Learning to Feel Otherwise: Emotional Training and Feminist Counter Tactics Amid Online Misogyny in German-Speaking Disruptive Climate Activism

This article examines the experiences with and consequences of online misogyny towards members of the disruptive climate justice movement 'Letzte Generation', foregrounding data collection through online and in-person co-constructed 'in-depth' conversations with activists based in Germany and Austria. Firstly, the analysis focuses on the role of ritualised organisational training practices. I conceptualise these as 'emotive institutions' whose socially organised practices cultivate shared emotional dispositions. These dispositions, understood as learned capacities to reinterpret violent encounters and to distance oneself from certain emotions, travel with activists into their digital encounters and shape how they interpret and respond to online misogyny. Secondly, I propose that some activists, against the background of the organisational training, reinterpret online misogyny as value, transforming it into feminist counter tactics for their activist cause. I conceptualise these as 'tactics of support' and 'tactics of validation' where online spaces provided by misogynists are utilised and infiltrated by activists.