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Surfing the Fourth Wave of the Feminist Movement Via SNS

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Orienting Feminism

Abstract

The location-specificity added by default to online interactions continue to make responses to transnational activism culture-specific. This, in turn, has political consequences. The New Delhi gang-rape incident of December 16, 2012, led to a sudden increase in coverage of rape incidents within the Indian media as well as a surge in social media-based activism. But this has also resulted in tagging India internationally as a country too unsafe to visit.

I argue that digitally mediated transnational activism, via Facebook updates and transformative tweets, has the potential to create dialogue on feminist issues that are shared but highly localized. This could eventually facilitate drawing the commonalities of the three waves of feminism—namely suffrage, equality and power conditions—to potentially herald the beginning of a digitized fourth wave.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Paula Ray

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  1. Paula Ray
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan

    Catherine Dale

  2. Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Rosemary Overell

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Ray, P. (2018). Surfing the Fourth Wave of the Feminist Movement Via SNS. In: Dale, C., Overell, R. (eds) Orienting Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70660-3_7

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