Digital Activism in Fourth Wave Feminism
Following the rise of social media and digital platforms, digital activism has become a cornerstone of the most recent social movements, especially the fourth wave of feminism characterized by online movements such as Me too and Times Up. Organizing digitally has enabled these feminist movements to reach much wider audiences and led to large-scale participation the world over. This week's episode dives into what fourth wave feminism is and how digital media has contributed to its performance.
In our first segment, Dr. Zeinab Farokhi provides an overview of fourth-wave feminism. Topics discussed include: Whether digital platforms have made the fourth-wave more inclusive than past feminist movements, whether the fourth wave has been reduced to performative messaging and branding by companies, the evolving role of men in feminist movements, concerns that digitization has also lended legitimacy to anti-feminist movements, and whether measuring success ought to depend upon legislative progress.
In the second segment, we are joined by Professor Sara Liao from Penn State University for a conversation about the impacts and significance of fourth-wave feminism for China, including: The origins of the #MeToo movement in China, techniques used by the Chinese state to silence feminist activists online, the impacts of transnational networks, whether there has been meaningful progress in terms of legislative victories and public opinion, and much more.
Guests:
Dr. Zeinab Farokhi earned her PhD in Women and Gender Studies and Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University (2022-24) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her dissertation, "Digital Islamophobia: A Comparison of Right-Wing Extremist Groups in Canada, the United States, and India," investigated and tracked the gendered, affective, and transnational digital strategies, rhetoric, and affinities of anti-Muslim extremist actors on Twitter via qualitative discourse analysis. Building on her dissertation, Dr. Farokhi's postdoctoral research will conduct a mix-methods comparison of Hindu nationalist and white supremacist discourses on Youtube in order to further assess the affective and affinitive alignments among extremist groups and their exploitation of audio-visual affordances. Dr. Farokhi's work emphasizes feminist approaches to extremism, digital media, and transnational and diaspora studies and highlights the urgent need to better understand how national and transnational extremist rhetoric manifests, spreads, and persuades across digital ecologies.
Professor Sara Liao is a media scholar and feminist based out of Penn State University. Her research interests intersect digital labor, feminist studies, globalization, and East Asian popular culture. Her book Fashioning China (Pluto, 2020) investigates gendered digital labor in China’s maker culture and fashion industry, highlighting how social media commerce has transformed creative industries, and produced new forms of creativity, identity, and precarity in work and life. She has published in renowned academic journals such as Journal of Communication, Signs: Journal of women in Culture and Society, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Convergence. She currently works on researching and writing about the tangled relationship between digital culture of misogyny and popular nationalism in China.
Producers:
Ayesha Ali
