This thesis explores both what feminism looks like in a digital age, as well as how the Internet and technology inform the ways in which feminists interact, build communities, and form identities. I found that online feminist spaces are built as communities of validation and support, education and empowerment, as well as spaces of radicalization and contention. Ultimately my thesis leads toward a new understanding of feminist activism that incorporates the unique characteristics and abilities of online feminism.

No description available.

In this essay, the concept of online and fourth wave feminism is enhanced through a study of the TikTok-trend #servingcvnt (serving cunt). This study builds on the engagement of contemporary forms of feminist culture with the ever changing dynamic of social media platforms. It offers insight into the otherwise inscrutable world of a TikTok subculture and discloses the mechanisms and practices behind the culturally tinged feminism taking place within it. Combining Muted Group Theory and the conceptual framework of recent feminist media studies, the process of reclaiming is explained and analyzed in terms of feminist humor and shamelessness as resistance tactics. The analysis uses material collected through digital ethnography, encoded through content analysis, that results in detailed studies of video material as well as a portrayal of the digital environment. The study showcases a digital environment tainted by feminine confidence, solidarity and a mentality of shamelessness and humor. #servingcvnt is a subculture constructed by females for females in which they encourage, support and inspire each other to take up space and emancipate from a shaming culture wherein to serve cunt is to reject ideas about how women “should not” be. By constructing their own culture and language, women form a safe sphere in which their own rules and norms apply and reign dominant. This study shows how feminist resistance is injected with a newfound power and possibilities enabled through TikToks media logic and affordances. Hence, this essay should be considered a study of the old phenomenon of reclaiming within a contemporary format of the social media platform TikTok. It is argued that the results and analysis of this study contributes valuable insights to contemporary feminist characteristics, tactics and environments, usable for other future researchers.

Drawing upon the opportunity that the Internet and social media provides anyone with internet access to create, consume, publish and produce digital content, this study aims to examine one of the new means of communication. In today’s digital society creating content and communicating across boarders is easier than ever, but actually getting the point across is not – with an evergrowing number of posts, users and sites there is a struggle close the gap between posting a message and actually having it noticed. This study examines memes – normally seen as easily understood jokes – as means of accessible and simplistic communication by qualitatively examining fifteen feminist memes on Twitter. The study aims to see what the memes are conveying in means of social criticism and feminist orientations, their relation to the online feminist discourses and, lastly, explore the memes’ potential role in the political sphere. The theoretical framework firstly explains memes in relation to Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture, Lawrence Lessig’s remix culture and relates memes to the political sphere based on both Limor Shifman’s meme theory and the two theories mentioned above. Secondly, first-, second- and third-wave feminism is introduced along with radical feminism and the feminist concept of sisterhood. Lastly, the social constructivism sets the groundwork for the study’s choice of method; critical discourse analysis. The critical discourse analysis is used in a modified version along with the ‘verbal-visual unity’; a method designed to take the memes structure – the combination of text and images – into account. These methods are used to identify themes, connotations, modality, interdiscursivity, social criticism and the feminist orientation of the memes. The result reveals that there are four main points of social criticism emphasized in the memes; regarding body norms, regarding belittling of women’s opinions and actions, regarding patriarchal structures and regarding men in general. The main feminist orientation visible in more than half the memes is radical feminism, while second-wave feminism is visible in a third. Meanwhile, the memes’ relation to the feminist discourses varies; smaller discourses have low levels of interdiscoursivity, while the main discourse for online feminism show high levels. The study shows that memes’ – potential – roles in the political sphere are as means of spreading opinion, as ways of constituting new norms in a new reality, and as means of shifting the structures of power in society.