Session Chair: Cecilia Ka Hei Wong
Presentation 1
(Re)sharing feminisms: Re-sharing Instagram Stories as everyday feminist practices
Sofia P. Caldeira
Lusófona University, Portugal
Contemporary experiences of everyday feminisms often include the use of social media platforms like Instagram. The introduction of Instagram Stories created a space for emerging feminist engagements, allowing for practices of re-sharing content that serve as small acts of political engagement, accommodating the participation of otherwise reluctant users. This article explores the feminist potential of these re-sharing practices, grounding it on the analysis of 2282 Instagram Stories, produced by 52 Instagram users in Portugal. This analysis combines qualitative textual analysis, close readings, and the use of digital methods to explore overarching patterns. The article foregrounds the multiple meanings of re-sharing, its social character, its ability to engage in intertextual conversations with the original context, while simultaneously recognising some of the limitations of the Stories’ format for feminist action. In this way, this article reflects on the tensions and possibilities of these small acts of political engagement.
Presentation 2
Mediating, Mediatizing, or Datafying Iranian Women’s Struggles? Imperial Feminist Campaigns, the Economies of Visibility, and Suffering of Other Women
Bahareh Badiei
Rutgers University, United States of America
This research explores the tensions in the work of an Iranian diasporic feminist campaign and the techno-social affordances of social media and data-driven platforms for (lack of) recognition and (in)visibility of feminist activism. Situating this study within the sociopolitical context of diasporic feminist activism, I look at the 2017-2018 #WhiteWednesdays hashtag campaign on X, launched by a New York-based journalist and women’s rights advocate, which invited women to post photos of themselves walking unveiled or wearing White headscarves. This campaign, using the Orientalist trope of the veil and aligned with imperial feminist discourses (Ahmed, 1992), gained heightened visibility in popular media, particularly American mainstream news. The research draws upon datafied recognition and visibility (Campanella, 2022) to explore how the campaign’s practices are distributed, under which logics, and with what consequences. I employ digital ethnography and trace the campaign’s life on Twitter and in Farsi-speaking sponsored popular outlets and the American mainstream news to argue how liking, retweeting, sharing, and commenting are social media practices implicated in the platform’s dynamics of recognition, attention, and visibility. These practices imply a particular type of sociability marked by the process of datafication, heavily influenced by high demands for branding and personal visibility, commodifying the suffering of the Other women, transforming violence and injustice into spectacles that generate profit, and erasing the voices from the margins. Yet, such regimes of visibility (Campanella, 2024) are also ambivalent. They can simultaneously go either way: inclusion and exclusion, visibility and erasure, co-optation and resistance, imperialist and radical.
Presentation 3
“This Barbie is Woke!”: Online Backlash in Response to Feminist Trends in Popular Culture
Hadas Gur-Ze'ev, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Digital spaces have become a battleground for contesting cultural values, particularly around gender. The aftermath of #MeToo has fueled a rise in feminist trends in media texts, often triggering online backlash from right-leaning audiences that oppose what is perceived as “progressive” agendas. At the heart of this debate was this year’s highest-grossing movie, “Barbie,” which was praised for its feminist messages but strongly condemned by those who saw it as promoting anti-male sentiments and pushing “woke” propaganda.” With digital platforms being used for digital protest campaigns such as downvoting, misogynistic review-bombing, trolling and harassment, various social media platforms have responded with restrictions and structural changes to regulate users’ expression. This study aims to explore how users employ different platform affordances to express opposition to feminist trends in popular culture. By employing qualitative approach to examine patterns of collective political expression on three different platforms: X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and review aggregation website Metacritic, we aim to understand how different platform affordances enable—or constrain—individuals in expressing their ideological opposition. Our findings challenge the media reports of a clear online backlash, highlighting instead the nuanced power dynamics between user agency and platform regulation, as well as the negotiation of values and meanings within online spaces all-in-all reflecting a broader cultural clash between liberal and conservative competing ideologies.
Presentation 4
Measuring misogyny: Depp v Heard and the limits of atomistic content moderation
Lucinda Nelson, Nicolas Suzor
School of Law, Queensland University of Technology; QUT Digital Media Research Centre; ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society
Over the past decade, social media companies have come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for women. While they have made some changes to their policies and design, their foundational approach to content moderation has remained largely the same. Platforms continue to focus on identifying, assessing and responding to individual pieces of violating content, like overt hate speech, direct threats, and doxxing. This approach is ill-equipped to deal with structural harms like misogyny, which cannot be understood in terms of isolated instances, but instead as part of a continuum. ‘Everyday’ experiences of sexism and misogyny form part of the same dynamic as the more widely recognised, extreme forms of violence, but existing tools for identifying this type of harmful but not prohibited content are extremely limited.
This paper presents the preliminary findings of a study that investigates how everyday misogyny manifests on social media platforms, using the online discourse around the _Depp v Heard_ trial as a case study. We use a combination of topic modelling and in-depth qualitative analysis of content, informed by the literature on believability and doubt in cases of domestic and sexual violence. We find that everyday misogyny is widespread, and manifests partly in double-standards and double-binds in the expectations imposed on Amber Heard. We aim to use these findings to develop new methods and frameworks for understanding misogyny in aggregate.
