Who we Are Together: Radical Subjectivity, Sexual Violence, and Social Media
Date
2021-08-26
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Abstract
Incumbent to rape culture is the perpetuation of disempowering subjectivities for those who experience sexual violence. These disempowering subjectivities are particularly salient for people socialized as women (PSAW) as ideas of sexual purity and feminine morality undergird ideas of those who experience sexual violence as defiled or morally compromised. However, feminist conversations facilitated on social media platforms reveal feminine subjectivities that reject such ideas and articulate a critical awareness of sexual violence as a broader social issue rather than individual one. Noting this discrepancy between prescribed subjectivities and ones expressed online, this study sought to understand how PSAW who have experienced sexual violence use their social media platforms to reject and rework disempowering subjectivities and negotiate radical subjectivities built around activism and sexual violence advocacy. In conducting group discussion sessions with myself and five other PSAW, their wisdom revealed the political and personal significance of affects like grief and anger when negotiating one’s subjectivity. Moreover, participants’ experiences of gatekeeping from activist spaces revealed a need to rethink ideas of online activism as disembodied and uncommitted. By exploring these themes, I argue that expressions of grief and anger by PSAW following experiences of sexual violence are affectivist statements that work to reject the prescribed subjectivities of rape culture. Moreover, I contend that in rethinking the efficacy of social media activism as not only a means towards radical individual subjectivity but as a tool for social change, the imagined social media activist must be reimagined in intersectional ways that pay heed to the varied risk and lived experiences that inform their activist approaches. In doing so, I call upon the academic institution to critically interrogate their part in cloistering invaluable tools for critical awareness and to engage meaningfully in scholarship already being done by various indigenous, feminist, critical race, queer, and disability activists and scholars that seek to platform the critical conversations already happening in underserved communities.
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Keywords
sexual violence, social media, social media activism, sexual violence advocacy, online activism
Citation
Huh, R. H. (2021). Who we Are Together: Radical Subjectivity, Sexual Violence, and Social Media (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.