Feminist Organizers’ Experiences of Activism

Chapter 4 draws on semi-structured interviews with 18 organizers of Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and Who Needs Feminism? The chapter interrogates key experiences and the affective dimensions of starting, running, and managing a feminist campaign. The chapter outlines four key arguments: First, we posit that organizing feminist campaigns involves highly affective, invisible, precarious, and time-consuming labor. Second, we demonstrate how involvement in these campaigns can inspire “feminist awakenings” among organizers. Third, we suggest that while mediated abuse is a common experience, it is not universal; rather it operates on a continuum, and evokes varying responses from its victims, including being motivated to continue their activism. Finally, we map how feminist activism is often exhausting and draining, and individual and collective care strategies are needed to prevent activist burnout.

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Studying Digital Feminist Activism

In this chapter, we outline our conceptual framework, addressing key theories that underpin our analysis, including, affect and related concepts, including affective solidarity, networked affect, and affective publics. We also introduce key terms from critical technology studies, including platform vernacular and other concepts relevant to the political economy of social media. After providing further information on the six case studies described in the Introduction, including their reason for selection and methods used, the chapter details our unique methodological approach, which draws insights from a range of interdisciplinary tools, including feminist ethnographic methods, thematic textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, surveys, and online observations.

Documenting Harassment, Sexism, and Misogyny in Digital Feminist Spaces

Chapter 3 presents results from a qualitative content analysis and thematic textual analysis drawn from four case studies: Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, Who Needs Feminism?, and #BeenRapedNeverReported. The chapter presents one of the first attempts to analyze these popular feminist campaigns by answering the question of what kinds of experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture the public are sharing on feminist digital platforms. We begin here to develop a key argument that digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and is used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes, drawing on a range of different conventions or vernacular practices. Taking a cue from critical technology studies, we attend to emerging vernacular practices that we argue have been shaped by platform architecture, affordances, and conventions, which work to simultaneously encourage and discourage certain narratives from certain groups of people.

Introduction

In this chapter, we begin by making a case for the ubiquitous ways rape culture, harassment, and sexual violence continue to be a part of many girls’ and women’s everyday lives, despite the ways in which feminists have challenged these issues for over half a century. This chapter then goes on to outline the various ways girls and women have begun to harness new technologies to challenge these practices. Importantly, the chapter also introduces the scholarly foundation for this book, focusing specifically on the contemporary social and cultural context in which our case studies operate. The interdisciplinary nature of this study means we engage with key concepts from the fields of digital media studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, sociology, and education studies. The concepts or terms that we explore and define here include rape culture, lad culture, hashtag feminism, and mediated abuse.

Teen Feminist Digital Activisms

Chapter 7 explores how teen girls are using social media to engage with institutionalized and systematic forms of sexism, sexual objectification, and harassment constitutive of not only what can be termed rape culture but also lad culture in secondary schools in the UK, US, and Canada. The chapter draws on interview data with 27 teenage girls including individual Skype interviews with 11 teen girls in Canada, US, UK, and Ireland and in-person focus groups with 16 girls from a London secondary school feminist club. We show how platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and group chats provide different affordances and vernaculars for girls to challenge rape culture collectively and individually. We focus on the minutia of moments such as when girls challenge a rape joke on Facebook, collectively operate a feminist Twitter account, or negotiate instances of trolling, offering unique insight into the nuances of using social media as teen feminist activists attending school.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes our key findings and case studies and outlines directions for future scholarly inquiry. The Conclusion reiterates the importance of not only asking questions about what digital feminism does, or how it is manifested, but how it is felt and experienced amongst participants. In particular, we draw out the implications of our findings to explore affective and material changes in the lives of our participants. We discuss how our research has revealed a range of new connectivities among girls and women and show the main aspects of what digital feminism can do including educating and transforming lives, and ask what it can achieve, especially considering its demanding nature. We consider these potentialities in light of recent surges of victims speaking out against sexual violence in #MeToo and #TimesUp.

Hashtag Feminism

This chapter focuses on women’s use of the Twitter hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported. Using the hashtag, hundreds of girls and women shared the reasons they didn’t report incidents of sexual assault by partners, family members, friends, and acquaintances. We explore how this feminist hashtag developed in response to the public allegations of sexual violence made about then-popular Canadian CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, and ultimately moved across the media landscape, producing a robust public discussion about sexual violence and rape culture. Drawing on thematic analysis of #BeenRapedNeverReported tweets and interviews with eight women who contributed to the hashtag, we analyze the “affective solidarity” produced along this hashtag and the ways it created new lived possibilities for feminist identification, experience, organizing, and resistance. We contextualize this analysis within a larger Canadian media culture to position the hashtag as both a discursive and affective intervention into hegemonic public discourse about rape culture and sexual violence.

Twitter as a Pedagogical Platform

This chapter shows how feminists are using not only Twitter but a diverse interconnected range of social media platforms to engage in their digital activism. Drawing on a survey of 46 self-defined Twitter feminists, and a subsample of email, Skype, and in-person interviews with 21 of these respondents we explore how participants challenge rape culture and engage in feminist activism creating social media counter-publics. Twitter affords feminists connectivity, speed, immediacy, and global reach to share and debate: important pedagogical processes for raising awareness and visibility around issues such as rape culture. Despite the widely understood benefits of social media, participants recounted challenges of participating in digital activism on Twitter, including instances of hostile anti-feminism and episodes of sexually aggressive trolling. We outline participants’ emergent strategies for coping with technologically mediated misogyny and illuminate the significant role Twitter is playing in activating networked feminism.