Would her voice have been met with cynicism and backlash because of her blackness? We carry articles, news, podcasts, videos, comics and blogs on internet policy and cultures from a feminist and intersectional perspective, privileging voices and expressions from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Arabic-speaking countries and parts of Eastern Europe. In a post-social media society, Twitter threads and Instagram stories are the new pamphlets. Though Mukhopadhyay continues to believe in the empowering potential of online feminism, she sees that much of it is becoming dysfunctional, even unhealthy. Often, these rules began as useful insights into the way rhetorical power works but, says Cross, “have metamorphosed into something much more rigid and inflexible.” One such rule is a prohibition on what’s called “tone policing.” An insight into the way marginalized people are punished for their anger has turned into an imperative “that you can never question the efficacy of anger, especially when voiced by a person from a marginalized background.” This reached an absurd peak during the tempest over #Femfuture. “Everyone is so scared to speak right now,” she says. And to have white folks do that is powerful, particularly in a world where white women often deploy power against black women in ways that are really problematic.” If there’s something inherent about the way women work within movements that makes us assholes to each other, that is incredibly sad.” Last year, Women, Action & the Media and the Everyday Sexism Project spearheaded a successful online campaign to get Facebook to ban pro-rape content. By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. Afterward, Martin and Valenti used the discussion as the basis for a report, “#Femfuture was earnest and studiously politically correct. When it comes to the making of a feminist internet, knowledge and research matter. There are also rules, elaborated by white feminists, on how other white feminists should talk to women of color. Plimpton takes intersectionality seriously—A Is For is hosting a series of discussions on the subject this year—but she was flummoxed by this purist, arcane form.

Partly, says Cooper, this comes from academic feminism, steeped as it is in a postmodern culture of critique that emphasizes the power relations embedded in language. The pair discussed the way online activism has highlighted the particular injustices suffered by transgender women of color and celebrated the ability of the Internet to hold white feminists accountable for their unwitting displays of racial privilege. Kendall, for example, compared #Femfuture to Rebecca Latimer Felton, a viciously racist Southern suffragist who supported lynching because she said it protected white women from rape.

I had someone who spent four hours last week dumping porn images into my mentions.

“There are these Olympian attempts on the part of white feminists to underscore and display their ally-ship in a way that feels gross and dishonest and, yes, patronizing.”

Preening displays of white feminist abjection, however, are not the same as respect. An elaborate series of norms and rules has evolved out of that belief, generally unknown to the uninitiated, who are nevertheless hammered if they unwittingly violate them. Das Bild feminist internet von Marco Verch kann unter Creative Commons Lizenz genutzt werden. The one place that you are able to look to for safety, where you were valued, where there is a lot less of the structural prejudice that makes you feel so outcast in the rest of the world—that’s now been closed to you. Some were outraged that tweets were quoted without the explicit permission of the tweeters. They lend theirs to their partner for a while. “And when there are women, they are white and privileged. “So you’re really committed to doubling down on using a term that you’ve been told many times is exclusionary & harmful?” asked one self-described intersectional feminist blogger. ¿Qué pasa con la democracia, la participación y derechos humanos en Latinoamérica? Or would we have celebrated her tenacity and boldness? “How do we disentangle what part is about social media and what part is about the way women interact with one another? My favourite online feminists have been inspired by the likes of Audre Lorde and bell hooks, who were inspired by the revolutionaries writing before them. The problem, as she sees it, lies in mainstream white feminists’ expectations of how they deserve to be treated. Sign up for our free daily newsletter, along with occasional offers for programs that support our journalism. So they control how we access it, and that means our access to education, culture, health information – important things,” said Tudón.What’s more, the Internet is “colonized by men from the US,” Tudón argues.