Works under Peer-review
Works under Peer-review
2025
- Under ReviewPower, Vengeance, and Hope: A Roles-Based Analysis of Asymmetric Hashtag Activism for the 2023 War in GazaTay Jeong2025
[Working paper, critical feedback from anyone is very much welcome] Using cross-lingual international X trends data and a unique roles-based analytical framework well suited to the study of political affect and granular textual data, this study examines the spatial distribution of emotions in global pro-Palestine and pro-Israel affective spectatorship about the 2023 Gaza War in its early phase. Global pro-Palestine hashtag activism was overwhelmingly focused on victimhood, but Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East uniquely exhibited a comparably strong commitment to glorified sentiments of heroism in tandem with victimhood. In comparison, global pro-Israel hashtag activism was predominately driven by villain-centric messages focusing on the topic of denunciation. Palestine/Gaza and Hamas furnished the main characters to which these three roles were competitively assigned, ultimately serving as condensed signifiers for the perennial media frame contestation between ‘injustice and defiance’ and ‘terrorism’. Contrary to popular attempts to characterize the discursive conflict about the War as a parallel clash of victimhood or vengeful emotions, our results reveal the starkly asymmetrical nature of affective spectatorship by political partisanship. We propose a power-centric interpretation of the observed affective asymmetries, which we argue is more plausible than culturalist explanations. We also reflect on the observed affective fissure within the global Palestine solidarity movement amidst debates about the cultural praxis of subalternity that have intensified since the outbreak of the 2023 Gaza War.