Digital Media and Discursive Contestation: The Importance of Feminist Counterpublics Online

Abstract

For feminist research, digital media now enable other ways of knowing currently lacking in mainstream research. Therefore, searching for African women's lived experiences in other sites, such as digital media spaces, requires the appropriation of methodologies that empower women. This article discusses the feminist approach of centring women as subaltern counterpublics, to show how this unearths the intersection of technology, power, hegemony, and subordination in the Zimbabwean context. The overall goal is to explain how the feminist counterpublics approach enables empirical findings on the emancipatory potential of blogs for Zimbabwean women. This research approach reveals how Zimbabwean women are using digital media as spaces to circulate counterdiscourses that resist their subjugation and the legitimation of power. Utilising the feminist approach to qualitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews, the study shows that communicative spaces online enable traditionally emasculated groups in Zimbabwe, particularly women, to reaffirm their identities and to begin to question the societal norms that continue to oppress them. This approach illustrates that blogs act as sites for regrouping and contestation, developing remedies for women's oppression, taking positions, and influencing wider publics.