The working paper "#FrauenSagenNein - Bridging the Divide. Analyzing the Affective Networt of Gender-Critical Alliances" is based on the master's thesis by Pauline H. Zahn and is situated within the framework of the anti-gender debate in Germany following the publication of the draft Self-Determination Act in June 2022. Two prominent groups of actors have emerged within this discourse: gender-critical feminists and right-wing populists. Despite their different ideological and political positions, the affordances of social media offer them a platform for collaborative interactions. The boundaries between these actors are becoming increasingly blurred under topic-related hashtags. This paper uses affect theory and the analysis of hashtag activism to examine the collective protest on Twitter against the proposed self-determination law. The results show that #FrauenSagenNein served as a bridge between gender-critical feminists and right-wing populist actors and led to their overlap.

The article was published in the Working Papers series of the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies and can be downloaded in full here.