‘Something substantive enough to reach out and touch'

This chapter examines the way in which digital spaces can rupture the intimate relations victim-survivors have to personal and public regimes of power and extend the possibilities for resistance in a way that continues what Deborah Withers calls feminism's 'already there'. In rape culture, rape is imagined as a given – the natural and inevitable consequence of certain behaviours on the part of the victim. The chapter focuses on Withers' concept to describe the strategies, ideas and practices that work to constitute affective and intimate relations between survivors and to disrupt public narratives that hold survivors responsible for sexual violence. It aims at drawing attention to the ways in which digital activism draws on an archive of feminist resistance for its strategies. A. Lorde argues that internet feminism must provide not simply an abstract definition, but something more visceral and affective: 'something substantive enough to reach out and touch, in all its ugly, heaving, menacing grotesquery'.