Platform Feminism: Celebrity Culture and Activism in the Digital Age

Abstract

Platform Feminism: Celebrity Culture and Activism in the Digital Age tells the story of digital platforms' role in the feminist movement during the early 21st century. Taking celebrity culture as a potent site at which to analyze the new visibilities of feminism and its responses to a new wave of conservative and deeply reactionary politics, I explore the ways in which networked publics coalesce around celebrity events and, in discussing, analyzing, and critiquing various actors within these events, engage in boundary work around what it means to “be a feminist.” From responses to celebrity harassment to hashtag campaigns supporting celebrity feminism to critiques of imperfect feminist celebrities, this dissertation explores the contentious debates about feminism that arise around celebrity culture within digital spaces.

To analyze these discourses, this project draws together literature from three often-disparate academic subfields: platform studies, feminist media studies, and celebrity studies. Using a case study approach, each chapter draws on intersectional feminist theory to examine a celebrity event from 2014-2016 that incited controversy across a variety of media platforms around issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. I track each event across online and legacy media outlets and engage in multiplatform critical technocultural discourse analysis to analyze how discussions amongst issue publics that coalesce around each event both reflect and further define contemporary feminist discourses in ways that are often distinctly shaped by the digital platforms on which they emerge (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández 2016, Brock 2016). In contrast to prior feminist media studies research that argues popular culture is largely postfeminist, I demonstrate that feminism, amplified by the famous voices that espouse it and the broad reach of the digital spaces in which it appears, has increased its discursive power so greatly that many aspects of popular culture no longer take for granted the gains of the feminist movement but rather feminism itself. Further, the iteration of feminism that is ideologically dominant espouses the importance of intersectionality, calling out the limitations of white liberal feminism and foregrounding the importance of a feminist platform that interrogates racial, sexual, and class differences.

Overall, I argue that digital platforms have emerged as a major techno-cultural infrastructure for the dissemination and negotiation of the positions, goals, and actions of the contemporary feminist movement, which experienced a resurgence in the wake of the crisis of neoliberalism. While established media institutions continue to inform popular understandings of feminism, it is the recirculation, re-mediation, and conversations around print, film, and television media images and discourses on digital platforms that are driving the ongoing shifts in the feminist movement. More specifically, I contend that celebrity culture is a potent site at which the very category of “feminism” is being challenged in these digital spaces. Together, digital platforms and celebrity culture form a crucial discursive arena where postfeminist logics are unsettled, opening up the possibility of a more radical, intersectional, and activist popular feminism.