The "Crisis": The Emergence of an Evangelical Feminist Public on Social Media

• In Event: Redefining the Feminist Identity in Today's World

Abstract

In April 2017 the evangelical magazine Christianity Today published an article that called into question the role of female Christian bloggers as authoritative figures. Immediately the hashtag began by the editors of the article, #AmplifyWomen, erupted with arguments against this premise. This study conceptualizes the Twitter response to this article as an “affective public” (Papacharissi, 2015) and employs the method of “hashtag ethnography” (Bonila & Rosa, 2015) as a means to investigate this public. Ultimately, I argue that though it is through a reliance on the tropes of postfeminism that Christian celebrity bloggers have gained their influence, the affective public that emerged to defend them mobilized a tactical rhetoric (following Certeau, 1984) to resist the dominant patriarchal structure of evangelicalism. Furthermore, I assert that this public points to the beginnings of a connective feminist movement in evangelicalism brought about by the affordances of digital media.

Author

• Corrina Laughlin, Annenberg School for Communication at the U of Pennsylvania