#SayHerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism

Abstract

Social media activism presents sociologists with the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how groups form and sustain collective identities around political issues throughout the course of a social movement. This paper contributes to a growing body of sociological literature on social media by applying an intersectional framework to a content analysis of over 400,000 tweets related to #SayHerName. Our findings demonstrate that Twitter users who identified with #SayHerName engage in intersectional mobilization by highlighting Black women victims of police violence and giving attention to intersections with gender identity. #SayHerName is a dialogue that centres Black cisgender and transgender women victims of state-sanctioned violence. Additionally, #SayHerName is a space for highlighting Black women victims of non-police violence. Therefore, we propose that future research on social media activism should incorporate intersectionality as a basis for understanding the symbols and language of twenty-first century social movements.