Main content

Take back the fight : organizing feminism for the digital age

Available Formats:

  • Accessibility:
    • Described images
    • Customizable display
    • ​Print page numbers
    • Heading navigation
    • Table of contents navigation
    Publisher:
    Fernwood Publishing, 2020

Details:

  • Author: Loreto, Nora
    Date:
    Created
    2020
    Summary:

    Social movements across North America have suffered from the rise of neoliberalism. Feminism in particular has not been able to call itself a structured movement since the 1990s with the end of National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Instead, feminism and other social movements have survived in a grassroots, disjointed manner. While the work of transition houses and crisis centres, student movements and gender studies departments, Indigenous woman-led land defence, BIPOC anti-racist organizing, social media campaigns and much more continues to claim and develop feminism, as a social movement feminism lacks purposeful structure. As a result, feminism has become prey to individualism and outsourced to digital platforms that seek to make money off harassment and acrimonious debates. Feminist identity and political demands are more and more in vogue, so much so that it seems that everything can be called feminist: from anti-abortion activists to the Prime Minister of Canada. This book argues that liberal, individualized feminism can be made accountable through a formal movement structure to bring sense and practice to ongoing feminist thought and action; this kind of formal movement structure plays a critical role not just in creating social change, but also in building leadership, feminist practice, innovation and debate.

    Contents:
    • Introduction : if mainstream feminism says everything can be feminist, is anything feminist?
    • White supremacy and the first feminist waves in Canada
    • Neoliberalism and decentralized activism
    • Feminism in the digital age
    • Social movement organizations as vehicle for change
    • Debating and re-debating what is feminism
    • Disseminating feminist knowledge in the digital era
    • Ad hoc organizing in the digital age
    • Accountable leadership
    • Feminist opposition to power
    • Mainstreaming anti-capitalist, anti-racist feminism
    • Afterword : to make radical feminism mainstream.
    Original Publisher: Halifax, Fernwood Publishing
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781773632414, 1773632418