Who Needs Feminism? Lessons from a Digital World

news and views Who Needs Feminism? Lessonsfroma Digital World Rachel F. Seidman "Who needs feminism?" My students asked that simple question in spring 2012, and then we watched, astounded, as the world answered. What started out as a final project in a class I was teaching at Duke University exploded into a transnational social media campaign that lives on more than a year later. The significance of the Who Needs Feminism? project is still unfolding, but it already offers a case study in how social media shapes feminist pedagogy and civic engagement and has a powerful, if unpredictable, impact on our students, our scholarship, and our world. The Who Needs Feminism? project originated in a class called Women in the Public Sphere: Flistory, Theory, and Practice. My goal in that class is to help young women connect the history of women's activism in the United States to the debates, issues, and challenges that they face today. I want my students to not only understand the his torical foundations of women's organizing but also to develop their own skills of feminist analysis and leadership for the present. For their final project, students work together to choose an issue about which they are passionate and then figure out a way, as a group, to exercise leadership aimed at social change. The spring of 2012 was a difficult time on Duke's campus and more generally in the United States. Women students faced wide spread sexual assaults and a demeaning party culture on campus. FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 549 550 Rachel F. Seidman Nationally the Republican "war on women" was in full swing; leg islative restrictions on women's right to abortion were cropping up in states across the country and multiple states sought to defund Planned Parenthood. My students watched, aghast, as Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and a "prostitute" after she spoke to House Democrats in favor of mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives. Adding to their sense of horror about racism was the February 2012 killing of 17-year old Trayvon Martin by a neighbor hood watch captain who assumed the young black man was "up to no good." Meanwhile the 2012 elections were approaching, and it felt as if the political and cultural stakes could not have been higher. These events spurred powerful conversations in our classroom about power, privilege, linkages between racism and sexism, and the enduring need for an intersectional feminist movement. But when my students tried to talk about these ideas outside of class, they were often shut down by their peers' refusal to engage or by accusations that they were "man-hating feminists." Deeply frustrated, they asked "How can we make any progress on any of these issues if we can't even talk about them!" Determined to open new dialogue on campus about gender issues and to reach out to a wide audience, they designed a "PR campaign I NEED(*ww^ W$mwm] because I WimwiiW s wv&'"c^&/ow Rachel F. Seidman 551 for feminism." They recruited friends and acquaintances, young women and men from different backgrounds, and asked them to finish the phrase "I need feminism because..." in black marker on a whiteboard and then have their picture taken holding up their sign. "I need feminism because my mother gave up her dreams for a family," wrote one young black man. "I need feminism because I shouldn't have to justify my ambitions" and "I need feminism because intoxica tion shouldn't mean yes," others read. My students' goal was to point out that feminism was a necessary and useful tool for a wide range of women and men, that it could be leveraged against a variety of oppres sions, and that there was no such thing as a stereotypical feminist. The students designed posters from the photographs embla zoned with the question "Who Needs Feminism!" across the top that they then had printed in the hundreds using money they had raised by lobbying supportive organizations and administrators. Early in the morning on April 12, 2012, they split up into teams and fanned out across campus, giddily plastering bulletin boards, doors, and walls with their creations

Class (philosophy) · Face (sociological concept) · Feminism · Feminist pedagogy · Media studies · Political science · Scholarship · Social media · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law

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