Transformations in the frame of protest

The academic literature addresses the media coverage of protests mainly from the news framing approach, that through the concept of “protest paradigm” (^{Boyle et al., 2012}; ^{Harlow & Johnson, 2011}) describe a predominant interpretation scheme characterized by: a) highlighting the act rather than the causes and background of the protest; b) focusing on confrontation with others (authorities and police, mainly); c) highlighting the negative actions and aspects of the act; d) focusing on the authorities speech rather than the voices of protesters, to mitigate their negative actions. Studies account for the variables that affect adherence to this paradigm: the media norms and practices, the system and the political culture of the context, the sympathy that the movement arouses, and the size of the audience, among others.

However, the tendency to delegitimize the speech, to misinform about the causes and to make the demands invisible remains constant. This creates a relationship between the media and social movements that is asymmetric from the very beginning due to the paradoxical need of the latter to increase the visibility, scope and legitimacy of their protest acts through media coverage (^{Brown & Harlow, 2019}; ^{Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993}; ^{Rovira Sancho, 2013}).

Nevertheless, the impact of sociodigital platforms in global protests has reformulated not only this asymmetric relationship, but also the very conception of the media and movements. In the first place, there is talk of an emerging information environment in which the workforce, practices, genres and formats, technologies and temporalities of the platforms with traditional media hybridize (^{Chadwick, 2011}). The latter not only transfer their publication channels to the web, but also change their information production dynamics (routines, publication formats and languages) due to the mediation of digital technologies. In this transformed information sphere, news production is decentralized, therefore the (now digital) media become nodes in a dense network of information gatherers, producers, and disseminators (^{Heinrich, 2011}; ^{Hermida, 2010}).

On the other hand, the emergence of this information environment affected the dynamics of social movements, as exemplified by the cases of the Arab Spring, the Movimiento de los Indignados (The Indignant movement), #Yosoy132 (#Iam132) or #MeToo. The studies on these cases highlight the use of digital technologies as tools that have facilitated the distribution of information, the organization and the visibility of the movements but, above all, the platforms are recognized as the space for the connective action that shapes events, subjects and protest expressions (^{Cottle, 2011}; ^{Micó & Casero Ripollés, 2014}; ^{Rovira Sancho, 2012}; ^{Tufekci & Wilson 2012}).

This has undoubtedly had an impact on the media coverage of the protest, due to what ^{Cottle (2011)} calls “overlapping communication flows” (p. 652) in which there are no asymmetrical relationships, but constant interaction: movements provide on-site images and testimonies of the protest through their network profiles, they monitor local media coverage, and alert the international community; while the media collect what the community of users shares on the networks, they update the protest coverage with this information and provide direct links to the different platforms where the information is disseminated. The protest paradigm’s reviews in this digital context find adherence to it to a lesser extent, a tendency to a more legitimizing frame of the movements, and a preference of the user community for coverage by platforms instead of traditional media (^{Brown & Harlow, 2019}; ^{Harlow et al., 2017}; ^{Shahin et al., 2016}).

Feminist protests in the media

Analyzes of feminist protests in the traditional media concur in pointing out that there is minimal coverage, with frames and discourses focused on ridiculing, minimizing, and demonizing the actions of the protesters (^{Armstrong & Boyle, 2011}; ^{Lind & Salo, 2002}; ^{van Zoonen, 1992}), and that they generate stereotyped and distorted images of feminists and the movement (^{Bradley, 2004}; ^{Bronstein, 2005}). However, more recent reviews find a greater number of news items with more positive but fragmented, depoliticized and even contradictory framings that omit the disruptive nature of feminist action (^{Dean, 2010}; ^{Mendes, 2011}).

In this change on the framing, some authors point to the strategic use of sociodigital technologies as a key factor: the information disseminated by the collectives (through their own channels and accounts), the protesters (who transmit on-site) and the community that, without being in the streets, take part of the protests in the digital world and create other discourses about the protests that modify the media perspective (^{Casas et al., 2016}; ^{Nicolini & Hansen, 2018}). In fact, there is a growing field of studies on feminist protest on platforms and in digital media. In particular, priority has been given to studying the potential and limitations of feminist hashtags or the hashtag feminism (^{Dixon, 2014}; ^{Williams, 2015}) in generating public conversations, increasing visibility, and growing the feminist protest communities bigger (^{Acosta & Lassi, 2020}; ^{Esquivel Domínguez, 2019}; ^{García González & Guedes, 2020}; ^{Mendes et al., 2018}; ^{Portillo Sánchez et al., 2022}).

When reviewing the media coverage of these online protests (mainly through monitoring the hashtags), we find that the news framing focuses on the creativity of the repertoires and the diversity of testimonies, but without going into depth or contextualizing the cases (^{Brantner et al., 2020}; ^{De Benedictis et al., 2019}). Although the existence of less stigmatizing frames is recognized, other authors identify remaining elements of the protest paradigm (^{Shahin et al., 2016}) or warn of a news framing of decontextualization that contributes to the media devaluation and depoliticization of feminism in general (^{Thomas & Stehling, 2016}).

In a different research line, there are few works that, from the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), address more subtle ways in which the coverage of the protests (again, in networks) reproduces the gender order (^{Eilermann, 2018}; ^{Murphy, 2017}). These studies don’t seek the characteristics of the general framings, but the contradictions of the coverages that are considered to be more legitimizing. The CDA perspective analyzes the way in which social relations are established and strengthened through the use of language, texts and speech in the social and political context (^{Wodak & Meyer, 2003}). From CDA, discourse is considered as a social practice (^{Fairclough, 2001}), which implies a relationship between a particular discursive event and the situations, institutions and social structures that frame it. In this consideration, discursive practices can produce and reproduce power relations through the ways of representing situations and subjects with different linguistic resources. From a feminist perspective, resorting to ACD contributes to understanding the power of discourses (in this case, of the media) to reproduce social gender norms.

Thus, the contribution that is intended starts from analyzing the feminist protest as a transgression to the gender norm that determines the ways of acting in the public space and that is reproduced in the media coverage. Various authors point out that the exclusion of women from public space has functioned as a structuring element of the gender order that produces imaginaries and meanings differentiated for women and men, which regulate access, practical activities and behaviors carried out daily (^{Falú, 2011}; ^{Soto Villagrán, 2016}, ²⁰¹⁹). However, women have historically developed -individually and/or collectively- resistance and political transgressions expressed in the use and appropriation of public space. In this case, it is considered that the organized and massive action of the feminist protests transgresses and updates this gender norm in, at least, three ways:

These three transgressions are key in the media representation of the feminist protest, since it guides a sanction on women’s actions in the streets. Following this argument, here we seek to expose these sanctions in the coverage carried out by digital media

Predominant discursive strategies: the main trends in the coverage of feminist protest

In this section, the predominant nomination, predication and framing strategies are presented through a table that illustrates the proportional trends in each medium’s total news items and in the overall total (Table 3). The cells with the predominant strategy categories (with the highest percentage) are highlighted to illustrate the differences between media.

In the nomination strategies (Table 3) it was found that the generalization Women (with variants: Protesters or Participants) is the most frequent, sometimes alongside an indicator of quantity: the media talk of thousands, hundreds of or dozens of women as a discursive resource to qualify or intensify the relevance of the protest. Later, it appears the verbal noun The March (with the variants: The marches and The mobilization), as an entity to which protest actions are attributed: causing damage, leaving injuries, causing losses. The third strategy names collectives or groups (alongside the adjective “feminist” or with complementary descriptions such as “hooded women”). The specificity is much less: there are few news items in which a specific group or individual figure is named.

Regarding the predication strategies, from the description of the actions, an implicit valuation is granted that guides the positive or negative attributions to the acts, actors and situations. The predication with the least presence is the implicit positive (17%), with an argumentative line that highlights causes and reasons for the mobilization, including statistical data and testimonies that account for situations of violence and inequality. On the other hand, the implicit negative predication describes the impact of the protests, highlighting the consequences: damage to buildings and monuments, confrontations, injured people, mobilized police forces, closure of subway stations, deployment of cleaning personnel, etc. The contrast or mixed predication strategy, which is the predominant one, describes the spectrum of actions and participants between the two poles of valuation.

On the other hand, four framing strategies are identified that determine the central point of view to frame the protests. The predominant frame is carnivalization (almost half of the corpus), which focuses on the detailed, emotional and anecdotal narration of the protest, with the description of women’s actions in the streets in a recounting and episodic manner. The second frame is confrontation, present in less than a third of the corpus, focused on conflicts with the authorities, security and police forces and, mainly, the president. Conflicts do not always happen in the space-time of the protest, but rather through statements (made in press conferences, press releases, and conferences such as La Mañanera).¹³ The foresight frame prioritizes the information referring to the actions prior to the protests, where the news stories focused on the measures of the authorities stand out (streets closures, extension of transport timetables, police mobilization) as well as the ones focused on the recommendations and calls from organizing groups (routes, schedules, protest slogans and songs and even “Tips for your first march”). In both cases, the notion of security frames the meaning of the texts.

Vandalization is the frame with the least presence (11%), although acts of vandalism are mentioned in more than 20% of the news items (but from another discursive strategy approach). The vandalization is presented by two perspectives: the narrative one, with the recount of the affectations caused by The March in public space; and the informative one, which presents the figures from the authorities on the damage caused by The March (number of buildings affected, mobilized elements, repair costs, etc.).

Associations of discursive strategies in the texts: the hubs of significance around women’s actions

After identifying the predominant strategies, this section shows the association of the strategies present in the texts of the news stories. Figure 1 illustrates, proportionally, what type of nomination and predication strategies (highlighted by the colored lines) are more linked to the framing strategies (located in each quadrant).

Source: The author.

Figure 1 Relation between framing, nomination and predication strategies 

By associating the strategies, it becomes evident that there’s a configuration of two hubs of significance of the protest, which define what is acceptable (validating recognition) and what is reprehensible (sanctioning transgression) of women’s actions. In one of the hubs, the carnivalization frame is associated with mixed and positive predication strategies, mainly linked to generalizing nomination strategies:

“We want ourselves alive, free and without fear. Not one less” is one of the phrases on one of the protest signs with which tens of thousands of women demonstrated this Sunday, March 8th, in Mexico City, tired of machismo, to demand equality and to stop the femicide violence, which takes the lives of at least 10 women a day in the country... From there the group left for the Antimonumenta (Anti-monument), in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), and then arrived at the capital’s Zócalo, where the names of murdered women were painted earlier that day (^{La Equipa Editorial, 2020, par. 1}).

Due to this association of strategies, the protest is presented as the appropriation of public space with feminist acts, symbols and protest slogans; women are valued positively: “dressed in black with purple and green scarves, they protested with songs and protest signs”, or “they walked and shouted protest slogans such as: We are not hysterical, we are historical”. In this hub of significance, the media validate two senses of the transgression that the protest represents: the alteration and occupation of the public space to claim and demand rights (which stands out by virtue of the magnitude of the attendance); and the use of symbols, languages, behaviors and body aesthetics that challenge stereotypes of female behavior (and that are validated as they constitute an act that can be watched and even spectacularized).

In contrast, the framing strategy of vandalization and the negative predication strategy are presented as complementary to each other, associated with nominations such as The March (which, by not referring to specific subjects, facilitates negative valuations):

The Hemiciclo a Juárez was damaged today after the “Not One Less” March that takes place in commemoration of the Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, in which several of the sculptures and monuments located in Paseo de la Reforma were also vandalized (^{Piñón, 2019, par. 1}).

The March to commemorate International Women’s Day, yesterday March 8th, in Hidalgo, generated losses valued at one million pesos due to the destruction of 52 windows in three stations of the Tuzobús transportation system that will remain closed for several weeks... the closure of the stations will affect at least two thousand users, mostly women, since 54 percent of users are women (^{Redacción, 2021b, par. 1}).

In this type of news stories, an opposition between categories of women converging in the public space is implied (which, however, are hidden in the use of nominations such as The March). This opposition is clearer in the news stories with mixed or contrast predication where, regardless of the framing, the nominations delineate the canon of what to validate and to sanction:

Several Mexican women and feminist groups have begun to gather at the Monument to the Revolution in the Historic Center of Mexico City, the place from which the march for International Women’s Day will begin. Girls, adolescents and adults have gathered in the area, who will once again demonstrate against gender violence in the country. In the Monument to the Revolution there are women who arrived hooded, as well as mothers who arrived with their daughters (^{Redacción, 2021a, par. 1}).

Among the more than 3 000 people attending the protest, a group of no more than 50 hooded women was the one that cause the damage along the route, which was watched, at all times, by policewomen who repelled the attacks with slogans of: We are policewomen and we are eradicating violence! (^{Padilla, 2019, par. 2}).

This opposition is accentuated by the comparison of actions and the emphasis on the numerical difference. Thus, at one hub are “the mothers who arrived with their daughters”, “the thousands who protest in peace” or the “policewomen”, and at another, the “women who arrived hooded”, the “feminist groups” and the few that “go beyond limits”. With these strategies, sanction for female action in the public space remains, through a categorization of women and their acts. In the linguistic choices that make up phrases such as “this is how the streets were after the 8M march”, “Buildings remain damaged four days after the feminist march” or because “Not even by being sealed off, buildings saved” an implicit sanction to women who transgress what is considered valuable in the public space becomes evident, even when the value of occupying this space to protest is recognized.

Differences and commonalities in the media discourse: from feminists vs. buildings to feminists vs. the president

Even with the general commonalities described, the review presents discursive differences between the traditional media (Milenio, El Universal) and the native digital media (La Silla Rota, Aristegui Noticias, Animal Político). Traditional media, who make up, to a greater extent, the hub of significance that sanctions the women’s actions, show a greater tendency to negative predication (around 30% of their coverage, unlike the digital native media that register less than 10%); and they publish more news stories with the vandalization frame (around 15%, almost double or triple that of other media), focusing on the public space affectation:

In the middle of the “Not one less” march that takes place this Monday in Mexico City in commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, several of the sculptures and monuments in Paseo de la Reforma have suffered damages with the graffities of some protesters (^{Redacción, 2019b, par. 1}).

Notably, Milenio focuses on the Collectives as protagonists in more than 60% of its news stories (associated with negative predications and the vandalization perspectivization). In contrast, Aristegui Noticias, La Silla Rota and Animal Político register a higher proportion of news stories with positive predication (close to 30%, three times what Milenio and El Universal register), focused on the actions of “women”:

Women in Mexico City demonstrated this Monday against gender violence and femicides in the country, to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. “I am not hysterical, nor I am menstruating, I am outraged by all my murdered sisters”, is one of the messages that a young woman showed, on a protest sign. “If we don’t fight together, they kill us separately”, said another (^{Redacción Animal Político, 2019, par. 1}).

However, during the period analyzed, the discourse of both types of media evolved coincidentally in the coverage of the protest, from the confrontation frame, as a result of the conflict with the president.

In the timeline, the vandalization frame in the total corpus decreased from 20% in 2019 to around 10% during 2021. In contrast, the confrontation frame tripled (from 14% in 2019, to 43% in 2021). The digital media that most resorted to this strategy represent the two types of media: Aristegui Noticias and El Universal. This indicates that the concern for the affectations on the public space was replaced by the direct conflict of the protesters with the president and the authorities:

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador insisted that the #8M protests were an act of open provocation against the authority because there were hammers, mallets and even gasoline. This after reports of aggression by authorities in the feminist protest. Regarding the Marabunta group, he maintained that its members take sides. To exemplify his statements, he showed a video with violent expressions during the march (^{Redacción AN / AA, 2021, par. 1}).

Only 10 minutes and 700 meters had gone by on the path that one of the marches for safe and legal abortion intended to follow in Mexico City, when the police surrounded it, set up an encapsulation that lasted four hours, and deployed actions of repression that provoked the violent response of the protesters (^{Arteta, 2020, par. 1}).

This change in strategy, observed in all the media, altered the valuation of the protesters by placing the hub of the negative sense in the actions of the authorities. Although it seems to give feminist protest more legitimacy (that is, it increases the positive predication of transgressive acts while confronting presidential machismo), it also pushes it into the background. Thus, the increase in media interest in the street’s feminist protest is the pretext to talk about the conflict with the president, which becomes the central event.