L. Ayu Sarawasti, Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie

Abstract

Can feminists -and other activists -lead social media campaigns while escaping the neoliberal logic underpinning such digital spaces? This is the main question explored by Ayu Sarawasti, associate professor in women's studies at the University of Hawai`i, in her new book. Indeed, Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism and the Neoliberal Selfie investigates different modes of online feminist activism, focusing specifically on the political potential of pain resulting from different forms of sexual violence, harassment or abuse. Using material collected online and a method based on feminist discourse analysis, this study scrutinizes "how feminist activism is structured and shaped by the neoliberal logic of this space and becomes neoliberalized and used for neoliberal purposes" (p. 20).

#StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearheading Counter-Narratives and Forming an Ad Hoc Asian Community

“…The #StopAsianHate hashtag brings together the stories of Asian/American women and facilitates a sense of community among Asian/American creators and viewers. As Saraswati (2021) writes in her book on feminist activism on social media, hashtags "function as a mode of curating and imagining one's community," encouraging participants to be present "with" and "for" others (p. 160). Through their participation in the #StopAsianHate discursive space, Asian/American women TikTokers and their supporters stand "with" and "for" Asian/American women by validating their experiences of racism, sexism, and oppression.…”

Sexualized Violence and Neoliberal Discourse

“…Women are, according to this argument, knowledgeable and discerning consumers of popular images of women and of body modification practices based on these images who take great pleasure in modifying their bodies and engaging in forms of sexuality, sexual activity, and self-objectification that earlier waves of feminists argued supported patriarchal oppression. When combined with the argument that women are now relatively equal in status with men, this means that these formerly oppressive images, activities, and practices now reflect women's agency and empowerment rather than their continued patriarchal oppression (Gill, 2007;Lamb & Peterson, 2012;Lynch, 2012;Roiphe, 1993;Saraswati, 2021;Stringer, 2013).…”

“…Consistent with other scholars, we argue that these images, practices, activities, choices, and agency do not signal women's and girls' empowerment so much as their continued oppression by patriarchal social structures. Indeed, a key limitation of the agency argument is that it conceptualizes individual choice and oppression as being mutually exclusive (Gavey, 2012;Gill, 2012), as if oppressed people are never able to make choices, exert some form of limited agency, or experience limited agency as freedom (Saraswati, 2021). The agency argument also overlooks the fact that given a specific set of structural constraints and incentives, people can experience as positive, pleasurable, and empowering actions that harm them in some way or go against their interests or some subset of their interests (Bartky, 1988;Bordo, 2003).…”

“…This is also true for teenage girls and women in regard to their sexual agency. Indeed, rather than empowering women and girls, the argument that increased choice equals increased agency and freedom ends up imposing additional patriarchal obligations on women and girls (Gill, 2007;Jeffreys, 2005;Saraswati, 2021), which it does by forcing them to follow both a new "agency line" and an older disciplinary line that in the past differentiated good women from bad according to whether they refrained from having sex outside marriage (Bay-Cheng, 2015).…”

The Crooked Platform

“…There is a rich body of literature from feminist and critical race scholars that consider the inequalities sustained through the architectures of digital platforms, including literature on algorithms (Benjamin, 2019;Noble, 2018) users' cultural practices (Brock, 2012;Maragh, 2018;Sweeney, 2013), capitalist logics (Dean, 2005(Dean, , 2009Saraswati, 2021), the "digital divide" (Norris, 2001;Ragnedda & Muschert, 2017) and legacies of colonization (Du Bois et al, 2018;Risam, 2018). I contend that it is no longer a question of whether or not social media platforms are crooked-they are-this is well established by interdisciplinary literature.…”