Bodies on the Line vs. Bodies Online: A Feminist Phenomenology of Digitally Mediated Political Action

Abstract

Many scholars and commentators dismiss digitally mediated activism as an inadequate and inferior form of political participation. Such disparagements ignore accounts from feminist, disabled, BIPOC, and LGBTQ + activists, for whom social media has become an essential tool to raise awareness, advance political demands, and build coalitions. By centering their praxis and delineating how social justice–oriented social media activism (SJSMA) reconfigures political presence, we demonstrate that SJSMA constitutes consequential—indeed, embodied—political action, which remains undertheorized. This article clarifies how the definition of “the political” that privileges conventionally corporeal and public political activism is rooted in masculinist and ableist thinking, what we term manceptualism. Drawing on Black feminist media studies, crip, queer, and feminist theory, we offer a corrective to manceptualism by retheorizing embodied political action. Taking a phenomenological approach, our concept of marbled embodiment better accounts for our simultaneously online and offline lives and political labor.

Keywords:

• Crip theory
• feminist phenomenology
• hashtag feminism
• political embodiment
• social media activism

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Political Science Association conference (2022) and the Western Political Science Association conference (2023). We would like to thank Lilie Chouliaraki, Cynthia Enloe, Ella Myers, Oz Frankel, Tankut Atuk, Be Stone, Elif Ege, Lorna Bracewell, Patricia Moynagh, Michael Miller, and Women’s Studies in Communication’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on various iterations. Additional thanks to Andrés Besserer Rayas for his bibliographic assistance.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use the terms online, virtual, and digital when referring to SMA, though not interchangeably. SMA is an online practice mediated through the Internet, which is rooted in the material world. It is virtual to the extent that it reenacts materiality in cyberspace by creating virtual public spheres and counterpublics. Enabled by digital technologies, it can also create/mediate virtual realities/experiences.

2 Following Hawkesworth (1994), we use gendering to criticize privileging the masculine (p. 115), but expand it to include intersections with race, sexuality, and ability.

3 Performative activism refers to practices such as posting without fact checking or context, self-interested engagement, and treating social justice movements as merely fads. #BlackoutTuesday is the quintessential example repeatedly cited as harmful, performative SMA.

4 Apprehensions about how the Internet and social media platforms are embedded in capitalism should give us pause. Corporate ownership of these platforms can undermine their progressive potential and reinforce “offline inequality” (Schradie, 2019, p. 15). Given how social media data are used and how once-free hashtag data transformed into profitable mining, the fact that capitalism shapes and can distort content is indisputable (Conley, 2021, p. 26). But these features are not unique to online platforms. All technologies of communication—the printing press, radio, telephone—are products of capitalism, driven by profit, and thus information and organizing facilitated with any of these tools could likewise be classified as “communicative capitalism”.

5 Yet another group of feminists argue that networked counterpublics “renegotiate feminist politics for a neoliberal age” and “redo feminism” (Baer, 2016, p. 29), producing effective responses to neoliberal dismantling of justice movements (Jackson, 2016, p. 377).

6 Fifty years later, Hanisch (2018) demurs, considering SJSMA “crucial,” but not recognizing how it constitutes a form of CR.

7 The sedimented history narrated/materialized through SMA could belong to any body, the privileged and marginalized alike. Helen Ngo (2017), for instance, draws on Merleau-Ponty to explain racism as a matter of habit, a function of an “I can” that allows racist performances to become habituated (p. 8).

8 Online actions replicate how bodies act in the material world in productive and problematic ways. Gendered behavior and “gender policing” continue in cyberspace (Travers, 2003, p. 226; Daniels, 2009, p. 110).