Platform Feminism and the Politics of Elevation

• In Event: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - III: The Materiality of Deviance in Institutions, Movements, and Mediascapes

Abstract

Platforms are an enduring centerpiece in popular feminist movements. Platforms both mobilize a gaze and direct an audience. We can point to moments in history where platforms are used as a media for resistance. The recent Women’s March on Washington has given way to a series of new iconic images of contemporary feminist protest. A new unknown face for the movement steps out of the shadow, up to the mic and is finally heard. Platforms include the physical soapbox, stage, megaphone but also of course the digital platform brandished with a hashtag. These staged platforms will undoubtedly come to mark what feminist resistance looked like during “our time”. But all of these rather common media platforms tend to infer an underlying assumption of safety, privilege and power in relation to social space. The focus on platforms tends to obscure the needs of those who do not take so readily to them. This project will investigate how the platform is a media that marginalized feminist activists engage with and subvert as they reconfigure ways of convening in the digital age. I trace the different spatial and mediated strategies of activists whose relationships to space are more complicated than the symbol and activating of the platform. To question the platform and its role in feminist resistance is also to destabilize an understanding of feminist digital resistance that does not function as it should for feminists on the margins

Author

• Rianka Singh, University of Toronto