gender, race and the political economy of feminist online activism
DESCRIPTION
Online feminist activism is the greatest innovation for feminism in 50 years, yet it is simultaneously “in crisis” because it is “underfunded and unsustainable,” according to a 2013 report called #FemFuture: Online Revolution” (BCRW, Volume 8). A New York Magazine cover story (October 30, 2011) proclaimed the ‘Rebirth of the Feminist Manifesto’ through feminist blogs. In the article, 20-something feminist blogger, Shelby Knox, described the blogs as her generations’ “version of consciousness-raising groups.” The emergence of digital media, and particularly blogs, represents a crucial new force for civic participation that holds the potential to destabilize old hierarchies, such as gender inequality. Relying on a mixed, augmented methodology of ethnography, content analysis and interviews with bloggers who identify as “feminist” or “womanist,” this explores the implications of “#femfuture” through an intersectional lens of gender, critical race theory and political economy.TRANSCRIPT
Jessie Daniels, PhD
Women’s Studies Colloquium – Graduate Center-CUNY
May 8, 2013
“’Our version of consciousness-raising groups’:
Gender, Race & the Political Economy of Feminist Online Activism”
Twitter: @JessieNYC
#digitalgc #fem2 #femfuture
introduction
sexism & misogyny exist
women are blogging
many to challenge sexism & misogyny
36.2 million women
15.1 million publishing
21.1 million reading & commenting
(white) men get invited, praised, listed
22
23
media use shifting
27
“We work for free and then pass this on... (to younger women). We must create a new culture of work, a virbant, feminist economy.”
~ Vanessa Valenti & Courtney Martin, The Future of Online Feminism
situating myself
34
2009
“Without an explicit challenge to racism, white feminism is
easily grafted onto white supremacy and
useful for arguing for equality for white
women and possibly for white gays and lesbians
within a white supremacist context."
feminist bloggers study
interviews
digitally augmented ethnography
getting paid for blogging
the political economy of #femfuture
raises a set of questions
1. what kind of labor is online feminism?
2. how is race implicated inonline feminism?
3. what kind of activism is online feminism?
60
“Maybe we can just be ‘weekend feminists’ with day jobs managing other websites or driving taxis, but when writing about feminist issues is what we want to do for a living, why shouldn’t we be able to?”
~ Elizabeth Daley
what kind of labor isfeminist blogging?
critiquing #femfuture
how is race implicated infeminist blogging?
“There is a dangerous ignorance in assuming #FemFuture is a first, a
start, or new.” ~ Jessica Marie Johnson, PhD
in-person meeting “closed”
online dialogue “open”
“It’s painful and embarrassing for white feminists to be called out around race and racism, but the
obligation to learn how to deal with those emotions productively is a
cost of privilege.”~ Jaclyn Friedman
hacking #femfuture
what kind of activism is online feminism?
epistemological activism
is online feminism digital labor?
"Social movements in the Information Age are essentially mobilized around cultural values. The struggle to change the codes of meaning in the institutions and practice of the society is the essential struggle in the process of social change in the new historical context, movements to seize the power of minds, not state power.”
~ Manuel Castells, 1997
how is race implicated?
what kind of feminism?
105
Twitter: @JessieNYC
#femfuture #fem2
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