This Is What a #Feminist #Antifeminist Looks like: Political Selfies and Social Media Activism

BACKGROUND

Social media technologies have fundamentally changed political participation and have made it possible for everyday people to politically brand themselves and participate in global political dialogs through hashtags, blogs, and status updates. Among these emergent modes of online political activism is the political self-photograph or “selfie.” In political selfies, supporters of a cause attach pictures of themselves to written political statements and circulate these messages through sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. When it comes to feminism, a social movement whose critiques frequently coalesce around ideas and images that portray, contest, and complicate conceptions of feminine beauty and their moral trappings, feminist embodiment is an important and undertheorized aspect of the political claims-making process. In this study, we examine the visual branding of feminism in pro-feminist (Who Needs Feminism/WNF) and anti-feminist (Women Against Feminism/WAF) social media campaigns on Tumblr. Our aims were twofold: to identify the ways feminism is understood and mobilized by proponents and opponents of feminism in the early 21^st century, and to explore the possibilities and limitations of social media for enabling political activism. 

METHODS

We drew upon several sources of data, including social media sites for WNF and WAF and popular news stories about feminism and women’s rights publicized during the study period. Images posted to WNF and WAF between April 2012 and June 2015 were downloaded, then sorted along two dimensions. The first dimension cued into visual motif with a particular focus on whether the image appeared to feature a real life person making a political statement and whether or not a given format could be easily “faked.” The second dimension zeroed in on similarities and differences in the way feminist and anti-feminist posters, particularly women, mobilized their bodies to make political statements. 

RESULTS

WNF and WAF used three primary visual motifs to make political statements: portrait memes, portrait macros, and image macros. All of these motifs shape the physical image of feminism and antifeminism and appear to say something about the demographic makeup of these social movements. But some posts appeared to have been appropriated from other websites, while others could easily be “faked,” troubling any conclusions one might draw about the veracity and representativeness of these online social movements.   Feminists and antifeminists looked aesthetically similar to one another but differed in way they dialoged with their bodies and in the meanings they ascribed to women’s bodies. Feminists exposed their own bodies while contesting the idea that bodily exposure is inherently sexual or signals sexual availability. Antifeminists also exposed their bodies but did so to defend normative understandings of women’s bodies as sex objects. Finally, feminists argued that oppression is invisible, while anti-feminists construed oppression as a condition visible on the body.

IMPLICATIONS

Social media enables novel forms of political participation, allowing highly disbursed people to embody politics in virtual rather than physical space. However, these same technologies make it easy to co-opt movements and fake political content, problematizing distinctions between virtual and real-time embodied political reality.