#AmplifyWomen: the emergence of an evangelical feminist public on social media

Abstract

This study conceptualizes the Twitter response to a Christianity Today article that challenged the role of female Christian bloggers as authoritative figures and centered around the hashtag #AmplifyWomen, as an “affective public”. It employs the method of “hashtag ethnography” to investigate it. The article argues that this public points to the beginnings of a connective feminist movement in evangelicalism brought about by the affordances of digital media and makes two moves in service to this assertion. First, it explains that it is through a reliance on the tropes of postfeminism that Christian celebrity bloggers have achieved the level of charismatic authority that they have. And second it tracks how the affective public that emerged to defend them mobilized a tactical rhetoric to resist the dominant patriarchal structures of the traditionally conservative culture of white evangelicalism.