In The New Politics of Online Feminism, Akane Kanai argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Moving beyond a narrow characterization of online feminism as a site of activism and resistance, Kanai attends to the feminist quandaries of being politically conscientious as life online becomes inseparable from the offline world. Kanai suggests that for online feminists, avoiding complicity with patriarchy, racism, and other oppressions has never been more important, yet the self has remained the central site of agency and transformation—casting politics in terms of individual scrupulousness, diligence, and improvement. Under these circumstances, a feminist lens becomes about benchmarking, comparing, and anxiously avoiding the public mistakes that others make in online life. Kanai foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.

Akane Kanai is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Knowing Right from Wrong  1
Part I. Responsible and Responsive
1. Everyday Reactivism, or, Never Look Away  31
2. In Your Lane and Knowing Your Place  54
Part II. Moving Upward, but Not Taking Up Space
3. Leadership Journeys and Intersectional Resources  81
4. Don’t Be That Girl  102
Part III. Lowering the Stakes
5. Quiet Publics and Lowercase Feminism  125
6. Registering Experience: Moving Between, but Not Moving On  146
Conclusion. A Call for Everyday Poetry  169
References  179
Index  193