Social media has been celebrated for revolutionising protest: it is now quicker and easier to create petitions and collect signatures, share details of direct actions and upcoming meetings, and engage in political discourse across geographical borders. One of the lingering and often ignored questions in social movement scholarship, however, is what does the move to social media signify for revolutionary movements that were once characterised by the building of strong ties between activists in physical space? What happens to activist commitment and community-building when the medium used for organising no longer requires sustained face-to-face contact? And, in the case of womenâs liberationâa revolutionary social movement seeking to overthrow male dominanceâwhat happens when the tool used for organising brings women into constant contact with men, the social group whose power they wish to dismantle?
In this book I examine the extent to which social media is, or is not, compatible with organising for womenâs liberation. In other words, I investigate the political significance of womenâs adoption of social media for feminist organising. Distinct from the static webpages of the early internet, social media platforms publish evanescent, user-generated content and are driven by a logic of constant updating, speed and connectivity. The rise of social media as the dominant system of digital communication has unleashed an avalanche of celebratory rhetoric championing the new opportunities now available to feminists to challenge the social and political order. These narratives suggest that not only are we âwitnessing seismic shifts around the uptake of feminismâ (Retallack et al. 2016, 86), but also that online feminism âhas exploded as the driving force of feminismâ in the twenty-first century (Crossley 2017, 97). Scholars and activists who suggest that social media has fuelled a distinct fourth wave of feminism argue that Facebook, Twitter and blogs have reanimated the movement by enabling increasing numbers of women to âshare their stories and analysis, raise awareness and organize collective actions, and discuss difficult issuesâ across cultural, geographical and generational lines (Martin and Valenti 2012, 6). Social media has also been heralded as a unique tool for overcoming racial and class-based differences between women, with some scholars conceptualising Twitter as a platform âamenable to intersectionalityâ that offers âan unprecedented means for solidarity and activismâ (Zimmerman 2017, 54)
I contend that the celebration of feminist success on social media is premature, from both an academic and an activist perspective. Whereas âa male presence was unthinkableâ within earlier forms of feminist organising (Brownmiller 1999, 8), the so-called fourth wave of feminism is taking place in publicly visible mixed-sex digital spaces hosted by multinational corporations. This represents a markedly different organising tactic from previous eras of feminism, where women created political theory in small, women-only consciousness-raising groups, and founded independent press houses to produce and circulate feminist materials outside of male control. Today, by contrast, many women appear to be relying on platforms such as Facebook and Twitterâglobally dominant, capitalist, male-owned companiesâto start the revolution.
Womenâs liberation provides a particularly interesting case study from which to investigate questions of (digital) space, social change and power. Firstly, this is because women are allowed very few autonomous spaces in male-dominated societies. Unlike race and class-based oppression, which often results in groups living in geographically segregated communities, sex-based oppression manifests and is maintained through women living closely with men (Morris and Braine 2001, 29). Women are often in intimate relationships with their oppressor, and the institutions of heterosexuality and marriage encourage them to remain spatially separate from other women over the duration of their lives (Rich [1980] 1993). Historically, womenâs liberation was a movement based around the small group structure, where activists communicated face-to-face and via autonomous newsletters, and at local, regional and national conferences. Today, by contrast, feminist organising largely no longer exists in a physically tangible form, with most of the womenâs and lesbian spaces fought for by Womenâs Liberation Movement (WLM) activists having been eroded (Morris 2016). The rise of transgender activismâparticularly its associated push for people who are biologically male to be included in feminist organising as womenâhas also made it increasingly difficult for women and lesbians to organise autonomously in bricks and mortar women-only spaces (Jeffreys 2014, 162â182; Morris 2016). Combined with this, women have all but lost feminist bookstores and womenâs centres in cities across Western democracies (Delap 2016), and the consciousness-raising group, the lynchpin of organisation and mobilisation in the WLM, has also largely gone out of fashion (Hanisch 2010; Firth and Robinson 2016).
Another reason that womenâs liberation provides an interesting case study for investigating the revolutionary political possibilities of digital space is because it is an enormous task for women to come to consciousness of their own oppression when the perspective of their oppressorâmenâconstitutes social reality. Several scholars have exposed and critiqued the totalising effects of male dominance on womenâs lives, describing how âthe struggle for consciousness is a struggle for worldâ (Mackinnon 1989, 115). Catharine Mackinnon (1989, 114), for example, has articulated how womenâs social reality has been completely defined by male-centric ideology:
Because the âconceptual categories required to challenge the status quo hardly existâ for women (Mansbridge 2001, 4), male power is a particularly pernicious form of domination to contend with.The perspective from the male standpoint enforces womenâs definition, encircles her body, circumlocutes her speech, and describes her life. The male perspective is systemic and hegemonic.
In this book, I consider whether social media is an aid or an obstacle to politically organising for womenâs liberation. Specifically, I aim to answer the central research question of whether using social media for feminist communication can revive the WLM. By asking this question, I do not mean to imply that the WLM ever completely disappeared. For this reason, I use the terminology reignite or revive the WLM, instead of create a new WLM. A revived WLM would necessarily look different today, because women have learned considerable political lessons since the 1970s and 1980s. Women are also now working in a different cultural and political context, which means that the tactics and strategies of WLM organising cannot be simply transposed to the contemporary landscape. Nonetheless, important insights pertaining to feminist theory and practice were also learned in the WLM. The WLM cannot simply be recreated as it was, but nor would it be politically efficacious for women to begin again from scratch. Alongside the central research question, I also seek to address three principal subsidiary questions: (1) How is feminist organising shaped by diverse technological, temporal and spatial contexts? (2) How does male power operate across media contexts and what does this mean for womenâs liberation? And (3) what sort of analyses, critiques and perceptions of social media feminism are held by feminist activists, both with and without experience of WLM organising?
The language of womenâs liberation is aligned with the type of feminism that social movement scholar Nancy Whittier (2006, 46) called âgrassroots feminismâ, WLM activist and scholar Jo Freeman (1973, 796; 1975, 222) called the âyounger branchâ and legal scholar Catharine Mackinnon (1989, 117) called âfeminism unmodifiedâ. Most commonly, this form of feminism is referred to as âradical feminismâ by academics and activists. While the WLM produced other distinct ideological strands (such as socialist feminism), this book is centred upon the radical feminist strand. Radical feminist theory emerged out of the WLM, and radical feminist activism and scholarship has continued since its decline in the late 1980s, albeit in a persecuted and much less visible form. As Nancy Whittier (1995, 5) has explained, âthe survival of radical feminism has been largely invisible to scholars precisely because the movement has never had a centralized or national organization but is based in grassroots, loosely organized groupsâ.
The experiences of radical feminist activists on social media have not yet been specifically considered in academic literature, and there is also little scholarship which considers male dominance as an analytical category shaping digital protest outcomes. In other words, digital social movement scholarship has failed to take patriarchy seriously. Analyses of online feminist organising have proliferated in recent years, but this work has so far fallen into the category of what Renate Klein (1983, 90) has called âresearch on women rather than research for womenâ. This body of literature investigates how women are using social media for feminist organising, but it has so far said very little about whether it is an effective tool for advancing the political project of womenâs liberation. There is little research which critically analyses how digital organising ties feminist strategies to marketing and media logic (Mendes 2017 is a notable exception), for example, or considers how the presence of men in the social media environment constrains activistsâ ability to cast aside the demands of stereotypical feminine behaviour, such as being appeasing, polite, and sexua...