Paper short abstract:

This paper is an article manuscript in progress that examines how contemporary Kenyan feminists navigate in an increasingly anti-feminist popular environment online while they experience disillusionment with established and institutionalised forms of gender rights work.

Paper long abstract:

Feminist activists are facing a multi-layered crisis in Kenya: on the one hand, rising authoritarianism and conservative anti-gender popular movements are shrinking the spaces for gender and sexual rights activism. On the other, young, radical feminists are disillusioned with the gender rights discourse set by previous generations in gender and development work, which many perceive not transformative enough. Drawing form a qualitative study among feminist activists in Kenya between 2019 and 2022, this paper suggests that while many young Kenyan feminists have not abandoned traditional civil society activism, they may navigate in the context of disillusionment by creating new forms of activism in online spaces without explicit political aims. Following Davina Cooper’s (2014) conceptualisation, this paper investigates such spaces as everyday utopias: for example, activists create communal and entertainment-driven utopian spaces on social media, where they express themselves in more radical and sex-positive ways than would be accepted in traditional gender rights activist spaces, and in the Kenyan society as a whole. Personal social media sites and spontaneously emerged, sex positive online communities accessible for the social media-savvy youth create safe spaces for radical feminist and queer self-representation and peer support. This paper argues that such everyday feminist utopias allow young Kenyan feminists to create small-scale changes they wish to encounter in the society, making them political activist sites even when political change making is not their primary goal.