Dissonance and defensiveness: orienting affects in online feminist cultures

Abstract

ABSTRACT Are there certain shared feelings that orient contemporary feminists? And what does it mean to feel like a feminist now, at a time when digital networks and media culture significantly shape the conditions for what feminism ‘is’ (Banet-Weiser 2018)? This paper considers how digital culture, as a crucial but potentially disorienting site of feminist encounter and contestation, may reshape norms of feminist feeling, and what feminist feeling is used to do. Feminists have long understood feeling as an ‘orienting device’ (Ahmed 2006). in the question of how subjects come to know the world and situate themselves in it. Feminism itself has been associated with a ‘willfulness’ creating dissident subjectivities moving against the grain of prevailing patriarchal gender norms. Following Ahmed’s queer phenomenology where feeling is theorized as an ‘orientation’ towards objects, this paper considers how the affective infrastructures and dynamics of digital culture orient and draw boundaries for feminists along particular lines. We explore self-identifying feminists’ accounts of learning, interaction and deliberation as feminists within digital environments, suggesting that what it means to be feminist is significantly determined by what it means to feel feminist. While digital culture makes feminism more ‘accessible’ to many, we suggest that the commercialized architectures and rhythms of digital culture complicate and intensify the politics of emotion connected to differences and histories of power relations within feminism.