DIGITAL FEMINIST ACTIVISM Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture

2020

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter...

This paper examines the ways in which girls and women are using digital media platforms to challenge the rape culture they experience in their everyday lives; including street harassment, sexual assault, and the policing of the body and clothing in school settings. Focusing on three international cases, including the anti-street harassment site Hollaback!, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, and interviews with teenage Twitter activists, the paper asks: What experiences of harassment, misogyny and rape culture are girls and women responding to? How are girls and women using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? And, why are girls and women choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in such a way? Employing an approach that includes ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis, discursive textual analysis, and affect theories, we detail a range of ways that women and girls are using social media platforms to speak about, and thus make visible, experiences of rape culture. We argue that this digital mediation enables new connections previously unavailable to girls and women, allowing them to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2018

#MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 2019

Drawing on a thematic analysis of original empirical data gathered from 117 qualitative surveys responses from #MeToo users, as well as further in-depth interviews with six of these respondents, this chapter interrogates the everyday experiences of those who have participated in the #MeToo campaign. In doing so, we unpack the complex range of motivations underpinning participation in this media event, drawing attention to issues of power and privilege in the ways certain testimonies are listened to, ignored or (dis)believed (see also Huda, Cowan & Jawad; Ryan; & Ison, this collection). Throughout the chapter, we challenge generalizations that engaging in digital activism is easy, banal, or a form of “low-intensity” activism, and instead highlight the often traumatic, emotionally exhausting and affective nature of this work. We conclude by pointing to the ways that involvement in digital feminist campaigns such as #MeToo transforms many of our participants’ lives in both tangible and hard-to-measure ways.

Young feminists use social media in order to respond to rape culture and to hold accountable the purveyors of its practices and ways of thinking when mainstream news media, police and school authorities do not. This article analyzes how social networks identified with young feminists take shape via social media responses to sexual violence, and how those networks are organized around the conceptual framework of rape culture. Drawing on the concept of response-ability, the article analyzes how recent social media responses to rape culture evidence the affective and technocultural nature of current feminist network building and the ways this online criticism re-imagines the position of feminist witnesses to rape culture.

Does social media enable forming networks of solidarity between different marginalised groups? Is there a space for non-normative discourses such as the discourse on pleasure? Does digital technology aid in the construction of feminist counter-publics? These are some of the questions explored in this paper. Power relations that operate through social media, including forms of gendered and sexualised violence, are also discussed.

Over the past decade, all around the world, there has been a surge in feminist campaigns which emerge and take shape via a range of digital platforms. While examining the wide range of issues addressed in these campaigns, including sexism, misogyny, harassment, and a wider rape culture, it is clear that sexual violence is a prominent theme and popular rallying point for activists, even when these campaigns were not initially designed to address this theme. This paper draws from qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis to focus on narrative and discursive constructions of sexual assault in two case studies – the photo sharing Tumblr site Who Needs Feminism?, where participants post a photo of themselves holding a sign explaining why feminism continues to be relevant; and the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, which was established to challenge the dominant discourse that any ‘true victim of ‘legitimate’ sexual assault would of course report their assault to the authorities. In this paper, I argue that these digital platforms open-up an under-explored terrain for researchers interested in discourses around sexual assault. Furthermore, while some age-old narrative tropes have transferred themselves to the digital sphere, new vernacular practices are also emerging, shaped by the conventions, affordances and restrictions of the platforms in which they appear. At the same time, because of their popularity, and the new creative ways in which new narratives around sexual assault are able to emerge, it is clear that digital platforms provide a new, fruitful space in which researchers, and the wider public, can come to know about sexual assault.

In this chapter we explore the first author's experiences of 'going viral' for reporting a sexual assault-and subsequently, having been labeled a " celebrity victim " by a mainstream media outlet-and the second author's experience of having her feminist academic Twitter profile aggressively trolled. The Internet presents new forms of mediated space where women have created platforms to report their experiences of sexual assault and fight back against gender and sexual violence and rape culture (Rentschlar, 2015), whilst simultaneously offering new and often anonymous, pathways for misogyny and abuse to proliferate and spread (Ging, 2016; Jane, 2017; Phipps et al., 2017). We examine how prominent anti-feminist discourses that undermine discussions of sexual violence online operate and contextualize this discussion in relation to the exacerbation of hate speech surrounding the Donald Trump presidency. But we also demonstrate how feminist activism and resistance to rape culture has grown, exploring the connectivity and collectivity enabled through social media platforms. We examine the recent dramatic growth of the Facebook group, Pantsuit Nation and by way of social media, the coordination and activation of the Women's March on January 21 st 2017, both of which fought back against the normalizing sexual violence, a theme that permeated the US election.

In 2017, the Me Too campaign, founded ten years earlier to help women of color from low-income communities who were survivors of sexual violence, became a viral social media movement following allegations on Twitter by actress Alyssa Milano of sexual harassment and violence against the powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Using the hashtag #MeToo, Milano unwittingly mobilized millions of women to share their stories via social media, and the #Metoo movement subsequently helped to illuminate both the structural and individual aspects of sexual harassment and abuse by men against women within virtually all aspects of society. As the #MeToo movement swept the globe, millions of women shared stories of sexual harassment and abuse through social media platforms, and indictments of the “inappropriate behavior” against women gained center stage. To understand this movement today and how media made it possible, this study analyses the discussion about online media and social movements surrounding the 2019 World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland. In doing so, this research sheds light on the achievement and impact of the movement. Employing a mixed-method approach providing a feminist epistemological perspective on elements drawn from discourse analysis, comparative discourse analysis, content analysis, and critical discourse analysis, this thesis analyses a sample of ten online reports on how online mass media, and particularly social media, shapes movements for social change. It shows that online media is of great significance in constructing movements for social change because it facilitates the construction and dissemination of a social change discourse and influences how we determine which situations and actions constitute “sexual harassment.” This analysis further shows that feminist principles of gender equality, women’s sexual self-determination, and empowerment no longer define the politics of sexual harassment in the digital age.