Influence and expertise: distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures

Abstract

In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily in terms of either ‘activism’, or the linear ‘accessing’ of feminist ideas. Drawing on an ongoing empirical project located in Australia involving 50 young feminists who regularly engage with feminist social media culture, we highlight participants’ affective practices of analysis and critique in connection with three Australian feminist ‘influencers’ with significant social media presences: Clementine Ford, a white columnist and memoirist; Abbie Chatfield, a white former Bachelor contestant, now podcaster and TV personality; and Lillian Ahenkan aka Flex Mami, a Black entrepreneur, and podcaster. We highlight how practices of distancing and proximity are enacted by participants in affective knowledge practices in relation to these influencers. We suggest the framework of ‘accessibility’ that predominates in scholarship obscures the complex classed, racialised and gendered dynamics through which knowledge is hierarchically made, contested, and accorded legitimacy in social media knowledge cultures.