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This paper explores the Twitter communication of Tanzania's first female President Samia Suluhu Hassan. Informed largely by African feminism, this study explores the relationship between Samia's political discourse and gender perspectives on her Twitter account within the frame of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, this study looked at the construction of her identity and leadership attributes as the country's first female leader and found that her identity, 'Mama Samia', signals respect that evokes the African conception of a respected mother. Indeed, even though gender-constructed feminine roles as mother take precedence, gradually her stature as a national leader is eroding these stereotype labels a handful of hostile sexist comments notwithstanding. In effect, the president's leadership attributes as constructed in her Twitter discourse are more feminine than masculine. Yet, it is these same feminine attributes of nurturance, wisdom, humility, humanity, collaborative-ness, calmness and politeness that present more of an advantage than a disadvantage in her leadership. Overall, netizens have been accommodative of these feminine attributes, which they find to be effective in addressing pressing national issues in the economy, political and social sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-political practices, which we term evidentiary activism. Using a qualitative content analysis of 82 documents produced by feminist organizations, our analysis finds that this activism has two fundamental components. First, feminist organizations engage with existing formal evidentiary cultures by advancing and critiquing legislative and regulatory reforms to address GBOV, platform-based technological 'solutions,' and conventional notions of user privacy and anonymity. Second, they embrace and contribute to informal evidentiary cultures, which treat evidence as a tool of cultural and political mobilization against GBOV through strategies of publicization, moral pollution, and the cultivation of feminist digital citizenship. We contend that, akin to evidence-based advocacy that is influential in the fields of biomedicine and health, feminist organizations participate in and invent modes of digitally-oriented evidentiary activism designed to combat GBOV. Feminists' recasting of the how, why, and what of evidence represents a noteworthy development in struggles against online violence and misogyny, and within digital culture more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines how gendered hierarchies and relations, particularly those between hegemonic masculinities and non-hegemonic gendered identities, manifest between students at a university in North West England in and through forms of online harassment, using data collected from a large-scale study (N= 810) conducted in this institutional context. Key findings indicate that some young masculinities subordinate non-hegemonic gendered identities, namely those who identify as female and transgender, in and through gendered and sexualised forms of online harassment or are complicit in these practices. Male research participants are more likely than any other gendered group to use 'free speech' discourses to legitimate online harassment directed at transgendered and cis-female subjects. Some white, heterosexual males, who occupy a dominant position in Britain's gendered and racial social order, appropriate discursive practices associated with identity politics, which have historically been used by non-hegemonic gendered identities to challenge social inequities, to claim they are 'victims' of this society. We argue that these new emerging forms of hybridised hegemonic masculinity, which appropriate and reconfigure the discursive practices of non-hegemonic gendered identities, reproduce and conceal patriarchal systems of power in digitised spaces. We suggest more research is needed to better understand these practices, their relationship to alt-right influencers and men's rights activists, and their implications for digital hegemonic masculinities at the local level of UK university campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is increasingly used to share information about political issues and coordinate political activism. This paper examines privacy as governance in online knowledge sharing and organizing within the Day Without Immigrants, March for Science, and Women's March movements. Structured by the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, the study illustrates how rules-in-use creatively support appropriate information flows and govern information resources to balance community objectives and privacy. Interviews, contextualized by participant surveys and Facebook data, illustrate: the importance of (1) polycentric governance and (2) private decision-making in public Facebook groups used by activists, and (3) privacy protecting institutions governing common knowledge resources shared within and across movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about the power and influence of networked publics often focuses on large-scale political events, activist campaigns and protest activity - the more visible forms of political engagement. On the other hand, digitally mediated activism is often questioned and sometimes derided as a lesser form of dissent, as it is easier to engage in, highly affective, and offers few assurances of sustainability of the change it calls for. But what about everyday political speech online, where social media platforms can contribute to a personalisation of politics? Can social media users express their views online and make a difference? This paper analyses around 3500 Facebook posts stemming from the #ЯНеБоюсьСказати (Ukrainian for #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt) online campaign that was started in the Ukrainian segment of Facebook in July 2016 by a local activist to raise awareness of how widespread sexual violence and sexual harassment are in the Ukrainian society. The paper argues that networked conversations about everyday rights and affective stories about shared experiences of injustice, underpinned by the affordances of social media platforms for sharing and discussing information and participating in everyday politics, can emerge as viable forms of networked feminist activism and can have real impact on the discursive status quo of an issue, both in the digital sphere and beyond it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new media industries are popularly regarded as cool, creative and egalitarian. This view is held by academics, policy-makers and also by new media workers themselves, who cite the youth, dynamism and informality of new media as some of its main attractions. This paper is concerned with what this mythologized version of new media work leaves out, glosses over and, indeed, makes difficult to articulate at all. Themes include pervasive insecurity, low pay, and long hours but the particular focus of the paper is on gender inequalities in new media work. Despite its image as 'cool', non-hierarchical and egalitarian, the new media sector, this paper will argue, is characterized by a number of entrenched and all too old-fashioned patterns of gender inequality relating to education, access to work and pay. Moreover, a number of new forms of gender inequality are emerging, connected – paradoxically – to many of the features of the work that are valued – informality,autonomy,flexibility and so on. Drawing on a study of 125 freelance new media workers in six European countries, this paper explores these issues and argues that the new forms of sexism in new media represent a serious challenge to its image of itself as cool, diverse and egalitarian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the computer game as an example of digital technology the paper argues that the embodied aesthetics of technology use are an important dimension of its implication in gender. Drawing on ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and Nigel Thrift the discussion rejects analyses that focus on video game content and asserts the importance of looking at what players do with their hands in the course of game play. The experience of form and space in games are best understood as part of a popular cultural employment of dance as a method for the navigation of socio-technical complexes. This situates computer games as a variety of gendered performance that is conflicted and not straightforward, combining agonistic and aesthetic strains. The paper reflects on the importance of using dance terminology to comprehend this, in terms of our reflexive understanding of computer games, gamers and gaming as a cultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can community informatics initiatives be sustained? This paper argues that, in the fast moving area of ICT and on the constantly shifting ground of community-sector practice, sustainability depends upon adaptability. We develop the concept of 'learning communities' – as developed by a women's ICT project – to meet the need for democratic, inclusive and on-going innovation in women's organizations and the wider community/voluntary sector. Reflecting on the Women Connect project, we conceptualize 'learning communities' as dialogic and 'playful' spaces within which members can draw creatively on their differences while constructing shared knowledge. This approach, it is argued, can lead towards a new way of conceptualizing knowledge, new approaches to learning, and new practice for community-based and women's organizations in relation to the use of ICT. The paper starts by describing the Women Connect project, and then introduces the idea of learning 'in community'. We analyse issues relating to the use of the term 'community' in relevant discourses, arguing for an approach which emphasizes agency in our use of this term – the 'doing' of community within a context of shared projects, obligations and goals. Weaddress some difficulties involved in working across social differences, while arguing that these differences – which may make the practice of community uncomfortable – can also facilitate their emergence in the new form of 'learning communities'. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of 'the Borderlands', Nira Yuval-Davis's concept of 'transversal politics' and Maria Lugone'sconcept of 'world-travelling', we analyse community-sector processes of innovation and change agency, as they have found expression within Women Connect. We conclude by arguing that the current, outcome-driven, model for funding voluntary sector organizations acts to actively inhibit the development of learning communities – and the sustainable innovatory practice they can produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While feminist media scholars have recognized the growing importance of feminist blogs, such as Jezebel, Racialicious, and Feministe, to contemporary feminism, the contribution of girls to this feminist blogosphere remains understudied. In this paper, the author addresses this research gap by investigating the complex and diverse ways that girls are using blogging communities to participate in a feminist political activism that reflects their needs as contemporary young feminists within a neoliberal cultural context. This analysis draws upon two case studies of popular blogs by teenage feminists, and interviews that were conducted with four girl bloggers who participated in these two communities. The author argues that through the practice of blogging, teenage girls are actively reframing what it means to participate in feminist politics, drawing on opportunities that the Internet provides to embrace new understandings of community, activism, and even feminism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a first analysis of popular Internet humour about gender. The focus is on the extent to which such humour encodes sexist, feminist, and post-feminist ideologies. Utilizing a novel sampling protocol, a corpus of 150 highly popular verbal and visual comic texts was retrieved from eight English-based websites. The findings of a content analysis suggest that although men and women are mocked to an equal extent, traditional stereotypical gender representations still prevail, along with the emergence of new postfeminist portrayals. The postfeminist, essentialist thesis of gender differences is revealed to be central, while feminist humour about gender inequalities is marginal. The discussion contextualizes these findings and argues they express backlash interpretations of postfeminism. Finally, the results are discussed in relation to the high hopes held for the potential of the Internet to be involved in women's empowerment and the transformation of gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates current discussions of women's position in ICTs in the wider context of feminist debates on gender and technology. While a common trend among early feminist theorists was a profound pessimism about the inherent masculinity of technology, this was replaced during the 1990s by an unwarranted optimism about the liberating potential of technoscience for women. This article gives an account of both technophobia and technophilia, arguing that recent approaches drawing on the social studies of technology provide a more subtle analysis. Avoiding both technological determinism and gender essentialism, technofeminist approaches emphasize that the gender-technology relationship is fluid and flexible, and that feminist politics and not technology per se is the key to gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shulamith Firestone was a foundational second-wave feminist thinker. Firestone's radical feminism argued for a future where technology was used to eliminate sexism by freeing women from childbirth and liberating both men and women from the patriarchal nuclear family. In many important ways, Firestone's work is the precursor for contemporary cyberfeminist writing, especially the work of Donna Haraway. This paper examines Shulamith Firestone and her contribution to the information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the gender matrix of time, arguing for cross-disciplinary consideration of political economy, globalization and technology to achieve a detailed understanding of gendered hierarchies of time and the ways in which public/private identifications of social space and time have variously constructed and maintained them. It is argued that women are alienated from their own time, which is identified as most legitimately allocated to the service of others both in the home and at work. The inter-relationship of technologies and gendered identities is explored in relation to public/private divisions and the political-economic and scientific-technological knowledge processes that contribute to upholding them. ICTs reflect these historically established gendered patterns, but international projects such as 'Women on the Net' also demonstrate the capacities of these technologies for disrupting the gender matrix of time through their use by women for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about online comment fields on news websites tends to foreground their potential for deliberative discussions whilst little attention is given to the ways these spaces reinforce existing gender inequalities. This study analyses online newspaper comments on articles about gender based violence to establish whether the historic marginalisation of women within public discussions is being reasserted online. Using thematic analysis, this study found that responses were characterised by disbelief. Posters questioned the type and nature of evidence that had been provided, they questioned whether these problems resulted from sexism and they questioned the feminist agenda behind the blogs. While voices expressing disbelief were dominant, there were counter-voices attempting to critique the scepticism by advocating for the importance of the lived experience women and girls. The study demonstrates that online comments on news websites operate as gendered spaces that can marginalise women from the public discussion of social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As shifts in technology and culture have complicated traditional definitions of privacy, researchers need new approaches to navigating privacy in online contexts. In this article, we argue that the experiences and perceptions of vulnerable groups must form the starting point for online researchers' ethical decision-making, regardless of whether their research population qualifies as 'vulnerable.' This is especially important in spaces where privacy violations put people, particularly marginalized individuals, at risk for online harassment and abuse, among other harms. We seek to intervene in online research practices by putting forth a feminist approach to privacy, drawing on two studies related to online harassment. Specifically, we argue that feminist theory and methodology inform an approach to privacy that (a) starts from the lives of socially and politically vulnerable groups, (b) takes an intersectional approach to analyzing power relations, and (c) draws on a moral imperative of care and responsibility in enacting feminist principles of context, dialogue, and reflexivity throughout the research process. In doing so, we offer questions to prompt critical reflection on privacy concerns in online research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of the Arab Spring led to several reforms in the Arab world and facilitated the creation of feminist movements. Social networking sites such as Facebook were used as tools to promote this kind of online activism and create a collective secular identity for the members of these movements. This study investigated over 220,000 Facebook posts and comments taken from three online feminist movements which supported gender equality in the Arab world. The results show that these movements sometimes face fierce resistance from Islamists who believe that their religion is under attack. Instead of having one type of poster and commentator, three main online groups are identified; each one competes to garner attention and support from the public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New digital and biogenetic technologies-in the shape of media such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, genetic modification and technological prosthetics- signal a 'posthuman' future in which the boundaries between humanity, technology and nature have become ever more malleable. We are more aware than ever that what we call 'nature' is open to manipulation by varieties of biotechnology such as gene therapy. Computer-assisted technologies transform perceptions of body, time and space. Dreams of merging humans and machines into new intelligent cybernetic organisms leave the realm of science fiction and enter everyday reality. As the taken-for-grantedness of what it means to be human shifts and blurs, we might consider how myth, literature and popular culture have furnished the Western imagination with a gallery of fantastic and monstrous creatures on the margins of human and non-human. One contemporary example is that of the cyborg, who serves as a metaphor of the various ways in which the contemporary west is currently experiencing the hybridization of human nature. One version of the cyborg popular with cultural theorists-especially feminists- has been the vision articulated in Haraway's 'Manifesto for Cyborgs'. Termed here as Haraway's 'cyborg writing', it expresses important values about gender, politics and technology; but whilst the cyborg subverts many of the dualisms of western culture, Haraway's comment that she would 'rather be a cyborg than a goddess' inadvertently reinforces one final, often unspoken dichotomy of modernity: that between religion and the secular. Therefore the implications for feminist theory and praxis of a recovery of the goddess are explored. To concur with Haraway, such a project is prone to an inversion of traditional gender stererotypes, enclosing women in a realm of unreconstructed 'nature' at the expense of empowering them to engage with new technologies. Other models of 'becoming divine', however, promise more radical reconfigurations of the religious symbolic of western modernity, a symbolic that has sanctioned the equation of technology with the disavowal of embodied finitude in the name of a quest for transcendence. Irigaray's concept of the 'sensible transcendental' refuses the simplistic distinctions between sacred/secular, spiritual/material, divine/human. Far from representing a female version of the patriarchal sky-god, or even a bucolic, romanticized 'mothergoddess', therefore, Irigaray's model of 'becoming divine' offers an exciting addition to the critical and reconstructive resources of cyberfeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]