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Educ. Rev. vol.36  Curitiba  2020  Epub 26-Nov-2020

https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-4060.76124 

DOSSIER - Digital culture and education

Cyberfeminism and Critical Multiliteracies in Cyberculture1

*Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso. Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, Brasil. E-mail: terezinha.ufmt@gmail.com

**Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. E-mail: edmea.baiana@gmail.com


ABSTRACT

This article aims to understand how the role of cyberactivist women in combating discursive violence practiced by men in social networks can mobilize critical cyberculture multiliteracies and contribute to feminist training processes at the university. The study, supported by the theoretical framework of the social perspective and a critical approach to multiliteracies, dialogues with cyberfeminism and violence through the use of language, analyzing an activist practice and its worldwide repercussion, broadcast in videos on the social network YouTube and expressed in the speech of politicians and cultural practitioners of interaction. The historical processes of worsening political and ideological conflicts related to the patriarchal and sexist legacy are reflected in public and social spaces and also in cyberspace, materialized in violence through the use of language in social networks and in the practices of cyberactivists who struggle, resist and mark their social place, pointing out the potential of these experiences in the development of critical knowledge for the social and political formation of other women against this form of oppression.

Keywords: Cyberculture; Multiliteracies; Social networks; Cyberfeminism; Discursive violence

RESUMO

Este artigo tem como objetivo compreender como a atuação de mulheres ciberativistas no combate à violência discursiva praticada por homens em redes sociais pode ser mobilizadora de multiletramentos críticos da cibercultura e contribuir com processos formativos feministas na universidade. O estudo, com suporte no referencial teórico da perspectiva social e abordagem crítica dos multiletramentos, dialoga com o ciberfeminismo e a violência pelo uso da linguagem, analisando uma prática ativista e sua repercussão mundial veiculadas em vídeos na rede social YouTube e expressas no discurso de representantes políticos e praticantes culturais da interação. Os processos históricos de acirramento de conflitos políticos e ideológicos relacionados ao legado patriarcal e machista se refletem em espaços públicos e sociais e também no ciberespaço, materializados na violência pelo uso da linguagem em redes sociais e nas práticas de ciberativistas que lutam, resistem e marcam o seu lugar social, apontando o potencial dessas experiências no desenvolvimento de conhecimentos críticos para a formação social e política de outras mulheres contra esta forma de opressão.

Palavras-chave: Cibercultura; Multiletramentos; Redes sociais; Ciberfeminismo; Violência discursiva

Introduction

Digital network technologies have been provoking the emergence of new and different social practices, which involve the uses and appropriations of information and knowledge that circulate through them. In this movement, there is a reconfiguration of the performance of subjects also in the ways they learn, teach, produce and share in networks.

But there is still a dichotomy between everyday cyberculture practices, and pedagogical and teaching and learning practices developed in university curricula. Initially, we place this dichotomy in the tradition inherited in education in considering a single model of literacies, the schooled and, therefore, present in the training processes that are based exclusively on the development of skills and competences of reading and analogical writing, to the detriment of the existing multiliteracies from contemporary cyberculture.

For Street (2014), broadening the reflection on the theoretical principles of the social perspective and critical approach to multiliteracy through the ideological model bias is essential to understand the opposition to the autonomous model, used to measure skills through tests on literacy levels and degrees, common in programs for verifying the skills acquired individually by the subjects, regardless of the sociocultural context in which their practices are inserted. Associated with this model is the assumption that “writing facilitates the ‘logical’ functions of language, allowing them to separate into interpersonal functions, so that written statements are less socially ‘embedded’; it creates, therefore, a more objective and scientific use of language” (STREET, 2014, p. 104).

To discuss the implications, constraints and challenges of literacies, the New Literacy Studies (NLS) shift the emphasis to social practices, recognizing their variety and diversity, according to time, space and sociocultural context, contested in power relations. From these studies, the conceptual frameworks of the ideological model of literacies emerge, which it considers to be in social practices that knowledge, resulting from the ways in which people relate to reading and writing, are rooted in socially constructed epistemological principles (STREET, 2013). In this sense, literacies are places of disputes both as meanings and as practices, rooted in a given worldview and, therefore, ideological. In social practices, interactions between subjects affect the nature of literacies in a process “sensitive to local variation in literate practices and capable of encompassing the uses and meanings that people themselves attribute” (STREET, 2014, p. 159).

Because it considers sociocultural aspects, ideology, power, identity and language, this model, when applied to multiliteracies, takes into account the heterogeneity of social practices and the sociocultural and situated character of the variety of literacies, which means considering the complexity of practices that are not necessarily related to schooling and pedagogy. The variety of literate practices in different contexts, cultural patterns, ideology and politics presupposes the recognition that there are multiliteracies (STREET, 2014).

In contemporary culture, the use of digital network technologies enables communication and the circulation of information and knowledge in multiple media and platforms, redimensioning the subjects' modes of action and leveraging new forms of organization, engagement and creation of cultural products. For Rojo and Moura (2012), multiliteracies encompass the diversity of curricula, the variety of cultures present in schools and the valorization of the local in connection with the global, in a sociocultural perspective. For the authors, the concept points to two types of multiplicities present in contemporary societies, “the cultural multiplicity of populations and the semiotic multiplicity of constitution of [hypermedia and multimodal] texts through which it is informed and communicated” (ROJO; MOURA, 2012, p. 13).

These sociocultural formations, according to Santaella (2003), are called both digital culture and cyberculture, and they have cyberspace as a distinctive and defining brand. For the constitution of contemporary culture, according to the author, we went through cultural eras, such as orality, writing, print, mass and media, which are lines of force that coexist and live simultaneously today, because in them there is a synchronization of languages ​​and media in overlapping, multiplexing, complexification and developments. For this reason, in this text, our option is to use the concept of cyberculture.

For Rosemary Santos and Edméa Santos (2012, p. 161), "cyberculture is the contemporary culture structured by digital network technologies and is currently characterized by the emergence of ubiquitous mobility in connectivity with cyberspace and cities". The authors point out that “contemporary culture, associated with digital technologies, creates a new relationship between technique and social life. We cannot understand the paradoxes, potentialities and current conflicts without understanding the phenomenon of cyberculture” (SANTOS R.; SANTOS E., 2012, p. 160).

These changes reshape social practices and challenge cultural practitioners, as Certeau (1998) conceives the subjects who practice daily life, to consider that their actions, productions and meanings are processes and products built from the sociohistorical context of culture, in which the schemes of operations, techniques, tactics and cunning are engineered in space, time, context and human historicity. So that, in cyberculture, such daily practices, roles, mobilization repertoires, modes of production and sharing of information and knowledge are deterritorialized, as there are no geographical or spatial boundaries for the experiences and creations of individual and collective narratives, as forms of social and political performance in cyberspace.

For Matos (2018), these are also characteristics of fourth wave feminisms, movements that develop with the use of the internet and highlight the massification, diversity, and digital and transnational militancy of women in social networks, as spaces of subjectivities and new identities. The discussion of feminisms, in this text, does not go into what Matos (2018) highlights as theoretical frames of the gender field and feminisms of the global north in relation to the agendas of the global south and the new theoretical frame of feminist articulations of south-south countries, in view of the cut made for this study.

The movements of women on the internet mark this new stage of feminisms in Brazil that, for Hollanda (2018), post-journeys of June 2013, become plural and gain strength from 2015 on, with the reaction against the bill on legal abortion in case of rape proposed by Congressman Eduardo Cunha, intensifying struggles and combining axes, such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, etc. In this sense, the author points out that it is a collective, shared, connected by affection, without clear leadership, without mediators and that is heard with the mastery of social networks on the internet. A horizontal, performative movement, with occupations of streets and digital networks, and that converges new generations of thinkers, philosophers and journalists, who invite other women to leave the place of historical silence to seek their place of speech, marked by intersectionality, through empowerment and sorority.

Hollanda (2018) discusses the theoretical and political perspective of gender and other relations in the social field and its complexities, involving the various inequalities and structural dimensions of political and public life, which unequally affect the collective also composed of young women that organize themselves autonomously, with new repertoires of protests that mark the multiple identities of these activists, with the intense use of social networks to spread their creations, narratives and struggles. These spaces on the internet enable the production of new subjectivities, connections and solidarities, structure and open opportunities for mobilization and discursive intervention made in social interactions.

This movement of women in social networks on the internet is also called cyberfeminism, which, according to Haraway (2009), characterizes the performance of women who practice “cohabitation” between technological means and political movements and being between frontiers of meanings. In this sense, cyberfeminism, as a new wave of thought, and social and political practices by net-activist women, opens up to the hope of building a new order, which questions gender in intersectionality with other axes of feminisms and their reappropriations.

Cyberfeminist actions tense practices by men on social networks that exacerbate violence against women through language. This phenomenon points to the challenge of building forms of activism in cyberspace to legitimize struggles in the fight against violence and historical, patriarchal and sexist oppression, seeking the empowerment of female resistance discourse. This type of violence is understood from the studies by Ribeiro (2018), for which:

The oppressive language of hate speech is not a mere representation of a hateful idea; it is in itself a violent conduct, which aims to subject the other, deconstructing their own condition as a subject, pulling them out of their context and placing them in another where the threat of real violence to be committed hangs [...] (RIBEIRO, 2018, p. 781).

Violence through language is understood by us as discursive violence, and in Seixas's studies (2019), Marie-Anne Paveau's (2015) notion of discursive virtue is resumed, which involves the ethical and moral dimensions of language adjusted to cultural, historical and social contexts of discourse production. For Seixas (2019),

discursive violence is symbolic violence, insofar as it tries to impose on subjects ways of seeing and thinking about reality consistent with a violent perspective from the genesis of the discourse in question, and, in this sense, it is necessary to understand the status of this discursive violence beyond just semantic or pragmatic implications (SEIXAS, 2019, p. 195).

With the understanding based on these notions, the objective of this text is to understand how the role of cyberactivist women in combating discursive violence practiced by men in social networks can mobilize critical cyberculture multiliteracies and contribute to feminist training processes at the university.

With this intention, the text is structured in four parts. The first presents the methodological aspects of the study. The second dialogues with cyberactivist practices and discursive violence as a possibility of relating them to critical multiliteracies to support feminist training processes at the university. The conclusions point out to the limits, advances and possibilities of the study, opening up the prospect of continuity.

Methodological aspects of the study

To start our dialogue with the conflictive character with the ecologies of female engagement practices in social networks, we bring to analysis the activist practice of a young woman who fights for a social agenda, through which we dialogue with the discursive violence of men against women in these spaces. We can highlight social practices of women in cyberspace that were potentializing the new post-journey feminisms of June 2013, such as the feminist spring of 2015, the 8M international general strike of 2017, the #EleNão movement, the death of Marielle Franco in 2018, the trajectories of the hashtags #PrimeiroAssédio, #MeuAmigoSecreto, #NãoMéritoSerEstuprada, # NãoéNão, among others.

These practices of cyberactivist women contribute to develop knowledge that we can relate to multiliteracies as critical social practices in Street (2014). Such social practices are not separated from their ideological roots and issues of identity, gender, social inclusion, time, space and other aspects of culture and, therefore, are places of disputes that need to be faced, and not masked by apparently neutral and impartial processes.

The study was developed with the inspiration in research-training in cyberculture (SANTOS, 2014), for which the educational processes mediated by digital network technologies establish new curricular and plural arrangements and new demands on training. Due to the complexity of this type of research, the social practices of cyberculture are not separated from the training of its practitioners and it is self-organized through the processes instituted in the relationship between human beings and technical objects. For Santos (2014), research in cyberculture is to act by producing data with practitioners who produce cultures and knowledge in the context of the practices in which they research, forming and forming themselves, and, at the same time, traversed by them, forge devices for the production of meanings and meanings triggers and dilemmas that circumscribe the training by the cultural practitioners involved.

The case in question is that of Greta Thunberg, a 17-year-old Swedish girl, who, since August 2018, misses school every Friday and sits in front of Parliament in Stockholm, waiting for concrete measures by the politicians of the country against climate change. From that solitary gesture, Greta was winning over fans around the world, forming a movement called “Fridays for Future”. In May 2019, more than a million young people from more than 100 countries joined the strike to protest [against?] the global climate. Since then, the young environmental activist has gained prominence on the world stage for her activism and her role. The environmentalist was chosen as the Person of the Year 2019 by the American magazine Time2, which has her photo printed on the cover. There is also the work “No one is too small to make a difference”3 (THUNBERG, 2019), inspired by his most famous speeches, as a call to engage young people in their fight for climate justice in the world.

In cyberculture, cultural practitioners leave traces of their interactions and creations with images, narratives and authorship on social networks, blogs, websites, video platforms and other media and interfaces, and, in this set, women of all age groups engage for different feminist causes. This movement is called, according to Matos (2018), the fourth wave of feminism or cyberfeminism, made up of communities of women activists on the internet, activists of cyberculture, in which the multiplication of struggles and agendas has cyberspace as a means of organization and extension of their fields of activity in everyday life.

There are currently several feminist practices against gender-based violence that have gained prominence on social networks, such as the #MeuAmigoSecreto campaign, by the Não Me Kahlo collective, in which the banner of struggle is the deconstruction of misogynistic and gender violence involving close people, such as friends, companions, bosses and relatives. These experiences had numerous consequences, such as writing self-narratives, writing authorial articles, producing and launching books, producing videos, events, lectures, etc., in the intertwining with the multiplicity of digital media languages, with the different modes of intersection between women's collectives, with different modes of interaction among themselves and with other gender axes, producing meanings and shared meanings in favor agendas.

In the study by Trancoso, Maddalena and Santos (2020), the authors carry out a digital mapping of feminist groups formed on the social network Facebook during the period of the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil, aiming to understand the daily life of the construction of the female social space as an educational network, through gestures and conversations that promote digital literacies of its practitioners and problematizing the concepts of intersectionality and misogynistic in the context of gender discussion. And, in the study by Trancoso and Santos (2019), the authors develop a cartography of the female social space on Facebook, in the group “Women against Bolsonaro”, with the aim of understanding the daily life of this educational network as a space of protest against a form of a policy that excludes, controls and diminishes women, inquiring about the uses that practitioners / thinkers make in their fabric and evoking concepts such as fiction, rites and gestures.

Both studies cited helped us in the theoretical and methodological aspects for the composition of this text, which is part of a broader study in feminist groups on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, in which one of the stages is characterized as netnography, based on Kozinetes (2014, p. 9), who considers that nowadays it is essential to understand “people's social activities and interactions on the internet”. For the author, netnography researches cultures and online communities, complex cultural practices in action, their multiplicity of ideas and meanings, relationships and symbolic systems.

We mapped videos on the social network YouTube that brought content about the participation of the young environmental activist Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The choice of this event was due to the repercussion that the participation of the activist had in the international media, considering some aspects: the expressive number of young supporters who accompanied her in person at the Forum, the effects of the speech given at the event, the mobilization of the prejudice and exacerbation of discursive violence by political representatives worldwide, and the meanings attributed by practitioners of interactions on social networks, expressed in the comments on the videos.

To understand the discursive violence that shaped the interactions of authorities in interviews and statements in the media and the comments of practitioners of the interaction with the content of the videos, we turn to Rocha and Brandão (2020), for whom these hateful and discriminatory speeches

they can be characterized by any expression that devalues, oppresses and disqualifies the [...] subjects in a situation of social and moral disrespect, since it reduces the human being to [...] the object of the violent intention by the aggressor can appear clear and objective or subliminal (ROCHA; BRANDÃO, 2020, p. 78).

From the countless videos analyzed on the YouTube platform, we selected two that bring together content representation of the discursive violence of two world political leaders. The first is "World Economic Forum in Davos was the scene of two antagonistic speeches", broadcast on the Correio do Povo channel (Brazil) and which addresses the statements of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. The second, called “Greta Thunberg: brat for Bolsonaro, personality for Time”, from the Catraca Livre channel (Brazil), which discusses the statements by the President of Brazil about Greta's participation in the same event.

This selection was also based on criteria such as greater number of views, greater number of likes and greater number of comments by practitioners of the interaction with the content shown in the videos. Through these gestures and through narratives, practitioners construct meanings and senses that legitimize or disqualify the participation of women in social practices in cyberspace. In the analysis we discussed the relationship between cyberfeminist practices, men's discursive violence against women and critical cyberculture multiliteracies to compose university training processes.

Critical knowledge for feminisms in cyberculture

The video "World Economic Forum in Davos was the scene of two antagonistic speeches", aired on the Correio do Povo channel (Brazil), highlights that, while environmental activist Greta Thunberg accused the world powers of doing nothing to prevent the rising temperature of highlighting that “political ideologies and economic structures have not been able to face climate emergencies and create a sustainable world”, US President Donald Trump defended an antagonistic position and warned the world not to listen to “alarmists”.

SOURCE: OS DISCURSOS..., 2019.

FIGURE 1 OPENING VIDEO ON CORREIO DO POVO CHANNEL 

This video received numerous comments, usually made by men. Among them, there were those who timidly supported the activist, with the vast majority approving the aggressive stance of the speech of the President of the United States, as shown by one of the comments on the video:

I thought that this forum was for people, with authorities and quality of knowledge, but to make room for a child who still needs to grow up, to study, then yes, with knowledge, come to make a hole in the world, a manipulated child, where are these big shots who don't they give the change in time denying this farce (OS DISCURSOS..., 2019).

The video highlights that, in line with the president's statement, US Treasury Secretary Steven Minuchin, in addition to irony asking “Who is Greta Thunberg?”, declared that the activist should “first study economics and then go back to looking for it ”. In other words, he said that he did not even know the person to whom he announced himself and subtly called him ignorant. Stances that function as subtle instruments of superiority and misogynistic to control and attack women, through the speech of oppression and symbolic violence.

For Rocha and Brandão (2020, p. 77-78), “The root of the problem lies precisely in the violent cultural processes that cultivate the hegemony of the oppressive man and the submission of the woman, ratified by the (bad) use of social networks, which corroborate prejudices present in our offline life ”. Violence takes on “varied forms and needs to be interpreted and defined in its various faces, in the offline or online world and through the events in which it is expressed, reflected and reproduced through the language and space in which it is professed” (ROCHA; BRANDÃO, 2020, p. 78).

The previously silenced voices of women are now heard on social networks, without leaders and mediators, and reaffirm their place of speech, of forming identities and subjectivities, contributing to sensitize other women to engagement and resistance. This reappropriation is not found in practice and in the conservative and authoritarian discourse of political leaders for the same agendas, which are also the responsibility of the State as an institution for maintaining gender relations. From the cyberactivism of young women, it is possible to get closer to concrete proposals to subsidize public policies that dialogue with groups that live in situations of inequality, vulnerability and violence.

By situating the uses and productions made by cyberactivists on the internet in the social perspective and critical approach of the multiliteracies (STREET, 2014), we realize the complexity of these practices and the meanings attributed by practitioners of social networks, in the sense that these statements are not institutionalized and therefore are considered illegitimate and should therefore be rejected, since

the institutionalization of a particular model [...] operates not only through particular forms of speech and texts, but in the institutional physical space, which is separated from the "everyday" space for teaching and learning purposes and which derives from constructions broader social and ideological (STREET, 2014, p. 130).

Cybercultural practices of young women like those of Greta show the power relations engendered in historical, cultural and political processes, permeated by values ​​and ideologies that directly affect gender relations. These activist practices are continually marked by rearrangements of meanings, recognized by a number of supporters and by the press, but they also face the prejudice and intolerance of men who, historically, impose their patriarchal worldview, their beliefs and their values ​​on women considered lower.

In this sense, Jenkins (2009) defends the full participation of young people in the use of the internet, in the sense of uniting the knowledge they have in their daily practices with collective knowledge or collective intelligence, contributing to expand literacies. Recognizing cyber-cultural practices and problematizing them in curriculum acts at the university, permeated by mixtures of languages ​​such as the videos analyzed in this study and other manifestations, contributes to the extent of the struggles practiced by women on the streets, to gain strength in online social networks, showing the different variables linked to the social and political context that legitimate or not their actions and discourses, mobilizing critical multiliteracies.

The video "Greta Thunberg: brat for Bolsonaro, personality for Time", from the Catraca Livre channel (Brazil), highlights that the young Swedish woman is currently one of the main names in the global environmental cause. It is the protagonist of an international movement that draws the attention of government officials, NGOs and civil society to an urgent and current issue: the impacts of climate change, pointing out criticisms of the world consumption model and demanding concrete actions from governments and institutions to face the issue. After the Forum, in a statement given to the press, Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, highlighted that “Greta has already said that the Indians died because they are defending the Amazon. It is impressive that the press makes room for a brat like that. A brat”. In response to the Brazilian president's statement, Greta used the speech only to update her Twitter profile with the description “Pirralha” (brat).

SOURCE: GRETA..., 2019.

FIGURE 2 GRETA’S PROFILE IN TWITTER 

With this gesture, the young cyberactivist showed that struggle and resistance for social justice can be reframed, as well as power and ideology, because, from the point of view of her empowerment as a young environmental activist woman, with this gesture, she represents her current 4,1 million followers on Twitter4, showing that, even in an unequal relationship in the gender hierarchy, accentuated by age prejudice when considered a “brat”, it leaves the historical silence and echoes its voice with other young women and supporters of the global environmental cause.

Specifically in Brazil, it is important to highlight, as Matos points out,

that “feminist voices” here have always emerged in the face of the many oppressive and conservative structures, even at an early age, since the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite the existence of a strong patriarchal culture and a predominantly male society, especially in political terms, Brazilian feminist voices appear(ed) from the least expected places and at even less favorable times (MATOS, 2018, p. 79).

In addition to the derogatory adjectives "alarmist", "ignorant" and "brat", expressed in the statements of the world authorities, in comments to videos on YouTube, other aggressive adjectives were also attributed to Greta, such as: "hysterical", "disturbed", “autistic”, “comorbid”, “mentally disabled”5, “fraud”, “feminist pig” and others. Another part of the practitioners of the interaction reproduced the speech and positioning from the Brazilian president, as commented below, which had seventeen responses.

The brat chosen by Marxism, does not fly by plane due to the emission of pollutants and it not being fueled by sustainable energy, but rides by train, car and boat... Nor do I say that this is just to make a mess because she is a maneuvering tomboy by George Soros...

Her role and instruction is to impact... to be contrary to common measures, to be extremist even in simple questions that she is asked, she is even more than a rather rude and obnoxious girl in the answers... see, there is no interview with her... she never had a frank and open line of dialogue and debate to see what she thinks [...] (GRETA..., 2019).

Greta became the target of the position of men who deny the existence of global warming and use discursive violence as a marker that adds to strata of state, institutional and political violence against women. The discursive violence of these authorities and users of social networks demonstrates, on the part of these men, the intellectual superiority, the political power and the control of the actions of a young woman who, signified in the historical processes of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, authoritarianism and oppression, reproduces practices that reinforce her condition as a woman, and therefore, inferior and disqualified for claims and political practices.

For Rocha and Brandão (2020, p. 70), “the analysis of the causes and relationships that generate violent behavior imposes challenges”, such as: recognition of the specifics of situations; understanding of broader processes that produce violence; combating age prejudice; and combating structural violence (oppression exercised by the economic, political and social systems, and by institutions in general over groups, classes, nations, individuals). The authors also emphasize that

there is not only a perception of what violence is, but a multiplicity of violent acts, whose meanings must be analyzed from the norms, conditions and social contexts and, referring to women in contemporary times, always considering race, class and gender (ROCHA; BRANDÃO, 2020, p. 79).

The sociocultural and economic projects of neoliberal globalization operate through power relations that take shape in inequalities that affect different social groups and are materialized in the naturalization of violence and dehumanization, refracted also in the language used in cyberspace, as a historical consequence of the social and economic hierarchy between men and women. From the point of view of multiliteracies, for Street (2014), the rules for the engagement of practitioners are continually affirmed and reinforced within social practices, confirming relations of hierarchy, authority and power situated in the cultural context in which the discourses are produced. When dealing with the characteristics of the multiliteracies, for Rojo and Moura (2012, p. 23), they emphasize that “they fracture and transgress the established power relations, especially the property relations (of machines, tools, ideas, texts) [...]”.

Cyberactivist practices engender the confrontation between the historically established power and the struggles and opposing resistances of women who contribute, according to Hollanda (2018), as a fundamental political force to break barriers in hierarchical, authoritarian and control relations, allowing the construction of a scenario of resistance against oppression, especially at a time when, worldwide, many achievements and rights are under threat of setbacks.

Fourth-wave feminisms, according to Matos (2018, p. 81), contribute to the understanding of the urgency of transnationalized and networked practices and discourses as a way of resistance and as a propositive form of a new alter-world development model

known as transnational feminism: a movement attentive to the intersections between nationality, race, gender, sexuality and economic exploitation on a worldwide scale, mainly due to the emergence of global capitalism for its international [...] struggle against neoliberalism and for the search for greater social justice (MATOS, 2018, p. 81).

Such questions show the relevance of cyberfeminist practices of women who, in social networks, from individual to collective, contribute to deconstructing models of violence such as the discourse practiced by men against women in everyday life, seeking their historical and cultural roots to build critical knowledge.

Conclusion

The reflections around cyberactivist practices, which involve a multiplicity of languages ​​that circulate on social networks, show their heterogeneous and multifaceted character, engendered in culture and history, and imply the demonstration of power also through discourse. It is in these social practices that the multiliteracies gain strength, as practitioners act through a diversity of modes of interaction, uses, productions, information and knowledge in the construction of new knowledge in different spaces and places connected by digital network technologies to create, share and collaborate collectively.

The potential of the contemporary social and technological scenario, in constant transformation, enables rearrangements in the practices of women activists in cyberspace and favors dialogue with other training processes. It was in this direction that this text sought to understand how the work of women activists can mobilize critical multiliteracies of cyberculture and contribute to feminist training processes at the university.

With the analysis of the videos posted on YouTube about the participation of the young environmental activist Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, it was possible to see that the discursive violence that shaped the reaction of world authorities and the interactions of practitioners expressed in their comments are not just oppressive forms of speech, as a representation of a hateful idea given to a young woman, but historical issues related to the patriarchal and conservative structures of a society in which political power is predominantly male, which silences women voices and makes actions and discourses invisible, above all, of social and political engagement for the environmental cause that involves economic interests.

Social networks in cyberspace, as spaces of struggle and resistance, can contribute to the empowerment of women, resignifying values ​​and developing active and critical participation, as well as subsidizing public policies that dialogue with the inequalities and symbolic violence that permeate gender relations and their agendas and struggles. The occupation of these spaces promotes changing, remodeling and challenging women's collectives to rethink performance strategies, roles, mobilization repertoires, modes of production, sharing and disseminating information and knowledge, without mediators or geographical and spatial boundaries.

As critical knowledge that mobilizes multiliteracies of cyberculture, the analyzed experience points out relevant aspects to combat historical practices of violence from men against women, such as discursive violence, age prejudice and intellectual superiority. It also contributes to the promotion of gender guidelines with perspectives of horizontalization and dialogue to guarantee the transnationalization rights of feminisms; for the deepening of understandings of northern and southern global feminisms to redesign processes of institutionalization of social demands; and to forge new public policy formats for gender democratization. In addition, it favors the approximation of the cyberactivist practices and guidelines of women on social networks with the training processes of other women at the university, for which it is necessary to develop online devices to implement training practices and develop critical knowledge.

The limits of the social perspective and critical approach of cyberculture multiliteracies are given in order to effect the inclusion of guidelines and gender themes as curriculum acts to be practiced in the daily training of women, breaking the logic of patriarchy and recognizing the legitimacy of cyberactivist movements as educational networks for the construction of transformative practices.

1Translation by Fabielle Rocha Cruz. E-mail: fabielle.cruz@gmail.com

2In addition, the activist participated in editions 24 and 25 of the UN Climate Conference (COPs), held in Poland and Spain, respectively, at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, spoke at European Parliament, met with Pope Francis and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and 2020 (source: https://www.ebiography.com/greta_thunberg/).

3This book was also released in Portuguese in Brazil, in February 2020, by Companhia das Letrinhas, as well as the book “A Nossa Casa Está a Arder”, launched by Editorial Presença, in Portugal.

4Greta also has 2,867,971 likes on her Facebook page and 10.2 million followers on Instagram, according to her profile checks on March 30, 2020.

5Term used to refer to the fact that the young woman has Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism, diagnosed when Greta was eight years old and that affects her social interaction skills (source: https://www.ebiography.com/greta_thunberg/).

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Received: July 28, 2020; Accepted: September 12, 2020

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