Speaking ‘unspeakable things’: documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which girls and women are using digital media platforms to challenge the rape culture they experience in their everyday lives; including street harassment, sexual assault, and the policing of the body and clothing in school settings. Focusing on three international cases, including the anti-street harassment site Hollaback!, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, and interviews with teenage Twitter activists, the paper asks: What experiences of harassment, misogyny and rape culture are girls and women responding to? How are girls and women using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? And, why are girls and women choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in such a way? Employing an approach that includes ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis, discursive textual analysis, and affect theories, we detail a range of ways that women and girls are using social media platforms to speak about, and thus make visible, experiences of rape culture. We argue that this digital mediation enables new connections previously unavailable to girls and women, allowing them to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others.

Keywords:

• Feminism
• activism
• affect
• Twitter
• rape culture

Acknowledgments

We’d also like to acknowledge the useful comments we received upon presenting this work at the 2015 Console-ing Passions Conference in Dublin, as well as the suggestions from anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. This project is funded by Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

2. We interviewed nine teen feminists (aged 14–19) through our Twitter sample, but also recruited further teen participants through contacts with a feminist group in a London secondary school who operate a shared Twitter account. We conducted 6 focus group interviews with 15 of these participants (aged 14–15) at their school. We interviewed 25 teens in total.

3. Participants from Saudia Arabia, Nigeria and isolated regions or small towns in USA and UK said they would be would be otherwise unable to connect to an international and global feminist community if it was not for the online networks enabled via Twitter.