Is There Space Left for Intersectional Feminist Networks on the Internet?

Over the last two decades, scholars and commentators have oscillated between optimistic accounts of the Internet’s potential for activism, consciousness-raising, and the empowerment of marginalized publics and more sobering assessments of how digital technologies reproduce, intensify, and extend systems of oppression and inequality. This talk brings together practical and theoretical questions about technology, social movements, and the public sphere to consider what these competing narratives reveal about the present moment and the possibilities for intersectional feminist organizing online and offline. Drawing lessons from pre-internet feminist networks and from feminist scholarship on visibility, community building, and digital activism, I examine a persistent question: Do the many well-documented forms of digital feminism generate meaningful social change beyond the backlash they often provoke? In response, I challenge narrow ways of defining and measuring political and social change, consider what digital feminism might look like over the next two decades, and ask whether new possibilities for intersectional feminist resistance remain emergent within an increasingly commercialized and fragmented online landscape.

This event will be held via Zoom on Thursday, October 8th, 2026 from 4:35 - 6:20 pm.