Female Performers on a Male Stage
In this concluding chapter, I argue that feminists should reject social media and return to older forms of revolutionary praxis. I examine how the contemporary conditions of advanced neoliberal capitalism have dovetailed with the ideology of the social me
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There is no way you are going to build a radical movement without some deep intensive thought and without a real community too, but you can’t have either of those online. I hate the thing. Sometimes I think our only hope is when the internet goes down. Then we can have a real movement again. I don’t know what else to hope for at this point […] it’s just overwhelming. All I can do is encourage people to still think, and still be together, and still care about each other in some way. But it’s a real fall-back position because everybody is addicted. —Lierre Keith WLM, USA It’s very energy sucking, it’s just a never-ending hole […] it’s just a constant reaction to men rather than [a focus] on us, and any attempt to build an alternative reality, basically, which should happen when we meet in real life. —Anne Billows DN, UK
The title of this concluding chapter is taken from a paper delivered at a WLM conference held in London in 1980. The author of the paper, Elizabeth Sarah (1982), argued that the first wave of feminism failed because it was based around achieving equality with men in their world, rather than fighting to liberate women from male control. Throughout this book, I © The Author(s) 2020 J. Megarry, The Limitations of Social Media Feminism, Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60629-9_7
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have attempted to demonstrate that while WLM activists understood that bringing about a feminist revolution required autonomous organising and a complete break with male culture, women today are once again organising alongside men, in a male space, on a male stage. I have argued that social media and the politics of women’s liberation are incompatible. Relying on social media for organising produces an impoverished form of feminist politics that ultimately preserves the status quo. My argument is not only that social media is an impediment to reviving the WLM, but also that the use of male-controlled digital platforms for feminist organising is politically dangerous for women. To this end, I have not discussed alternative technological platforms that could be more women-friendly, or that might offer feminist activists more personal security in digital space. Such a focus would constitute reformism by endeavouring to alter the technological landscape in specific ways, rather than recognising social media as a political institution upholding male dominance that feminists should reject. There is an inherent fallacy in the idea that a male-owned digital platform could provide an auspicious organising space for advancing women’s liberation. As Audre Lorde ([1979] 2007, 112) famously stated, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. In the much less frequently quoted sentences that follow the citation above, Lorde goes on to say that: [The master’s tools] may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s h
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