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The culture wars, or battle between American conservatives and progressives to define national values, appeared to be in abeyance until they were seemingly reignited by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rally cry. Yet, contemporary culture wars are different from those of previous decades because, instead of being driven by political and intellectual elites, they are often fought by populist voices on social media platforms. Additionally, whereas culture wars have traditionally been understood as reactionary to changes in local communities, social media may redefine community such that threats emerging in one geographic area reverberate across the country. In this study, we analyze 1658 comments posted to four ideologically divergent Reddit communities in response to Drag Queen Story Hour, which entails drag performers reading books to children in libraries. Our analysis demonstrates ways that different communities grapple with cultural threat, with those who have historically influenced American values exhibiting fear over the power they stand to lose. Additionally, in our analysis, members of online communities responded to threats that materialized in geographic communities to which they did not necessarily have a tangible connection. Thus, the diffuse nature of digital age culture wars may render distinctions between abstract and tangible threats obsolete.

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Hashtag feminism exists in a time of postfeminist contradictions marked by the simultaneous existence of popular feminism and popular misogyny. In one such contradiction, popular feminism has led women to expect the successful negotiation of sexual consent, while popular misogyny permits the circulation of traditional sexual scripts that disregard the necessity of consent. In this study, we analyze messages conveyed through digitized narratives of sexual consent posted on Tumblr, a social media site that is popular among feminist activists, to identify the ways that users construct meaning around the dissonance between expectations for consent and the inequalities that inhibit its negotiation. We specifically explore whether hashtag feminism navigates postfeminist contradictions in a way that simultaneously calls out misogyny and calls on feminism. We find that the Tumblr posts in our sample did both, albeit in a manner that failed to offer tangible solutions to the problem at hand. Calls on feminism were largely limited to tagging feminist allies and recirculating existing feminist campaigns. Thus, we argue that the hashtag ultimately became a handoff to a larger feminist abstraction. Future research should explore conditions under which activists link tangible issues, actors, and agendas to an otherwise abstract popular feminism.

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