Table Of Content

i Digital Feminist Activism ii Oxford Studies in Digital Politics Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick, Professor of Political Communication in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture and the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era: The Politics of Doubt Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong C.W. Anderson Francis L.F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Bits and Atoms: Information and Campaigning and the Construction of Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Citizenship Statehood Jessica Baldwin- Philippi Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter- Drop Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Mobilization Opportunity Jessica L. Beyer Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and William W. Franko If . . . Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics Taina Bucher Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post- Soviet Sphere The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power Sarah Oates Andrew Chadwick Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the The Only Constant Is Change: Technology, Digital Age Political Communication, and Innovation Taylor Owen Over Time Ben Epstein Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution Zizi Papacharissi in American Politics Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Joel Penney Memories of Neoliberalism Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch China’s Digital Nationalism Florian Schneider Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain Jennifer Stromer- Galley The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and News on the Internet: Information and Democracy: Information Technology and Citizenship in the 21st Century Political Islam David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg Philip N. Howard The Civic Organization and the Digital Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Citizen: Communicating Engagement in a Political Strategy Networked Age David Karpf Chris Wells The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Transformation of American Political Advocacy Politicians, and Political Manipulation on David Karpf Social Media Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Howard Prototype Politics: Technology- Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Daniel Kreiss Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia Mohamed Zayani Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama Daniel Kreiss iii Digital Feminist Activism GIRLS AND WOMEN FIGHT BACK AGAINST RAPE CULTURE KAITLYNN MENDES JESSICA RINGROSE and JESSALYNN KELLER 1 iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Mendes, Kaitlynn, 1983- author. | Ringrose, Jessica. | Keller, Jessalynn. Title: Digital feminist activism : girls and women fight back against rape culture / Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, Jessalynn Keller. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Series: Oxford studies in digital politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018028842 (print) | LCCN 2018049113 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190697860 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190697877 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190697853 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190697846 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Rape—Prevention. | Men—Social aspects. | Sexism. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / Political Advocacy. Classification: LCC HV6558 (ebook) | LCC HV6558 .M46 2019 (print) | DDC 362.883—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028842 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America v Contents Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction: Digital Feminist Interventions 1 2. Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Studying Digital Feminist Activism 24 3. Documenting Harassment, Sexism, and Misogyny in Digital Feminist Spaces 42 4. Feminist Organizers’ Experiences of Activism 73 5. Twitter as a Pedagogical Platform: Creating Feminist Digital Affective Counter- Publics to Challenge Rape Culture 100 6. Hashtag Feminism: Sharing Stories with #BeenRapedNeverReported 125 7. Teen Feminist Digital Activisms: Resisting Rape Culture in and around School 145 8. Conclusion: Doing Digital Feminist Activism 175 Notes 191 References 193 Index 213 v vi vii Acknowledgments There are many people we would like to thank. To start, thank you to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK for funding the project “Documenting Digital Feminist Activism: Mapping Feminist Responses to New Media Misogyny and Rape Culture” (grant number AH/L009587/1). Without them, this book wouldn’t have been possible. We would like to extend an enormous thank you to our research assistants. Emilie Lawrence from UCL Institute of Education helped us with many aspects of the research including our literature review, collecting digital content, conducting individual interviews and focus groups at our research school. Matt Bee from Leicester University was also es- sential in collecting data for the project. Thanks also to everyone who provided critical feedback and support on our writing, particularly Tanya Horeck, Akane Kanai, Bianca Fileborn, Katie Warfield, and the two anonymous reviewers who provided useful feedback on our book proposal. The ideas in this book were presented at several national and international scholarly conferences where we received important feedback that improved many aspects of this book. Thanks to the fantastic audiences at the following conferences for enthusiastically engaging with our research: 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference; the 2015 Console-ing Passions Conference; the 2016 Canadian Communications Association Annual Conference; Affect and Social Media Symposium, University of East London, March 2016; Ask First: A Symposium on Creating a Culture of Consent at the University of Calgary, October, 2016; #NotAskingForIt Rape Culture and Media Symposium, Middlesex University, February 2017; Gender, Sexuality and the Sensory Symposium, University of Kent, May 2017. vii viii 1 1 Introduction Digital Feminist Interventions For over a decade, feminist scholars and critics have sought to challenge the idea we are living in a “postfeminist” moment where feminism is irrelevant, dated, and even dead (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009; Mendes 2011b; Scharff 2012; Ringrose 2013). This postfeminist sensibility, yoked to the neoliberal values of individualism, self- regulation, and entrepreneurialism (Gill and Scharff 2011; Gill 2016), has not only fostered an environment in which collective social ac- tion is discouraged in favor of individual change, but one in which rape culture and misogyny remain prevalent in common cultural narratives. Despite this, postfeminism requires girls and women to withhold their critique of patriarchal ideas (McRobbie 2009), and those that refuse are often ridiculed or chastised for having no sense of humor, or are seen as fighting for more than their share of rights (Gill and Scharff 2011; Mendes 2011b). Yet in spite of this, it is clear that new formations of feminism and diverse feminist communities do exist and are being reimagined and expanded through the use of new media. This visibility of contemporary feminist politics is heightened both by the opportunities afforded by digital media technologies and our current cultural moment, whereby feminism is increasingly popular (Banet- Weiser 2015; Banet- Weiser and Portwood- Stacer 2017; Gill 2016; Keller and Ryan 2018). In today’s “feminist zeitgeist” (Valenti 2014; Gill 2016), feminist ideologies, initiatives, critiques, and even celebrities have attained significant levels of visibility within popular media cultures (Darmon 2017; Hamad and Taylor 2015; Gill 2016; Rivers 2017). From pop singer Beyoncé dancing in front of an illuminated screen reading “FEMINIST” at the 2014 Video Music Awards (Valenti 2014; Keller and Ryan 2018), to “feminist” special issues of popular magazines such as ELLE (Keller and Ringrose 2015), to Dior’s “WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS” T- shirts launched in their 2017 Spring/ Summer cam- paign, feminism is increasingly visible and consumable in mainstream culture 1