Feminist activism

From sites like Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism, which document instances of street harassment and misogyny, to social media-organized movements and communities like #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported, feminists are using participatory digital media as actvist tools to speak, network, and organize against sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. As the first book-length study to examine how girls, women, and some men negotiate rape culture through the use of digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps, the authors explore four primary questions: What experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture are being responded to? How are participants using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? Why are girls, women and some men choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in this way? And  finally, what are the various experiences of using digital technologies to engage in activism? In order to capture these diverse experiences of doing digital feminist activism, the authors augment their analysis of this media (blog posts, tweets, and selfies) with in-depth interviews and close- observations of several online communities that operate globally.

For more than a decade, criticisms levied against Muslims and Islam in Western European countries such as France and the Netherlands have been shielded under the auspices of a call for increased security and a desire to protect liberal secularism. An example of this can be found in the recent move by the Dutch cabinet to implement legislation to ban the burqa in public places such as schools, hospitals, government buildings, and public transportation. The proposed Dutch ban follows the French parliament who implemented similar legislation in 2011 restricting the presence of discernible religious symbols such as burqas and niqabs from the public sphere. In a statement to the press, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, explains the proposed ban " had nothing to do with religion, " but rather it is intended to help facilitate " recognizable communication " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). He clarifies " In a free country like the Netherlands, everyone has the right to dress how they choose, no matter what others think. That freedom is only limited in situations when it is essential for people to look at each other " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). In this statement the restrictions placed on full face-veils are steeped in concerns of contemporary cultural conflict, inflamed by language that claims that Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands need to be better integrated. In France and the Netherlands, full face-veils have become symbols of " religious extremism " that are actively legislated against. As such they are tied to a series of judgments and evaluations that situate them as objectionable cultural objects and indicative of problematic immigrant groups. Defined as " extremist " or " politically dangerous " this vision of full face-veils is based on normative conceptions of the subject. When considered in relation to the secular, violence is done to those who are visibly different, marked by religious symbols that are understood through binaries such as objectionable/unobjectionable, Western/Eastern, Islamic/Christian, religious/secular further problematizing them. These schisms have intensified in the aftermath of 9/11 and the global war on terror creating a rift between secular and religious worldviews. There is no greater symbolic target of this schism between the secular and the religious than the burqa. The polarization of these two groups, secular and religious has gained further strength when they are posited in relation to the nation state. Within this context secularism is invoked as that which protects the state, defines it, and transforms practices related to public and private life via institutions. This paper explores the invocation of normative dispositions of secularism and security in light of the increasing restrictions placed against Muslim women in the public sphere in France and the Netherlands within dominant discourse. Drawing from the draw work of Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad I explore how bodies are marked as " different " within public spaces, through a discussion of the schism between the secular/religious. Such an examination is significant as these legislations are some of the most prohibitive in the West.

This was a research paper for a course entitled Feminist and Multicultural Theologies. I unpack what gender complementarianism is, examine its history, and compare it to how Scripture and earlier Christian Tradition understood gender. This allows me to establish that gender complementarianism is a recent innovation in secular and Christian thinking about gender, and that it can be described as a "trajectory" from Scripture and Tradition on gender, influenced by social, ideological, and intellectual developments in secular societies. I then pursue a critique of gender complementarianism, arguing that it is an "unsatisfactory trajectory" because it has troubling implications for orthodox theology, is not borne out by empirical experience and observation, and has harmful effects on human beings and societies and on ethical development.

Our scholarship on aids must be located at the crossroads of art and politics, life and art, and life and death.-Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, "Response to the Repre sen ta tion of aids" Activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history, a dialogue between the memories of the past and the imaginings of the future manifested through the acts of our own pre sent yearnings. aids has surrounded us with the living memory of familiar ghosts, faces that haunt our intimate realities of being infected/not yet infected, sick/not yet sick, alive but not yet dead. As we wait for passage to the other side, we plan our revenge and chart strategies of re sis tance to head off the silence. Identity politics, as an organ izing tool and po liti cal ideology, has historically had specific investments for marginal-ized groups in this country. Po liti cal groupings based on identity categories, however, have become highly contested sites, splintering ever further into more specialized and discrete social and po liti cal units, based on more precise yet still problematic categories of identification and concomitant modes of definition. As a lived practice, strategic essentialism (and the policing of identity) that often defines it has become a messy and contentious organizing strategy that ultimately reveals the limits and problematic assumptions of identity politics. Identity politics formed in re sis tance to state power thus remains implicated in the perpetuation of the narratives upon which it is founded, specifically the conflation of identity, ideology, and po liti cal practices and the lived ramifications of the constructed and problematic duality of insider/outsider. Yet for many, it becomes impossible to conceive of po-liti cal organ izing without explicative narratives or definitive social positions.

In the course of history an interesting evolution has taken place in European gender equality policies. This story started in 1957 when the European Economic Community was founded and the principle of equal pay for equal work for men and women was included in the Treaty of Rome to avoid unfair competition and distortions in the free European market. Soon the Treaty article would evolve into a broader demand for equal rights related to work and result in a series of binding directives. In the eighties and nineties gender equality would increasingly enter other policy domains by means of non-binding soft law and gender mainstreaming. More recently, the EU has turned towards an approach of multiple discrimination which involves other grounds of discrimination, such as race and sexuality. The aim of this article is to review the history of gender equality policy in the EU while distinguishing some general trends, and discuss the implications of the most recent turn towards an anti-discrimination framework. I conclude that despite a continuous broadening of policies and strategies, economic motives continue to be the leitmotiv throughout this history. Also the broadening of EU equality policies with regard to the inclusion of multiple inequalities risks being trapped in the same economic logic. Nevertheless, despite the economic framing of EU equality policies, the pluralist and open nature of the EU’s decision-making process still provides gender activists with multiple access points to attempt to re-frame the way in which gender issues are addressed, as the struggle for a gender-just Europe continues.

In this collection, several authors – ranging from early career to well established academics – consider the role of women and the female voice in academia. This compilation developed from a conference session organised by the Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) Ireland group, at the Conference of Irish Geographers in University College Cork (UCC) in 2017. In the first piece, Ahern and Mc Ardle consider why this discussion is necessary at all, ruminating on examples from both within and outside of academia. Till then brings in her experience working in Ireland, the US and beyond, and reflects on the importance of including all voices, and challenges scholars to end gender discrimination in Ireland. Manzo then reflects on how female work in academia, similar to community organising, can be considered invisible, devalued labour (Daniels, 1987). Yet she focuses on the positives of this, outlining the women-centred community organising model, the social capital that is involved, and th...

En mars 2016, la poétesse russe Daria Serenko lance l’action #Тихийпикет
(#Manifestationsilencieuse). Tous les jours pendant un an, elle porte, lors de ses trajets dans Moscou en transports en commun, une pancarte et discute avec les autres passagers de son contenu. Ces interactions donnent lieu à des comptes rendus sur les réseaux sociaux, entrainant à
leur tour de nouvelles interactions. Cet article inscrit cette action dans l’histoire de l’art engagé russe et dans les pratiques contemporaines de l’activisme, qui s’appuie sur les réseaux sociaux pour construire une « chorégraphie de l’action collective ». Il montre que le but de la #Manifestationsilencieuse est d’utiliser le texte littéraire comme le moyen d’une communication incarnée et empathique.

Captured and branded in the highly recognizable image of the pink ribbon, the politics of breast cancer at the start of the 21st century is markedly hopeful (given the grim statistics) and surprisingly compliant with the medical establishment’s defined health goals and approaches to addressing the breast cancer epidemic.  In keeping with this volume’s theme of “Working to be Healthy”, this chapter examines and evaluates how the pink ribbon message has shaped and organized social response to breast cancer. The work in question is “healthwork”, a term found in the critical health literature denoting the active and purposeful work that people do to look after their health (Mykhalovskiy and McCoy, 2002). Healthwork analysis tends to focus on personal care practices—taking medicines, dealing with healthcare practitioners, informal care-giving, health information seeking, etc.—that are then subject to examination of how those individual actions invite extended relations of governance and ruling (Mykhalovskiy, McCoy and Bresalier, 2004).  In this examination of breast cancer campaigns, the same analytic concern with governance is taken, but the health-related work is extended beyond personal care and self-surveillance to also include the volunteer work done by many concerned citizens in their contributions of time, energy, and money to support campaigns for the cure.

In this chapter, I argue that while the appropriation of the language and themes of the early women’s health movement frames pink ribbon activism as a highly personal, emancipatory, and socially-responsible individual effort, this brand of breast cancer activism instead serves to fund a limited biomedical research agenda that is largely shielded from public scrutiny.  This agenda has been universalized through endearing “hero” narratives of personal struggle that inspire civic engagement by complicit consumers rather than critical activists. Pink ribbon activism problematically diverges from the women’s health movement’s demand for participation in setting the research agenda and determining treatment strategies. This neglect is troubling, given that breast cancer discourse is so fraught with contested knowledge claims regarding disease aetiology, prevention, and treatment. While the pink ribbon message offers hope and optimism, it does so by suppressing many counterclaims, disputes, and ambiguities surrounding the problem of breast cancer. Instead of soft “pink”, a more critical social response to breast cancer is needed in order to ensure women’s informed participation in addressing this serious challenge to women’s health.

Ever since the late 1960s when Virginia Slims cigarettes released their logo ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’, tapping into women’s liberationist tropes, scholars have been aware of the ways corporations have adopted feminist slogans and rhetoric to sell their products. While there is growing scholarly interest in the ways corporations promote ‘brand-led’ or ‘commodity activism’ (see Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012), there is a surprising dearth of research on the other side of the coin - the ways activists are increasingly adopting slick PR and marketing strategies into their campaigns including, branding, commercialising, franchising, merchandising, and the increased use of celebrity icons.
Given the contemporary ‘hot-ness’ of feminism around the globe (Gill 2016), and the plethora of recent initiatives such as the global SlutWalk movement and the Women’s Marches in January 2017, this is a timely and fruitful space in which to apply theories from promotional and critical consumer studies. In this talk, I will outline a new theoretical account of what I term ‘brand feminism’, which attends to the ways feminist activists are increasingly drawing on corporate strategies to ‘brand’ their activism, using case studies such as SlutWalk, Hollaback!, and various women’s marches around the globe. While ‘framing’ (Entman 1993) may have been a key concept in the past to understand social change movements, I propose that as neoliberalism continues to gain global dominance, we need a new theoretical framework in which to understand the relationship between activism, promotional culture, and social change.

Keynote Talk delivered at the German Association of Communication Research. Cite as:

Mendes, K. (2017) ‘Brand Feminism: Promotional culture and contemporary feminist activism’ German Association of Communication Research, Frankfurt/Main, 6 October.

L'histoire de mai 68 et de la longue décennie de luttes qui en découle est  demeurée à ce jour essentiellement parisienne, focalisée sur les étudiant.e.s et le gauchisme. En se centrant sur Marseille et les Bouches-du-Rhône, cet ouvrage rompt avec cette vulgate en apportant un regard inédit sur la période. A partir du dépouillement d'archives jusque là classifiées (notamment des Renseignements généraux) ou collectées auprès des nombreuses personnes interviewées, nous exhumons une histoire riche en mobilisations politiques, parfois initiatrices au niveau national.
Entreprise d'histoire sociale, ce livre mobilise trois niveaux d'analyse: le contexte politique, économique et social des Bouches-du-Rhône dans les années 1966-1983; le niveau des collectifs et des luttes portées par les syndicats, les gauches alternatives, les mouvements de défense des immigré.e.s., des féministes, lesbiennes et homosexuels ; le niveau des individus enfin, celui des militant.e.s ordinaires des années 68 dont on verra qu'ils et elles se situent loin des clichés véhiculés par l'histoire officielle narrée depuis Paris par quelques figures médiatiques. Des femmes et des hommes restant très largement engagé.e.s pour un monde plus juste, mais qui ont payé lourdement de leur personne, aussi bien sur le plan professionnel que personnel, leur engagement.
En plus de livrer une histoire sociale et politique inédite de la région, ce livre est plus largement la réhabilitation d’une époque et d’une génération souvent mises en accusation et instrumentalisées à des fins politiques.

La aprobación de la Constitución de 1901 que instauró la República de Cuba privó a las mujeres, tanto blancas como afrocubanas, del derecho a participar en el sistema electoral. En un contexto marcado por la primera ola feminista en los EEUU, las mujeres cubanas fundaron las primeras agrupaciones sufragistas y feministas para crear un estado de conciencia favorable a sus demandas y promover cambios legislativos que favoreciesen su acceso a las instituciones y una mayor igualdad en el código civil. Además de la lucha por el derecho al voto, las mujeres demandaron mayor protección laboral, se movilizaron en campañas educativas y por la paz, crearon ligas benéficas y asistenciales y participaron en los movimientos insurreccionales de 1933 y 1952. Su creciente activismo político y social fue generando entre las mujeres un mayor compromiso con los problemas nacionales y facilitó su expansión hacia el espacio público en los años previos a la revolución y la llegada de la segunda ola femin...

This paper considers perspectives on marriage in the Queer and feminist community reviewing key contemporary thinkers on the subject and using direct interviews and material from radical Queer activists and academics in the field.  It examines problems inherent in the fight for gay marriage and examines the ways gay marriage intersects with issues of race and class. I conducted dozens of interviews over the course of the research involved in this project.  Many of them  were broadcast in a documentary entitled, “Beyond Gay Marriage, broadcast on KPFA in 2010 and podcast by Race, Poverty & the Environment http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer. Quotations from these interviews are interwoven in the text without specific footnote. Unattributed direct quotations are excerpted from the transcript of Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010).

Tous droits réservés © Recherches féministes, Université Laval, 1995 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l

As expectativas feministas têm sido muitas, de acordo com as demandas questionadoras têm sua própria temporalidade e, portanto, uma historicidade. Aqui não se pretende discutir a viabilidade ou legitimidade de suas reivindicações; pelo contrário, neste capítulo, busca-se discutir sua especificidade como movimento social de cunho político que buscou transformações e mudanças diante das angústias inseridas em seu próprio tempo, ou ainda os diferentes desejos e quereres dessas mulheres identificadas como feministas; e perceber essa historicidade, seu debate como articulações feministas. Entendido como corrente social e política que preconiza a luta das mulheres pela igualdade de direitos em relação aos homens, conceito este mais conhecido e difundido.

Resumen: América Latina y el Caribe se caracteriza por una amplia historia de luchas anticoloniales. Los movimientos de mujeres han formado parte de esta trayectoria y han sido protagonistas de diferentes procesos emancipadores. Analizamos aquí dos modelos que nos permiten valorar la participación de las mujeres y las implicaciones de cada uno de estos enfoques para la lucha feminista. Por un lado, la Revolución Cubana introdujo desde 1959 el socialismo como alternativa al contexto de subordinación latinoamericano, siendo la emancipación de las mujeres una de las líneas políticas del proceso cubano. Por otro, la llegada al gobierno de agrupaciones político-sociales de izquierda en Bolivia (2006) y Ecuador (2007) ha otorgado un papel relevante a los movimientos sociales de ambos estados, planteándose nuevos modelos de construcción del poder desde abajo; entre los actores sociales implicados en ambos procesos se encuentran organizaciones feministas y grupos de mujeres.

Palabras clave: feminismo; procesos emancipadores; movimiento feminista latinoamericano; Revolución Cubana; procesos constituyentes; Bolivia; Ecuador.

Abstract: Latin America and the Caribbean has a long history of anticolonial struggles. Women’s movements have been part of them, and central to different emancipatory processes. Here we tackle two models that allow us to evaluate the participation of women and the implications of each approach for the feminist struggle. On the one hand, since 1959 the Cuban Revolution introduced socialism as the alternative to the Latin American context of subordination, establishing the emancipation of women as one of the political lines of action in the process. On the other, the arrival of sociopolitical fronts from the Left to the governments in Bolivia (2006) and Ecuador (2007) has given a central role to those states’ social movements, with new proposals of building ‘power from below’; among the social actors involved in both processes we find feminist organisations and groups of women.

Key words: feminism; emancipatory processes; Latin American feminist movement; Cuban Revolution; constituent processes; Bolivia; Ecuador.

The present article seeks to understand the uses of the internet as a space for action and reflection among feminist groups in the Brazilian scene. It takes as its focus the relationships between new feminist generations and esthetics and the social space of the internet. Several feminist groups have emphasized the use of the internet and social networks as relevant platforms for organization, news and political expression. I thus take as my object of analysis one of the most important blogs in the Brazilian context: Blogueiras Feministas (Feminist Bloggers - BF), seeking to use this as an ethnographic resource in order to understand the set of actors and collectives working within this feminist scenario, as well as the spaces and social, political and cultural strategies that appear within it.

In this reflective essay we compare the contexts and outcomes of the #MeToo movement in South Korea and Japan. South Korean women have a relatively stronger practice of mobilizing across generations in mass demonstrations; more have also gone public-without the protection of anonymity-with accusations against men in multiple high profile cases. This has allowed #MeToo to have an impact that includes policy proposals. In Japan, the movement has grown more slowly because fewer women go public, and if they do, they remain anonymous. The impact in Japan can be seen in a small number of cases that have resulted in the formation of a professional network in support of women in journalism. In addition, activists continue to lobby politicians for reforms. Women in both countries, however, continue to face a powerful backlash that includes victim-blaming and social and professional sanctions for speaking up.

This article explores the ways in which feminist and women’s agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace, and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, in which complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women’s groups’ representatives, it examines how nationalism and women’s approaches to gender, politics, peace, and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women’s agency. It finds that a strategic essentialist approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women’s agency, and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities for feminist and women’s agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses. Moreover, it challenges theories that posit a rigidly hierarchical relation between local and transnational gendered and peace agency paradigms, by demonstrating their malleability and reciprocity. Thus, it contributes to the debate about the modalities and possibilities of feminist sociopolitical intervention in nationalism- and conflict-ridden contexts.

KEYWORDS: Cyprus; feminism; gender; nationalism and peace; women’s agency

Breathing and politics are not usually considered relevant to one another. Is it therefore possible to engage with breathing as a force of social justice? What kinds of atmospheres can corpomaterial dynamics of breathing help envision for the possibility for individuals and social groups to live breathable lives?

It is my aspiration here to argue that politics can take place not only in terms of governance, social movements, identity politics, and biopolitics but also in terms of quotidian bodily actions—such as breathing. By working with breath as a force that is common to all living and breathing (in this chapter, human) beings yet differential in its enactments, I propose a rethinking of politics in which corpomaterial actions matter—politics not based on universalizing, homogenizing, or essentializing understandings of embodiment or subjectivity but conceptualized and enacted intersectionally in their specific situatedness and dispersal in the individual and structural dynamics of power relations. This chapter of the volume, therefore, explores the possibility of such politics in relation to the quotidian practices of breathing.

In the chapter, Zabrzewska analyzes Polish politicians’ responses to the 2020 protests against the abortion ban through the lens of feminist philosophy. Using selected sources (e.g. the transcript of the Committee on Administration and the Interior) provided in the Gender, Voice, and Violence in Poland: Women’s Protests during the Pandemic sourcebook (Zabrzewska and Dubrow 2021), the author provides insights into how contemporary right-wing rhetoric relies on the body politic metaphor and on the gender bias inherent to mainstream notions of embodiment. She exposes how the facilitators of the anti-abortion law conceptualize the protesters and their demands as a disease or even a virus that threatens the state, as defined by the Catholic right wing. At the same time, the article shows how pro-abortion protests – as an example of what Judith Butler (2015) called “plural embodied action” – place the actual human body at the forefront of politics, heralding a possibility of arriving at a more livable future.

The Ana Cha Collective is a coalition of feminist scholars, artists, and filmmakers formed to interrogate the cultural world through a feminist lens and engage in a creative practice that deconstructs violent power structures. This article outlines the feminist (her-)story and politics that contextualizes the formation and political praxis of the Ana Cha Collective. The Feminist Art Movement’s points of strength and limits can reveal effective feminist political practices in the contemporary cultural sphere. The Ana Cha Collective formed to utilize radical feminist practices in cultural production for the complete liberation of the marginalized by dismantling the structures that identify and
oppress these groups. By archiving the collective’s critical and creative pedagogy, this article serves as a form of feminist counter-discourse that will hopefully spark more
collective feminist art praxis.

This article examines Amanda Coogan’s Floats in the Aether (2018-19) in relation to ‘home rule’, broadly interpreted to encompass the agitation for Irish women’s citizenship and autonomy.  Between  November  2018  and  January  2019  Irish performance artist  Amanda Coogan staged  performances  with  100  women and girls responding to the exhibition Markievicz: Portraits and Propaganda. This was the first performance artwork commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI). The exhibition and Coogan’s commission marked the centenary of women’s suffrage (1918), the election of Constance Markievicz (1868-1927)to British House of Parliament (1918), and the formation of the first Dáil (1919). A revolutionary feminist,  socialist and republican, Markievicz was an  enigmatic  figure  who,  as  an  artist, carefully  crafted  images  of  herself  using  performative  photography  to  construct  a  public persona. Floats in the Aether included secondary school students, the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf,  a  choir  and  sitting  female  parliamentarians  including  two  former  Tánaistí,  Cabinet Ministers and TDs. This essay argues that Coogan’s performances, situated at the intersection of historical and institutional critiques, offer new perspectives on ‘home rule’ with regards to Irish women’s history, gendered spaces and the struggle for gender equality.

Enlivened by queer and feminist enactments of new materialist, posthuman and affect theory, this chapter explores what has become possible with speculative pARTicipatory activist encounters with young people, educational practitioners and politicians in the field of gender and sexuality education in Wales (UK). Sparked by a throw-away comment of how some boys use rulers to lift up girls’ skirts, the chapter maps what else a ruler can do through a series of five ‘ruler-skirt risings’. Each rising provides a glimpse into the agency of ‘d/artaphacts’ (arts-based research objects) across micro-resonating moments to macro force-fields of change. From fashion activism to curriculum and national policy, every rising takes form and shape to in-form and re-animate how sexism, sexual violence and sexuality education might be felt, noticed and engaged with differently, but never in ways known in advance and always on the move.

This article shares the experiences of Women Now for Development, a women's organisation working with Syrian women in Syria and neighbouring countries. The key questions under consideration are whether important policy commitments to empower local actors are bearing fruit in practice and identify some of the challenges that still frustrate working with women and girls in humanitarian settings. This article aims to consider whether localisation is more than a current ‘buzz-word’.

These are challenging times for feminist activists everywhere. Globalization has produced rapid changes that are threatening communities across the world and destabilizing hard-won benefits. Global capital has become more flexible, mobile and harder to contain, regulate and transform than we once thought. Although women are well-embedded in labor markets in many societies and have gained some measure of equality, campaigns for women's rights in general and labor rights in particular are constantly under challenge. The growing insecurities of labor market regulation have reduced workers' rights, with significant effects on women's employment and everyday lives. Demands on activists are immense, when forces opposed to progressive change have few constraints and traditional strategies seem futile. Activism in the face of what appear to be overwhelming odds takes courage. The question for us is how to have courage in these painful times. As Rob Burbea, a UK Buddhist puts it, the issue is how to act without falling into apathy or ill will. Those who seek justice and the virtues of compassion, humane curiosity and community are confronted by demands for new approaches and new strategies. The grounds of activism are rapidly changing while the risks as well as the political demands are intensifying. Individuals, groups and movements who commit the time, energy and sometimes whole lives to activism need courage above all. For women in many societies, everyday life takes courage–to sustain their own and the lives of their families under tough and unpredictable conditions. Finding ways to become activists is equally demanding when participating in political actions can mean risking their material and emotional lives. We ask, how do activists find the courage to act in precarious or

Social media has emerged as a powerful mechanism for the circulation of counter-hegemonic and feminist discourses of sexual violence (Michael Salter, 2013). There is now a burgeoning scholarship on the utility of social media for survivors and social movements against gendered violence (Fileborn, 2016; Keller, Mendes, & Ringrose, 2018; Loney-Howes, 2018). However, social media does not merely facilitate political communication. Through its architecture and embedded incentives, it produces sociality and shapes political discourses and practices in specific ways (Milan, 2015). Using the example of #MeToo, this chapter explores how social media directs online justice-seeking in a manner conducive to its underlying commercial interests, generating contradictions and moments of rupture in social movements. Adapting Dean’s (2005) conceptualization of “communicative capitalism”, the chapter examines three allegations of sexual misconduct that departed in significant ways from #MeToo’s prior focus on seeking justice for victims and survivors of sexual violence and harassment. The analysis suggests that market imperatives had a significant role to play in undermining and contradicting #MeToo’s promotion of ethical sexuality, and argues that online social movements should develop a more strategic orientation towards social media and networked technology.

"The Feminine Mystique" (1963) passed off the struggles and conditions of a specific group of white women as the struggles and conditions of ALL women. This has had an immense impact on feminist theory and activism; the contemporary feminist movement has been coopted by white women in order to serve their particular interests and continually forgets/ignores the needs of "Other" groups of women.

Aunque es cierto que existen múltiples definiciones de feminismo, se podría entender que este movimiento político y social persigue la toma de conciencia de las mujeres (como colectivo humano), de la opresión, dominación y explotación a las que han sido y son sometidas, a lo largo de la historia.

Por tanto, el feminismo busca la liberación de la mujer con todas las transformaciones de la sociedad que esta requiera. Por tanto, el feminismo no se contrapone al machismo, es decir, no persigue alcanzar una “actitud de prepotencia de las mujeres respecto a los varones”, en consonancia con la definición de machismo que adopta la RAE