Search Results

Young feminists use social media in order to respond to rape culture and to hold accountable the purveyors of its practices and ways of thinking when mainstream news media, police and school authorities do not. This article analyzes how social networks identified with young feminists take shape via social media responses to sexual violence, and how those networks are organized around the conceptual framework of rape culture. Drawing on the concept of response-ability, the article analyzes how recent social media responses to rape culture evidence the affective and technocultural nature of current feminist network building and the ways this online criticism re-imagines the position of feminist witnesses to rape culture.

Al-Hubb Thaqafa ('Love is Culture') is a new Arabic social media platform, providing accurate and unbiased information on love, relationships and sexuality. Its website, Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel offer visitors unprecedented opportunities for interaction, exchanging ideas and opinions not only with experts affiliated with Al-Hubb Thaqafa, but also with fellow users; for all the high hopes of greater freedom of expression in the wake of the 2011 uprisings, such opportunities remain rare, in both politics and personal life, in most countries of the Arab region. Although its content, and language, were initially designed for an Egyptian audience, Al-Hubb Thaqafa has attracted Arabic-speaking visitors from around the world; its combined platforms have been visited more than nine million times since its launch in March 2014.

In this article, based on research I conducted in Western Canada, I discuss the significance of the emerging influence of social media on the overrepresentation of Indigenous girls in sexually exploitative situations. In interviews I conducted with Indigenous sexual exploitation survivors and intervention staff I found that social media is being used to recruit Indigenous girls and keep them exploited in three distinct ways: targeting girls in reserve communities and luring them to the city; setting up so-called dates to keep them off the streets; and facilitating constant communication between the victim and victimizer, thus ensuring that girls are perpetually active and reachable. I respond to these by outlining educational possibilities in order to combat the exposure of these girls to predators on social media sites.

Images on popular social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter that are the most entertaining are loaded with memetic power because their value is based on cultural attitudes that already constitute our lives in the everyday. Focusing on memes appropriating the artwork from Nicki Minaj’s single, Anaconda, I explore how popular memetic culture is fueled by Black women’s creativity yet positions Black women’s bodies as the fodder for potent viral images on social media platforms and in everyday experiences; Black girlhoods, at this level of representation and in lived experiences, are rarely awarded the distinction from womanhood that many other girlhoods enjoy. Thus, Black feminist discourses of desire which speak to both girlhoods and womanhoods inform my argument that social media has become a site of reproduction and consumption—a technological auction block where Black women’s bodies, aesthetics, and experiences are vilified for viral enjoyment.

Recently, social-media tools have been widely credited with igniting pervasive social upheavals in the Middle East, some of which brought down governments. This article explores the putative structure of such gatherings and considers new developments in what such collectives might be from a Sartrean perspective, in particular as mediated by the arrival of social media. A Sartrean perspective on the still indefinite composition of media collectives is offered under Sartre's concept of the groupe en fusion, yet still open to discussion under his concept of individual free choice. Throughout, the chimerical presence of the We-subject, as an ontologically suspect entity arises, in particular when reification is attempted by socialmedia users living under illiberal political regimes. The situation of dissident women in the Middle East is often referred to.

Girls do not need merely to be empowered with technological know-how in order to engage fully online. While girls use digital and social media for self-expression, activism, and identity experimentation, their engagement is too often interfered with by online gender policing and by being attacked for daring to challenge conventional stereotypes. Reshaping the online environment in ways that address this discrimination meaningfully requires a multifaceted approach that includes transparent, responsive, and accessible redress through both social media platforms and, where necessary, law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, these institutions all too often fail to respond adequately when girls report acts of cyberviolence committed against them. This article illustrates this failure by drawing on lessons learned from coauthor Julie S. Lalonde’s experiences in advocating online for gender equality. It also raises the troubling concern of law enforcement deference to corporate terms of service rather than to Canadian law.