Bodies on the Line vs. Bodies Online: A Feminist Phenomenology of Digitally Mediated Political Action

Abstract

Many scholars and commentators dismiss digitally mediated activism as an inadequate and inferior form of political participation. Such disparagements ignore accounts from feminist, disabled, BIPOC, and LGBTQ + activists, for whom social media has become an essential tool to raise awareness, advance political demands, and build coalitions. By centering their praxis and delineating how social justice–oriented social media activism (SJSMA) reconfigures political presence, we demonstrate that SJSMA constitutes consequential—indeed, embodied—political action, which remains undertheorized. This article clarifies how the definition of “the political” that privileges conventionally corporeal and public political activism is rooted in masculinist and ableist thinking, what we term manceptualism. Drawing on Black feminist media studies, crip, queer, and feminist theory, we offer a corrective to manceptualism by retheorizing embodied political action. Taking a phenomenological approach, our concept of marbled embodiment better accounts for our simultaneously online and offline lives and political labor.