Abstract
This thesis explores the popularisation of intersectionality in neoliberal digital media cultures. Specifically, I examine how intersectionality is articulated in popular German (speaking) digital feminist discourses, such as on feminist blogs and on social media platforms like Instagram. I contend that intersectionality, a term coined by activist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to challenge existing “single-issue analyses” (p. 149) of the discrimination Black women faced in the US legal system, experiences a transformation and a rearticulation in contemporary digital feminist spaces which ultimately fails to disrupt existing power structures in meaningful and productive ways.To explore the popularisation of intersectionality in digital media, as well as the social, political, and technological forces that condition this phenomenon, I set out to research both feminist media producers and consumers, while acknowledging that this distinction is increasingly replaced by the notion of ‘prosumers’ (Fuchs, 2014). I employ a variety of methods, including a combined thematic and critical discourse analysis of a feminist blog, in-depth online interviews with self-identified digital feminists [Netzfeminist*innen], as well as a focus group discussion using a secret Facebook group. My analysis follows feminist critiques of neoliberalism and takes a Foucauldian governmentality approach in exploring how neoliberal market logics, which are embedded in digital platforms, produce and operate through popular articulations of intersectionality and allyship. In doing so, I am drawing on and contributing to a variety of academic disciplines and fields, including feminist media and cultural studies, digital platform and communication studies, affect theory, as well as digital intersectionality studies.
To account for the above developments, I put forward the concept of ‘popular intersectionality’ in this thesis. Popular intersectionality is a feminist discourse which promotes an affective desire for and an understanding of intersectionality as an imperative of inclusion, while simultaneously reinforcing norms of whiteness and reproducing white saviourism. Having gained increased popularity and visibility in mainstream media, popular culture, and digital spaces in the past decade, popular intersectionality constitutes a neoliberal technology of self which entices digital feminists to engage in ‘perfect allyship’ with marginalised Others through performing caring and pleasing notions of white normative femininities. Ultimately, popular intersectionality assists in the production of anxious feminist subjectivities heavily invested in white normative femininity, and fails to achieve long-lasting structural change.
In this thesis, I contend that articulations of popular intersectionality produce discourses that recentre white individuals and (their) affective responses to intersectionality. My thesis therefore aims to explore the ways in which intersectionality is articulated and transformed in digital feminist spaces, particularly in relation to whiteness, white femininities, and under the influence of neoliberal-capitalist digital platform cultures. More precisely, I propose the concept of popular intersectionality as an umbrella term for discourses and speech acts that articulate intersectionality as synonymous with a highly affective, all-inclusive feminism that rejects ‘bad’ white feminism and instead focuses on individual narratives and visibilities of marginalised identities. At the same time, such articulations of popular intersectionality appear to negate the concept’s Black feminist origins, produce hierarchical thinking about marginalised groups, and neglect structural analyses of oppression.
| Date of Award | 1 Aug 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Christina Scharff (Supervisor) & Red Chidgey (Supervisor) |