Facebook Feminism: Social Media, Blogs, and New Technologies of Contemporary U.S. Feminism*
Social networks and interpersonal ties are critical to social movements. They help recruit members, sustain organizations, nourish participants' movement identities, and disseminate information. Scholarship has pointed to the formative role of social media and other information and communication technologies in online and offline mobilization. Questions remain, however, regarding how online social and friendship networks shape social movements. In this article, I draw from literature on social networks, online mobilization, and women's movements to examine the role of online feminist social networks in feminist mobilization. Presenting qualitative data from a racially and geographically heterogeneous group of college feminists, I argue that Facebook and feminist blogs enlarge and nourish feminist networks, create online feminist communities, expand recruitment bases for online and offline mobilization, and increase opportunities for online interaction with adversaries. Finally, I consider generational shifts in the feminist movement, and the broader relationship between friendship networks and online and offline mobilization.
Contributor Notes
*Thank you to Mobilization editor Rory McVeigh and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thank you to Verta Taylor, Leila J. Rupp, Maria Charles, Katrina Kimport, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Shelley J. Correll, and Andrea Davies for their insight, and to the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University for its support. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2013 Young Scholars in Social Movements Conference at the Center for the Study of Social Movements, University of Notre Dame.
†The author is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Direct all correspondence to the author at acrossle@stanford.edu.