Documenting digital feminist activism: Mapping feminist responses to new media misogyny and rape culture

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In recent years, the Internet and social media have played a prominent role in a range of social and political protests across the globe - from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to the Spanish Indignados, it is clear that new media technologies have the potential to create social change, reforming political systems, and challenging a range of oppressive ideologies. Yet such technologies have also opened up highly visible public spaces for the proliferation of online forms of sexism, harassment, and misogyny (hatred of women and girls). There have been numerous high profile stories about 'e-bile' (online hatred) and 'trolling' (online stalking) of women, and a growing concern over the normalisation and acceptance of rape jokes and images that celebrate violence against girls and women on web 2.0 platforms like Twitter and Facebook. While the UK government has recognised 'media sexism' as a growing problem, and has run a number of awareness campaigns aimed at rape prevention and stopping sexual violence and abuse, there is little research which documents the particular forms that misogyny takes in a digitally mediated culture, and even less which analyses the range of activist responses to this problem which mobilize new media technologies in innovative and creative ways. Although it is only beginning to attract mainstream media attention, feminists are fighting back against the proliferation of rape culture through their uses of new media platforms and technologies. For example, an international group of feminist activists recently initiated the #FBrape campaign which solicited over 60,000 tweets and 5,000 emails to Facebook's corporate advertisers, demanding that companies pull their advertisements from the social media company due to Facebook's refusal to remove misogynist content encouraging violence against women and girls. The one-week campaign resulted in a promise from Facebook to change their policies on hate speech and make it easier to remove pages which promote rape culture, misogyny and sexual violence towards women and girls. Similarly, a number of websites, Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags have been created which encourage women and girls to document, photograph, and record instances of misogyny and harassment, raising public awareness and creating communities to support victims. Consequently, the main objectives of this research are to 1) map out how and when rape culture, harassment, misogyny and sexual violence are occurring in on and off-line spaces; 2) explore and analyse feminist responses to these incidents; 3) understand the experiences of women and girls who participate in this activism; and 4) to document feminist responses and experiences through the creation of a living archive of contemporary digital feminist activism. To meet these aims the project uses interdisciplinary research methods including content and feminist critical discourse analysis of online media, and ethnographic methods, such as observation of online activist communities and interviews with feminist activists, to explore how and why they are using digital technology. The research has the potential to benefit a number of stakeholders including feminist activists, government, charitable organisations, and media companies like Facebook by documenting some of the forms that new media misogyny is taking and a range of feminist digital activist responses. Our primary digital output is an online archive that will document this feminist activism and facilitate a collaborative space where activists can record their own initiatives and connect with other women and girls globally.