Influence and expertise: distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures

ABSTRACT

In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily in terms of either ‘activism’, or the linear ‘accessing’ of feminist ideas. Drawing on an ongoing empirical project located in Australia involving 50 young feminists who regularly engage with feminist social media culture, we highlight participants’ affective practices of analysis and critique in connection with three Australian feminist ‘influencers’ with significant social media presences: Clementine Ford, a white columnist and memoirist; Abbie Chatfield, a white former Bachelor contestant, now podcaster and TV personality; and Lillian Ahenkan aka Flex Mami, a Black entrepreneur, and podcaster. We highlight how practices of distancing and proximity are enacted by participants in affective knowledge practices in relation to these influencers. We suggest the framework of ‘accessibility’ that predominates in scholarship obscures the complex classed, racialised and gendered dynamics through which knowledge is hierarchically made, contested, and accorded legitimacy in social media knowledge cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge cultures
• feminism
• class
• influencers
• social media
• intersectionality

Introduction: knowing subjects

For young people in Anglo-American societies, debates over identity politics and social justice have never seemingly been more accessible. As social media has shifted the landscape of everyday media use for young people in recent decades, scholars have explored youth online political cultures as potential spaces of a more vigorous democracy in connection with the exploration of queer identities (Byron et al. 2019; Cho 2015), antiracist activism (Gatwiri and Moran 2022; Mesch 2018) and feminism (Jackson 2018; Kim and Ringrose 2018). Presenting findings from an ongoing Australian project involving 50 young feminists who use online culture to understand and access feminism, this article centres the politics of knowledge making in these contested, unequal cultural domains. Here, we situate the online ‘knowledge cultures’ (Kanai, 2021) of this article’s purview as entangled within the productive and disciplinary circuits of popular and celebrity culture, rather than primarily in terms of activism, or the linear transmission of ideas and concepts that are ‘accessed’ or ‘revealed’.

We highlight participants’ practices of critique in connection with three Australian feminist public figures: Clementine Ford, a memoirist and columnist for Fairfax media and Abbie Chatfield, a former Bachelor contestant, now podcaster and TV personality, both of whom are white, and Lillian Ahenkan aka Flex Mami, a Black woman who has also been a reality TV personality, DJ and podcaster. These figures as a whole were often referred to as ‘influencers’, for brevity, by participants, indexing their visibility in social media circuits as well as through other forms of media. Focusing on these case studies, we argue that feminist celebrity indexes active struggles over value by young feminists remaking the meaning of feminism in their lives. These are knowledge cultures that are highly affective, involving differing felt positions in connection with claims of knowledge and how they are made. This article draws on Ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenology to demonstrate how our orientations to objects, including ‘knowledge objects’ (Cetina 1997), are affectively striated according to gendered, classed and racialised histories. These histories shape modes of arrival in particular scenes and the availability of particular relationalities to knowledge objects; that is, cultural resources are not ‘at hand’ (Ahmed 2006) in the same ways to all. We accordingly position online social justice cultures as knowledge cultures with uneven and differentiated forms of value creation and attribution.

Before we continue, we note that we have chosen to analyse Ford, Chatfield and Ahenkan given their recurring evaluation by participants, rather than to depict the online feminist knowledge cultures of which they were a part as nationally bounded per se. Participants’ social media consumption and participation in fact spanned a complex mix of transnational world events and celebrity culture. Thus, our attention to the Australian personalities in this paper derives from the in-depth focus and discussion of these particular figures. We mobilise the term ‘feminist microcelebrity’ to highlight their function for audiences in thinking through feminism in the everyday. We suggest a felt proximity makes these national personalities and their articulations of feminism feel knowable, practicable and available for evaluation. Like more high profile celebrities such as Emma Watson or Beyoncé, these microcelebrities were used as sites of judgment. However, in their more limited circulation, they provide an intimate relational frame – that of ‘big sister’ or ‘knowing friend’ – through which young audiences actively make sense of complex questions to do with social justice in their everyday lives, dependent on their own shifting and existing configurations of capital.

Social media, pop culture and youth social justice pedagogy

In recent years, online cultures have been identified as fruitful places for young people seeking to understand links between their identities and questions of social justice. For young queer and gender diverse people, this theme has been especially foregrounded in the literature in connection with spaces like Tumblr, which are conceptualised as spaces of possible affinity (Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021). While potentially fleeting, ‘short term and anonymous’ (Byron et al. 2019), such connections are understood to be crucial in coming to terms with gender and sexuality. In connection with online feminism, the emphasis in scholarship attends more explicitly to the question of resistance, asking how young feminists turn to shared accounts of the world in order to speak back to misogyny and sexism (Keller 2016;Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2019; Jackson 2018; 2021). In antiracist action, while there has been relatively less focus on the question of youth in those seeking to engage critically with questions of race in digital culture, young people have also been observed to embrace the possibilities of digital culture in adopting and promoting an antiracist vernacular (Campbell 2018; Moran and Gatwiri 2022). Thus, while scholars have begun to carefully note the antagonistic dynamics of youth-oriented social justice spaces associated with ‘silo sociality’ (Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021) and the whiteness of much feminist online practice and visibility (Daniels 2015), online social justice culture is largely favourably evaluated as a space through which resistant knowledge is accessed. As such, knowledge is positioned as both beneficial and inert; an object that youthful agents obtain, and then instrumentalise in their social justice quests.

In contrast, in feminist cultural studies analyses focused on pop culture representation, the differentiating and governing aspects of knowledge in cultural production and consumption has been more salient. Exemplified in the work on celebrity and reality TV as a site of pedagogy (Ouellette and Hay 2008), these self-representative branding cultures have been argued to further legitimate the cultural configuration of social surveillance and narratives of self-transformation and agency, particularly in the sphere of activism (Chidgey 2021). Angela McRobbie’s (2009) conjunctural work on young women as new figures of meritocracy establishes both how popular culture creates new authority figures along classed lines as well as producing new imperatives on young women, in particular, to continually better themselves through the acquisition of skills, taste and knowledge. Such authority figures – seen often in reality TV and lifestyle programming – establish domains through symbolic violence in which classed disciplinary norms of femininity are remade and reinforced. For Bev Skeggs (2004), drawing on both Foucauldian and Bourdieusian frameworks, culture is a resource for making the self, but the accessibility and relationality governing one’s use of culture is highly gendered, classed and racialised. Notably, the very orientation of ongoing learning and accumulation in connection to shifts in culture indexes a middle class sensibility, predicated on ‘creating perspectives and communicating them as knowledge’ (Skeggs 2004, 139).

Class as enacted through diffuse youth subjectivities has figured as a central concern to youth studies sociology (Allen and Hollingworth 2013; Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Nayak 2006). In this scholarship, class permeates new cultures of mobility and striving in these post-Fordist contexts where distinctions between labour, leisure and self-making increasingly blur (Farrugia 2018; Idriss, Butler, and Harris 2022). Class has also featured centrally in work focusing on young people’s attachments and analysis of celebrity culture and identity (Allen 2016; Allen and Mendick 2013). Yet, such concerns have often remained divorced from analyses of youth digital culture, and in particular, political and activist youth cultures. Such a dialogue, we argue, is vital given the centrality of digital culture to contemporary questions of citizenship in knowledge economies (Andrejevic 2013). Digital culture and its associated ideologies of use are fundamental to contemporary landscapes of knowledge in which it is deemed more important than ever to be ‘informed’, with digital culture positioned as the mechanism to access the world’s knowledge at one’s fingertips (Hillis, Petit, and Jarrett 2012). For Cetina (2007), who advanced the term ‘knowledge cultures’ to explain the technical, social and political underpinnings of expertise, it is now crucial to understand the place of knowledge, not simply in the domain of institutionally recognised ‘experts’, but in the processes of everyday life.

Methods

This data emerges from an ongoing project on youth online feminist cultures. The first two rounds of data collection took place over an online video platform during 2021. Participants ranged between 18 and 28 in year one, in order to take into account an extended ‘youth’ period in post-industrial economies shaped by precarity, and increasingly significant times spent in educational institutions post-secondary school (Woodman & Wyn 2015). The overwhelming majority of participants were women, with four participants identifying as nonbinary. Participants were located across metropolitan and regional locations in Australia proportionally to the national population distribution, with over half identifying as queer, and a quarter as Blak¹ / Black / people of colour. Here we have noted participants as ‘white’, and in terms of their own ethnic self-descriptions; many participants used the description ‘POC’ (‘person of colour’) as shorthand. Ethics approval was obtained from X University (reference number anonymised) in 2021.

Fifty participants were recruited for online workshops to discuss online feminist cultures, and what they considered the most useful elements of online feminist social media, as well as what detracted from their participation online. One-on-one, semi-structured interviews were then organised with 46 participants who elected to continue on with the project, in which participants shared examples from their feminist social media feed with the researchers. These interviews provided insights into participants’ individual identities, everyday use of feminist social media, and how they themselves defined content as ‘feminist’. While the interview has been noted to suit middle class participants who are accustomed to narrating their lives self-reflexively (Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood 2008), this choice was made to allow participants to describe their social media without the pressure of having to account for their tastes in a group setting. Analysis of participants’ accounts in workshops and in interviews used feminist theorisations of affect, positioning affect and meaning making as entangled, and as such, working to locate and position subjectivity along existing striations of class, race and gender (Ahmed 2004; Hemmings 2012; Hochschild 1983; Wetherell 2012). This affective-discursive framework was deployed to identify themes in workshops and interviews, and analyse how identity positions were made affectively through participants’ self-description and accounts of social media.

This framework was informed by Foucauldian articulations of the production and regulation of subjectivity, as well as feminist Bourdieusian analyses of the uses of culture, to understand how young people not only curate their own self-image, they also develop their own textual literacies through which they evaluate others’ image and self-making (Author 2021; 2017). These literacies both produce and are shaped by orientations (Ahmed 2006) to public figures as dynamic texts, whose significance is continually remade, and opened and closed down depending on the relationship between these influencers’ public images and participants’ own classed, racialised and gendered positions. We go on in the following analysis to outline how claims to and uses of knowledge were shaped by the interactions of the classed, racialised, and gendered performances of Ford, Chatfield and Ahenkan in interaction with participants’ own subjectivities.

The ‘authority’: Clementine Ford

First, writer and columnist Clementine Ford was deemed a central reference point for the young feminists in this study. An educated white woman who has been at the forefront of national conversations about feminism for some time, Ford began writing for Australian newspaper the Age in the 2000s, and soon became known for her vocal feminist perspectives on sexual assault in particular. Ford’s ‘whole brand was feminist’, according to one participant. She was someone that participants noted that they had ‘grown up with’ and now followed on social media, most on Instagram. Ford’s centrality was notable even when participants didn’t ‘mean’ to bring her up: as 22-year old POC participant, Sam, put it, ‘why is she the first person I think of when thinking about online feminism?’ Jess, a 20-year old white woman, had been a child when she first heard of Ford:

I mean, I don’t know what Clem Ford did before 2010 ‘cos I was too young, but I remember hearing about her around that time. Whereas the rest of [the feminist influencers I follow], I think I have found in the last two years … I think I actually appreciate that older perspective because if you look at everyone here, they’re all in their twenties, particularly early twenties … 

Growing up rurally, Ford’s broad reach was significant for Jess. Ford was an established figure, accessible through a range of media – newspapers, books, Instagram, podcasts. Jess appreciated Ford’s books, finding comfort in the personal perspective on navigating formative life milestones: marriage, pregnancy, and raising a child ‘because that’s something that I wouldn’t be able to get from any of the other people on here who haven’t had kids or haven’t been married’.

As such, Jess’s perspective was marked by an intimacy of knowing Ford as a woman, an older, wiser woman who could speak from her own experience. As Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood (2008) illustrate in relation to the reception of reality TV personalities, class plays a central role in shaping how audiences account for their connections with media. While middle class sensibilities work to affectively distance the viewer from these personalities, working class participants tend to more directly and openly evaluate such personalities as real and connected to ‘moral positions related to their own “real” lives’ (13). Similar dynamics were present here with Jess: Ford was an authority figure because of the life she had lived and shared, rather than to do with an abstract position of authority in media culture.

Ally, a 21-year old white woman studying politics at university, also spoke about Ford as a mature woman from whom she could learn life lessons. Ally assured us she had been afforded a ‘very good childhood’ by her parents, who worked in retail and customer service; ‘there were no major family issues, you know, mental health issues or alcoholism or deaths or anything like that’. However, like many young people who did not inherit significant educational cultural capital from their parents (Reay 2005), Ally lacked confidence in her own knowledge and as such, positioned Ford as a figure to be learned from, an educational authority. While Ally was keen to help us as researchers in giving her time, she did not position herself as an expert in her own life. While she found the group workshop in which she had participated prior to the one-on-one interview ‘very interesting’, she felt the others ‘were much more educated and well-spoken’.

More broadly, Ally sought women to look up to and to feel ‘empowered’. She loved prominent US rappers Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion because they produced ‘music for women’, although, conscious that her perspective was not necessarily universal, she hastily noted, ‘people might say, well, that’s not very feminist, but from my opinion, that’s feminist music. That’s how – that’s how I – that’s how I view it’. In this vein, Ally spoke generously of Ford and endorsed her cultural capital. She noted she was ‘older’ and had ‘much more experience’ than other emerging influencers. For her, Ford was ‘very educated’, ‘very well spoken’ and could speak to ‘theories’ in how she described the world. This was evidently something to which Ally aspired. Indeed, Ford is conscious of this dynamic as demonstrated by her podcast titled ‘Big Sister Hotline’, described as a ‘place to ask all the questions you STILL don’t know the answers to about sex, friendships, relationships, family and life stuff, with the kind of frank advice you could expect to get from the person who loves you most – your big sister’.

Sam, 22, similarly, was quick to note Ford’s achievements. Sam’s newfound feminist awakenings, in combination with being the first in her family to attend university, shifted her relationality with her mother. She would try to support her mother in her difficulties negotiating institutions like the healthcare system, and suggest things for her to read. In this vein, she had recommended Ford’s books:

I really liked her books Fight like a Girl and Boys will be Boys. I thought they were really well-written and I’m trying to get my mum to read them, but she’s like ‘ahh’ [hesitant noise], and I’m like ‘no no, read them. They’re good!’

Liking Clem Ford was complicated for Sam as she had begun to realise that her feminist social media feed was ‘whitewashed’, by which she meant dominated by white feminists. Many of our participants self-consciously identified as ‘intersectional feminists’, which was often straightforwardly conflated with diversity of representation, including of one’s social media diet. Similarly, Sam was seeking to ‘correct’ the tenor of her feed through following more accounts of people of colour. Sam herself had suffered extensive racist bullying at school, but did not feel like an authentic ‘POC’ (person of colour) because she felt she lacked knowledge of her Caribbean culture from her father’s side. However, she was seeking to understand the experience of race more generally. In this vein, she characterised the problem of ‘whitewashing’ as part of her own journey with learning on social media, as opposed to judging Ford. In this way, Sam did not authorise herself, in Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood’s (2008) words, to critique Ford; she accepted that she was some way off in her own ‘journey’.

However, other participants were much more critical of Ford herself, in ways that were precisely to do with her central, and authoritative position in Australian feminist culture. For these participants, Ford was viewed less as a woman and more as a public text or representation of a kind of feminism, in line with the middle class sensibility Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood (2008) discuss. It was thus impossible to unequivocally endorse Ford. Take for example Hayley, a white 25-year old Master’s student who casually surmised Ford’s contributions:

I think she does fantastic work, but she’s also makes a lot of money off some feminism she makes and she’s been noted to plagiarize Indigenous authors. So like it comes with the downsides of what feminism can be to me, which is the co-opting of a movement. It’s the neoliberalism, it’s the white feminism, that kind of thing that I like, I, I find problematic.

Ford’s centrality to feminism and high profile status that she was able to professionalise thus engendered uneasiness about her feminist legitimacy. Hayley noted, laughing, that Ford ran a ‘monetised ad for mops, like feminist cleaning supplies’. This was not only embarrassing for Ford from Hayley’s perspective; it also brought into question Ford’s integrity. Humour, or notably, ridicule, may be used as a form of distancing (Billig 2005); here it positioned Hayley as above Ford’s choice to participate in this advertisement.

Hayley slightly revised her critical take on Ford later in the conversation, noting that sometimes ‘you have to make money’; and by all means, she ‘wasn’t ideologically pure’; she herself had a book of Ford’s at home. As Sara Ahmed (2006) argues, however, declarations may have multiple effects. Framing the self as ‘not pure’ was, at once, a pragmatic acknowledgment of the messiness of politics; but also demonstrated the importance of carefully positioning and distancing the self in such a way as to deflect possible critique of the self while critiquing others.

Selina, a 25-year old born of Asian migrant parents, who had attended selective schools, a prestigious university, and was now a talented and ambitious NGO professional, was also part of the workshop with Hayley. Notably, Selina was a professional feminist and had done substantial work in women’s leadership in local politics. She noted she did follow Ford on Instagram, ‘problematic as her views are’, in the group conversation with Hayley. In her one-on-one interview later we asked more about Ford’s status in her circles. Selina expounded on it further, saying, carefully, that it was ‘okay to like Ford’, she noted, but you would have to be nuanced in how you framed it:

It’s just like, caveat: ‘I don’t agree with her on everything’

As a young woman who somewhat ambivalently identified as a person of colour – ambivalently due to the significant privileges she experienced in her career success – Selina did feel Ford’s views were significantly shaped by whiteness. She remembered a book launch she had attended where Ford, a guest speaker, had made the launch ‘all about her’ as opposed to the Muslim author of the book. Leah, a white, working class social worker agreed. Leah acknowledged her own whiteness in making this critique, in not necessarily ‘fully getting the picture for people of colour’, and went on to position Ford in a similar genealogy with Germaine Greer as ‘white, middle class women who have always had the microphone’ in Australian feminism. For this reason, Leah made the effort to find others who spoke more directly to her own concerns, particularly as a person with psychosocial disabilities who was particularly interested in divergent voices. Selina, notably, did still follow Ford on Instagram as a point of interest. Ford’s lack of ‘perfection’ did not translate into Selina adopting a position of enforcing a boundary against Ford; rather, she highlighted what was useful in relation to her politics, mixing up Ford with an omnivorous consumption of feminist-leaning professional, political and lifestyle content.

Ford’s mainstream success was accordingly a double edged sword. The attributes bestowing her the confidence and eloquence so admired by many participants who were generational newcomers to universities and white collar work, were connected to her whiteness and middle class cultural capital that could be deemed problematic for another group: our ‘established middle class’ participants. These were tertiary-educated young people, often white, who had been educated in the humanities and social sciences, whose parents often also had been tertiary educated; if this was not the case, participants were often highly academically talented and had managed, despite obstacles, to thrive in middle class professional environments. What brought them together was an identification of having legitimate perspectives, reinforced by both educational and professional success. These perspectives positioned participants at a distance from the object of discussion. The practice of acknowledging upfront the controversies surrounding public figures also worked to protect participants from any perceptions that they aligned themselves with these figures’ problematic behaviour. Such careful non-alignment contrasted with the positions taken by Ally, Jess and Sam above, who showed more openly their admiration and need for such figures. These positions emphasised Ford’s efforts as a woman, rather than as a feminist brand or text, articulating an affective proximity rather than distance. Kira, a 28-year old white woman and aspiring police officer, also saw Ford’s efforts similarly, commenting on an Instagram post where Ford sported a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Abortion saved my life’:

I thought it was wonderful … it's not a T-shirt necessarily that's for everyone, but … there are lots of women that I personally know who would and do very much relate to the statement that abortion did save their life as they knew it … . And it’s a very important conversation to have particularly with regard to a lot of people that oppose abortion, or perhaps are somewhat on the fence politically with regards to it.

Kira similarly lauded Ford’s ability to break complex questions down for the public:

She is someone who is academically qualified with regards to gender studies and her novels on the topic, are fantastic. But I feel like what [her] Instagram does is just relaying information in such an easily consumed way … it doesn’t necessarily need to be filled with lots of wanky different terms that the everyday person doesn’t understand. It’s, it’s quite simplified whilst being very in-depth and coming from a background of science and statistical evidence.

Ford’s qualifications and high profile position were thus held up as assets in communicating gender to a wide audience; for others, it made her impossible to unequivocally support.

The ‘relatable friend’: Abbie Chatfield

By way of contrast – another white, middle class feminist was considered to be significantly more likeable and relatable than Ford. Abbie Chatfield shot to fame as a highly vilified contestant on the Australian version of reality show The Bachelor. Being bullied and harassed on social media, Chatfield went on to rebuild herself as a feminist commentator through her own social media profiles, podcast and sponsorships, launching her own inclusively sized clothing brand, Verbose, in mid-2022. For Prue, a softly spoken white feminist in her early 20s, Abbie Chatfield was ‘really incredible’:

She is a big reason why I’ve been – able to broaden my understanding of feminism, and yeah, like I was saying, about what it means to be a woman … she spoke about how, like, how hugely edited The Bachelor was and how she’s actually a really lovely person (our italics).

In part, Abbie’s relatability was made more potent by the use of social media itself to rebuild her profile. Her caricatured appearance on the competitive reality show was seen as a stark contrast to the ‘real’ Abbie who the audience could now access directly in her own words through her Instagram, and her podcast. Chatfield had gone through humiliation and come out the other side; for Prue, it felt as though she could teach her about womanhood and confidence in a way that felt reassuring, warm, supportive. Despite Prue’s inherited middle class cultural and economic privilege, she often felt anguished about what she termed her ‘womanhood’. She was devoted to sustainability but worked in fashion and felt torn about the continually problematic options open to her as a consumer; her love of fashion was also complicated by a history of eating disorders. Like Sam, she had a strong relationship with her mother, but was afraid of what ageing womanhood had in store for her. Keenly aware of her mother’s trajectory, she was distressed by seeing her mother, a highly educated woman who had given up certain career aspirations for her children, now go through relationship issues with her father as she aged. Womanhood in the ‘top girl’ era (McRobbie 2009) felt conflicting, responsibilising, impossible. With this backdrop, Abby Chatfield’s confidence, simplicity and resilience felt reassuring. Chatfield gave practical tips for how to deal with the politics of everyday life. With vaccination being a central topic during the pandemic in 2021 in Australia, Prue recounted that on Instagram, Chatfield was:

… doing so much to promote the vaccine … I feel like I have a better language of why the vaccine’s important and, and how to like deal with people who maybe aren’t in or are bit of an antivaxxer … I feel like ready to fight for it.

Chatfield felt accessible as a feminist influencer in material ways, too, for those feminists who had not inherited educational or professional markers of middle class status from their parents. Ally explained:

She’s not as educated as Clementine Ford, for example. And she’s quite open about that. She doesn’t pretend to be someone – from my opinion, she doesn’t pretend to be someone who, you know, is super academic and knows everything … She doesn’t get into, you know, gender theories or anything super in depth like that.

But this was key to Chatfield’s appeal for Ally:

She really just talks very casually and she’s very outspoken, but I really like what she says. I feel like she doesn’t tear down other women, which – which is nice … And it’s just very, very casual … sort of like talking to a friend, it’s sort of … the casual way of talking about it, that I would talk about it with my friends.

This friendly address was also recognised by Jess, who noted, in contrast to Ford, that Chatfield would talk about ‘the way, you know, your high school friends talk about political issues, or the way your ex-boyfriend treated you or something like that and relate it to feminist issues’. This was more directly ‘relatable’ than marriage and children as discussed by Ford. Ford was also first and foremost ‘a writer’ with the intellectual status associated with the power of the pen as opposed to the orality of social media videos and podcast material that Chatfield posted.

Chatfield was thus ‘relatable’ because, while she had a degree in property economics, and had enjoyed professional success prior to her appearance on the Bachelor, her intellect did not distance her from her listeners. Chatfield’s affective warmth was appealing for many of our young feminist participants who lacked confidence in their own choices – either for reasons of lacking recognised cultural capital, or, for our established middle class participants, simply to do with the bewildering array of important choices one was to make in order to prove the self as a successful feminist woman. A white, middle class woman bringing the ‘sexual capital’ of a face and body that enabled paid work as an ambassador for a lingerie brand, Chatfield had never presented herself as a ‘top girl’ (McRobbie 2009) due to her reality TV origins; she had been embarrassed, and humiliated, and still continued to endure. She continued to share her everyday problems with listeners and did not purport to give ‘answers’, instead using her podcast guests and listeners as sounding boards.

Chatfield’s ability to renarrativise her experience intensified the intimacy and warmth felt towards her, particularly for our white participants. As mentioned, participants saw her portrayal on The Bachelor as ‘hugely edited’. Sexist tropes and commercial media were seen as responsible for her humiliation. The refusal to accept the demeaning abuse with which she had been faced was particularly admired, with participants lauding Chatfield’s use of her experience to invoke broader discussions around issues such as ‘slut shaming’. For many participants, who often demonstrated a self-conscious disposition when discussing their feminist knowledge and at times identity, Chatfield’s refusal to feel shame – and the implicit self-love with which she now centred her voice, her body, and her profile – was seen as impressive.

For those who were comfortable with their own knowledge, position and perspective, Chatfield felt less vital. Xanthe, 25, a white woman who was working professionally as a public policy researcher, had stopped listening to Chatfield. She did acknowledge that Chatfield did not steer away from controversial topics like Black Lives Matter, Xanthe conceded and this was ‘impressive’:

She could really easily have made a lot of money just by being hot and pretty. And she could have, you know, just talking about sex and dating and things like that.

Xanthe appreciated that she was a ‘strident feminist’. But overall, she found her a ‘bit self indulgent and annoying’ because ‘I just think she’s saturating my feed a bit too much. Like it’s not a reflection on her’. Xanthe was surrounded by supportive and ‘really smart’ colleagues, who were also working in research; she did not need Chatfield’s ‘down to earth’ sharing of experience or an injection of confidence.

For the most part, participants favourably looked upon Chatfield’s seeming lack of sophistication. Notably, Chatfield’s lack of claim to expertise seemed to deflect potential critiques both of her feminism and her whiteness, in comparison to Ford, for whom such critiques abounded. Kira, as a white participant who engaged frequently with Chatfield, was unique in her thoughtful critique of Chatfield’s ‘relatability’ and its racialised and classed nature (see also Kanai 2018):

it’s not even so much a criticism as it is just a – note that I suppose … no one can really be perfect, especially in an online world … but there’s obviously a lot of privilege there – as a white woman from a relatively middle class background who is able-bodied … And a lot of the privileges she has are privileges that I share as well, so I don’t claim to, you know, to be able to do a better job necessarily … But I just think because of her standing in society, it means that a lot of her opinions on things are not thoroughly considered when it comes to other disadvantages or minorities … 

Kira thus highlighted how Chatfield’s claims to not be an expert, lauded as being ‘unpretentious’, paradoxically allowed her to articulate her views on a public stage; while for Ford, her claims to expertise risked making her unlikeable.

The ‘straight talker’: Flex Mami.

In a similar vein to Chatfield’s ‘ordinariness’, Lillian Ahenkan aka ‘Flex Mami’ was seen as ‘straight talking’, confident and authentic. An entrepreneur who had spent time on the Australian version of Big Brother, MTV, and working as a DJ, Flex Mami was not ‘educated’ in the same way as Ford, or even as Chatfield, who had completed a Bachelor’s degree. However, she was approvingly evaluated as ‘unapologetic’ and just saying ‘what she thinks’. For Jess, she was ‘very honest’ and she admired her for drawing her boundaries:

She has heaps of followers but she refuses to be everyone’s teacher about all these concepts, which I found really interesting … it can be such a burden, especially on women of colour, to explain their lived experience to white women who don’t get it as much. So again, I really like her for that.

Ally admired Flex’s boldness. Interestingly, the refusal to ‘teach’ contrasted with Clem Ford’s sustained attempts at public education. For example, Selina had commented on how Ford organised ‘Feminist Fridays’ where people would be able to ask ‘any questions’ that she would attempt to answer. Yet such attempts at accessibility were not necessarily affectively appealing. It was clear then that not only was it important for participants how influencers presented their knowledge to the audience but also what value they purportedly attributed to it. Flex Mami was seen as admirable by many participants for the way she positioned her knowledge and time as something to be valued and protected.

Flex’s position as a Black woman of Ghanaian heritage legitimated her assertiveness around protecting her time. Commonly voiced in the workshops, notably, was the understanding that women of colour should not be obligated to spend the extra emotional labour required to ‘educate’ others (see, e.g. Nakamura 2015 on this). For Flex, this assertiveness, and refusal to waste time ‘teaching’ was also strongly intertwined with her brand as a successful and authentic entrepreneur. Daisy, a young white woman who was the president of a university-based feminist collective, mentioned how they would use her ‘ReFlex cards’ as a social activity:

She has this brand called ‘ReFlex’ and they’re critical thinking cards. So like, ‘would you rather be admired or envied’ … That wasn’t a good example, but yeah, like questions like that and yeah, so we play that and we have brunch.

Daisy was a young aspiring leader. While she self-consciously noted that she couldn’t go into ‘diversity leadership’ employment positions because ‘look at me’ (Daisy was white), she was passionate about seizing any opportunities connected to her activism, and showed a shrewd entrepreneurial disposition in connection with this. Flex’s brand spoke to such aspirations. Flex gave life advice about instilling confidence, managing time, and drawing boundaries – all bestselling topics in self-help genres. Ella, a young white woman who shared similarities with Daisy in often being positioned as a ‘leader’ in her social circles, spoke of the way Flex had discussed managing resources in her previous podcast, Bobo and Flex:

If you think about your like activism, you could think of it as like a pie chart. Like if you’re going to give 5% of your time to every single cause, how much time are you really enacting?

Ella critiqued online activity that sought to spread across many issues rather than ‘channelling your energy into just a couple of things’ as Flex had discussed. But Flex’s thriftiness with energy as a resource didn’t sit quite right with 20-year old Jess in other respects:

She was kind of saying you don’t owe your friends anything just because they’re your friends. So you don’t owe them your time or you don’t have to listen to them or … I don’t know. Stuff like that. And I, I guess that didn’t really resonate with me because I feel like if someone is a really close friend, I would do a lot for them, but I think that’s definitely a message that she puts out.

Jess had just emerged from her teens and she often played a kind of bridging feminist role for her friends; she would try to slip in references to larger gendered patterns when her girlfriends would talk about disrespect from male partners or dates. Her rural, Irish Catholic family background with conservative older male members of the family had taught her not to expect that relationships could be perfectly aligned with politics. But she still felt it was worth the effort to persevere with them.

Flex, then, occupied a largely favourable position. For our participants, Flex’s Blackness enhanced the legitimacy of her discussion of boundary drawing, self-investment and confidence, topics of keen interest to our white middle class aspirational leaders in particular, while interestingly, our participants of colour did not particularly single out Flex Mami in terms of people they admired. Like Chatfield, Flex, if mentioned, was not viewed as an ‘intellectual’ and thus a text to deconstruct; rather, like an online mentor or public figure, she was someone who had ‘made it’ and was passing on lessons about an emotional orientation to life, not from ‘gender theory’ but from experience. For our white, ambitious middle class participants, these ‘attitude’ lessons potentially authenticated the value of safeguarding their own knowledge and time.

Conclusion: The regulation of hierarchies in youth feminist cultures

What surfaced in our project was the continual circling of a highly intellectualised set of expectations that were entangled with racialised, gendered and classed orientations to culture, and the status driven logics of social media (Marwick 2013). The feminist ‘influencers’ we have discussed – Ford, Chatfield and Ahenkan – occupied positions embodying some of the feminist contradictions, imperatives and desires presented for our participants in their own lives. Ford’s intellectual authority was divisive; whilst influential for our participants who had as a generation more recently attained markers of middle class cultural capital, our participants with inherited capital were much more sparing in their praise. Ford’s contested status signalled that in these online feminist knowledge cultures, being able to keep up to date with the controversies around individual public feminists was just as important as knowing who they were. Ford’s older age also arguably occluded her from occupying the ‘relatable friend’ status that 27-year-old Chatfield occupied. Chatfield’s affective warmth and ‘down to earth’ equalising address largely protected her from the critiques of white feminism that Ford attracted, amplified by Ford’s doubled edged status as ‘authoritative’ and ‘intellectual’. For Flex Mami, her ability to straightforwardly present herself as a brand, and as an entrepreneur, contrasted with the questions over Ford’s integrity for her ‘making money’ through her feminism. The combination of her entrepreneurialism and her Blackness legitimated a confidence and self-promotion that authenticated the desires of our high-achieving white participants like Ella and Daisy who otherwise explicitly eschewed ‘neoliberal feminism’. While commercial opportunities thus raised questions over Ford’s integrity, the openly individualistic and entrepreneurial ethos of Flex and to some extent, Chatfield, was thus able to pass under the radar for many because of their capacities to present their feminist ethos as tightly tied to, and not surpassing, their own authentic experience.

As Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood (2008) note, respect for knowledge does not equally translate into one’s own dispositions and knowledge demonstrating value. While generationally newer middle class participants like Ally were eager to appraise certain work as ‘very well written’ and ‘well spoken’, Ally was conscious that sometimes this was just her ‘opinion’ and felt her perspectives were much more open to criticism. These tensions demonstrated some of the risks of these knowledge cultures. To straightforwardly ‘like’ a feminist, even while being a feminist, could be risky. Misplaced affective investments could demonstrate a lack of expertise; it could reveal the problematic nature of your feminism; you could ‘get it wrong’ when social media created an apparent abundance of information. This, we suggest, is particularly the case in connection with social media networks in which identities are actively circulated in ways that invite discussion, judgment and critique from young people. While these online knowledge cultures enabled the ‘accessibility’ of feminist ideas and affects, their takeup and significance demonstrated and reinforced the existence of uneven levels of expertise and the finite nature of feminist legitimacy as a resource. We suggest that this article indicates the high stakes for young feminists in online knowledge cultures. Our participants, who were overwhelmingly young women, negotiated an increasing regulation in the need to continually justify and explain their tastes, influences and positions. Far from an online panacea in which greater access to information straightforwardly translated to empowerment, we note the continued subtle reinforcement of social hierarchies along the lines of practices of distancing and self-authorisation. As feminism itself has expanded into greater visibility and circulation in popular culture, so too have modes of distinction and differentiation in connection with its consumption, use and articulation. These re-establish inequalities in the ways in which cultural resources are mobilised; and introduce further requirements of labour and self-improvement in the goals of fashioning feminist identity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number].

Notes

1 Artist Destiny Deacon proposed the term ‘Blak’ as a subversive strategy in reclaiming ‘colonisers’ language and recreating self-definition for Aboriginal Australians (Williamson and Perkins 1994)