“Transversing” Feminism: Digital Activism and the Responses to Sexual Violence and Rape Culture
Theresa Chapman
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 Structure of the Paper
2. Contemporary Young Feminism: investigating digital activism with ‘self identified’ feminist girls
3. Sexual Violence in the Digital World: Gendertrolling and the Manosphere
4. Digilante Feminist Tactics: Revealing the scope of violence
4.1 Feminist “Response-ability”
4.2 Politics of Care: the act of giving “advice” and self care as warfare
5. Tweeting back and ‘Shouting back’: The Power of Hashtags
5.1 #MeToo
5.1.2 Grounding MeToo and Digital Activism in Materialism
6. Digital Feminism in the Neoliberal Era
7. Conclusion
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ABSTRACT
This research attempts to explore digital feminist activism with challenging, and subversing dominant discourses related to sexual violence. I identify digital feminist activism as transversing feminism in the sense that its nature of wide dissemination of content and high connectivity allows it to transcend beyond geography and blur the boundaries between the online and offline worlds. In this context, online/offline are not sustainable as a binary but rather an interconnected framework where feminists can shape new forms of resistance. Through the introduction of digital technologies, feminists are now able to directly respond to sexual violence and do so in a diverse set of ways. Moreover, digital activism has been able to have material consequences; therefore, we must move away from viewing this practice as “meaningless” or in conflation to postfeminist frameworks. In the foreground of neoliberalism, digital feminist activism has been able to highlight the precarties of the neoliberal system through the female body (Baer, 2016), and through this process, feminists are able to connect personal experiences to overarching structural inequalities.
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1. Introduction
In the October 2010 issue of The New Yorker author and journalist, Malcolm Gladwell questioned the praxis of digital activism in contemporary times. He underscored the vast dissonance between traditional activism of the Civil Rights Movement and the digital
“Twitter Revolution” invigorating transnationally. Despite social media’s offering of new tools, such as the exploitation of “weak-tie” connections that allow the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and faster dissemination of ideas, Gladwell asserts the revolution will “not be tweeted” (Gladwell, 2010). According to Gladwell, what makes traditional activism divergent from the online variant is the feature of hierarchical organization. He argues that social media is utilized for building networks, which is dissimilar from hierarchy organizations that rely on a central authority to oversee level-distinctive groups that carry out specific procedures. Conversely, networks are more dissipated, predicated on weak or otherwise “loose” connections. The decisions made in the networks aren’t channeled through different levels but rather agreed upon a consensus
(Gladwell, 2010). Lack of structure creates favorability towards flexibility and resilience rather than discipline and perseverance, which Gladwell argues to be necessary for effective activist work. However, Gladwell also discerns social media to be highly adaptable in low risk situations and increase participation, although such participation does not neatly convert to motivation. Cassie Clark’s “#TrendingFeminism: The Impact of Digital Activism” concurs with Gladwell that digital activism is not substantial enough to cause a complete paradigmatic shift; rather it emerges as a new format where activist practices can be incorporated, and diffuse new dynamics of activism (Clark, 2007, 6). In other words, digital
4 activism has created new discursive and “counterpublic” spaces that attempt to subverse a monological and hegemonic media and promote more fluid, transformative and equal-access public spaces.
This paper questions digital activism in regards to challenging hegemonic discourses related to sexual violence. Of course, the effectiveness of digital activism is rather contentious and difficult to measure; therefore, we will focus on how digital activism has equipped feminists with new tools and broaden the scope of feminist activist work in the neoliberal era It argues that digital activism has transversed feminist work by its ability to transcend traditional spatial dimensions of the online and offline world, thus allowing feminists to do three tasks: (1) refashion previous feminist strategies through the use of digital technologies (2) formulate effective communities of solidarity and feminist consciousness raising through responses to sexual violence and rape culture (3) produce
‘offline’ tangible outcomes that counter the misconceptions of digital activism being viewed as a low-level engagement style of activism
Lastly, this paper will also address the concerned relationship of digital activism and neoliberalism, in which digital spaces seem to capture the contradictory-but patterned sensibility relevant to neoliberalism.,1 thus scholars warn that digital spaces can potentially reinscribe dominant notions related to discourses of victim blaming and rape culture.2 However, I aim to show that digital feminist activism is an appropriate mode of resistance in the neoliberal era.
1 See: Gill, R. (2016) “Postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times.” Feminist Media Studies, 16:4. 2 See: Stubbs & RIchardson (2018) Tweeting Rape Culture: Examining Portrayals of Victim Blaming in discussions of sexual assault cases on Twitter.” Feminisms and Social media, 28:1; Salter, M. (2013). Justice and revenge in online counter-publics: Emerging responses to sexual violence in the age of social media. Crime, Media, Culture, 9:3;
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Structure of the Paper
The paper is divided into six sections. The first section examines young contemporary feminisms, particularly with what feminisms young girls are engaging with, and illustrates how digital activism has been able to provide historically ostracized voices a platform in order to engage with feminist content. Moreover by understanding young girls’ feminist engagement, we can advance our knowledge of how feminism is evolving through the application of digital spaces. The second section detours through the pervasiveness of sexual violence as a response to growing feminist visibility in the cyberworld. This details the co-optation of feminist activism through digitized forms of gender violence. The third section discusses the various strategies online feminists have used as a response to such gender e-bile, and documents how digital technologies have aided feminists to respond directly to such violences and fortify communities of solidarity. The fourth section specifically goes over the use of hashtags and its uniqueness in feminist activism. This explores hashtags used to critique rape culture, specifically that of the #MeToo, and previous iterations, in order to prove that digital activism does have concrete results, and therefore, digital activism can be situated in materialism rather than through symbolic and representational practices. The fifth section parcels the concerns of online feminism and its relationship to neoliberalism, and draws upon Baer’s framework of “precarity” in order to situate digital activism as a mode of resistance through the redoing of feminism.
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2. Contemporary Young Feminism: investigating digital activism with ‘self identified’ feminist girls
As noted above, this section explores feminist engagement with young girls who self identify as feminists. By documenting how young girls are using the internet to produce and engage with feminist media, we can understand how feminism has evolved through the introduction of cyberspace by including previously ostracized voices. Despite muted research exploring young women’s interactions with digital feminism, certain studies have been conducted3.
Keller (2015) noted that young women have historically been outsiders to feminism and voiceless in feminist discourse. This exclusion could be explained by naivety, or the assertion of an apolitical stance, and that more politically invested concepts are adultist endeavors.
However, young women’s non-identification with the feminist label could be misinterpreted as apathy (Harris, 2004) as feminism burgeoned from negative and unfeminine stereotypes; a man-hater, a disruptor, a raging woman who sets her bra on fire. Discourses surrounding how young feminists fashion their identity as feminists are contentious. As I argue in this section, digital activism has transverse boundaries by quickly and vastly disseminating information as well as form new methods of knowledge-sharing that have made feminist information more accessible and diversified. According to Keller’s (2018) “Speaking unspeakable things:
Documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture”, young girls described how social media had allowed them to connect with other likeminded girls across geographical space and locations, as well as participate in activist spaces that are more accessible through online than through traditional activism, such as community outreach and volunteer work (21).
3 Studies include: Keller (2015); Retallack, Ringrose & Lawrence (2016); Jackson (2018)
7 Moreover, young girls noted in Keller’s research viewed social medias like Twitter and
Tumblr as being integral for developing a feminist consciousness. Young girls online are performing a micropolitics approach, focusing on intersectionality, diversity and a politics of difference which is largely resonate of a third wave feminist agenda (Jackson, 2018, 34).
Question is whether these micro-rebellions inform or enable broader, large-scale changes.
Given in the case of hashtags, which will be discussed more in depth later in this research, young girls can contribute their experiences to build onto a bigger collective feminist memory. For example, young girls have engaged with discussions about rape culture through experiences related to street harassment, rape jokes, and sexist dress codes. Keller (2018) refers to social media as a way to bring “urgency” and immediate coverage to these issues, which are evident through hashtags such as #everydaysexism and #croptopday (23). Shown in Keller’s research, young girls can make connections of their personal experiences with sexualization and sexism to larger, systemic forces like rape culture. The girls interviewed also expressed the need to “do something” or educate their friends on feminism through tools like social media and blogging. Therefore, not only are young girls communicating feminist issues with strangers online but also are communicating with the contacts of their peers. This not only demonstrates how feminism has evolved but also how digital activism has transverse space and blur the distinctions between offline and online worlds.
3. Sexual Violence in the Digital World
This section highlights the emergence of popular misogyny to counter the growing hypervisibility of feminist activism online. Online “popular” misogyny performs as rhetorically distinctive practice and resembles a new dialect and iteration of rape culture.
8 Otherwise referred as gendertrolling, digital misogyny is a gender-motivated and sexually charged tactic used to make women feel violated within digital spaces, including a set of tools such as: revenge porn, hyperbolic misogyny, rape and death threats, and doxxing4 (Jane,
2016, 284). Through the production of online misogyny, “manospheres” have cultivated on various subculture sites, such as Reddit and 4chan, comprising of mostly socially awkward “incel” boys who use libertarian, free speech rhetoric to justify their right to do or say anything regardless of whether it causes harm (Jane, 2018, 666). Such ecosystems act vicariously through mob mentalities, and in some cases, participants compete to who can cause the most suffering to the targeted victim. Emma Jane’s “Online Misogyny and Feminist
Digitalism” (2016), asserts that women who were targeted in mob attacks “suffered a range of psychological, professional and financial impacts” (287). Misogynistic violence in the cybersphere has severely impacted the voices of women and feminists, resulting in self-censoring, anonymity / pseudonyms or abandoning online spaces altogether. Therefore, we must view gendertrolling in the context of a masculinization of virtual space designed to silent women’s voices. Moreover, parallel to its offline conventions, online sexual violence is addressed with the same trivial and victim blaming response from law enforcement and media channels, which is demonstrated through lack of legal intervention and media framing that situate the victim as “sensitive” or “exaggeratory” when describing the impact of their online threats (Alat 2006). This framing contributes to ongoing attitudes associated with sexual violence, particularly victim myths and extends as far as normalizing online violence due to its “banter” (Lumsden & Morgan, 2017). The victim is typically constructed as
“vengeful” or “vindictive” to opposite a “reasonable” public discourse related to crime and justice that is ostensibly masculine (Salter, 2013, 286). Through symbolic power (Lumsden &
4 Doxxing refers to the act of releasing personal information online to encourage offline violence
9 Morgan, 2017) and existing homosocial cultures embedded in public channels and discourses, social media replicates acts of gender violence and victim blaming.
Furthermore, social media designs make violence easily accessible. Most obtrusive is the ability for users to pursue actions anonymously. As stated by Scott Struds (2014): “online, no one can see our physical body, so we are free to manipulate our avatars, names, self descriptions, and our manner of interacting with others to create our online persona” (169).
The malleability of online selves have been viewed with desirability because of its expressive freedom but consequently, has also enticed uncivil behaviors and even criminal activities, such as harassment and revenge porn. Creation of image based violence has become overwhelmingly traumatic as they represent a promise that the event will continue. To briefly go over image based violence as a concept, it is defined as the non-consensual production and distribution of sexually private images (McGlynn & Rackley, 2017). Image based violence, and photographs that document sexual acts or potentially, sexual assault are likely to be disseminated, reaching wider audiences and inviting users to comment. which then allows the degradation of the victims to continue at an exponential rate. Referencing Judith
Butler’s theory of photography, “the photograph reiterates the event, extends the event and is an act of sexual violence in and of itself as it humiliates, violates, and invites more and more viewers to join in on the violation” (2007, 961). Thus, the photograph has a temporal extension of the event that solidifies a feeling of permanency. Moreover, wide dissemination risks normalizing non consensual sexual activity; thus, while the normalization of sexual violence may cause individual harms, it can adversely impact society, especially when images visually engender a culture that help sustain sexual violence. Furthermore, we must interrogate the meanings that are framed in these photographs and how they perpetuate
10 meanings of rape culture. For example, Butler (2007) examines the “interpretive matrix” which suggests:
“the photos are not only shown, but named; both the way that they are shown, the way they are framed and the words used to describe what is shown work together to produce an interpretive matrix for what is seen” (957).
For example, in Dodge’s research (2016), victims presented in the photographs were accompanied by terms such as “whores” and “sluts” hence, normalized the myths surrounding victim blaming and the myths that women are naturally passive while simultaneously constructing their bodies as inherently sexual and tempting (74). Myths such as these send a cultural message that women who are sexually assaulted have elicited those reactions based on how they express their sexuality through clothes, entering spaces that should have been read as unsafe or being sexually assertive. Mirroring rape culture, rape prevention assumes to fall on the laps of victims rather than the assailants themselves and this message is propagated even further when assailants are not held criminally accountable.
4. “Digilante” Feminist Tactics: Revealing the scope of violence
This section highlights digital based guerrilla tactics that feminists have used to counter gender-based violence and the methods to which feminists have carved out space to resist hegemonic discourses. Due to aggregated forms of online violence with little to no institutional solutions available, many feminists have delegated themselves as their own defense advocate. Digilantism, otherwise known as DIY tactics, materialized as a direct response to gendertrolling. Prior to digital spaces, anti-rape activists relied on vigilante street
11 tactics, such as learning self defense and “guerrilla” activities by creating lists of known sex offenders in surrounding areas (Bevacqua, 2000). Eventually communicative forums were established, such as underground feminist magazines, journals and on-campus activism, allowing women to create larger networks beyond their inner circles (Howes, 2015). Digital activism is a variant of these subversive practices, as many women attempt to raise feminist consciousness and fight back through “speaking out” strategies. According to Byrne, (2013) unlike traditional vigilantes who used violence to paralyze their targets, digilantes involves a mixture of trickery, persuasion, and public shaming (71). The invention of digilante also reveals the structural weaknesses of cybersphere to account proper protection for victims.
Feminist digilantism has focused on shaming perpetrators through shaming and visualizing their acts of misogyny, sexual harassment, and violence through the use of blogs, web sites and hashtags. Some examples of digilante tactics include Hollaback! which started when seven residents in the New York area banded together to stop street harassment as a result of minimal law enforcement intervention. Originally, Hollaback! campaigns were dedicated to catalyzing conversations that would propel in devising strategies that could allow women to feel safer in public spaces and ensure women to have equal access to such spaces without the fear of being violated (Hollaback!, 2015). During its roots, Hollaback! operated by women taking photos and recording their experiences of harassment, which were then published in a larger forum. Consequently, this allowed women to observe sexual violence that expanded beyond just penetrative rape. The executive director, Emily May, also stated that due to the introductions of technology, women had a greater asset of bringing visibility to issues of misogyny and rape culture while also encouraging women to stand up to these offenses by documenting it (May, 2015). Eventually, Hollaback! became extensively communal, as members part of the group trained individuals and community organizers on how to use
12 cellular devices to document, map and narrate acts of street harassment (Rentschler, 2014,
72). Consequently, the organization expanded from a guerrilla tactic and blogging spot into an established international nonprofit organization, and partnering with other orgs and activists to tackle street harassment. Due to this expansion, Hollaback! now has designated local chapters where women can document their experiences in 500 words or less
(Hollaback!, 2015). These stories are then uploaded to the blog and act as merely informational rather interactive as other users cannot respond to each other’s posts. Perhaps what is most informative about Hollaback! is it allows us to conduct content analyses to gather an understanding about what forms of sexual violence, rape culture, and misogyny women are responding to. Keller (2018) sampled 159 posts from the Hollaback! website between 2006 and 2015. She coded three types of harassment from the data gathered, including the discourses present within the posts. She arrived at the conclusion that women were predominantly responding to street harassment (or general catcalling) and attempts by men to strike up conversations that included forms of sexual banter, such as comments related to appearance (Keller, 2018). Another persistent theme was women witnessing obscene gestures, such as a man groping himself and exposing private parts in public spaces that were confined or restricted. Most striking about Keller’s findings was that while some women decided to ignore the harassment, numerous women decided to step up and engage verbally with their harassers by telling them to back off or threatening to call police (Keller,
2018). Being able to report these forms of harassment has motivated others to speak up and become a critical strategy for resisting rape culture.
Another variation of feminist digilatnism is digital confrontation through the process of “naming” or revealing perpetrators of violence. For example, Canadian feminist, Steph
13 Guthrie5, tracked down the 25 year old man who created a game called “Beat up Steph
Sarkeesian” which was an explorative violent game that invited players to punch Steph in the face (288). Guthrie was able to track her perpetrator and confront him on an online forum before relaying his name and contacts to media outlets as well as alerting potential employers in his local area. This reveals another contour of guerrilla tactic, where victims of online violence expose perpetrator’s locations of work as a form of counter-doxxing. Or, in the case of gamer journalist, Alanah Pearce, who was sent rape threats from a teenage boy through her twitter, fought back by informing the perpetrator’s parents (Jane, 2018, 288). Pearce’s tactic also suggest that the conversation of educating younger aged perpetrators about misogyny and rape culture are a weight that should be borne by parents rather than the victims themselves. Above all, being able to identify perpetrators online and transfer the consequences into real life domains show subversion into social media designs that permit anonymity and intractable contexts.
4.1 Feminist “Response-ability”
Feminist and political philosopher, Kelly Oliver, author of Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, coined the term response-ability, the capacity to respond to others (2001). For Oliver, the ability to respond (response-ability) is a necessary condition for subjectivity as it requires
“the social address of another person, containing both the condition of possibility of response, and the ethical obligation to respond and enable response-ability from others” (15).
Oppression, domination and torture undermine subjectivity by disenfranchising
5 Refer to: Jane (2018) “Systemic Misogyny Exposed.” International Journal of Cultural Studies Vol. 21(6) 661–68
14 response-ability which are predicated on subjectivity. Consequently, the act of witnessing, which Oliver (2001) describes to have a double meaning, can subvert subject-object models; dominance-subservience; self-other; psychoanalysis-history; constative-performative (2000).
Carrie Rentschler (2014) draws on Oliver’s “response-ability” and uses it within the context of interrupting rape culture and its contours of gendered, racial, and sexuality harassment.
Rentschler proposes “feminist response-ability” is best captured through the application of social media that blends “testimonial, advice giving, and cultures of support” (68). Young women’s use of social media organizes, produces, and deploys a space for them to respond to the cultures of harassment and violence. In this case, young women are positioned as the witnesses to violence, which include cat-calls, rape jokes, verbal misogyny, and other communicative practices, who can then respond through the tool kit of phone image, video, or audio recording and mapping techniques. Rentschler (2014) also notes that feminist responses to rape culture transform original notions of witnessing, by which moving from witnessing as sensory based acts of seeing and hearing to the ability to record and disseminate audio and visual evidence of rape culture (69). Defining “response-ability” is not so much generated by seeing but rather the act of speaking across digital channels via media documentation. Accounts on Twitter and Tumblr have also been created for the sole intention for women who have been harassed or assaulted to share their stories, their experiences with victim blaming, and conversations they find difficult to share among non-survivors.
According to Rentschler (2014) these spaces are obtrusively sensitive; trigger warning testimonials in order to eschew the possibility of members reliving their assault and to promote a “politics of care” that is seamlessly void outside these spaces (69). While the tradition of testimonials are often communicated in serious contexts, online feminists are broadening the presentation of survivor’s stories to assemble more nuanced and unique
15 networks. In 2013, feminists took over twitter with the #safetytipsforwomen, a hashtag meant to disrupt commonplace victim blaming rhetoric but doing so with humor. User @jilaryjfb joked that if you hide your forearms in your sleeves, the rapist will mistake you for a T-Rex and carry on his way (March, 2013). Another, from user @inkhat satirizes women’s lack of access to public space due to the impending fear of rape by tweeting:
“don’t walk home alone when it’s dark. Even a little dark. Or might be dark. Don’t walk home. Or walk. Levitate #safetytipsforladies.” (March, 2013).
Humor is also exerted in ways of digitizing resistance. Examples include @NoToFeminism, a twitter parody account which aims to satirize aspects of misogyny and feminist stereotypes.
Characteristics of the profile include the intentional misspelling of “feminism” as “finism;”
“femmsm;” “feminiismn” and other variations. The account also humorizes feminist stereotype, such as the militant, warhead feminist. One tweet reads:
“I don’t need fimem PLEASE be careful on International Women’s Day it’s like The Purge and feminists can commit any crimes they want to for 24 hours #staysafe” (March, 2019).
Another tweet expresses feminists and their “man-hating” syndrome:
“I don’t need fimemms because they all HATE men, and i LOVE them! I adore them, they satisfy me completely, i want them every day, they are warm and fulfilling and salty and made of potato no wait that’s fries. I love fries.” (October, 2018).
Twitter based tactics foregrounded in humor are new reimagined ways of inserting feminism into the public sphere.
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4.2 Politics of Care: Forming spaces of Solidarity
Considering Gladwell’s insinuation of digital media formulating “weak-tie” connections, that are often situational and unearthed of emotional receptivity, networks that center on sexual violence contrast by nature. Due to the heaviness and traumatic experiences that sexual violence produces, members that are part of platforms centered on sexual violence are especially careful of which stories are shared, by denoting trigger warnings for sensitive content. The responses among these networks are also supportive. In ways, the practice of users offering support and options to other survivors of sexual harassment and violence is subversive when considering the backdrop of internet misogyny. For example, Hollaback! includes a significant feature; on their interface “I’ve Got your Back! button supplements as a solidarity act rather than going through the emotionally laborious process of responding, which to some survivors is heavily convenient. Despite this action being rather insignificant in a broader scheme and what others might conflate under a “slacktivist” umbrella, in the context of sexual violence in which many survivors are imparted with little support, the low involvement of pressing a button to deliver support is recognized as quite significant and reparative.
According to Rentschel (2016), feminist responses to rape culture are diligently organized as much by affective solidarities as they are by technological networks of online distribution. As blogger, Jessica Valenti (2013) stresses, online feminist activism can be exhausting, especially when confronted with the reality of ongoing violence, and the exacerbating conditions that tend to not reflect the activist work sought to thwart it. Valenti
17 emphasizes the emotional exhaustion, anger and sadness that can come from this work and therefore, the essence of self care is highlighted. Likewise, as much as online media is a focal point in current activism, many activists stress the act of leaving when conversations feel too triggering or laden. Subsequently, burnout occurs as a result of the physical and mental weight when activists put forth so much work yet don’t see the reflection in results (Mullen,
2019).
From the epilogue of Burst to Light, Audre Lorde (1998) reiterated the importance of self care in activist work: “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of warfare.” Lorde’s work speaks to the importance of feminism as not being too soft, too complacent, and too indulgent, which Sara Ahmed concludes to be a result of neoliberalism that has allowed a dismissal of feminism to be considered in these terms
(Ahmed, 2014). Ahmed uses the work of Catherine Rottenburg (2003) to demonstrate neoliberalism’s penetration of not only external contexts, but the internal as well, most specifically the psyche. Rottenburg cogently states that the feminist subject are “simultaneously neoliberal, not only because she disavows the social, cultural and economic forces producing this inequality, but also because she accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self care, which is increasingly predicating on crafting a felicitous work--family balance based on a cost benefit calculus.” In other words, neoliberalism reiterates to feminist subjects that in order to self preserve they must stay focused on upward mobility by maintaining presence at work, being responsible of their own well being, and separating from communal spaces in order to linearly progress. Divergently, sexual violence based digital activism attempt to subvert such hegemonic notions of existence and well being.
Digital practices participate in concerted healing efforts through carved out and moderated spaces, where everyone can share testimonies, provide sources, and be able to respond to
18 specific posts. Collective care plays a centralized role in the organizational sustainability of feminist movements and spaces alike. Most significantly, social media has enabled survivors to share their crowdfunding pages6, which users can donate to and allocate resources for them to seek out restorative methods (i.e. therapy, medication, physical therapy) and generally support themselves through crisis. The capability of survivors to navigate and cope with their experiences and trauma is what Ahmed would refer to as an act of resistance in of itself because the act of rape, and other forms of oppressions operate to reinforce the fragmentation of survival. Moreover, Ahmed supports that the recollection of personal experience can be connected to structure but also requires the connection to painful histories:
“As feminism teaches us: talking about personal feelings is not necessarily about deflecting attention from structures. If anything, I would argue the opposite: not addressing certain histories that hurt, histories that get to the bone, how we are affected by what we come up against, is one way of deflecting attention from structures (as if our concern with our pain or suffering is what stops certain things from just “going away”).”
To be viscerally or indirectly impinged by oppressional violence we need to connect our pains to painful histories and not neglect its presence in our recollections and cultivation of resistance. We can, however, be concerned of our own well being, but in lieu of upward mobility and progression we can foreground our care, and existence as a political struggle, which can equally be as radical and powerful.
5. Tweeting Back and ‘Shouting Back’: the Power of Hashtags
This section explores the use of hashtags that have been emblematic of digital feminist activism. Defined by Clarke (2007), hashtag activism is a: “community-driven tagging system used on social media platforms to aggregate and track content through use of
6 See: Help Jee Jing Survive Sexual Assault https://www.gofundme.com/jeesurvival?pc=&rcid=r01-155563731959-b67dccb5a81d4b88
19 a hash (#) symbol followed by a keyword, or tag” (62). Hashtags are useful with archiving bodies of memory by producing communities of conversation. According to Jenkins (2018), hashtag activism falls under the scope of participatory culture that views online interaction as a catalyst for individuals to create social support and connection with one another. In current feminist context, hashtag activism is another reiteration of feminist conversation-expansion tactics7 The uniqueness and effectiveness of the hashtag is the ability to bring latent narratives into ground view, creating accessibility to larger audiences with immediate and easy tracking, which allows using social media as a less intimidating tool when confronting misogyny and sexual violence. The development of Twitter centralized the role of hashtag to organize information on the app, specifically to help organize information related to a singular topic
(Small, 2011). When a hashtag gets repeatedly tweeted, it is thus, made visible on a trending list and featured in Twitter’s Moments tab, the site’s news section, solidifying the transparency of the hashtag across social networks and beyond. According to Clarke (2007), while some hashtags trend quickly and then disappear, not all hashtags fade into obscurity
(63). Carr and Cowan (2016) also question the lifespan of hashtags, which they view as being integral to formulate ideas and imbue them with meaning and associations before eventually being overlooked, forgotten and seldom mentioned again (441). Therefore, is it possible for hashtags to have long term relevancy and subsequently, what are the requisite features hashtags must embody in order to maintain that relevancy? Luckily, Xiong et. al (2019) gives us a brief look into what those features look like. First and foremost, a successful hashtag must be informative, unambiguous, and not too long (13). Hashtags must be able to speak
7 Feminist conversation expansion tactics allow women to politicize their personal experiences with all forms of patriarchy, including media. See: Clarke, C. (2014) #TrendingFeminism: The Impact of Digital Feminism.
20 towards something and do so with clarity, directiveness, and be encapsulating of a specific experience. We will apply these features to understanding the effectiveness of #MeToo.
5.1 #MeToo
On October 17th 2017, #MeToo jolted to the top of Twitter’s trending list when actress Alyssa Milano used the hashtag in response to rape allegations against Hollywood’s most prolific producers, Harvey Weinstein. However, the hashtag was originally created years ago by African American women’s rights activist Tamara Burke in 2006. Through her tweet, Milano encouraged users to join and showcase the epidemic of sexual violence, and confirm the nauseating truth that nearly all women has experience some form of sexual harassment in their lifetime. Within the first 24 hours, the hashtag was used 12 million times and thus, capturing attention from the public and mediascape (CBS, 2017). Undoubtedly,
#MeToo is one of the greatest spectacularizations of digital activism, especially in the bounds of sexual violence based activism. Several iterations of hashtags prior to #MeToo have also circulated the conversation around rape culture; #BeenRapedNeverReported,
#safetytipsforwomen, #YesAllWomen, and #SlutWalks. Each of these hashtags employ an integral feminist strategy of shouting back. Shouting back is defined by creating a response accompanied by a hashtag which is transmitted through digital spaces, and ventures to expose prejudice faced by people on a daily basis (Turley & Fisher, 2018, 128). These tweets are then shared or reacted by users and sequentially, provokes responses from others, resulting in staggeringly loud collectives that demand to be heard. In contrast to previous hashtags concerning sexual violence and rape culture at large, the galvanization of #MeToo was attributable to celebrity involvement. Alyssa Milano, at the time she tweeted and ultimately spearheaded #MeToo into spectacularity, had an overwhelming two million following count
21 and thus built high engagement. To give perspective of this rapid trajectory, an audience of
1000 individuals on average can be reached if a Twitter user’s original is retweeted once
(Murthy 2010), and Milano’s tweet had exponentially gathered 17,000 rts and 46,000 replies within the first 24 hours, and shared over 500,000 times on Twitter and additional 12 million times on Facebook (Park, 2017). Shortly after, a list of celebrities—Angelina Jolie, Reese Witherspoon, Lady Gaga, Gwyneth Paltrow, Rose McGowan, and many more—began to express their own experiences of sexual assault and harassment, or allowed the hashtag to speak for itself. While MeToo came into awareness through Milano’s tweet, MeToo has been an ongoing effort to help survivors of sexual violence and began as an intra-community catchphrase among survivors to one another know they were not alone and that a “movement for radical healing was happening and possible” (Burke, 2017). Eventually, MeToo burgeoned into a collective body, too exponential to ignore, that people had no other option but to deal with the epidemic of violence and the fixedness of rape culture and male entitlement given the sheer numbers of women coming forward. The MeToo was also extraordinary for feminist consciousness-raising. Practices of recounting experiences were essential for consciousness raising in the second and third waves and with the introduction of digital technology, we are able to replicate these practices, while also refashion them and do so with higher connectivity and visibility. Hashtags curate a public and visible body, where users can recollect their experiences and also relate to each other. Without the disclosure of collective narratives, many would view their experiences as a personal, and individual deficiency that is not foregrounded in a systemic problem.8 The ability for the hashtag to
8 Gleeson, J. (2018) The Feminist Hashtag as Consciousness-Raising.1-16
22 expand spatially9 has also prompted those who not have been reached in traditional forms of media to share their own story.
5.2: Grounding MeToo and Digital Activism in Materialism
Perhaps what is central to the topic of activism in the digital age is that it was able to be grounded in materialism. One of the concerns related to digital activism has been that its a lazy, non laborious practice, otherwise known as ‘slacktivism.’ Further, many are concerned that digital activism is too based in the symbolic and does not provide tangible outcomes; and therefore, is not actively or aggressively challenging anything. This is often a concern that gets lumped in with a postfeminist framework which attempts to drain the political efficacy of movements and prescribe to styles and commodification of personal experiences.
However, these concerns inaccurately frame online/offline worlds as a strict and rigid binary, when online actions are often connected to those in the offline world. Researchers have also noted that online and offline activism function together,10and can help establish effective modes of feminist protest. Even though it was not the first movement to shift from online to offline practice, the scope of visibility of the MeToo movement has situated digital activism into a site of material practice in extraordinary ways. For example, Meoo was able to materialize accountability of wealthy men for abuse and harassment against women, either by legal action or social excommunication. Thus, the actions of abusers documented online were able to have offline consequences. Moreover, MeToo has also sprawled into conversations related to the behaviors in offline public spaces, such as the workplace. This has been
9 MeToo has been able to circulate beyond the Global North’s reach, countries including South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, and Palestine (Gill & Orgad, 2018, 1317) 10 Bonilla and Rosa 2009, 10; Loza 2014; Baer (2016) notes that the growth of digital activism has occurred in tandem with the rise of street based protest actions.
23 essential with redefining pre-existing sexual harassment laws by showing that much of sexual harassment tends to be conducted by serial harassers rather than by misunderstanding suitors, which may cause courts to think about sexual harassment differently (Hebert, 327, 2018).
Furthermore, through the narratives explored in the MeToo movement, courts can get an understanding of the complexity of reasons that women fail to promptly report harassing conduct, including their realistic fears of retaliation, as well as concerns of not being believed or having their complaints dismissed. In the legislative world, MeToo has already led to some changes in the law relating to non-disclosure agreements. In 2018, the Washington state legislature enacted a statute that generally prohibits employers from requiring employees to sign a non-disclosure agreement that has the intent to prevent the employee from disclosing sexual harassment occurring at the workplace, work related events, or off the premises of the employer (333). Certainly, the effects of MeToo have expanded beyond just cultural or social influence and has penetrated other spheres, considerably that of law and legislature.
Lastly, the MeToo movement brings to question whether hashtag feminism is, in fact, laborious. According to Jessamy Gleason (2018), hashtag feminism and specifically the
MeToo movement, demonstrates a form of affective labor grounded in emotional work. To conceptualize labor in digital activism, it’s critical to understand that this labor is largely being performed by women. Additionally, Gleason positions labor performed in digital settings as immaterial.11 Immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affects and requires virtual or actual human contact (Gleason, 2018, 4). Through the process of conscious-raising, Gleason found users were engaging in a form of labor that prompted a transformative configuration of empathy that urged users to listen to each other’s stories
11 Term “immaterial labor” originally appears In Lazzarato M, 1996, Immaterial labor, trans. P Colilli & E Emery, in M Hardt & P Virno (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–147.
24 rather than separating from one another. The ability for users to listen to stories of violence experienced by women within the #MeToo hashtag also challenge the attitudes of hegemonic discourse regarding society’s inability to listen, accept and center their stories into believability.
6. Digital Feminism in the Neoliberal Era
This section underscores digital feminist activism and its relationship with neoliberalism. Feminist scholars are suspicious of the internet’s proximity to neoliberalism which have, shaped their concerns related to digital feminist activism. Therefore we will highlight these concerns and then move towards how digital feminist activism is an appropriate tool to respond to the changing terrain of politics in neoliberal societies and that we should understand digital feminist activism as a mode of resistance that operates within and through them.
Certainly there has been fatigue in academic feminism12 in the backdrop of popularized mainstream feminism. This has been possible through marketplace feminism and other forms of femvertising13, which has produced celebrity/style feminism and corporate/liberal feminism. According to Gill (2016) we are currently in an era of multiple feminisms, both new and old, and that terms like postfeminism is useful as an analytical category of feminisms that are antithetical to activist ones. Postfeminism is said to be deeply enmeshed with neoliberalism,14 with empirical patterns of empowerment, individualization,
12 Singh, M. (2017). What's the matter with representation? feminism, materialism, and online spaces. Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge. 13 Femvertising relates to how corporations and advertisements have appropriated feminist imagery and rhetoric to create a politically watered down version in order to be more palatable to consumers 14 Gill, Rosalind. “Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times/” Feminist Media Studies, 16:4, 2016.
25 choice, and agency; and the disappearance of structural analysis and systematic inequalities.
Moreover, postfeminism suggests femininity as a bodily property; a shift from objectification to subjectification, that emphasizes self-surveillance, monitoring and discipline; resurgence of ideas of natural sex difference; a resexualization of women’s bodies that reinscribe dominant ideals. These themes are unsurprisingly structured by continuing inequalities and exclude gender, race, and class analysis.15 However, despite there being a basis of the
“undoing of feminism”16 and co-optation by postfeminism, online feminism is not completely captive to neoliberalist ideology. In fact, it is ideal to refashion feminist methods and strategies as power and governance change. As we have seen, women have been able to use digital spaces as a way to directly challenge hegemonic discourses related to sexual violence and rape culture. Women are now able to “call out” abusers and injustices associated with rape culture while also having tools to form effective solidarity that makes speaking out easier. Additionally, online movements can move outside symbolic and representational issues and have material effects.
To demonstrate how digital activism functions in the neoliberal era we will be drawing on Baer’s (2016) notion of precarity. Baer uses precarity to offer a counter-narrative to neoliberalism that describes how paradoxes in the neoliberalist system can present opportunities for marginalized groups to shape modes of resistance (21). Even though precarity is not new, especially in relation to capitalism, neoliberalist practices have exacerbated its conditions to the point where emphasis on self empowerment and the good life are no longer able to suppress the pervasive feeling of insecurity. Exposure to the
15 Gill, R. (2007) “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10(2): 147-66 16 Term coined by Angela McRobbie (2009) see: The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London
26 contradictions in the late capitalist age then generates an “ambivalence”17 around resistance which Baer believes can produce possibilities for change:
“Subverting the dynamics of neoliberal ideology by unmasking its apparent neutrality, this concept of precarity thus aims to open up a space of social critique and political activism that takes advantage of neoliberal paradoxes” (21).
Furthermore, critical to conversations of digital feminist activism, specifically in the context of sexual violence and rape culture, is the body as a key site of resistance. Emergence of neoliberalism and digital culture has refashioned the body as the locus of identity. Through digital spaces, bodies are the primary means to formulating an online self. Examination of feminist campaigns that grew prominence online (FEMEN, SlutWalks, #YesAllWomen),
Baer demonstrates that acts performed in these movements redo feminism in the neoliberal age by centralizing the precarity of the female body, which underscores the body as both the sites of subjection/resistance; masking/unveiling; modest/uncovering. Furthermore, current feminist campaigns play out many of the central tensions within the historical and contemporary feminist discourses, notably those related to the category of woman, the role of the body, privilege, and the epistemological problems that surround feminist speech, specifically who can speak on behalf of others (Baer, 2016, 26). By working through and spotlighting central tensions in contemporary feminism and the precarity of feminism in the neoliberal age, feminists are refashioning collective feminist politics that go beyond self style and individualism. More importantly, digital feminism brings a resignification to the
“personal is political” that resist neoliberalist discourses of privatization and commodification of experience. This process is also considerably sped up through the use of hashtags that
17 Baer uses ambivalence as the space when modes of resistance can be formed. Ambivalence describes the consciously felt contradictions related to our social subjectivities and social requirements that can jumpstart political action.
27 allow women to see their experiences as unisolated events, and connect it to larger and systemic forces. Finally, despite concerns that digital feminism have been taking no account of structural violence against women or reproduce hegemonic norms rather than subvert them, research has shown that digital feminism has allowed feminism to be accessible to marginalized voices, providing them a platform to articulate and produce their own feminist work, and offer perspectives that counter hegemonic discourses.18 This is deeply unique to digital feminism as academia and traditional media outlets have often circumvented feminist perspectives from marginalized people. Marginalized voices, particularly from women of color, have been able to carve out publicly feminist spaces, which should not be discounted from this analysis. As Susana Loza writes:
“is mainstream feminism destined to remain the terrain of white women? Or can the digital media praxis of women of color, their hashtag feminism and tumblr activism, their blogging and live journaling, broaden and radically redefine the very field of feminism?”19
Moreover, feminist scholars are moving toward more open-access digital formats to reach new audiences, and hopefully this will lead to new forms of research and modes of presentation enabled by digital technologies, including collaborative work.
Conclusion
The use of digital technologies in activism work is expanding and it seems relevant to consider online spaces as a useful tool for political engagement and part of broader social movements. In this paper I have shown that digital feminist activism transverses the online/offline spatial distinctions, which have allowed feminists to challenge hegemonic discourses related to sexual violence in unique ways. As I’ve discussed in my research,
18 Kendzior (2014); Kaba and Smith (2014); Park and Leonard (2014); Mann (2014) 19 Loza, S. (2014)
28 feminists were able to refashion previously used feminist strategies via technological tools, formulate effective communities of solidarity that allowed survivors to share their story and build feminist consciousness, and foreground online based movements into the “real” offline world. Therefore, this research attempts to thwart the misconceptions of digital feminist activism being based in an empty “postfeminist” framework, with low level political engagement. While we should not view digital activism as more superior to traditional activism, we should start to view digital activism as an integral tool for feminists, especially in the neoliberalist era. Like the female body, digital platforms occupy a double function as a site of empowerment and identity and a site of surveillance and self monitoring. This allows digital feminist activist to situate the precarities of the female body into a public context.
Moreover, to fully grasp and conceptualize digital activism, it’s essential to ground it in current contexts and not apply previous frameworks and methods. As Clarke (2007) suggests, in order to understand the full possibility of digital feminist activism and to promote more effective feminist campaigns in the future, feminist researchers must be attentive to the newer methods of feminist engagement.
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