Building a digital Girl Army: The cultivation of feminist safe spaces online

Abstract

“Safe spaces” emerged as an important activist tactic in the late twentieth-century United States with the rise of feminist, queer, and anti-racist movements. However, the term’s ambiguity, while denoting its wide applicability across movements, has led “safe space” to become overused but undertheorized. In both theory and praxis, “safe space” has been treated as a closed concept, erasing the context-specific relational work required to construct and maintain its material and symbolic boundaries. The emergence of online communities promising safety for marginalized groups calls for renewed investigations into the construction of these activist spaces. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the cultivation of safe space within Girl Army, a Philadelphia-based feminist Facebook group. Through participant observation and interviews with Girl Army members, I trace the group’s technical and discursive enforcement of safety and the role this space plays in members’ activism and everyday lives.

Layers of Marginality: An Exploration of Visibility, Impressions, and Cultural Context on Geospatial Apps for Men Who Have Sex With Men in Mumbai, India

“…The second implication of our findings follows from prior work suggesting that community boundaries, and in particular, the ability to regulate who is part of an online community, matter for marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ people (Clark-Parsons, 2017;Jackson et al, 2017). The technical and social capacities to collectively police boundaries allows for community protection from outsiders, though, as work cited earlier suggests, can also lead to controversial discussions of who qualifies as a member of a marginalized group.…”

Gender and the two-tiered system of collegiate esports

“…Whether through treating inclusivity policies as bureaucratic necessities or avoiding them altogether, the end result is the same: most of the programs and clubs we heard about have little in the way of actionable, explicit Safe Space policies and/or Codes of Conduct, even while feminist games activists and scholars emphasize the necessity, and effectiveness, of making such policies explicit in the long shadow of the gamergate hate campaign (and numerous other incidences of bigotry, marginalization, and harassment in contexts of game production and play; see Clark-Parsons, 2017;Lo, 2018;Massannari, 2015). This makes instances in which they are visible all the more compelling.…”

Gendered (in)visibility in digital media contexts

“…The feminist perspective on gende red digital visibility is represented by crit ical analyses of postfeminist gendered selfpresentations in social media (Bruce, 2016;Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018), research analyzing the potential and practice of dig ital feminist activism (ClarkParsons, 2018;Gabriel, 2016;Jackson, 2018;Jackson, Bai ley, & Foucault Welles, 2018;Linabary, Cor ple, & Cooky, 2019;Mendes et al, 2018;Myles, 2019;Pruchniewska, 2019;Turley & Fisher, 2018) and studies uncovering the threats to feminist activism such as on line harassment (Drakett, Rickett, Day, & Milnes, 2018;Massanari, 2017;VeraGray, 2017) and abuse (Eckert, 2018;Mendes, Keller, & Ringrose, 2019;StubbsRichard son, Rader, & Cosby, 2018).…”