ABSTRACT
In May 2014, Twitter exploded with a new wave of posts under the hashtag #YesAllWomen, a campaign drawing attention to the ubiquity of sexism, misogyny, and violence against women. Users posted individual stories of discrimination, harassment, and fear, underscoring the fact that “yes, all women” are subject to sexual violence. In Germany, feminists contributed to #YesAllWomen with posts about sexual discrimination and violence that also included the hashtag #Aufschrei (outcry), creating a transnational digital connection between two locally grounded protest actions, with reference to the Twitter campaign documenting women’s experiences of everyday sexism in Germany that created widespread public resonance in 2013. For example, German feminist activist Anke Domscheit-Berg (@anked) wrote in a Twitter posting on May 25, 2014, “#Yesallwomen-the global #outcry … Because awareness is the fi rst step towards social change.” 1 #YesAllWomen and #Aufschrei demonstrate the
ABSTRACT This article investigates the renewed feminist politics that emerge from the interface of digital platforms and activism today, examining the role of digital media in aff ecting the particular ways that contemporary feminist protests make meaning and are understood transnationally, nationally, and locally. I consider the political investments of digital feminisms in the context of what Angela McRobbie has termed the “undoing of feminism” in neoliberal societies, where discourses of choice, empowerment, and individualism have made feminism seem both second nature and unnecessary. Within this context, I describe a range of recent feminist protest actions that are in a sense redoing feminism for a neoliberal age. A key component of this redoing is the way recent protest actions play out central tensions within historical and contemporary feminist discourse; crucial here is the interrelationship between body politics experienced locally and feminist actions whose effi cacy relies on their translocal and transnational articulation. My discussion focuses on three case studies: SlutWalk Berlin, Peaches’ “Free Pussy Riot!” video, and the Twitter campaigns #Aufschrei and #YesAllWomen. My analysis ultimately calls attention to the precarity of digital feminisms, which refl ect both the oppressive nature of neoliberalism and the possibilities it off ers for new subjectivities and social formations.
