Feminism in the troll space: Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl, social media, and the networked book

ABSTRACT

Clementine Ford’s memoir/manifesto hybrid, Fight Like a Girl, was hailed as a significant contribution to feminist debate in Australia when it was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016. The book is one stage in Ford’s considerable media career, developed across traditional journalism, public speaking, and social media. It can be situated in the context of a recent Anglophone publishing trend of similar hybrids between feminist manifesto and memoir, as well as—as evidenced by its cover quote from Anne Summers—being part of a much longer history of Australian feminist publishing. This article positions Fight Like a Girl as a networked text, exploring its close and constitutive relationship to Ford’s social media presence and its online reception. Both book and reception tap into online feminist conversations and mainstream public debates about feminism in the wake of identity politics, trolling and shaming, and the gendered nature of contemporary online spaces. Analysing conversations on Facebook and Twitter and reviews across Goodreads and more traditional media outlets, this article explores the extent to which the book reconfigures, intensifies or enters into existing conversations as it moves through the networked space of post-digital Australian literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Book publishing
• digital feminism
• social media
• online misogyny
• reception studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See https://github.com/PJHRobles/Twitter-Get-Old-Tweets-Scraper .

2. When data collection for the article was finalised (May 11 2018), Ford had 179,007 followers on Facebook and 121,600 followers on Twitter.

3. Follower statistics and content analysis are based on the pages as of May 11 2018. Ford’s Facebook page can be accessed here: https://www.facebook.com/clementineford/and her Twitter here: https://twitter.com/clementine_ford .

4. https://www.facebook.com/clementineford/posts/957543664322728 .

5. For example: “This is a space with a very clear political ideology and not everyone has the right to post here or be heard. This especially goes for deliberately obnoxious dickheads who come here purely for the purpose of trolling or disagreeing with every single thing I post because they literally have nothing better to do than demonstrate what a total fucking toolbox they are on Facebook. Get a life, losers. There are thousands of groups catering to racist, sexist, asinine dickblisters that FB refuses to remove, and I’m sure you will be most welcome there with the other missing link specimens who sadly roam this earth. Fuck off and find your people.”

6. https://twitter.com/clementine_ford/status/781109273283526656 .

7. All Facebook posts, including dates and measures of engagement, were collected using Netlytic, a program which uses the Facebook API to collect posts and top-level comments from public pages. The posts used for this analysis cover the four-month period from July 22 2017 to November 22 2017.

8. See https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/3b6fz1/man_shamed_for_trolling_clementine_ford/and

9. https://www.facebook.com/sydneymorningherald/posts/10153528824691264 .

10. Data provided by Nielsen Bookscan.

11. For example, Benjamin Law’s tweet sharing a screenshot of Avid Reader’s funny response to a troll on Facebook garnered 17 replies, 165 retweets and 874 favourites: https://twitter.com/mrbenjaminlaw/status/879256299547971584 .

12. See Facebook post from June 27 2017, “Thank you so much to our wonderful regular customer Victoria for baking us an ANTI-TROLL SOUR CREAM AND WALNUT CAKE.”: https://www.facebook.com/avidreaderbookshop/posts/10154964018228992 .

13. These statistics were recorded on June 21 2018.

14. As above, all Facebook posts, including dates and measures of engagement, were collected using Netlytic, a program which uses the Facebook API to collect posts and top-level comments from public pages.

15. At the time of data collection in June 2018, there were no customer reviews on the British or Canadian Amazon sites; this is expected to soon change, as international publishing rights for the title were bought by OneWorld in December 2017, and the first UK edition published on August 2 2018.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP170103192].

Notes on contributors

Millicent Weber

Millicent Weber is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She researches the intersections between live and digital literary cultures, and is the author of Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Email: [email protected]

Mark Davis

Mark Davis is coordinator of the Publishing and Communications program at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on issues of mediation and cultural gatekeeping, and the role of the book in digital networked culture. He is lead investigator on the ARC funded Discovery Project, “New Tastemakers and Australia’s Post-Digital Literary Culture”. Email: [email protected]