of colour, intervention strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race will be of limited help to women who face different obstacles by race and class." One hashtag that points to the various overlapping forms of oppression is #WhyIStayed, where women tell why they endure domestic violence. It started in September 2014, with the video of an NFL player beating his girlfriend in a lift. At the time Beverly Gooden, an African American blogger, tweeted her own experience with her ex-husband and added #WhyIStayed. Testimonies began to be shared of how lack of financial means makes it impossible for many women to leave abusive partners: "I had to plan my exit for months before I had a place to go and money for the bus to get there. #WhyIStayed" (in Conley, 2017, p. 31).
In this hashtag, Clark (2016) finds a form of first-person storytelling that allows for resonance and empathy. The same is analysed by Keller, Mendes, and Ringrose (2018) in the case of the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, where participants felt empowered personally and collectively.
In the case of African American feminism, black femitags connect, multiply and deepen what it is to end racism as a woman and how the struggle against oppression is also a class struggle. Conley (2017) documents how digital feminist spaces have served to radicalise and mobilise with the hashtags #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #BlackPowerIsForBlack-Men, #WhyIStayed and #YouOkSis. As Conley explains, the hashtags of black feminism are: "...are thresholds between the lived and the liveable dehumanisation; they are sites of struggle for the politics of representation. They function as a way of renewing histories and interventions across time and space. They express desires to break social norms of violence and marginalisation, and of belonging" (2017, p. 29).
Sonia Reverter and María Medina-Vicent (2020) have analysed 35 hashtags of transnational feminism, markers of these connected crowds that began to spread their campaigns in global digital networks, many of them in English. Among The arsenal of hashtags most used by the feminist connected crowds (shared on feminist Instagram, feminist Facebook, as well as on blogs and other platforms) are what we call femitags the most relevant are #BringBackOurGirls, created in Nigeria after 276 girls were abducted by Boko Haram in April 2014. Others are #SlutWalk, #FreePussyRiot, #IAm-Malala, #YesAllWoman, #NiUnaMenos ("not a single one less")... Each one responds to a singular moment and a viral campaign.
A lot of literature analyses hashtags in English. This is why we consider it essential to document the variety and functions of Mexican and Latin American feminist hashtags, in many cases shared with Spain, in the broad Spanish-speaking region. We start from Mexico, our place of ethnographic observation, to enter this tangled web of performative markers.

Methodology
For this research, we started with a set of 40 hashtags that we first identified using digital ethnography techniques and observant participation in feminist protests in Mexico City throughout the sample years, from April 2016, the date of the first major feminist self-convocation called on networks: the National Mobilisation against Machista Violence #VivasNos-Queremos ("We Want Ourselves Alive"), and the end of 2021, after the mobilisation for the International day against violence against women. We followed the actions live and in the digital sphere during all these years, and for this study we reviewed the feminist hashtags that have been trending. We also analysed programmatically which were the ones in concurrence that were most present and implemented a "snowballing" strategy.
Using Twitter's academic API, we collected 2.5 million tweets issued between January 2016 and October 2021 in which at least one of the hashtags from our initial package was used. The tweets obtained contained no less than 275,271 hashtags used on 5,451,566 occasions in total. The most used hashtags over this 5-year period are included in Table 1.
To analyse all this, we built a data model and dashboard with PowerBi (https://powerbi.microsoft.com) to interactively explore the geographic reach of each hashtag, its volume and temporality, its contents and main authors and its linkage with other hashtags. A sample of the data obtained is shown in Figure 1.
As criteria for the final selection of hashtags, we have eliminated those that are single words (#Women, #Feminism, etc.) and those that make up backlash communities, such as #AsíNo and #EllasNoMeRepresentan (the latter two emerged against direct action protests in Mexico) or non-feminist ones such as #NiUnoMenos.
The top 5 users of this period correspond to 5 personal accounts, indicating that the leaderships in these connected crowds are contingent and distributed, a phenomenon we have analysed in a previous paper (Rovira-Sancho; Moralesi-Gras, 2023).
The interest of this research is not to analyse the tweets that have accompanied each hashtag, but rather the femitags as performative tools that articulate different repertoires for action and communication, that "do things with words" (Austin, 1982), in the networks and beyond them It should be noted that these hashtags can have different syntax and variations, as well as accents and capital letters: #NosQueremosVivas or #VivasNosQueremos. #YoTeCreo ("I believe you"), #AmigaYoTeCreo ("my friend, I believe you"), #YoSiTeCreo ("I do believe you"), #HermanaYoTeCreo ("sister, I believe you"), or even marked by country: #MeTooMx or #YoTeCreoVenezuela ("I believe you Venezuela"). They can also add dates such as #8M2021, and most of the time they go together, in strings.
To contrast our results, we also reviewed the research of Esquivel-Domínguez (2019), who compiled the main feminist hashtags in Mexico up to 2019, based on the following premises: that they were related to protests against violence against women and girls, that they had been trending in Mexico and in some cases internationally, that they had been picked up by the digital media, that they had been used by the media, and that they had been used by the media in the country's media.
In the end, we elaborated a battery of hashtags specific to the Mexican connected crowds that were revealed in many Latin American cases. These femitags are not only indexing elements but "metacommunicative tags", since they are characterised by: having been used repeatedly in one or more of the three main feminist campaigns: against feminicide, for the legalisation of abortion, against sexual violence. They are at the same time transnational hashtags, with different origins, mostly in Spanish-speaking regions.
The interest of this research is not to analyse the tweets that have accompanied each hashtag, but rather the femitags as performative tools that articulate different repertoires for action and communication, that "do things with words" (Austin, 1982), in the networks and beyond them.
We will begin with a brief genealogical description of some particularly relevant femitags. According to Foucault: "Genealogy is a particular investigation of those elements that we tend to feel are without history. It is a work of demythologisation that sets out to dislodge the hidden meanings and false semblances under which a historical reality is concealed" (1997, p. 15).
We will trace their appearance in specific contexts of activism, the way in which they are the fruit of intertexts with density in time and space, using secondary sources and data from our own ethnography.
After tracing a brief genealogy of some femitags, we will go on to elaborate a more general characterisation of the 50 in our list (see Table 2) by cross-referencing their main attributes.

Classification and genealogy of some femitags
In this section we trace the intertextual origin and transnational extension of the most emblematic femitags. Emphasising the online/in-person imbrication of feminist activism, we will start with a first classification: 1. Femitags to take the streets, i.e. that constitute calls for collective action beyond the networks, and 2. Narrative femitags "to tell and to count us" in the networks.

Femitags to take the streets
#VivasNosQueremos began as an activist campaign launched by the collective Mujeres Grabando Resistencias ("Women Engraving Resistances") in Mexico City in July 2014. Its aim was, according to their words on their Facebook page, 3 to print posters with the engraving technique in linoleum "with clear and understandable messages against violence against women, feminicides and for our right to self-defence, in order to intervene in the streets of Mexico and other countries of Abya Yala".
As Rovetto (2015, p. 17) explains, "they received seventeen posters that they circulated on the social network FB and distributed through feminist collectives in Mexico, Europe and other Latin American countries to print and paste on the streets or make political interventions in public spaces".
As a direct antecedent to this campaign, Rovetto points to the wallpapering of posters in Ciudad Juárez in April 2011, with the portraits of disappeared and murdered women by the civil association Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa ("Our Daughters Back Home") and the hashtag #HastaEncontrarles ("Until They are Found"). These images were circulated on social networks and printed on stencils, posters, and silkscreens. In 2014, the enforced disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico circulated #VivosLosQueremos ("We Want Them Alive", masculine #NiUnaMenos opened the space for a broad agenda, not only against feminicides but also for the legalisation of abortion, against women's precariousness and indebtedness, generating new campaigns such as #AbortoLegal ("legal abortion"), or the strike on 8 March Inspired by Mujeres Grabando Resistencias ("Women Engraving Resistances"), in Argentina they also held a feminist linoleum engraving workshop in 2015 with the same slogan. And after the success of the Mexican march in 2016, they incorporated #VivasNosQueremos to their call for #NiUnaMenos ("Not a Single One Less") to take to the streets on 3 June of that year.
#NiUnaMenos clearly stands out as the most relevant femitag of the whole wave of Latin American feminist connected crowds. Its genealogy is also an example of the online/offline overlapping and transnational dimension of feminist protests, with historical memory. The phrase "Not a Single One More!" was written at the beginning of this century by the poet Susana Chávez, mother of a young victim of feminicide in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. This mother was murdered in 2011 while demanding justice for her daughter. According to Laudano (2019), it was then that a feminist hashtag became a global trend for the first time: "the cyber-action that became a successful trending topic with repercussions within national political spheres and international resonance will immediately become the initiating tweet to be emulated in different causes" (p. 360).
Thereafter, many women across the continent joined the cry of #NiUnaMenos and organised their own mobilisations in their countries. At the local level, as Garibotti and Hopp (2019, p. 186) show, #NiUnaMenos opened the space for a broad agenda, not only against feminicide but also for the legalisation of abortion, against precariousness and women's indebtedness, generating new campaigns such as #AbortoLegal ("legal abortion") or the strike on 8 March. What began as a call for a march spread through networks has become a broad social movement, with many local organisations and at the same time a global campaign. #NiUnaMenos has called for mobilisations in the streets of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay, among others (Rovira-Sancho; Morales-i-Gras, 2022). And it has jumped the ocean, reaching Spain, Turkey, Germany, and Italy. According to Marcela Fuentes (2019), #NiUnaMenos "configures a multisited, multiplatform, (a)synchronic performance constellation that aims to hack patriarchy" (p. 176).
At the height of the #NiUNaMenos mobilisation in Argentina, a work stoppage was called on 19 October 2015, following the murder of 16-year-old Lucía Pérez, with the hashtag #NosotrasParamos ("We Stop") and #MiercolesNegro ("Black Wednesday"). This replicated the #BlackMonday strike by women in Poland that same month against the criminalisation of abortion. After the success of the strike, both Polish and Argentinean women and women of other nationalities in a Facebook group decided to call for an International Women's Strike for the following 8 March 2017. According to Annunziata (2020), the call for the strike in networks "constituted a milestone that connected misogynist violence with the economic and social violence of capitalism, exploitation and labour precariousness" (2020, p. 160).
The strike on Women's Day in 2017 and 2018 spread with great success in Argentina and Spain, but also in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the United States (Garrido-Ortolá, 2022). On 9 March 2020, in Mexico, the Twitter profile of a small women's collective, Las Brujas del Mar ("The Witches of the Sea"), called for #UnDiaSinNosotras ("A Day Without Us"), with great success.
The femitags we call "for stories and counts" acquire metonymic power: the part is the whole, one testimony grows and re-presents (presents again) all the others, that is to say, it condenses a discourse that generates a redundancy cascade with new voices #NiUnaMás, the original phrase from the poem by Susana Chávez, the struggling mother from Ciudad Juárez, has not been as widely used as Ni Una Menos in recent years at a global level, but it has had a constant presence in Mexico's social networks and acquired maximum power between 2019 and 2020, with a clear function of indexing new cases of feminicide victims. As a confrontation with the state, #NiUnaMás has served as a marker of impunity. In turn, this femitag bridged two distinct communities: networked, urban and young feminism, and the struggle of the families of victims of feminicide and disappearance, the latter being a more traditional, non-feminist, and territorially anchored movement (Rovira-Sancho; Morales-i-Gras, 2023).
There are a variety of other femitags calling for action in the streets. #NoMeCuidanMeViolan ("they don't take care of me, they rape me") had a one-off, but high intensity impact in Mexico in August 2019, following three rape allegations against members of the police forces. This hashtag appeared at the same time as the self-convocation of the #Brillanteada ("glittered") march, after an activist sprayed the chief of police with glitter. The mobilisation was also accompanied by #MeCuidanMisAmigasNoLaPolicia ("my friends look after me, not the police"). These hashtags circulated intensely and in strings, while in the streets of Mexico City groups of women threw incendiary cocktails at public buildings, urban transport and graffitied monuments.
Hashtags with key dates for taking to the streets are the most abundant in this wave of feminist crowds: for example, #8M (and its variants, which can include the year and even the place) for the annual call to march on International women's day; #25N as the International day against violence against women; #28S for the Global day of action for the decriminalisation of abortion. Sometimes the date is moved forward or postponed by a day, depending on the year and the call to march. Date hashtags allow the simultaneous and delocalised articulation of the mobilisations of a translocal and global feminist agenda with a common code.
Date hashtags also indicate specific local calls, such as #3J, corresponding to the huge demonstration on 3 June 2015 in Argentina, or #24A for 24 April 2016 in Mexico. The dates do not stand alone, they are usually accompanied by other femitags that drive them and that define the appropriate action and repertoire to be used, usually a march, but it can also be other repertoires, such as strike, as indicated by the successful call for #HuelgaFeminista8M ("Feminist Strike 8M"), for International women's day, #HuelgadeMujeres ("Women's Strike"), #ParoInternacionalDeMujeres ("International Women's Stoppage"), #NosotrasParamos ("We Stop"), #UnDiaSinNosotras ('A Day without Us"), extended between the years 2017 to 2020.

Narrative femitags for "stories and counts" 4
There is another sub-genre of femitags that do not call for taking to the streets, but rather stand as digital story-telling campaigns (Polletta, 2006) or "ethical testimony" (Núñez-Puente; Fernández-Romero, 2017). It is a networked discursive action that goes viral and adopts the first person singular, mainly to break the silence about gender-based, sexual and feminicidal violence.
These femitags implement the tactic 5 of telling stories and counting the number of stories, which unveils and builds a collaborative archive in the first person of something whose evidence was so scattered and silenced that it could not be assembled as such. Each account tells its own story and at the same time adds to the overall story. The account is kept in the additive sense, the testimonial account is taken into account and told, especially about sexual harassment and violence. In this sense, against any generalisation, the femitag campaigns are based on the singular case and the denunciation by iteration. The feminist politicisation of their activists occurs when the aggregative power of individual stories reveals a structural condition.
The femitags we call "stories and counts" acquire metonymic power: the part is the whole, one testimony grows and re-presents (presents again) all the others, that is to say, it condenses a discourse that generates a redundancy cascade with new voices. These femitags also trace frameworks of meaning that highlight stereotypes and the complicity of the state in gender violence and its impunity. They show the continuity between jealousy in dating, harassment and feminicide, in what has come to be called the "violentometer", 6 with its varying degrees of the same problem.
In our archive we have found two sub-genres of femitags of stories and counts, those that serve to break the silence in the face of sexual violence and those that stage the seriousness of feminicidal violence by unveiling the cynicism of its authorised normalisation. We will call the latter femitags of paradoxical reflexivity.

Femitags of paradoxical reflexivity
Femitags that confront the ineffectiveness, omission and complicity of the state, the media, and institutions in the face of feminicidal violence, showing the vexatious conditions that stigmatise women, belong to this category. For example, #ViajoSola ("I Travel Alone"), #SiMeMatan ("If I am Killed") or #MisSeñasParticulares ("My Personal Details").
The present tense of the femitags opens a Jetztzeit, in Walter Benjamin's. It shows the prefigurative will of connected action, here and now, opening up the moment and making the present the place of struggle and listening, without waiting any longer or projecting #ViajoSola emerged after the disappearance and murder of two young Argentinian women, Marina Menegazzo and María José Coni, in Ecuador on 22 February 2016 (Piñeiro-Otero; Martínez-Rolán, 2016). Outrage at the media's treatment of the event led a networked community to highlight the fact that two women do not "travel alone" together. The Mexican collective Plumas Atómicas (2016) ("Atomic Feathers") made a viral video that accompanied the Facebook hashtag: "#ViajoSola. Violence against women." It was in this same context that, on 1 March 2016, Paraguayan student Guadalupe Acosta wrote a letter on Facebook entitled "Ayer me mataron" ("Yesterday I was killed"), a post that Facebook deleted a month later (Piñeiro-Otero; Martínez-Rolán, 2016, p. 23). The dissemination of this letter, both on digital networks and in various media, made the femitag #SiMeMatan a virtual settlement around which an outraged crowd of women gathered again, ready to show how many ways a misogynist crime is usually justified.
A year later, this femitag resurfaced and trended again in May 2017 following the feminicide of National Autonomous University of Mexico student Lesvy Berlin Osorio, when authorities exposed elements of her private life that appeared to blame her for her death. #SiMeMatan accompanied the rabid student demonstrations that led to the boyfriend being tried and imprisoned for feminicide.
In these chilling tweets, each woman gives the potential reasons she could be blamed if killed, such as being bisexual and indigenous, or being an investigative journalist and not choosing motherhood, or having been diagnosed with a mental disorder and being divorced. In researching the content of the tweets of this hashtag, Kadic (2019) found that "one of the first things that stands out is the overwhelming use of verbs that we use on a daily basis, such as 'estar ', 'viajar', 'andar', 'beber', 'tener', 'vivir', 'hablar' (to be', 'to travel', 'to walk', 'to drink', 'to have', 'to live', 'to speak', 'to have', 'to live', 'to speak')." In September 2017, one of the young women who had participated in the #SiMeMatan tweet campaign, Mara Castilla, a student in Puebla, was raped and killed by a Cabify taxi driver. She had written on Twitter: "#SiMeMatan is because I liked to go out at night and drink a lot of beer...".
Another femitag of paradoxical reflexivity that anticipates the horror and denounce the hypothetical possibility of disappearance and feminicide is #MisSeñasParticulares. It refers to a 2018 report where it is acknowledged that, out of more than 9 thousand registered cases of disappearance of women since 1968 in Mexico, more than 61% of the files do not specify any physical traits that could facilitate their search. Two years later, in February 2020, at the height of the protests against the feminicide of young Ingrid Escamilla, this femitag was recovered and became a trend. Here is an example of one of the tweets: "#MisSeñasParticulares ("My Personal Details") in case you have to look for me: 1.57 Brown eyes Short, straight, painted hair. Tattoo of 1 heart with 2 hands on my right thigh. A mole just above my belly button and a mole under my right eye. I wear brackets #11assassinadasaldía ("11 Murdered a Day") #Niunamás."

Femitags to break the silence on sexual violence
In October 2015, the femitag #PrimeiroAsseido appeared in Brazil, created by journalist Juliana de Faria, from the feminist collective Think Olga, to accompany and defend a 12-year-old girl who suffered a barrage of obscene insults on Twitter after her participation in the MasterChef youth competition. The supportive journalist explained that she had also been a victim of harassment when she was a minor. Within days, more than 100,000 women had shared their own experiences of sexual violence. According to what was published, the average age of the first harassment in Brazil was 9.7 years old. And this happened not only in the street, but also in the family, where girls are supposed to feel safe (Ruiz-Navarro, 2016).
A few months later, accompanying the call to take to the streets on 24 April 2016 in Mexico, the Spanish version of this femitag went viral when Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro wrote on Twitter: "When and how was your first harassment? Today from 2pmMX using the hashtag #MiPrimerAcoso ('My First Harassment'). We all have a story, raise your voice!". While a self-convened crowd of women marched in 40 cities across the country, the testimonies followed one after another on the networks. With #MyFirstHarassment, the experience of "realising" managed to transform the damage or shame into political power in the networks and simultaneously in the streets.
But the most successful femitag of this kind, with the longest duration and global reach, came at the end of 2017: #Me-Too was able to jump context, iterate and mutate over the last 5 years. Because of its brevity and simplicity, #MeToo is not only read, it is seen: it becomes an iconic unit, it becomes a meme. Launched on Twitter from the United States on 15 October 2017 by Alyssa Milano, it crossed borders and languages. Its ability to produce and connect individual stories was articulated in the Mexican case with other hashtags: #YoSiTeCeCreo and its variants, or #NoEstásSola, femitags more specifically dedicated to generating affective community, which came from the Spanish context, with the #Cuéntalo campaign in 2018, unleashed after the so-called La Manada 7 sentence.
Unlike #MyFirstHarassment, the Mexican #MeToo not only recounts a situation of harassment or violence, but also names the perpetrator. In this sense, it took the repertoire of protest known as escrache 8 to digital networks. The different hashtags that emerged from #MeToo in Mexico 9 had an unexpected intensity between 24 March and 10 April 2019 and showed the ineffectiveness (social, cultural, legal) of access to justice for women victims of sexual harassment and rape. The Mexican #MeToo, with all its variants by workplace and educational centre, had an enormous impact on public opinion and the media (Rovira-Sancho, 2023). It also marks the beginning of the misogynist wave in digital networks directed against women activists and journalists: discrediting them, threatening them and making them the target of new aggressions (Pedraza, 2019).

Femitags of the crowds connected from Mexico
In Table 1 we have marked the axes of relevance of the femitags collected. Regarding the feminist agenda, for example, we have only indicated whether the femitag initiates and has a special impact on a specific campaign of the three main ones found: -against feminicide, -for the legalisation of abortion, and -against sexual violence.
If this is not the case, it is understood that it is generalist and includes all of them, such as #8M and other dates of large mobilisations or #ViolenciaMachista ("Misogynist Violence"), #ViolenciaDeGenero ("Gender Violence"), #JusticiaPatriarcal ("Patriarchal Justice"). It is worth highlighting the relevant axis of #HuelgaFeminista ("Feminist Strike"), #ParoInterna-cionaldeMujeres ("International Women's Stoppage"), #NosotrasParamos ("We Stop"), as it marks a milestone of global mobilisation and a new issue on the feminist agenda that will become fundamental: that of undervalued reproductive work and wage inequality, tracing a new framework: the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism.
With Latin America being the second most lethal region for women in the world, it is not surprising to see the wide deployment of femitags to denounce feminicides that take on a transnational dimension: #NiUnaMenos or #Miércole-sNegro originating in Argentina, #ViajoSola, which emerged in Ecuador, #NiUnaMas in Mexico.
It is also common to create hashtags with the names of victims, such as #IngridEscamilla in Mexico, as well as many others with names and surnames that we represent in this hashtag.
For its part, the campaign for the legalisation of abortion has had its arsenal of transnational femitags, most of them driven by the Argentinean crowds, calling to take to the streets and put pressure on the legal apparatus of each country: #AbortoLegalYa ("Legal Abortion Now"), #AbortoLegal ("Legal Abortion"), #SeraLey ("It Will Be Law"), #MareaVerde ("Green Tide"), #PañuelazoInternacional ("International Scarf-Raising"), #28S, #26S.

The personalisation of politics or the personal is the political
We can also observe the recurrent use of the first and second person in femitags, especially in the sub-genre for stories and counts The "I" and the "you" are present, even combined, in hashtags such as #MeToo, #YoTeCreo or #Cuéntalo. Undoubtedly, this type of rhetorical resource coincides with what has been considered typical of digital networks: the personalisation of politics, which leaves aside mediating structures and expresses itself from the first person, from individual experience, making the personal the political. The plural, the "we" (feminine) appears in the femitags where the desire for unity of the collective is shown and the desire that none of them should be missing as a slogan of struggle: #NiUnaMenos (from us), #NiUnaMás (from us), #VivasNosQueremos, #FuimosTodas ("We Were All"), #EstaEsNuestra-Manada, #NosotrasParamos.

Building affective community and feminist awareness
Silence-breaking hashtags often appear in concurrence with those whose main function is to emphasise the value of women's voices and confirm the existence of an affective community based on empathy: #MeToo, #YoSiTeCreo, #Yo-TeCreo, #AmigaYoTeCreo, #Cuéntalo, #NoEstasSola, although in some way all femitags fulfil the purpose of connecting emotions and motivating to action, as do the following: #MeCuidanMisAmigas, #EstaEsNuestraManada, #FuimosTodas, #MarchaFeminista ("Feminist March"). At the same time, some femitags warn and inform by creating a community that teaches itself and raises awareness among peers, in a clear distributed pedagogical function, reiterating examples in #NoesNo, #BastaYa ("Enough is Enough"), #JusticiaPatriacal, #MachismoMata, #ViolenciaDeGenero.

Filing of reports as a marker of impunity
Several hashtags have the function of indexing new reports of cases of violence in a growing digital archive: #MeToo and its variants, #MiPrimerAcoso, or #Miracomonosponemos do so for sexual violence. A femitag whose priority function is the indexing of new feminicides is #NiUnaMás. It is usually accompanied by hashtags with the names of the victims. These seek not Some femitags, because of their intertextual quality, show the historical density of protests, invoke previous struggles, and weave a global dimension between local mobilisations and sometimes distant causes only to denounce and call for justice, but also to recover the memory and humanise the murdered women. For example, in the case of #IngridEscamilla, the hashtag managed to change the denigration of the leaked images of her tortured corpse for other images that associate her memory with aspects of her life, landscapes of peace and beauty (Signa_Lab, 2020).
Only in one case does a verb appear in the past tense: #FuimosTodas. This hashtag was punctual and specific: it appeared in mid-August 2019 in Mexico in the face of the media and institutional rejection of the direct action of women in the streets, breaking and burning. #FuimosTodas allowed a networked community to collectively take on the destruction and graffiti to alleviate the criminalisation of protest, at a time of enormous backlash.
The present tense of the femitags opens a Jetztzeit, in Walter Benjamin's terms (Benjamin, 2008, p. 51). It shows the prefigurative will of connected action, here and now, opening up the moment and making the present the place of struggle and listening, without waiting any longer or projecting. The few femitags that appeal to the future are imperative statements rather than expressions of utopias: #SeráLey (abortion), #SeVaACaer (patriarchy); sometimes they anticipate the future to call for action in the now and avoid the paradox they announce: #SiMeMatan (...it will be because I liked to go out at night, for example) or #MisSeñasParticulares (...in case they find my corpse). Denouncing through paradoxes is a complex rhetorical device; it involves putting oneself in the place of a future victim to ensure that this should not happen and to fight right now to prevent it.

The ephemeral life of a hashtag
In terms of duration, some hashtags can jump continents and stretch for years, such as #MeToo. Others become trending and then disappear, but can be resurrected at another time. Their duration does not serve as an indicator of success or failure, as some are one-off campaigns that fulfil their function, such as #UnVioladorNoSeráGobernador or even #MiPri-merAcoso, which trended in Mexico with the call for a march on 24 April 2016. Or #SiMeMatan, which accompanied the anger at the university after the feminicide of Lesvy Berlin.
Other hashtags remain beyond their initial purpose, which was often to call for a spatially situated mobilisation. For example, #NiUnaMenos, which emerged to call to the streets in June 2015, became a global indicator of the current transnational feminist wave. At the same time, it has become an Argentinean movement with a broad agenda, ranging from abortion to denouncing the debt. In the same sense, #MeToo has been reiterated, translated and appropriated in different variants and in multiple campaigns in more than 90 countries. There are femitags that are repeated intermittently over the years and localities, as they indicate agendas that are not resolved, such as #AbortoLegal, while global dates are repeated such as #8M for International women's day, or for calls that are repeated such as #HuelgaDeMujeres, or slogans that function as motivational frameworks, extending across Latin American time and space, such as #SeVaA-Caer ("It Is Going To Fall", referring to patriarchy) or #NoesNo (No is No).

Conclusions
The hashtags of the connected Mexican feminist crowds make up a series of metacommunicative elements characteristic of this wave of protests and show the profound overlap between street mobilisations and online activity throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In reviewing the arsenal of feminist hashtags from Mexico (which are not Mexican), we have found that they construct a common agenda of feminisms between countries: Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, Spain, Peru, Paraguay... These femitags transcend their indicative function to become performative meta-discursive elements, which sustain the weak ties of feminist multitudes, as they allow for coordinated action and the extension of frames. Femitags in their diversity thus constitute a toolbox for convening, denouncing and narrating grievances. Some femitags, because of their intertextual quality, show the historical density of protests, invoke previous struggles and weave a global dimension between local mobilisations and sometimes distant causes. They practice a memory of free appropriation, which rescues some legacies (such as the struggle against the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, the disappeared of Ayotzinapa or the Mothers of the May Square in Argentina).
As performatives, femitags acquire a strong affective connotation that vindicates life, against feminicides. For example, #VivasNosQueremos, with its emphasis on the present, is not only an invocation to take to the streets but the affirmation of a challenge that implies recognising the importance of each one, denying the possibility that there are lives that do not matter. The questioning of the state by some femitags are serious denunciations and markers of impunity. They reveal and make visible VivasNosQueremos, with its emphasis on the present, is not only an invocation to take to the streets but the affirmation of a challenge that implies recognising the importance of each one, denying the possibility that there are lives that do not matter how patriarchal violence is sustained by institutional omission, which proves ineffective in defending life and which normalises sexual violence and re-victimises the victims.
The personalisation of politics, typical of the digital era, is manifested in the abundance of femitags in the first (or second) person, calling for participation from the singular and embodied experience: one's own voice, rejecting mediation or representation. Feminist multitudes have obtained in the common space of the femitag the possibility of eluding the abstract character of universals and appealing to a "multiple generalisation": the patient and unexpected creation of an expansive "we", as Gutiérrez (2014) would say. The distribution of voices and the absence of strong or permanent leadership constitutes an experience of political power. It also makes it susceptible to backlash, to the use of the same hashtags against activists, with cybermisogyny and hate speech.
The femitags of stories and counts that are used to break the silence construct a constellation of affections and voices that manages to put together a jigsaw puzzle: an unprecedented archive of sexual violence. These femitags generate conversations that return epistemic authority to the victims themselves about what constitutes harassment or rape. The pedagogical work among peers through hashtags deserves a separate investigation, as well as the feminist consciousness-raising that reading and publishing their own grievances on social media triggers among young women.
Femitags not only sustain networks and oil protests, but also have the function of violence archive and cases indexing. The fleeting nature of networks and the corporate ownership of large platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook mean that the duration and permanence of this body of discursive evidence is not guaranteed. Only in the case of #Cuéntalo is there a public and accessible repository of the testimonies collected on Twitter, thanks to the initiative of the Association of Archivists of Catalonia together with the journalists Cristina Fallarás and Karma Peiró, which can be consulted at https://proyectocuentalo.org Documenting and preserving these testimonies posted on the networks via hashtags is essential for thinking about and diagnosing the state of the world and the efforts to transform it.

Notes
1. "Hacking is doing things with code, with machines, with words, with connections, with interventions, with bodies.
Hacking is an attitude that brings the hand and politics into play in any space and with any machine or social gadget" (Rovira, 2017, p. 111).
2. In the context of the brutal sexual murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexico border, anthropologist Marcela Lagarde (Lagarde, 2005) made the distinction, now incorporated into law in 16 countries, between any murder of women and girls (femicide) and hate crimes as a culmination of gender-based violence and impunity (feminicide). According to Lagarde, feminicides are "the result of misogynist violence taken to the extreme and are thus the most visible sign of multiple previous forms of harassment, mistreatment, harm, repudiation, harassment and abandonment" (2005, p. 1).
5. As opposed to the strategy of the powerful, the tactic corresponds to the weak and their ways of trying to get their own way. It is a matter of "clever tricks of the 'weak' within the order established by the 'strong,' an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter's tricks, maneuverable, poly-morph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries" (De-Certeau, 1984).
6. It is a graphic and didactic material that circulates in all formats and contains a classification of the various manifestations of intimate partner violence.
7. On 26 April 2018, the La Manada sentence was announced in Spain, which cleared 3 of the 5 men who assaulted an 18-year-old girl in Pamplona in 2016 of rape (sexual assault) and only convicted them of sexual abuse.
8. The escrache, which originated in Argentina, consists of going in groups to the homes or workplaces of alleged perpetrators of genocide to publicly point them out to the public.
9. Among the top hashtags of the nearly 40 that emerged during the period were: #MeTooEscritoresMexicanos ("Me Too Mexican Writers") #MeTooAcadémicosMx ("Me Too Scholars Mx") The fleeting nature of networks and the corporate ownership of large platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook mean that the duration and permanence of this body of discursive evidence is not guaranteed