The new feminist frontier on community-based learning: Popular feminism, online misogyny, and toxic masculinities

Abstract

Feminist activism has always promoted informal learning opportunities for men and women. Internet, along with ICTs, has expanded these opportunities by affording large-scale feminist mobilisation and connection. Yet, the digital environment is not only enhancing feminist campaigning but also facilitating the contexts for abusive behaviours to flourish. Departing from the concept of social movement learning, we examine the significance of the large-scale reinvigoration of feminist activism to adult education in tandem with the surge of anti-feminist and misogynist ideas in the digital environment. We argue that just as online social media brought unprecedented opportunities to provide social movement learning, it offered the same tools to misogynists groups, mostly led by a toxic understanding of masculinity. By co-opting the same online opportunities the feminist movement enjoys, individualised and collective toxic masculinity agency is a potential foe to match, not only adding advantage to feminist movements but reinventing the same struggle and demanding an ongoing battle towards deconstructing patriarchy.