"Are you me?": understanding the political potential of feminist identity spaces on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic (original) (raw)
Related papers
Oppression in the Reddit Hivemind: Tracing Patterns of Misogyny in Electronic Public Spaces
2016
My research specifically analyzes patterns of misogynistic discourse on the social bookmarking site Reddit, well-known for its tagline "The Front Page of the Internet." Under that banner, Reddit is widely regarded as a neutral and universal source for news, and is often seen as being more democratic than legacy mass media. The website is also male-dominated and widely believed to foster a community that exhibits internal cultural and social biases rooted in specific power structures of hegemonic masculinity. This causes male experiences to be universalized and issues and perspectives pertaining to women to be ignored or even stigmatized within the community's practices. These contradictions can be linked to a persistent culture of practices tracing back to older online platforms such as Usenet and more current ones such as 4chan involving meritocratic principles that inextricably form Reddit's architecture. As a popular and influential social media platform, Reddit has potentially dangerous implications for public discourse. However, Reddit is also unique in that its open-ended nature allows for a multitude of independently functioning spaces. This includes the existence of alternative safe spaces, such as /r/TwoXChromosomes, which offer a more nuanced understanding of the site's overall contributions to democratic public space. Using critical discourse analysis, I analyze popular subreddit communities including /r/worldnews and /r/TwoXChromosomes to see how prominent these patterns of misogyny are, how alternative spaces can function within its ecosystem and how these factors affect Reddit as an electronic public space and a contributor to democratic news discourse.
Feminist Online Identity: Analyzing the Presence of Hashtag Feminism
Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2014
Available Online July 2014 In theory, the concept of hashtag feminism has created a virtual space where victims of inequality can coexist together in a space that acknowledges their pain, narrative, and isolation. As social scientists Susan Herring, Kirk Job-Sluder, Rebecca Scheckles, & Sasha Barab (2002) state, these properties make online forums appeal favorable to vulnerable populations seeking support from 'disease or abuse, and to members of minority, social and political groups such as homosexuals, racial minorities, and feminists' (p. 371). However, in identifying online communities such as Twitter and Facebook as safe spaces for expressing feminism views and politics, its ramifications present dire consequences which lead to online harassment, hate speech, disagreements, and a miscommunication in rhetoric. It is with these consequences that the academic discourse becomes lost in transmitting the message of what feminism is and how feminists are identified. Using the ongoing debate that feminism does not acknowledge real life experience outside of the academic terrain, this paper explores how hashtag feminists identify in redefining feminism in their generation. Using the public platform of Twitter and Facebook (less specifically), this paper will explore the online following of women who identify as hashtag feminists and how their dialogue has set the tone for the era of internet activism.
Woman's place is in the (digital) resistance: politics and power in online communities, A
2019
2019 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The 2017 Women's March on Washington marked a significant moment in contemporary U.S. political history as hundreds of thousands of women gathered on the National Mall in an expression of embodied dissent. Key women's movement groups, Pantsuit Nation and the Pussyhat Project, operated as powerful collectives in the time leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the subsequent 2017 Women's March. Their transition from sites of rhetorical secrecy to embracing the strategic publicity of the 2017 Women's March illuminates how ego-function, reversed symbolism, and consciousness raising impact social movements in our digital age. To understand how social movement groups navigate rhetorical secrecy and strategic publicity, this thesis explores how the ego-functional responses of Pantsuit Nation and the Pussyhat Project led to the deployment of specific rhetorical tactics to cultivate collective identities. I argue that ...
Feminism & Psychology
This special issue on feminisms and social media is published at a unique point in time, namely when social media platforms are routinely utilised for communication from the mundane to the extraordinary, to offer support and solidarity, and to blame and victimise. Collectively, social media are online technologies that provide the ability for community building and interaction (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), allowing people to interact, share, create and consume online content (Lyons et al., 2017). They include such
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Reddit’s men’s rights community (/r/MensRights) has been criticized for the promotion of misogynistic language, toxic masculinity and discourses that reinforce alt-right ideologies. Conversely, the men’s liberation (/r/MensLib) community integrates inclusive politics, intersectionality and masculinity within a broad umbrella of self-reflection that suggests toxic masculinity harms men as well as women. We use machine learning text classifiers, keyword frequencies, and qualitative approaches first to distinguish these two subreddits, and second to interpret the differences ideologically rather than topically. We further integrate platform metadata (referred to as ‘platform signals’) to distinguish the subreddits. These signals help us understand how similar terms can be used to arrive at different interpretations of gender and discrimination. Where /r/MensLib tends to see masculinity as an adjective and women as peers, /r/MensRights views being a man as an essential quality, men as t...
From the Streets to the Web Looking at Feminist Activism on Social Media
Does social media enable forming networks of solidarity between different marginalised groups? Is there a space for non-normative discourses such as the discourse on pleasure? Does digital technology aid in the construction of feminist counter-publics? These are some of the questions explored in this paper. Power relations that operate through social media, including forms of gendered and sexualised violence, are also discussed.
The discursive construction and performance of gendered identity on social media
This article looks at the construction and performance of gendered identity through a subsection of Facebook web pages belonging to the Slut Walk movement. The authors' analysis suggests that gender is constructed through the subjects' participation in the 'post-feminist masquerade' through which their gendered identity is defined in relation to a hegemonic masculine ideal. This situates the web pages within a space characterized through the ambivalent and appropriative treatment of feminism and further, coiled within an acute tension between feminist and post-feminist discourses. Acts of resistance are framed as individual, momentary ruptures of Judith Butler's heterosexual matrix of 'cultural intelligibility'. The online context of these ruptures is found to vest a creative potential, by removing the constraints of time and location, indicating that the impact of these ruptures may extend beyond its immediate environment.
Twitter as a Feminist Resource: #YesAllWomen, Digital Platforms, and Discursive Social Change
Twitter as a Feminist Resource: #YesAllWomen, Digital Platforms, and Discursive Social Change This paper analyzes #YesAllWomen, one of the largest, most visible, feminist Twitter events of recent years. Though hashtags and other forms of digital activism are not always taken seriously as politics, in this project we investigate #YesAllWomen and its recirculation through media and public blogs, as an important instance of contemporary feminist discursive activism. Specifically we argue that the hashtag functioned, first, as a site of collective identity for participants and we describe some of the ways in which this identity building was achieved, and second, we argue, that through its links to, and recirculation by, other platforms and media, #YesAllWomen also functioned as a public protest or agenda-building event with impact on public discourse beyond Twitter. Our project draws on content and discourse analysis methods to analyze the #YesAllWomen hashtag and to trace its interaction with other discourses such as news and blogs, including an automated content analysis of almost two million tweets and an analysis of a sample of 251 media and blog stories. We note that contemporary feminists are using digital media, in this case a Twitter hashtag, to achieve many of the same discursive goals of knowledge building and critique that have previously been achieved using other communications strategies such as consciousness raising groups, publishing collectives, media strategies, and zaps.