Event cancelled: Intersectionality in digital feminist knowledge cultures: Practising a travelling theory

COVID-19 Update

The situation with COVID-19 continues to change at a rapid pace. It is posing unprecedented challenges for the health and wellbeing of our communities and for the continuing operations of La Trobe University. Events over the weekend and earlier this week have necessitated a rapid review of the University’s response – in particular the ban on large scale events, compulsory self-isolation for all visitors to Australia, and the Premier’s announcement of a State of Emergency.

La Trobe is therefore announcing a range of measures to help members of our community remain as safe as possible, while ensuring minimal disruption to teaching and research activities. Our campuses will remain open and our teaching and research will continue, but with some significant changes to the way we work. As a precautionary measure, from Tuesday 17 March onwards all non-essential events that do not involve delivery or support of teaching or research activity will be cancelled or postponed until the end of June, regardless of the number of participants. This includes events such as graduation ceremonies; public lectures and events; events run by all Student Union Associations and student clubs and societies; sporting events and planned ceremonies.

As a result of this decision, the 'Intersectionality in digital feminist knowledge cultures: Practising a travelling theory' event on 18 March 2020 is now cancelled. We thank you for your understanding and hope you will be able to join us at another La Trobe event in the future. All ticket holders will be refunded.

If you have any questions in relation to this event please do not hesitate to contact Dr Renae Fomiatti at r.fomiatti@latrobe.edu.au

To find out more about events scheduled later in the year, please visit the La Trobe website at latrobe.edu.au/events

For more information about La Trobe’s response to COVID-19, you can view our online statement and FAQs

🠘 Back to ARCSHS events

In recent years it has been noted that feminism has been the subject of a resurgence in mainstream media and in social media activism in the West. However, as Christina Scharff, Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle (2016) note, it is important to observe that such activism is transnational, rather than corresponding to universal notions of justice, difference and oppression. In view of these insights, this paper seeks to foreground the transnational nature of popular feminism(s). This paper explores how intersectionality, as a dynamic, mutable and transnational framework, is interpreted by self-identifying Australian feminists.

This paper derives from a pilot project seeking to map movements in contemporary digital feminism in Australia, not to emphasise Australia as necessarily a unique or bounded site but to understand the hybridity of popular feminism as a travelling and popularized discourse. Australia is a nation-state that is dominated by whiteness but also on ‘the periphery of the Euro-American core of 'the West'’ (Ang 2003). As such, it is necessary to understand how the significance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) is remade, both in relation to both transnational movements in digital culture and the neoliberal disciplining of difference. While immersion in such transnational cultures may produce cosmopolitan Australian feminist subjects, these movements instantiate questions of how to take politics into effective translation on the ground.

About Dr Akane Kanai

Dr Akane Kanai is a lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. Her research on youthful femininities and digital intimate publics has been published in outlets including Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Gender Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Social Media and Society. Her first book, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value is published with Palgrave Macmillan.

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