Trapped in the Matrix: An Analysis of Intersectional Social Media Activism

• In Event: 534 - Regular Session. Race, Class and Gender

Abstract

Social media activism, the use of social network technology to organize and coordinate real-world action, has shaped not only how people engage in political protest, but also how researchers from various disciplines come to understand social movements (Peuchad 2014; Bell 2016). To date, there are few sociological analyses of intersectional social media activism, defined as advocacy that incorporate social network technology into their action repertoire and rely on intersectional mobilization and consciousness raising to advance their aims. To fill this gap, this article relies on a framework of intersectionality and its role in social movements as a basis for a study of #SayHerName, an intersectional social media campaign against violence toward Black women (Crenshaw et al. 2015). It concludes with a discussion of the role of intersectionality in twenty-first century social media activism and suggestions for the direction of future research on social media activism and intersectionality.

Author

• Melissa Brown