Digital Feminist Activism

From sites like Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism, which document instances of street harassment and misogyny, to social media-organized movements and communities like #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported, feminists are using participatory digital media as activist tools to speak, network, and organize against sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. As the first book-length study to examine how girls, women, and some men negotiate rape culture through the use of digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps, the authors explore four primary questions: What experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture are being responded to? How are participants using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? Why are girls, women and some men choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in this way? And finally, what are the various experiences of using digital technologies to engage in activism? In order to capture these diverse experiences of doing digital feminist activism, the authors augment their analysis of this media (blog posts, tweets, and selfies) with in-depth interviews and close-observations of several online communities that operate globally. Ultimately, the book demonstrates the nuances within and between digital feminist activism and highlight that, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers which create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

This book sheds new light on the way that, in the last decade, digital technologies have become inextricably linked to culture, economy and politics and how they have transformed feminist and queer activism. This exciting text critically analyses the contradictions, tensions and often-paradoxical aspects that characterize such politics, both in relation to identity and to activist practice. Aristea Fotopoulou examines how activists make claims about rights online, and how they negotiate access, connectivity, openness and visibility in digital networks. Through a triple focus on embodied media practices, labour and imaginaries, and across the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer social life, she advocates a move away from understandings of digital media technologies as intrinsically exploitative or empowering. By reinstating the media as constant material agents in the process of politicization, Fotopoulou creates a powerful text that appeals to students and scholars of digital media, gender and sexuality, and readers interested in the role of media technologies in activism.

The collection of essays outlines how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminist empowerment in favor of collective, tangible action. Including scholars and activists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, these essays help to catalog the ways in which feminists are organizing online to mobilize different feminist, queer, trans, disability, reproductive justice, and racial equality movements. Together, these perspectives offer a comprehensive overview of how feminists are employing the tools of the internet for political change. Grounded in intersectional feminism––a perspective that attends to the interrelatedness of power and oppression based on race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and other identities––this book gathers provocations, analyses, creative explorations, theorizations, and case studies of networked feminist activist practices. In doing so, this collection archives important work already done within feminist digital cultures and acts as a vital blueprint for future feminist action.

Two decades of neoliberalism have destroyed a structured, pan-regional feminist movement in Canada. As a result, new generations of feminists have come to age without ever seeing the force that an organized social movement can have in democratic society. They have never benefited from the knowledge, the debates, the actions, the mass mobilizations or the leadership that all accompany a social movement and instead organize in decentralized silos. As a result, government and corporate leaders have co-opted feminism to turn it into something that can be bought, sold, or used to attract voters. Campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported, #MeToo, the SlutWalks and the Canadian Women’s marches, while important, don’t yet have the organized power to bring the changes that activists seek to make in society. In Take Back The Fight, Nora Loreto examines the state of modern feminism in Canada and argues that feminists must organize to take back feminism from politicians, business leaders and journalists who distort and obscure its power. Furthermore, Loreto urges today’s activists to overcome the challenges that sank the movement decades ago, to stop centering whiteness as the quintessential woman’s experience, and to find ways to rebuild the communities that have been obliterated by neoliberal economic policies.

Networked Feminism tells the story of how activists have used media to reconfigure what feminist politics and organizing look like in the United States. Drawing on years spent participating in grassroots communities and observing viral campaigns, Rosemary Clark-Parsons argues that feminists engage in a do-it-ourselves feminism characterized by the use of everyday media technologies. Faced with an electoral system and a history of collective organizing that have failed to address complex systems of oppression, do-it-ourselves feminists do not rely on political organizations, institutions, or authorities. Instead, they use digital networks to build movements that reflect their values and meet the challenges of the current moment, all the while juggling the advantages and limitations of their media tools. Through its practitioner-centered approach, this book sheds light on feminist media activists' shared struggles and best practices at a time when collective organizing for social justice has become more important than ever.

"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--

The relative rise or decline of feminist movements across the globe has been debated by feminist scholars and activists for a long time. In recent years, however, these debates have gained renewed momentum. Rapid technological change and increased use of digital media have raised questions about how digital technologies change, influence, and shape feminist politics. This book interrogates the digital interface of transnational protest movements and local activism in feminist politics. Examining how global feminist politics is articulated at the nexus of the transnational/national, we take contemporary German protest culture as a case study for the manner in which transnational feminist activism intersects with the national configuration of feminist political work. The book explores how movements and actions from outside Germany’s borders circulate digitally and resonate differently in new local contexts, and further, how these border-crossings transform grass-roots activism as it goes digital. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

"This book troubles the phenomenon of feminists turning to social media to respond to and enact the political potential of pain inflicted in the acts of sexual harassment, sexual violence, and sexual abuse. Anchoring its analysis in theories and criticisms of neoliberal feminism, this book illustrates the complexity of how in using digital platforms that are governed by neoliberal logic, feminists take on a "neoliberal self(ie) gaze" in their social media activism, potentially undercutting their work toward social justice"--