Evidentiary activism in the digital age: on the rise of feminist struggles against gender-based online violence. Issue 14 (26th October 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kurasawa, Fuyuki; Rondinelli, Elisabeth; Kilicaslan, Gulay
• Is Part Of: Information, communication & society. Volume 24:Issue 14(2021)
• Page Start: 2174
• Page End: 2194
• Publication Date: 2021-10-26
• Subjects: Gender-based violence -- feminist activism -- evidence -- digital culture -- social media platforms; Information technology -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Information technology -- Economic aspects -- Periodicals; Information technology -- Political aspects -- Periodicals; Internet -- Periodicals; World Wide Web -- Periodicals; 303.4833
• DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1962945
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1369-118X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-political practices, which we term evidentiary activism. Using a qualitative content analysis of 82 documents produced by feminist organizations, our analysis finds that this activism has two fundamental components. First, feminist organizations engage with existing formal evidentiary cultures by advancing and critiquing legislative and regulatory reforms to address GBOV, platform-based technological 'solutions, ' and conventional notions of user privacy and anonymity. Second, they embrace and contribute to informal evidentiary cultures, which treat evidence as a tool of cultural and political mobilization against GBOV through strategies of publicization, moral pollution, and the cultivation of feminist digital citizenship. We contend that, akin to evidence-based advocacy that is influential in the fields of biomedicine and health, feminist organizations participate in and invent modes of digitally-oriented evidentiary activism designed to combat GBOV. Feminists' recasting of the how, why, and what of evidence represents a noteworthy development in struggles against online violence and misogyny, and within digital culture more generally.