Feminist Resistance across the Ocean: Diffusion of 2019 "Un Violador En Tu Camino" Protests from Chile to Turkey

Studies on the diffusion of protests and social movements stress the necessity of geographical, historical, organizational or cultural proximities between countries as the factors that facilitate the spread of ideas, frames, identities and repertoires of collective action from one country to another. Yet in the last two decades, the explosion of various protests across the globe and their mobilizing impact on each other challenged this established view. The recent interconnections and interactions among the protests demonstrated the increasing role of emotional and cognitive dimension of the collective action in the cross-national spread of protests despite absence of abovementioned proximity factors. The 2019 "Un violador en tu camino" protests against the gendered violence and femicides in Turkey was a remarkable example of this phenomenon: While these protests were originally choreographed and performed by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis in November 2019 and became popular worldwide, Turkey emerged as the most contentious site of this protest wave. Designed as a case study employing Grounded Theory methodology, this study explores why and how protests inspire other protests in distant places by analyzing fifteen in-depth interviews, textual data and secondary sources. Grounded in the empirical data, the concept of affinitive diffusion is introduced to explain that perceived similarities, attachment to a transnational identity and multi-layered resonance of a collective action repertoire may cause the cross-national diffusion of protests. Apart from exploring the role of cognitive and emotional mechanisms of diffusion, which have been largely neglected in social movement studies, the findings shed light on the discussions regarding the positionality and reflexivity of the researcher in social movement studies.