Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

This chapter begins to investigate new activist media practices by drawing on ethnography with various feminist organisations and individuals based in London. I focus on how these actors understood the role of digital media in contemporary feminism. My fieldwork shows how activists negotiate access, connectivity, immediacy, labour and visibility, the key characteristics of digital technologies, while they raised important points of critique about technical expertise and unpaid labour in the context of post–2008 austerity. Of particular interest here is how activist practices are influenced by libertarian promises that make up a shared social imaginary of the internet as an empowering technology. There is a wider rhetoric of digital networks as sites of non-hierarchical modes of connection and as elementary components of democratic participation. My argument is that this imaginary influences what counts as legitimate political engagement for feminists today and is instrumental in shaping the form and agendas of women's organisations. The findings demonstrate that indeed, the internet presents an alternative way of engagement for many London-based women groups as it provides spaces for rapid circulation of their campaign material, and connection with one another. At the same time, it becomes a space where older feminists, who are not ‘digital natives’, experience an uncomfortable sense of being left behind and forgotten about. With this discussion, the chapter portrays how the web becomes a new mediated context of increased visibility and connectivity, part of the wider media ecology, where political opinions about old and still unresolved feminist issues are being reformulated whilst vulnerability and empowerment are experienced in new mediated ways.

This chapter revisits the concept of networked feminism within the wider context of debates in contemporary feminism about forms of gendered and reproductive labour (Dickenson, 2007; Franklin and Lock, 2003; Thompson, 2005). I turn here to account for feminist projects of knowledge production about reproductive technologies and their regulation in digital media, focusing specifically on the example of fertility policy around egg donation and fertility tracking with smart technologies. The significance of reproductive labour for global capitalism, and the biodigital vulnerabilities that are created in relation to reproductive technologies are my key interests in this discussion. Reproductive labour and the changes in the political economy of reproduction brought by new reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilisation and egg extraction, are controversial issues that have invited numerous feminist interventions around the world. A conceptualisation of gendered labour is vital for an understanding of the reconfigurations of the ‘political’ in our digitally mediated worlds. Second, I move on to analyse the communicative acts that contribute to a layperson’s knowledge production about reproductive rights, and note how these cut across academic/grassroots, online/offline, and national/local spaces, whilst challenging these boundaries. Feminist networks attempt to create alternative but credible sources of knowledge that question dominant understandings of biomedicine and its policy. My examination shows how these actors establish their credibility and how their participation in mainstream digital media legitimises them as representatives of affected groups in society. The central preoccupation with subjective experience and seizing control over one’s body in contemporary feminist mobilisations indicates continuity with the Women’s Health Movement. As with the other chapters in this book, there are deep contradictions that characterise feminist politics of reproduction, as neoliberal discourses of individual choice, sexual agency and empowerment shape the conditions in which they emerge. I argue that these politics can be better understood in relation to embodied, material practices of knowledge production, mutual learning and self-experimentation with digital media and smart technologies.

From the international biopolitical networks of reproduction and pornography, in this chapter I cross over to consider the specificity and importance of locality and space for queer political cultures in digital networks. I am motivated here by the need to understand how the meaning of belonging, community and politics are changing with digital networking technologies. I draw from ethnographic analysis of an anarcho-queer activist group in Brighton called Queer Mutiny, and examine how reterritorialisation and community building were key elements of their political project. Through a combination of pedagogic and cultural activist practices, where peer support and learning are central, activists built a strong sense of place, and maintained an active connection between the past, the present and the future. These practices involved workshops and parties, as well as the production of DIY zines and online content, and aimed at creating a community life with thick and strong ties Brighton. Through a discussion of the group’s resistance to digital media technologies, I show how social networking was in this case key in a project of world-making, as a means for documenting and promoting assets of community and strengthening embodied affective relations on the ground. Meanwhile, the chapter shows the tensions between how participants imagined global activism and how this activism materialised locally, against this backdrop of neoliberalism and the ‘pink pound’. With an attention to intimacy, friendship and belonging and their centrality for local political communities and cultures, the chapter returns to a key concern in this book: the ways in which, in the digital world, feminist and queer activism are today performed and enacted through affective relations and material, embodied practices.

In this book, I set off to answer a key question: What do feminism and queer activism mean in the digital era, when digital technologies are so inextricably linked to culture, economy and politics? By asking what feminism and queer activism are in the digital era, I have focused on the contradictions, tensions and often-paradoxical aspects of these politics, in relation to both identity and activist practice. I started from the premise that today both feminism, as forceful critique and praxis, and the figure of the feminist are often missing in digital as well as activism studies. This final chapter revisits the key premise of the book, that doing feminism and being feminist involves enacting ourselves as activists – as embodied – and political subjects through media practices, technologies and their imaginaries. While digital networks help us maintain a dialogue with the past, feminism creates conditions of possibility in the present, for a livable future – by making claims for rights, and social justice, across networks, media, and technologies. This epilogue is a reminder that the recursive loops of feminism – across time, linking past, present and future – matter.