Digital Feminisms

Transnational activism in German protest cultures

Christina Scharff, Carrie Smith-Prei, Maria Stehle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315406206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The relative rise or decline of feminist movements across the globe has been debated by feminist scholars and activists for a long time. In recent years, however, these debates have gained renewed momentum. Rapid technological change and increased use of digital media have raised questions about how digital technologies change, influence, and shape feminist politics. This book interrogates the digital interface of transnational protest movements and local activism in feminist politics. Examining how global feminist politics is articulated at the nexus of the transnational/national, we take contemporary German protest culture as a case study for the manner in which transnational feminist activism intersects with the national configuration of feminist political work. The book explores how movements and actions from outside Germany's borders circulate digitally and resonate differently in new local contexts, and further, how these border-crossings transform grass-roots activism as it goes digital. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism

Hester Baer

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

ABSTRACT
This article investigates the renewed feminist politics that emerge from the interface of digital platforms and activism today, examining the role of digital media in affecting the particular ways that contemporary feminist protests make meaning and are understood transnationally, nationally, and locally. I consider the political investments of digital feminisms in the context of what Angela McRobbie has termed the “undoing of feminism” in neoliberal societies, where discourses of choice, empowerment, and individualism have made feminism seem both second nature and unnecessary. Within this context, I describe a range of recent feminist protest actions that are in a sense redoing feminism for a neoliberal age. A key component of this redoing is the way recent protest actions play out central tensions within historical and contemporary feminist discourse; crucial here is the interrelationship between body politics experienced locally and feminist actions whose efficacy relies on their translocal and transnational articulation. My discussion focuses on three case studies: SlutWalk Berlin, Peaches’ “Free Pussy Riot!” video, and the Twitter campaigns #Aufschrei and #YesAllWomen. My analysis ultimately calls attention to the precarity of digital feminisms, which reflect both the oppressive nature of neoliberalism and the possibilities it offers for new subjectivities and social formations.

In May 2014, Twitter exploded with a new wave of posts under the hashtag #YesAllWomen, a campaign drawing attention to the ubiquity of sexism, misogyny, and violence against women. Users posted individual stories of discrimination, harassment, and fear, underscoring the fact that “yes, all women” are subject to sexual violence. In Germany, feminists contributed to #YesAllWomen with posts about sexual discrimination and violence that also included the hashtag #Aufschrei (outcry), creating a transnational digital connection between two locally grounded protest actions, with reference to the Twitter campaign documenting women’s experiences of everyday sexism in Germany that created widespread public resonance in 2013. For example, German feminist activist Anke Domscheit-Berg (@anked) wrote in a Twitter posting on May 25, 2014, “#Yesallwomen—the global #outcry … Because awareness is the first step towards social change.”¹ #YesAllWomen and #Aufschrei demonstrate the interplay of individual stories and collective modalities enabled by digital platforms; both also illustrate the crucial interrelationship between body politics experienced in a local context and feminist actions whose efficacy relies on their translocal and transnational articulation. These actions reveal the pervasive, structural nature of sexual violence, linking the specific, local stories of individual women to larger narratives of inequality. Utilizing the digital to make visible the global scale of gender oppression and to link feminist protest movements across national borders, these actions exemplify central aspects of digital feminist activism today.

Digital platforms offer great potential for broadly disseminating feminist ideas, shaping new modes of discourse about gender and sexism, connecting to different constituencies, and allowing creative modes of protest to emerge.² The example of hashtag feminism makes clear how the increased use of digital media has altered, influenced, and shaped feminism in the twenty-first century by giving rise to changed modes of communication, different kinds of conversations, and new configurations of activism across the globe, both online and offline.

Feminist scholars have described digital feminist activism as a departure from conventional modes of doing feminist politics, arguing that it represents a new moment or a turning point in feminism in a number of ways.³ First, the emergence of feminist memes is seen as significant not only for creating a renewed and widespread consciousness of feminist issues in the public sphere, but also for promoting a dynamic new engagement within feminism itself: Samantha Thrift (2014, 2) highlights “the political efficacy of the feminist meme event to mobilize new modes of feminist critique and collectivity.” Second, digital feminism is viewed as engaging substantively and self-reflexively with issues of privilege, difference, and access:

The Internet provides a space where feminists can learn from each other about why things some feminists see as harmless can be hurtful and offensive to others. Most feminists know about intersectionality, but far from all of us know every way in which intersectional oppression works. (Fredrika Thelandersson 2014, 529)

By bringing together diverse feminist constituencies, digital platforms enable new kinds of intersectional conversations. Finally, the interplay of digital feminist protests and female bodies represents a provocative and risky space for an emergent feminist politics that moves away from an emphasis on equality and rights pursued through conventional legal and legislative channels: “the rise of these bodies, body politics, and speech acts points to the new feminism’s disillusionment with the state as a channel for gender justice” (Zakia Salime 2014, 18). There appears to be a consensus, then, that digital activism constitutes a paradigm shift within feminist protest culture.

Less clear, however, are the specific political investments of digital feminism, which has emerged in tandem with the global hegemony of neoliberalism. The relationship between digital feminism and neoliberalism raises a number of questions: are digital protests drained of their efficacy when they are co-opted, a virtually inevitable outcome in the age of neoliberalism?⁴ Can feminist solidarity emerge despite (or even because of) the often “toxic” environment in online spaces (Thelandersson 2014)? Will structural change result from the “microrebellions” of digital feminism, which often appear to work “in concert with neoliberal subjectivities and entrepreneurial forms of self-promotion, self-reliance, and self-governance” (Salime 2014, 16)? How do we understand the changed political function of the female body within both digital mediascapes and street protests? Finally, by what means do we measure the efficacy of political action in an age when inequalities are tolerated, upward redistribution of wealth is the norm, and alternatives to capitalism are increasingly unimaginable?

With the aim of establishing some provisional answers to these questions, this article examines the renewed feminist politics arising from the conjunction of digital platforms and activism today. I begin by contextualizing contemporary feminist protest actions within the framework of neoliberalism and outlining the stakes of their body politics in this context. In my analysis, the term “body politics” functions as a heuristic for considering the disputed status of the (female) body within both neoliberalism and feminism today. With its emphasis on self-optimization, personal responsibility, and individual choice, neoliberalism recasts the body as a key site of identity, empowerment, and control (Alison Phipps 2014). Decoupled from social status, identity in post-Fordist societies is increasingly linked to the body, which may be shaped, repurposed, and given value through consumer choices. With the rise of digital media, the body has taken on further significance as a site of both self-representation and surveillance, not least with regard to gender identities and gender norms. The female body has long functioned as a key site for feminist activism around issues of sexual violence, reproductive justice, sex work, sex trafficking, genital cutting, cosmetic surgery, disability, and disordered eating, among others. However, the schisms within feminism that emerged from different theoretical approaches to these contentious issues over the last thirty years have dovetailed with the neoliberal recasting of the body to stymie feminist political action. Together, these developments have colluded to undo the efficacy of feminism’s politicization of the personal and its reliance on rights- and choice-based frameworks in combating the oppression of women’s bodies.

My analysis explores the way digital feminisms contend with this state of affairs by investigating three case studies of transnationally inflected protest actions taking place in Germany. I argue that the body, as a “porous boundary” (Judith Butler 2004b, 25) between self and other, autonomy and sociality, emerges at the conjunction of digital spaces and street protests as a symbolic and precarious site of control and resistance. My first case study describes the interface between street protests and online representations in actions by and debates over SlutWalk, FEMEN, and Muslima Pride in Berlin. My second case study investigates the body politics of performance artist Peaches’ digital video “Free Pussy Riot!,” which was recorded in Berlin. In the final part of my article, I return to the Twitter campaigns #Aufschrei and #YesAllWomen.

As Michelle Rodino-Colocino (2014, 1) puts it, “#YesAllWomen is a key moment in the genealogy of feminism that underscores the old-in-the-new and suggests an urgent course of action for feminist media scholars.” Responding to this call, I draw on these three case studies to suggest how digital feminisms are in a sense redoing feminism for a neoliberal age. As I argue, by working through, making visible, and re-signifying central tensions in contemporary feminism, as well as the precarity of feminism itself in neoliberalism, these protests have begun to re-establish the grounds for a collective feminist politics beyond the realm of the self-styled individual. Crucial to this redoing of feminism is the interplay between digital platforms—the transnational mediascape of the Internet, a space encompassing and highlighting difference, in which discussions play out in a disembodied and sometimes anonymous forum—and local protests that draw attention to the female body as a site of contention in the politics of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and culture today.

Feminism and neoliberalism

In the context of neoliberalism, hegemonic discourses of individual choice and empowerment, freedom, self-esteem, and personal responsibility have conspired to make feminism seem second nature and therefore also unnecessary for women, especially in the West, where structural inequalities are increasingly viewed as personal problems that can be resolved through individual achievement. In her book The Aftermath of Feminism, Angela McRobbie has described the active “undoing of feminism” that has occurred in neoliberal societies, which disavow feminism as unnecessary while offering women “a notional form of equality, concretised in education and employment, and through participation in consumer culture and civil society, in place of what a reinvented feminist politics might have to offer” (2009, 2). McRobbie argues that the undoing of feminism in neoliberalism is effected not least through post-feminist popular culture, which reflects the “double entanglement” of present-day political life, where we witness the coexistence of neoconservative values with the liberalization of sexual relations and kinship structures (2009, 12). McRobbie builds on Rosalind Gill’s descrip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Introduction – Digital feminisms: transnational activism in German protest cultures
• 1. Redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism
• 2. Online feminist protest against sexism: the German-language hashtag #aufschrei
• 3. From #aufschrei to hatr.org: digital–material entanglements in the context of German digital feminist activisms
• 4. How (not) to “Hollaback”: towards a transnational debate on the “Red Zora” and militant tactics in the feminist struggle against gender-based violence
• 5. The communicative construction of FEMEN: naked protest in self-mediation and German media discourse
• 6. Kübra Gümüşay, Muslim digital feminism and the politics of visuality in Germany
• 7. Riot Grrrls, Bitchsm, and pussy power: interview with Reyhan Şahin/Lady Bitch Ray
• 8. Performing the “quing of berlin”: transnational digital interfaces in queer feminist protest culture
• 9. “Allow access to location?”: Digital feminist geographies
• Index