Feminism and Digital Anthropologies: Gender, Intersectionality, Social Continuity and Change

Abstract (English)

Gill (2016) highlights a ‘new cultural life of feminism’, recognizing it as the ‘fourth wave of feminism’, accentuated through digital media based feminist activism, a thought that is an echo of Banet-Weiser, (2015), Valenti (2014) and Keller & Ryan (2014). Banet-Weiser points out that popular feminism has multiple forms of feminism circulating within digital culture, creating a broader acceptance of feminism, where feminism does not have to defend itself. Hill and Allen (2021) also recognize the easy reacquisition of the term ‘patriarchy’ within popular feminism, without the necessary burden of feminist academic critique around the term, that has led to greater vocality in social movements including ‘smash the patriarchy’. This brings forth celebration in terms of an engaged feminism in popular culture. However, Gill cautions that this resurgence of feminism should not be misunderstood as the non-existence of anti-feminist or postfeminist thoughts. These forms of feminism operate in ‘a terrain of struggle’ (see Stewart Hall), within themselves as well as the coexisting structural dominance of neoliberalism and commodification, race and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, disability, gender and other existing eventualities of inequalities and exclusion. This creates opportunities for scholar’s to use an academic lens for understanding various forms of digital feminism and the associated interconnected phenomena around it in terms of scale as well as continuities with the physical world. This panel hopes to bring forth an academic discussion on popular feminism in digital culture, with a sight on the social impact that it has the ability to make, especially in terms of policy discourses.
The panel looks towards papers that research
a. Different forms of feminism circulating within digital culture.
b. Feminism between different frames of global and glocal, and as continuities between the physical and digital world.
c. Digital Feminism in a comparative frame of different waves of feminism.
d. Feminism and its commodification in the neoliberal digital economy.
e. The impact of digital Feminism on identities, including gender and other social intersectionalities.
f. Manosphere and its critique of feminism
g. Digital Feminism, misogyny and hate speech (looking at multiple modes of communication including texts, memes, reels, videos etc.), with reflections on policy discourses and action.