Abstract
This article brings into question the political utility of platforms as media for feminist resistance. Using examples of #MeToo, and the Women’s March on Washington, movements that have relied on the platform for reinvigorating what Sarah Banet-Weiser has called “popular feminism” (2018), I argue that common media platforms tend to infer an underlying assumption of safety, privilege and power in relation to social space. Through highlighting how BIPOC people organize in social space, I argue that the focus on amplification and elevation, facilitated by the logics of platform, obscures the needs of those who resist on the margins. I introduce the spatial strategies employed by those who must negotiate space differently to challenge the centrality of platforms as media the structure contemporary feminist protest.
Highlights
This article brings into question the political utility of platforms as media for feminist resistance
The protests have been charged as corporate and neoliberal because they disarticulate systematic violence and seem blind to other forms of oppression beyond middle class white women’s experience in public space. (Rottenberg 2017). Each of these recent feminist mobilizations rely on digital media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Such social media platforms lend themselves to making feminism visible and accessible
The platform has become synonymous with social media and mobile apps in the context of digital culture (Gillespie, 2010; Hands, 2013; Langlois and Elmer, 2013; Taylor, 2014; Snerick, 2017) and it is this iteration of the word that is most commonly associated with mediated contemporary feminist movements
Summary
This article brings into question the political utility of platforms as media for feminist resistance. By making connections between the material stage at the Women’s March on Washington, and the digital platforms of other expressions of contemporary popular feminism, I argue that for feminist political activism to be generative, the platform needs to be put aside. Without thinking about the platform from a materialist perspective, which existing literature does not do, it is difficult to think of digital feminisms beyond the logics of platforms Through intervening in these fields by raising questions about the platform and its role in structuring intersectional feminist struggle it might be possible to uncover or at least highlight, the important ways in which women who are POC, queer, trans and/or disabled, develop differential spatial strategies in moments of resistance. We need to begin to think about how feminist struggle has been bound to various iterations of the platform and by extension to normative spatial organizations and how these arrangements are constantly being renegotiated
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