Feminism

Post-Feminism and Social Media

In this course, Dr Gemma Cobb (University of Sussex) explores the phenomenon of post-feminism and its manifestations in social media. In the first module, we look at the key ideas and historical development of feminism since the 19th century. The second module then examines the main characteristics of post-feminism and its relationship to feminism, focusing on the work of Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill. In the third module, we outline the key features of contemporary social media content, notably its user-generated, image-centred nature, and the role of hashtags and algorithms in its curation. The fourth module then analyses the hashtag “thinspo” as an example of post-feminist social media content. We conclude with a fifth module on the more complex case of the hashtag “fitspo”, which contains similar content to #thinspo, but packages this in feminist language around women’s empowerment.

Cover image by Ajay Suresh licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Feminism

In this module, we think about the history of feminism and some of the key ideas associated with it. We focus on: (i) the concept of patriarchy, and analysis of its role in producing gender inequality, as core to feminist thought; (ii) feminism as both a theoretical perspective in academia, and an activist cause; (iii) the historical development of feminism since the nineteenth century, outlined as a series of four “waves” of thought and action; (iv) some criticisms of the waves metaphor as a way of framing the history of feminism, such as its privileging of Anglo-American trends over those in other parts of the world.