#AmplifyWomen: the emergence of an evangelical feminist public on social media

Laughlin, Corrina

doi:10.1080/14680777.2020.1711794

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Many scholars have focused on the ways that Evangelical women mobilize their whiteness to bolster their authority (Mikkelsen andKornfield 2021, Burke andMcDowell 2021) and express conflicted responses to feminism, which often functions as an ideological stand-in for a range of progressive movements (Diefendorf 2019). Further, given the constraints of women's authority within gender-traditional religions like Evangelicalism (Burke 2012), women's use of social media to engage in ministry can deepen existing crises of Biblical authority (Gaddini 2021, Laughlin 2021. Through an in-depth analysis of Girl Defined's discursive construction of feminism on the one hand and Biblical womanhood on the other, this study explores how Clark and Beal deploy microcelebrity practices to spread their anti-feminist messaging.…”

Section: Relevant Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Girl Defined by God: Biblical Womanhood, Anti-Feminism, and White Evangelical Microcelebrities

Lawson

2023

SPIR

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Girl Defined is a cross-platform fundamentalist Evangelical Christian ministry started by two sisters, Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal. The goal of their ministry is to encourage women to reject feminism, deny their personal desires, and live out God’s design for their lives: Biblical womanhood, which centers on traditional feminine gender performance, subordinance to one’s husband, and motherhood. This project seeks to understand the ways that white fundamentalist Christian women make sense of and mobilize against the feminist movement in order to augment our understanding of anti-feminist backlash and white Evangelical women’s place in the culture wars. Informed by research on white Evangelical women in the US and microcelebrity practices, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of 67 blog posts (2012-2021) and 14 YouTube videos (2016-2021) tagged “feminism” on the Girl Defined blog. This analysis demonstrates that Girl Defined portrays feminism as fundamentally self-interested and synonymous with mainstream secular culture. Clark and Beal appeal to their audiences by incorporating neoliberal logics of self-improvement while appropriating the language of progressive movements to modernize their presentation of traditional gender norms. Through their expansive construction of feminism as ideologically dominant, Girl Defined simplifies and individualizes women’s experiences to frame Biblical womanhood as a “radical” alternative to feminism. Overall, these findings provide insight into the paradoxical flexibility of hyper-conservative ideologies that center on a rigidly defined “us” vs. an ever-flexible “them” while expanding our understanding of the ways conservative thought leaders modernize old ideas and use digital networks and influencer logics to spread them.

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Section: Relevant Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Girl Defined by God: Biblical Womanhood, Anti-Feminism, and White Evangelical Microcelebrities

Lawson

2023

SPIR

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“…Workers are increasingly exerting voice and developing collective forms of organizing through online activism and social media (Arora & Thompson, 2018; Gerbaudo, 2012; Masip et al, 2020, Vats, 2015). Activists’ use of hashtags to address racism (Vats, 2015), build solidarity (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), and develop feminist identities (Laughlin, 2020) exemplify the multiple uses of such technologies. Similarly, crowdsourcing platforms have emerged as tools for sharing information about labor rights and fostering dialog among workers (Arora & Thompson, 2018).…”

Section: Online Activism and Technological Affordancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our second site of analysis included the @AMTransparency Twitter handle, building upon an approach to social media as public performances of identity, discourse, and activism (Gerbaudo, 2012; Papacharissi, 2014). Research on Twitter often employs hashtag ethnography to follow themes across user bases (e.g., Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Laughlin, 2020; Vats, 2015). However, AMT employs a different strategy of hashtags, discussed further below.…”

Section: Data Procedures and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Resistant Transparency and Nonprofit Labor: Challenging Precarity in the Art + Museum Wage Transparency Campaign

Südkamp

Dempsey

2021

Management Communication Quarterly

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Drawing upon contemporary academic debates about nonprofit worker precarity combined with needed theoretical re-orientations toward transparency, this paper explicates the situated communication practices and politics of resistant transparency. Resistant transparency describes communication aimed at revealing and publicizing previously obscured or hidden wage data and employment conditions to challenge powerful actors. Resistant transparency involves dynamic shifts in control over information, modes of in/visibility, and surveillance of powerful actors. We develop the case of Art + Museum Transparency, a collective of arts and museum workers employing Google spreadsheets and Twitter to publicize salary information and challenge norms of self-sacrifice and unpaid labor. Moving beyond an understanding of transparency as an institutional demand, our analysis develops how technical affordances shaped the collective’s efforts. We argue that transparency functions as a resistant communicative practice with potential for increasing worker voice and furthering the goals of collective resistance to precarious work across sites of employment.

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Hashtag activism: tactical maneuvering in an online anti-mandatory hijab movement

Basmechi

Barnes

Heydari

2022

Sociological Spectrum

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#AmplifyWomen: the emergence of an evangelical feminist public on social media

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

A Girl Defined by God: Biblical Womanhood, Anti-Feminism, and White Evangelical Microcelebrities

A Girl Defined by God: Biblical Womanhood, Anti-Feminism, and White Evangelical Microcelebrities

Resistant Transparency and Nonprofit Labor: Challenging Precarity in the Art + Museum Wage Transparency Campaign

Hashtag activism: tactical maneuvering in an online anti-mandatory hijab movement

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