Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Social media and activist sites have provided an avenue to contest the dominant framing of street harassment as ‘trivial’ and have sought to make street harassment and its harms visible. To date, digital activism has been analysed and conceptualised in relation to its potential as a counter-public forum that enables collective action and resistance, political mobilisation, ‘speaking out’ and consciousness raising, and as a site of informal or innovative justice. I aim to build on this literature by examining the potential for the activist sites Hollaback!, @catcallsofnyc and @dearcatcallers to function as a form of ‘counter-mapping’, contributing towards broader social justice efforts to disrupt and transform dominant productions of space/place. I examine the tensions created by these digital practices, particularly with regards to whether they disrupt the production of space/place or, rather, reinforce urban space as a gendered ‘threatscape’.
Source: Oñati Socio-legal Series
Author: Bianca Fileborn
Institution: The University of Melbourne
Language: English
Topic: Gender, Feminism, and Media
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3045703303