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Paper short abstract

Based on an ethnography with a feminist collective in Greece, this paper examines the embodied, affective labour of administering feminist social media, by focusing on everyday practices of care, emotional engagement, and burnout as administrators navigate polarized post-#MeToo digital environments.

Paper long abstract

What is it like to be the administrator of the Facebook page of a feminist collective? How does it feel to be responsible for disseminating information in digital counter-publics, for responding to private messages from survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) and for generating political feminist content in Greek post-#MeToo social media? Drawing on an ethnography with an intersectional feminist collective in a small city in Northern Greece, I explore the im/material and affective labour involved in administering feminist social media accounts. I focus, first, on the largely invisible forms of digital labour that underpin feminist online presence and examine how it is experienced by the admins as embodied states of information fatigue and burnout. I approach these not as an individual conditions but as a collectively produced public feelings (Cvetkovich 2012). Secondly, I analyze how this labour is informed by the affect-laden imperatives of solidarity and community building, such as feminist chants that circulated widely in social media in the wake of femicides and GBV incidents in the past six years: “We’re full with rage and affection”, “Should you need any help, come to me”. Drawing on Hemmings’ concept of affective solidarity (2012) and Hardt and Negri’s theorization of affective labour (2004), with emphasis on digital feminist labour (Mendes 2021), I argue that feminist social media administration constitutes a key site where digital infrastructures materialize the porous boundaries between connection and exhaustion in today’s polarized world, while revealing key featurs of contemporary feminist political subjectivity in Greece.