“Consent Is F#@king Required”: Hashtag Feminism Surrounding Sexual Consent in a Culture of Postfeminist Contradictions

Abstract

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.

The Pluralization of Feminist Hashtag Landscapes: An Exploratory Mapping of Feminist Hashtags on Portuguese Instagram

“…This pluralized hashtag landscape thus allows for discursive activism that raises much needed (albeit limited) attention to a wide range of problems. However, it can struggle to offer tangible solutions and agendas, thus limiting its transformational potential (Kettrey et al, 2021). This contrasts with hashtags strongly connected with concrete campaigns and with clearly identified central key actors, like #naopartilhes, which offer a clear shared frame of understanding and a well-defined feminist target, which can be helpful to mobilize collective action (Dumitrica & Felt, 2020, p. 1826).…”

“…The positive tone of these messages fits particularly well with the dominant culture of Instagram, which often privileges idealized and aspirational content that can be presented according to Instagrammable aesthetics (Leaver et al, 2020). As Kettrey et al (2021Kettrey et al ( p. 1842 note, this embeddedness of hashtag feminisms in a context of inherent postfeminist contradictions enables the visibility and potential popularity of these practices, while also constraining their meanings and impacts.…”

“…As this exploration suggests, the contrast between single-hashtag movements and the analysis of broader hashtag landscapes can reveal compelling dynamics of diversification and pluralization, but it can also raise pressing questions regarding the possible political “effectiveness” of such generic and all-encompassing hashtags. This pluralized hashtag landscape can help to raise visibility to a wide range of feminist issues, thus drawing on and expanding the potential of discursive activism (e.g., Clark, 2014; Kettrey et al, 2021; Myles, 2019)—normalizing diverse feminist concerns, expanding the scope of social discourse and feminist media representations, and helping to change the cultural consensus. However, broad feminist hashtags can end up becoming mere repositories of parallel, and at times diverging, conversations on a shared topic, with users who fail to engage with each other.…”

“…Hashtags and their political potential have long been a topic of interest for social research, in part due to their ability to place individual posts in the context of broader public conversations and their potential wide reach (Bruns & Burgess, 2015, p. 15). Scholarship can thus explore hashtag practices as a form of discursive activism (e.g., Clark, 2014; Kettrey et al, 2021; Myles, 2019).…”

Thick Description and Embodied Analysis of Digital Visual Artefacts: The Visual Repertoire of #SisterIDoBelieveYou

“…Working with Twitter and hashtag ethnography has allowed us to look at a timeline of group objectification, so to say, at a register of visual affective practices related to this process. Furthermore, in considering the conditions under which the hashtag feminism of #HermanaYoSíTeCreo developed (Kettrey et al, 2021), we have been able to evidence the effectiveness of this particular movement in dismantling key aspects of misogyny in Spain, foremost reversing the victim-blaming paradigm. We believe that digital communicative practices of protest, such as the one associated with #HermanaYoSíTeCreo, show memory in action, resistance through active involvement, and the formation of a concrete political imaginary.…”