Table Of Contenti
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
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© Oxford University Press 2019
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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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.
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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 femi-
nism 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
