Guiomar Rovira Sancho, Universitat de Girona
https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/106553, PDF
This article explores how political identity emerges within connected multitudes —those hybrid collectivities that act simultaneously in the street and online, where communication itself becomes a form of political being-together. Using feminist ethnography and digital observation of Mexico’s protest cycle between 2016 and 2022, it takes this case as an entry point to reflect on what ethnography can offer to political communication research: a way of understanding identity as lived, relational, and communicatively enacted. I argue that, in contemporary political communication, identity is performative and relational: it does not precede interaction but takes shape through the communicative practices of a networked multitude.
Feminist movements in Mexico, expressed through what I call femitags —feminist hashtags (Rovira-Sancho & Morales-i-Gras, 2022) like #NiUnaMenos, #VivasNosQueremos, #MeToo), offer a privileged field to understand how peer-to-peer communication and embodied protest weave new collectivities of sense. In these connected multitudes, first-person testimonies turn private pain into public claim; affects circulate, bodies gather, and cities are reconfigured as living archives of protest. What begins as a hashtag becomes a body in the street, and later an inscription in urban space —a continuum where communication, emotion, and matter co-produce identity.
The article thus proposes that the connected feminist multitude functions as both a communicative infrastructure and an epistemic challenge to modern notions of the “people,” sovereignty, and individuality. Identity, in this context, is less a label than a practice: the collective performance of visibility, care, and refusal that interrupts the silence sustaining patriarchal violence.
Situated Methodology
Political communication has been largely shaped by quantitative and experimental paradigms that prioritise messages, senders, and receivers. Yet this approach, grounded in measurement and representation, often overlooks how political meaning is lived, embodied, and collectively enacted (Karpf, 2016). Scholars such as Papacharissi (2015) have called for methods capable of capturing affective publics, while Couldry and Hepp (2016) remind us that communication is not merely the transmission of information but a practice that constructs social reality. In this context, ethnography —particularly feminist ethnography (Abu‐Lughod, 1990)— does not offer a marginal alternative but an epistemological shift (Blánquez, Flórez & Ríos, 2012). Bodies, as Butler (2015) notes, also communicate politically by gathering, by occupying space, by appearing together.
Understanding identity within political communication requires attention to hybrid communicative ecosystems (Treré, 2019)—where streets, screens, bodies, and institutions converge to produce political subjectivity. While quantitative approaches and data analysis of online interactions offer valuable insights into the scale and circulation of messages, they are insufficient to understand how identity is lived, felt, and collectively enacted. These processes cannot be grasped solely through metrics or digital traces; they demand sustained, participatory observation—placing one’s physical and digital body within the unfolding of protest.
This research involved participant observation in marches, assemblies, and occupations; field diaries, interviews with activists, and daily engagement with digital platforms where hashtags, testimonies, livestreams, and visual repertoires shaped how protest was organised, felt, and remembered.
Beyond a list of techniques, this approach is grounded in the feminist principle of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988). The “field” emerges not as a place but as a continuum between streets and networks, where political meaning is produced through bodies, digital media and shared affects. Following Latour’s (2005) idea that “the social” consists not of a stable domain but of ongoing processes of association, I approach feminist mobilizations not as fixed entities but as living networks of relations.
Ethnography, in this sense, does not merely document protest; it inhabits it and becomes one more node in the chain of associations through which feminism is communicated, embodied and made visible. This perspective expands what we mean by political communication. Rather than a linear flow, communication appears as a situated, material practice—made of hashtags on screens, bodies in the street, rage and chants. Politics is communicated not only through campaigns or media framing, but through the daily labour of sustaining protest—where collective identity is continuously formed, negotiated, and held together.
The Connected Multitude and the Feminization of Collective Action
An ethnographic approach to feminist mobilizations calls for theoretical frameworks capable of grasping their hybrid condition. It is at this intersection—between bodies, networks, and emotions—that identity emerges as a communicative process.
The concept of the multitude, formulated by Italian autonomist theorists (Virno, 2003; Negri & Hardt, 2004), helps us think twenty-first-century aggregation beyond the Hobbesian “people.” Against a sovereign unity that erases differences, the multitude—following Spinoza—“persists as plurality in the public scene, in collective action, in attention to common affairs, without converging into a One” (Virno, 2003: 21). The multitude needs neither a central command nor an “empty signifier” organizing hegemony, as Laclau (1996) proposes, because its potency lies in cooperative heterogeneity. Today, this irreducible plurality becomes visible in connected multitudes acting both in situ and online—what we might call onlife.
Historically, the multitude was the feminine of the political: that which had to be excluded so the “people,” masculine and sovereign, could appear as a rational, unitary subject. As Virno notes, liberalism neutralized “the many” through the public/private divide. That confinement had a sexed body: women were enclosed in reproduction and care, erased from public life. The feminist multitude returns as the insurgency of what modern politics expelled—shared dependence, vulnerability, and the reproduction of life.
Latin American digital feminism embodies this turn: awareness of structural gendered violence circulates online and propels bodies into the streets. It marks the irruption of a different rationality—a politics of interdependence that replaces the sovereign logic of the One with the multiplicity of a We. In practice, networked feminist mobilizations enact precisely that: communities of meaning that denounce sexual violences and feminicides and acuerpan (hold, shelter, accompany) victims and families. Once dismissed as “impure” or “incoherent,” the multitude becomes the condition for rethinking politics in feminist key: open, connected, embodied.
From the Hashtag to the Body and Back: Opening Political Space
As Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us, “the political does not consist primarily in the composition and dynamics of powers, but in the opening of a space through action itself” (Nancy, in Marchart 2009: 105). Feminist mobilizations make this opening tangible: they transform fear into appearance, silence into speech, and vulnerability into collective strength.
In Mexico, this process crystallized in what the media began to call “the women’s protests” —an impossible subject, since it did not preexist as a unified entity. It was neither all women, nor those who identified as such, but a multiplicity of bodies refusing silence. The political here was not represented but enacted communicatively.
Online, hashtags such as #MiPrimerAcoso or #MeToo condensed countless personal stories into shared grievances. These femitags —digital speech acts— made visible “those who have no part” (Rancière, 1996), the uncounted whose suffering had been normalized or erased. Testimonies became a public vocabulary of pain and rage, generating new frames of recognition.
At the same time, in the streets, thousands shouted: “My body is mine, I decide, I have autonomy, I am my own!” Their bodies completed what the hashtags began. Yet the circulation was not unidirectional. The embodied scenes of protest —chants, graffiti, performances— returned to the networks, where they were livestreamed, memefied, and re-signified, feeding new waves of mobilization. The communicative energy of the movement moved from the digital to the corporeal and back again, producing an onlife continuum of feminist visibility.
What the hashtag opened, the body occupied —and what the body enacted, the network amplified. This reciprocal movement blurred the borders between communication and action, turning expression itself into infrastructure.
Crucially, activists hacked corporate digital platforms not through code but through use: transforming spaces built for entertainment, consumption, and individual branding into arenas for collective encounter and political contagion. Twitter threads became collective archives; Instagram stories became channels of mutual aid; and memes became weapons of critique.
It was the perception of imminent danger that triggered action: women marched to embrace —acuerpar— those already murdered, knowing they could be next. Through this recognition of shared vulnerability, fear was transfigured into solidarity. That affective transformation produced what Raquel Gutiérrez (2014) calls a “nosotras expansivo” —an expansive We that unbinds women from their assigned social roles and activates insurgent agency. Mothers of femicide victims became furious organizers; middle-class daughters turned incendiary; professionals exposed sexual abuse in their workplaces.
The feminist multitude disrupted the coordinates of political normality. It overflowed traditional organizations and occupied public space in “inappropriate” ways: shouting, burning, occupying, breaking reputations and urban infrastructure alike. Online and offline, the living invoked the dead, prefiguring a community of destiny whose fatality they sought to undo.
In this continuum, communication is not an accessory to politics —it is its very substance. The hashtag, the body, and the city are interconnected modalities of a single process: the communicative making of collective identity.
The Year Everything Caught Fire
In 2019, feminist mobilization in Mexico reached a breaking point (Rovira-Sancho & Morales-i-Gras, 2023). The digital and the embodied ignited each other in a loop of outrage and recognition that reshaped political communication itself.
The year began with a sector-based #MeToo wave—#MeTooEscritores, #MeTooMúsica, #MeTooAcademia—that multiplied in dozens of collective Twitter accounts. Women spoke because every story met a chorus of #YoTeCreo —I believe you—, and because thousands recognized in each thread not an isolated case but a shared structure of violence. The hashtags became archives of experience and catalysts of political subjectivity.
The digital sphere quickly overflowed into physical space. University walls filled with tendederos of denunciation —paper lists of abusers’ names— while assemblies occupied classrooms and faculties. The voice became handwriting; the hashtag became graffiti. What had circulated online now insisted on occupying walls, plazas, and avenues.
The turning point came that August, after a series of police rapes in Mexico City. The hashtags #NoMeCuidanMeViolan (“They don’t protect me, they rape me”) and #AMíMeCuidanMisAmigas (“My friends keep me safe”) summoned thousands to the streets. Young women sprayed pink glitter on police officers, and filled the city center with slogans and smoke. The media denounced “vandalism”; politicians promised order. The response —#FuimosTodas (“It was all of us”)— short-circuited the logic of criminalization and reasserted the feminist multitude as shield and chorus: every act of disobedience belonged to all.
That August became known as the glitter revolt: a performative explosion where anger turned luminous and art became weapon. The Antimonumenta #VivasNosQueremos, erected in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, anchored the uprising in both the street and the feed. Groups like Restauradoras con Glitter documented hundreds of inscriptions and argued that what needed restoration was not marble but the social fabric itself.
The city turned into an interface: murals, songs, stencils, and livestreams produced a new cartography of resistance. Amid this storm of words, images, and bodies, another current of memory joined the flow: the mothers searching for their disappeared and murdered daughters. Their annual Marcha por la Dignidad —held every 10 May— had long embodied a politics of love as perseverance: “We search for them because we love them.” In 2019, their presence at feminist marches deepened the rebellion’s time horizon. The immediacy of rage met the endurance of mourning, linking the glitter of protest with the dust of the search fields.
That continuum reached its peak in March 2020, when the largest women’s march in Mexican history filled the capital’s avenues under the cry “Vivas nos queremos” —We want ourselves alive. The next day, a massive women’s strike, coordinated almost entirely through social networks, brought the country to a standstill: workplaces, schools, and public offices emptied of women.
Feminists transformed urban space into a living archive: in 2021 and 2022, the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan —Roundabout of the Women Who Fight—, a purple silhouette replacing the statue of Columbus, surrounded by the names of murdered and disappeared women. Walls, fences, occupied institutions and monuments became heterotopias of resistance —spaces where communication became matter and mourning became message. The city itself spoke the nosotras expansivo: we were here, we are here, we will remain until justice arrives.
Conclusion
Throughout the 2016–2022 cycle, identity was not represented but made communicatively. From online testimonies to graffiti and monuments, feminist communication redefined what counts as political speech and who is allowed to speak.
The Mexican case also reveals the instability —and the creative force— of this insurgent identity. The feminist multitude disrupted all predictable alignments: progressive and conservative camps traded accusations; leftist governments denounced the protests as excess; feminist factions fractured over gender and trans issues. These tensions evidence that feminist communication operates through multiplicity rather than unity.
Thus, the connected feminist multitude redefines the role of identity in political communication. No longer a marker of belonging to a preexisting group, identity becomes a collective act of appearance and disruption. It is communication performed through hashtags, chants, flames, and inscriptions —a choreography of care and fury that interrupts the normalization of patriarchal violence. Seen through an ethnographic lens, this performative role of identity becomes visible as an ongoing process of making and unmaking the social through embodied connection.
In that persistence of the many —plural, embodied, furious— identity is not representation but the ongoing rebellion that refuses female subordination and gender violence. Feminist multitudes destabilize fixed alignments and construct a “we” as powerful as it is precarious if judged by the lifespan of unified organization. The point is not to lament dispersion but to recognize how identity here is practice, not predicate: acting, denouncing, caring, and acuerpando—in the streets and online, in an onlife continuum. Feminist ethnography, by staying with bodies, affects, and relations, allows us to perceive these processes not as abstractions but as lived practices of collective becoming.
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Author
Guiomar Rovira-Sancho is a Full Professor of Political Science at the University of Girona, Spain. She is a specialist in social movements, political communication, feminisms, and digital networks. Based in Mexico for 28 years, she taught as a full professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City until 2021. She has authored five books, including #MeToo. La ola de las multitudes conectadas feministas (Bellaterra), Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas (Icaria-UAM), Zapatistas sin fronteras (Era), Women of Maize (LatinAmerican Buro), and Zapata vive! (Virus/Sexto Piso). She currently leads two research projects: “Digital Violence Against Women in Political Leadership”, and “Digital Feminist Activism in Latin America: From the Internet to the Critique of Artificial Intelligence”. Her email is: guiomar.rovira@udg.edu