Paper short abstract

Online feminists’ movements remain spaces of controversy that include feminist critique, selective outrage and slacktivism, deconstruction of meaning and social backlash. This paper looks at continuities between such movements in terms of similarities, performativity, successes & controversies.

Paper long abstract

Online feminist movements operate simultaneously as platforms of resistance and advocacy representing "grassroots globalization" as agents, utilizing ideoscapes (Appadurai, 2018) (rights, equality) to challenge local patriarchies. They are arenas of public engagement, political expression, online and offline performativity, and social impact that intersect in complex ways. India has seen a number of feminist movements that have made effective use of the virtual space to reiterate their narratives. These movements include #Braveheart, #MeTooIndia, #LahuKaLagaan, #PinjraTod (Break the Cage), #IWillGoOut, #WhyLoiter, Pink Chaddi Campaign. While these movements have created recognition for the need of significant social reform, they have also been questioned by sceptics for their selective outrage and slacktivism. The movements in their global engagement also remain susceptible to deconstruction of meaning in the shift from global to local and the relevant cultural context. They remain spaces of controversy that are influenced by the fact that the grassroot is not homogenous and include dynamism of thought, interest and practice in addition to feminist questioning and critique as well as social backlash of the dominant culture.

This paper utilises a comparative analytical framework to understand the above-mentioned feminist movements, especially focusing on their successes and contradictions. The research is based on review of literature which include ethnographic works, narratives and media communication on the movements, with a construction through multidisciplinary exploration, in an effort to understand and emphasise the possible learnings form these feminist movements.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on digital ethnography of the Spanish-speaking manosphere, this paper analyzes women's constitutive role in validating and mainstreaming antifeminist discourse, and its challenge to feminisms.

Paper long abstract

Research on the manosphere has largely focused on male actors—influencers, men's communities, grievance discourses—treating female participation as peripheral or anomalous. This paper, based on ongoing digital ethnography of the Spanish-speaking manosphere conducted as part of a doctoral research project, proposes an analytical shift: women are not external to the manospheric assemblage, but constitutive of its functioning.

Fieldwork across platforms including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram has revealed the significant presence of two types of female figures. First, women who explicitly identify as antifeminist and position themselves as "defenders of men," validating male grievance narratives. Second, women who claim earlier feminisms to invalidate what they call "radical feminism," characterized as punitive, anti-men, and destructive. Though differently positioned vis-à-vis feminism, both perform convergent work within the assemblage: they validate, mainstream, and contribute to the confusion surrounding gender discourse that adolescents navigate today.

Drawing on Barad's agential cuts and Berlant's cruel optimism, I analyze how these women produce specific distinctions that reconfigure the terms of debate while participating in the same cruel optimism the manosphere fosters: promising a restoration of gender order that benefits those who preach it while leaving followers vulnerable.

The paper concludes with a challenge to contemporary feminisms. If these voices resonate among adolescents who find no meaning in our narratives, this cannot be reduced to a misinformation problem. Following Puig de la Bellacasa's invitation to dissent-within, I propose these figures offer an opportunity to revise our own strategies—particularly those that have turned punitive or closed conversation with young men.

Paper short abstract

Social media generates visceral but fleeting anger. This study proposes that streaming media like Netflix acts as a "memory prosthesis," consolidating fragmented digital affects into an enduring historical record to sustain the #SeAcabó movement against erasure

Paper long abstract

Social media often intensifies feelings of agony, but this polarized world also comes with a sense of immediacy. Consequently, the great thoughts, outcries, and history of online movements are often forgotten by the public in a matter of days. Can these moments be memorialized not just by activists, but by the world at large? This study suggests that commercial streaming media offers a new possibility for modern feminism. Through an analysis of TikTok content during the #SeAcabó movement, we find that Netflix acted as a structural pivot , connecting grassroots affect with neoliberal commodification.

Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzed data from August 2023 to December 2024, combining Social Network Analysis (SNA) of TikTok videos (N=1000) and press articles (N=200) with qualitative discourse analysis of the Netflix documentary Se Acabó.

Findings showed that TikTok served as an incubator for "affective publics," generating the emotional solidarity necessary to breach the mainstream news agenda. However, it was the intervention of Netflix that acted as a "structural pivot." By historicizing transient digital anger into a cohesive narrative, the documentary stabilized the movement against the volatility of the attention economy.

This study argues that the success of #SeAcabó relies on this recursive loop: grassroots activism provides the moral impulse, while institutional and commercial media provide the structural amplification and memory required to resist erasure. This study thus highlights the paradoxical "possibilities" for feminist success: navigating the tension between authentic struggle and commodified visibility to secure a place in history.

Paper short abstract

This study examines China's "jiangzhehu only daughter" hashtag, revealing how privileged women's digital performances reproduce patriarchal structures. It demonstrates how regional privilege, filial post-feminism, and platform logics create depoliticised empowerment within authoritarian constraints.

Paper long abstract

This dissertation investigates the emergence and cultural significance of the “jiangzhehu only daughter” hashtag phenomenon on one of the most popular lifestyle social networking platforms in China, the RED (Xiaohongshu). Through the mixed-method research design, this research combines the analysis of user posts with semi-structured interviews of participants. This study aims to examine how the only daughters of families from China’s economically privileged regions navigate the gender performance within existing patriarchal structures.

Drawing on post-feminist theory and intersectionality, the research presented here reveals the intricacies of empowerment and limitation in today’s Chinese online spaces. First, it examines how “refined materialism” is used to justify consumption, as individuals deploy educational and cultural capital to present luxury as a sign of personal refinement. Second, it explores the rise of “digital filial performance” as a gendered mode of aesthetic experience that honours family legacies as well as produces personal identities; Third, it analyses how algorithmic infrastructures on digital platforms both enable expressions of empowerment and impose constraints that depoliticise feminist discourse.

The study demonstrates that while the social networks offer new sites of identity formation, they retain entrenched power relations through the mechanism of algorithmic brokerage. It also highlights how Western post-feminist frameworks have been digitally adapted within China’s distinctive cultural and political context. Through the analysis of the negotiation of mainstream values in new digital domains by this hashtag, the research provides a further avenue of insight into the comprehension of gender, technology, and cultural evolution in the digital era.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines fathers' rights activism in Hungary, focusing on how claims about custody, care, and deservingness articulated online appear in family support institutions under an illiberal, anti-gender political regime.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines fathers' rights activism (FRA) in Hungary, where an illiberal, anti-gender political climate has enabled fathers' claims around custody and care to gain institutional traction. Drawing on digital ethnography of Hungarian-language online groups to complement sixteen months of fieldwork in family support services, I analyse how divorced fathers mobilise moralised claims to deservingness as caregivers while positioning themselves as victims of a feminised bureaucracy.

Family support services are municipal institutions traditionally serving low-income families, but middle-class, legally assertive fathers have increasingly approached them recently seeking support or intervention around parenting. Hungary’s pro-natalist regime has promoted traditional family roles while attacking "gender ideology" since 2010, creating conditions where FRA discourse resonates with state rhetoric. The 2021 introduction of alternating custody, a key FRA demand, demonstrates their potential influence on policy.

Rather than treating FRA as merely an anti-feminist backlash, this paper shows how it operates in online spaces and shapes institutional practice. Drawing on fathers' rights discourses, these men file complaints and invoke "parental alienation" to advance their claims. During my fieldwork, I observed social workers describing middle-class fathers as a challenging new client group while themselves referencing "parental alienation" uncritically. While often rooted in pro-feminist desires to support involved fatherhood, such uptake can obscure post-separation power dynamics and reinforce gendered harms.

By examining how FRA operates across digital spaces, policy reform, and street-level practice in an illiberal context, this paper shows how anti-gender movements gain legitimacy, reshaping the negotiation of care in welfare governance.

Paper short abstract

The use of AI to create Virtual Child Sex Abuse Material (Krishna, Dubrosa, & Milanaik, 2024), and how it's not a victimless crime (O’Brien et al., 2025) is gaining a lot of attention. This paper proposes a feminist approach to AI as a more sustainable alternative to current preventive measures.

Paper long abstract

While discussions around the negative side-effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are gaining momentum, amidst the ongoing buzz about how it is transforming our lives for the better, one serious downside to its proliferation - the use of Generative AI to create Virtual Child Sex Abuse Material, and the harms it can cause, are increasingly gaining attention - with lawmakers and the tech providers scrambling to find solutions to curb its spread. This research shows how the systems that are in place are inherently insufficient, and often contradictory, to deal with this issue. This paper proposes how a feminist approach to AI as a possible solution to prevent this new type of AI-facilitated violence. A feminist approach is rooted in the belief that oppressive systems of power harm everyone and hinder true and lasting social impact (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). It looks beyond punitive models, and relies more on feedback and care mechanisms not only for children, but those involved in content moderation (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). It also advocates an ecosystem where technology works in tandem with the law and larger community initiatives to foster prevention and care (Masikini & Modi, 2025).

Paper short abstract

This sensory ethnography argues that dating apps like Grindr algorithmize caste and class hierarchies, transforming them into codes of digital desire. It exposes how "Pure Top" masculinity and trans-fetishism commodify marginalised bodies, centring Dalit-queer embodied resistance to this violence.

Paper long abstract

This article presents a sensory-embodied-experiential digital ethnography of the "Pure Top" figure on Indian dating apps (Grindr, Bumble, Tinder), centring the experiences of working-class, lower-caste, rural-origin, and transqueer people in North India (Delhi, Haryana: Hisar, Rohtak, Karnal, Panipat) and East India (Kolkata, West Bengal: Ranaghat, Kalyani, Krishnanagar, Barasat, Bongaon). Positioning myself as a Dalit-Queer-Trans-Kothi researcher from rural West Bengal, I argue that the Pure Top positioning is not a sexual preference but a performance of caste and class respectability that reproduces Brahminical hierarchies through hypermasculinity, body hair removal, and the violent commodification of trans and feminine bodies. The article traces a specific form of trans-fetishism wherein Tops demand trans bodies in feminine presentations (sarees, underwear, makeup) while simultaneously denying trans identity, rendering trans bodies as detachable sexual commodities available only for insertion-based pleasure. Through sensory ethnographic methods attending to the haptic, olfactory, and affective dimensions of digital desire, I document how apps materialise caste discrimination through language ("clean," "decent," "educated"), spatial segregation via geolocation, and the eroticization of master-slave hierarchies that mirror caste-based exploitation. The research draws on interviews with working-class gay men, trans sex workers, and Dalit-queer activists across six sites, combined with my own embodied experiences as a Grindr user. I conclude by centring emerging Dalit-queer collective spaces that refuse app-mediated desire and practice sensory, embodied, care-centred community-building outside neoliberal logic.