210
G. M. CHEN ET AL.
activism less costly and time-consuming and led to success, but tweets also simplified the issue and fostered a perception of Africa among a western audience that fit the dominant narratives associated with poverty, conflict, AIDS, and oppression (Higgs 2015). The white western audience was cast as liberator, confirming this narrative: “Within the discourse is entrenched a White (feminist) savior complex, positing that African women’s apparent suffering can be alleviated through White-Western intervention” (Higgs 2015, 345). The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag used worldwide after the 2014 kidnapping of approximately 300 Nigeria schoolgirls because they craved education offers another cogent example (Khoja-Moolji 2015). The hashtag united feminists in a seemingly large intimate public, and the hashtag was used to pressure the United States and Nigerian governments to take action. However, Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2015) argues that when disparate groups come together this way it ignores the history and cultural significance of the situation and creates a false equivalence, reifying long-standing colonial and imperial attitudes about “others.” In particular, white women can feel emboldened by assisting in such an effort and feel a sense of shared connection with these women that belies the true differences in their social locations and privilege. In addition, Western women may feel an inflated sense of credit for their relatively small actions, perpetuating a “technological fetish” (Dean 2009) that exaggerates a particular person’s role in an online movement. Khoja-Moolji (2015, 349) explains: While it is important to seek justice for the specific suffering of the schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria, this form of feminism produces an oversimplified analysis of the situation …. We are not neutral bodies; we bring with ourselves impressions of history and its affects which make it possible for us to enter into particular kinds of affective relationships, or not, with the objects that we encounter. Thus, the participants’ eagerness to take up hashtag feminism on behalf of third world schoolgirls from Nigeria betrays the awareness and histories that they bring to feminist activism.
Future of Feminist Theorizing Online Our aim with this chapter was to critique the feminist hashtag, as well as explicate the tension inherent in such a tool of empowerment to make larger connections about feminist media theory and how feminism is produced online. Our analysis suggests that the hashtag has great potential for women’s empowerment because it allows women themselves from
