Networked Feminisms

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.

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.

Networking Arguments presents an original study on the use and misuse of global institutional rhetoric and the effects of these practices on women, particularly in developing countries. Using a feminist lens, Rebecca Dingo views the complex networks that rhetoric flows through, globally and nationally, and how it’s often reconfigured to work both for and against women and to maintain existing power structures. To see how rhetorics travel, Dingo deconstructs the central terminology employed by global institutions—mainstreaming, fitness, and empowerment—and shows how their meanings shift depending on the contexts in which they’re used. She studies programs by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the United States, among others, to view the original policies, then follows the trail of their diffusion and manipulation and the ultimate consequences for individuals. To analyze transnational rhetorical processes, Dingo builds a theoretical framework by employing concepts of transcoding, ideological traffic, and interarticulation to uncover the intricacies of power relationships at work within networks. She also views transnational capitalism, neoliberal economics, and neocolonial ideologies as primary determinants of policy and arguments over women’s roles in the global economy. Networking Arguments offers a new method of feminist rhetorical analysis that allows for an increased understanding of global gender policies and encourages strategies to counteract the negative effects they can create.

This book presents a historicised account of the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE), a coordinated effort during the 1980s and 1990s by an international group of women to create and disseminate feminist knowledge about the then-new field of reproductive technologies. Bringing insights from science and technology studies together with social movements and feminist theory, it seeks to examine larger questions about knowledge and expertise in activist engagements with rapidly-developing technologies, as well as explore an important and neglected episode of feminist history. Its findings will be relevant to scholars in science studies, gender and women's studies and social movements, as well as to anyone with an interest in reproductive technologies and the history of feminist activism.

Feminist organizing in the United States is undergoing a paradigm shift. Whereas 1960s-era feminism unfolded through the in-person activities of formal organizations, today, feminist movements are mediated and networked. Contemporary feminism manifests as hashtags, blogs, print zines, digitally coordinated protests, online communities, and more. Case studies of recent movements suggest that, for feminists, to be networked is to be both politically empowered and politically vulnerable. At the same time that emerging media platforms enable activists to quickly reach wide audiences at little or no expense, networked movements face online harassment, commercial cooptation, and activist burnout. This qualitative study examines how feminists are navigating the double-edged nature of networked activism. In particular, I demonstrate how feminists are drawing on networked media to organize resistance, mobilize protests, and cultivate communities, all while juggling the affordances and limitations of their media tools. Data for this study come from an ethnographic analysis of grassroots feminist media activism in the city of Philadelphia, textual analyses of national and transnational feminist media campaigns, and interviews with and archived reflections from activists. Through this data, I argue that feminists' negotiations among media platforms, the political context, and their intersectional values produce a particular activist praxis. I call this praxis do-it-ourselves (DIO) feminism, an organizing paradigm that draws on networked media to build feminist movements from the ground up that reflect feminist values and meet the challenges of the current climate. Faced with an electoral system and a history of collective organizing that has failed to address intersecting systems of oppression, DIO feminists do not rely on existing political institutions. Instead, they draw on networked media to create their own communities, discourses, and protests, cutting out the middlemen of political leaders, organizations, parties, and policy-makers and integrating protest into everyday life. Feminists' turn toward diffuse, decentralized media networks and away from formal organizations raises questions about movement accessibility, sustainability, backlash, impact, and cooptation. But the do-it-ourselves praxis is a distinctly feminist form of networked activism that models new possibilities for what collective action and social transformation can look like in the networked era.

This Element analyzes the features of current feminist movements in Latin America and their responses to conservative reactions. For this, it focuses on the pro-choice movement vis-à-vis the anti-abortion countermovement in Mexico and Brazil. It offers a relational approach embracing the dynamics within the feminist field and between feminism and the state to capture the movements' potential effects. First, the Element proposes the concept of nested feminist networks, which comprises of three dimensions revealing the plurality of the movement across intersectional and sexual identity issues (horizontal), its relationship with the multifaceted state (vertical), and the intermediation of political parties and participatory institutions in this relationship (intermediary). Second, it argues that nested networks allow feminists to enable policies and block actions from conservatives. In sum, it explores how feminists, leveraging their plurality and connection with the state, can counter conservative attacks.

This book studies digital feminist activism in contemporary India. It provides a close and comprehensive analysis of the postmillennial digital moment in India which has given rise to new modes of women’s digital dissent. The volume examines how anti-rape narratives, Feminichy scandals, #MeToo movements, and menstrual activisms, amongst a host of other performative feminist dissent and their discursive medialities create ‘affective digital feminisms’ which both break with and continue the residual and emergent practices within feminisms in India. It looks at digital womanspeak from India and focuses on vernacular forms of dissent, through which the author aims to decolonize feminist imaginaries from their moorings in the West. The author explores new digital, cultural, and social geographies where politically untamed women use their precarity to unsettle deep sexist structures and mount a gendered critique of the political economy of the nation state. An important contribution to the study of feminism in India, the volume will be useful for students and researchers of gender and women’s studies, cultural studies, digital sociology, intersectional feminism, transnational feminism, digital humanities, and South Asian studies. It will also be appeal to readers interested in the history of women’s dissent in India.