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- Convenors:
-
Indrani Mukherjee
(Indian Anthropological Association)
Saptarshi Bairagi (University of Delhi)
Diya Koshy George (University of Sussex)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel endeavors an academic discussion on popular feminism in digital culture and ‘terrain of struggle’ within coexisting structural dominances like neoliberalism and commodification, manosphere critiques, and digital misogyny; with a sight on social impact, and successes.
Long Abstract
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). 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 aka popular feminism including multiple forms of feminism circulating within digital culture (Banet-Weiser), creating a broader acceptance of feminism, where feminism does not have to defend itself. Gill however cautions that the resurgence of feminism should not be misunderstood as the non-existence of anti-feminist or postfeminist thoughts. The multiple 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. This panel hopes to bring forth an academic discussion on popular feminism in digital culture, with a sight on the social impact, looking at-
* feminism between different frames of global and trans-local, and as continuities between the physical and digital world.
*feminism and its commodification in the neoliberal digital economy.
* impact of digital feminism on sexualities and identities.
* manosphere and its critique of feminism
* 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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper 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
Drawing on ethnography with Romanian women truckers, this paper theorizes the 'affective tachograph.' It explores how TikTok facilitates both feminist resistance and corporate surveillance, analyzing the tension between online solidarity and the misogynistic backlash of the logistics 'manosphere'.
Paper long abstract
Engaging with the digital "terrain of struggle," this paper investigates the gendered dynamics of transnational trucking. Drawing on ethnography with Romanian women drivers, I propose the "affective tachograph" to theorize how digital platforms function as dual mechanisms of neoliberal subjectivation and resistance.
While recruitment campaigns instrumentalize "corporate feminism" to plug labor shortages with flexible workers from the European semi-periphery, the reality of the truck cabin contradicts this rhetoric. I argue that social media, particularly TikTok, becomes an arena where the "logistical colonisation of life" is both contested and reproduced. On one hand, women use these platforms to perform resilience, disrupting the industry's hegemonic masculinity. On the other, this visibility exposes them to intense "digital misogyny" from the logistics "manosphere."
Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how the industry co-opts this digital labour. The "affective tachograph" implies that the emotional labour performed online is monitored and quantified by algorithmic gazes, turning solidarity into a metric of employability. By analyzing this digital dialectic, the study reveals how fourth-wave feminist discourse is paradoxically utilized to sustain the brutal "just-in-time" flows of logistical capitalism, trapping women between physical exhaustion and digital performance.
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 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).