ABSTRACT

In this chapter, Cohn explores #WomenAgainstFeminism, a social media campaign that developed in response to the explicitly feminist and highly popular #WeNeedFeminism campaign that circulated images of women (and the occasional man) holding signs reading why they need feminism. Cohn uses this case study to consider the relationship between emergent feminisms (such as #WeNeedFeminism) and the postfeminist and anti-feminist sensibilities that have blossomed in response, as manifested in #WomenAgainstFeminism. This chapter argues that the incoherent anti-feminist discourses on this site illustrate how incoherence has become a useful technique throughout contemporary hate speech more generally. More specifically, it provides important insight into the ways in which the “willful incoherence” of postfeminism must be analyzed in relation to both contemporary emergent feminisms and anti-feminist discourse, and the ways in which they are made visible online.