Feminism & Psychology

Existing research into the depiction of female athletes has indicated that while they remain under-represented across traditional and online media outlets, social media is a potential tool for female athletes to redress this lack of coverage, and even contest and rework normative gender and sexual identities in sport. This paper challenges such arguments by offering a feminist thematic analysis of how five international female athletes are using social media to present their sporting and feminine selves within a neoliberal post-feminist moment characterised by individual empowerment and entrepreneurial subjecthood. Adopting a feminist critique of neoliberalism, and critically engaging Banet-Weiser's gendered “economies of visibility”, our findings demonstrate that, in a social media environment, female athletes are adopting new strategies for identity construction that capitalise on tropes of agentic post-feminist subjecthood to market themselves, including self-love, self-disclosure and self-empowerment. This paper advances the emerging field of inquiry into athlete social media usage by focusing on the ideological workings of neoliberalised gender discourse not only in the crafting of contemporary sporting femininities in digital spaces, but in recasting feminism as an individualised endeavour firmly located in the market.

Over recent years, young feminist activism has assumed prominence in mainstream media where news headlines herald the efforts of schoolgirls in fighting sexism, sexual violence and inequity. Less visible in the public eye, girls’ activism plays out in social media where they can speak out about gender-based injustices experienced and witnessed. Yet we know relatively little about this significant social moment wherein an increasing visibility of young feminism cohabits a stubbornly persistent postfeminist culture. Acknowledging the hiatus, this paper draws on a qualitative project with teenage feminists to explore how girls are using and producing digital feminist media, what it means for them to do so and how their online practice connects with their offline feminism. Using a feminist poststructuralist approach, analyses identified three key constructions of digital media as a tool for feminist practice: online feminism as precarious and as knowledge sharing; and feminism as “doing something” on/offline. Discussing these findings, I argue that there is marked continuity between girls’ practices in “safe” digital spaces and feminisms practised in other historical and geographical locations. But crucially, and perhaps distinctly, digital media are a key tool to connect girls with feminism and with other feminists in local and global contexts.

Nonconsensual pornography, sometimes referred to as “revenge porn,” refers to the distribution of sexually explicit photographs or videos without the consent of the individual in the image. These images, along with accompanying personal information, are often disseminated by a former romantic or sexual partner with the intent to harm. Websites exist that have a reputation for hosting and promoting revenge porn. However, it is unclear to what extent these websites function for the purpose of explicitly harming victims by providing a victim's personal information. To address this question, a content analysis was performed on 134 photographs from seven different websites that originated within the United States. Descriptions of photos posted, content of victims' personal information included within the post, victim and distributor demographics, and viewers' comments were coded and analyzed. Website layouts and policies were also documented. Key findings were that nearly 92% of victims featured on included websites were women. Moreover, when a reason was given for posting the photo, it was correlated with having a greater number of views, being more likely to allow commenting on photos, and being more likely to include a victim's name. Implications are discussed.

On Instagram, the accounts Bye Felipe and Tinder Nightmares feature screen-grabbed messages of sexist abuse and harassment women have received from men on dating apps. This paper presents a discursive analysis of 526 posts from these Instagrams. Utilising a psychosocial and feminist poststructuralist perspective, it examines how harassing messages reproduce certain gendered discourses and (hetero)sexual scripts, and analyses how harassers attempt to position themselves and the feminine subject in interaction. The analysis presents two themes, termed the “not hot enough” discourse and the “missing discourse of consent”, which are unpacked to reveal a patriarchal logic in which a woman's constructed “worth” in the online sexual marketplace resides in her beauty and sexual propriety. Occurring in response to women's exercise of choice and to (real or imagined) sexual rejection, it is argued these are disciplinary discourses that attempt to (re)position women and femininity as sexually subordinate to masculinity and men. This paper makes a novel contribution to a growing body of feminist work on online harassment and misogyny. It also considers the implications for feminist theorising on the link between postfeminism and contemporary forms of sexism, and ends with some reflections on strategies of feminist resistance.

Social media has become an important aspect of contemporary culture and cultural change; it has accordingly become a valuable resource for informing feminist theory. Social media is a digitized social reality that lends itself to analysis and research. This study examines rape culture in the widely used social media platform, Twitter. We collected tweets from four days surrounding the Torrington and Steubenville Rape Trials and the Rehtaeh Parson’s story of rape, victimization, and suicide. Using qualitative content analysis, we identified three themes related to rape culture: (1) the virgin–whore binary and the just world, (2) sharing information on the sexual assault cases as subnews, and (3) rape myth debunking to support victims. Additional analysis indicated that Twitter users who engaged in victim blaming were more likely to be retweeted and have more followers than Twitter users who engaged in tweeting victim support content. The research demonstrates that rape culture is an aspect of social media and that data about rape culture can be readily accessed and studied. It also suggests that in future research, social media can be used to study how individuals and groups who are exhibiting rape culture interact with others who are engaged in victim support.

The Internet is a space where the harassment of women and marginalised groups online has attracted the attention of both academic and popular press. Feminist research has found that instances of online sexism and harassment are often reframed as “acceptable” by constructing them as a form of humour. Following this earlier research, this present paper explores a uniquely technologically-bound type of humour by adopting a feminist, social-constructionist approach to examine the content of popular Internet memes. Using thematic analysis on a sample of 240 image macro Internet memes (those featuring an image with a text caption overlaid), we identified two broad, overarching themes – Technological Privilege and Others. Within the analysis presented here, complex and troubling constructions of gendered identity in online humour are explored, illustrating the potential for the othering and exclusion of women through humour in technological spaces. We argue that this new iteration of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity in online sexism, couched in “irony” and “joking”, serves to police, regulate and create rightful occupants and owners of such spaces.

This article contributes to recent research on young women’s emerging feminist movements or feminist counter-publics in the digital age. The focus is on the #freethenipple protests in Iceland in 2015 organised by young women and the ensuing debates in mainstream digital news media and popular ezines. A feminist, post-structuralist perspective is adopted to analyse the discursive context in which the debates and discussions about the protest are embedded, but we are also informed by recent theories about role of affect in triggering and sustaining political movements. The data corpus consists of 60 texts from the digital public domain published during and after the protests. The young women’s political movement is construed as a revolution centring on reclaiming the body from the oppressive structures of patriarchy which, through shame and pornification, have taken their bodies and their ability to choose, in a post-feminist context, from them. Public representations of the protest are mostly supportive and many older feminists are affectively pulled by the young women’s rhetoric about how patriarchy has blighted their lives. We argue that the young women manage to claim space as agents of change but highlight the importance of the support or affective sustenance they received from older feminists.

Social media is a well-established communication method, but little academic literature explores the psychological and social benefits for sexuality education. Particularly for queer, trans, and racialized communities – who have been historically maligned by state-based sex education – social media has become a tool to build internal capacity and psychological well-being as well as democratize, amplify, and share experiences around sexuality. Informed by intersectionality and health literacy frameworks, this commentary provides concrete examples of how and why these communities are taking advantage of social media as a means of liberation and form of sexuality education in and of itself. We also provide practical strategies for researchers, educators, and organizations seeking to utilize the power of social media.