In the United States, the nursing profession has been dominated by women, who constitute nearly 90% of the workforce. The profession's popularity among women has consequences for gendered assumptions about labor: unions represent a key path for demanding equitable working conditions, yet the gendered framing of nursing has undermined efforts at building a labor movement within the profession. We offer two contributions with this paper: documenting the working lives of women nurses at a pediatric hospital in Oakland, CA, and unpacking the interrelated tensions between nursing, union work, and feminism. Drawing on interviews with 10 women nurses at Children's Hospital Oakland, we analyze the complex negotiations between gender and feminism that emerge in the everyday lives of union nurses. We use the concept of feminist agency as an organizing principle for understanding the disconnects between nurses and feminist discourse, and the affordances of labor activism for gaining workplace equity and mobilizing broader commitments to health justice.

Hashtag feminism, a form of activism that appropriates Twitter's metadata tags for organizing posts to draw visibility to a cause, has become a central component of the feminist media repertoire. Much discourse about hashtag feminism revolves around whether or not Twitter is an effective tool for activism. This instrumentalist approach leaves activists' strategies for juggling both the affordances and limitations of hashtag feminism under-theorized. Taking up a case study of the #MeToo movement, I consider practitioners' perspectives on hashtag feminism and highlight the processes through which activists develop tactics while working within particular sociotechnical constraints. Through an analysis of a meta-tweets, or tweets about the campaign, I argue that hashtag feminism is a contentious performance in which activists make the personal political by making it visible, bridging the individual with the collective and illustrating the systemic nature of social injustice. As #MeToo demonstrates, however, making the personal visible on a globally networked stage opens activists up to a variety of risks. To address these limitations, #MeToo participants developed performance maintenance strategies, through which they evaluated the campaign's shortcomings and advanced solutions. Their reflexivity points toward hashtag feminism as a complex recursive process aimed at achieving a transformative politics of visibility.

Prevailing theories of marginalized media position the work of resistance as beneath or less than the institutions against which resistance works, raising a number of methodological and ethical challenges for research on online alterity. We offer a margins-as-methods approach for studies of social media on the margins, directing critical attention to the theoretical, ethical, and political implications of positioning subsets of social media users as peripheral to an imagined center. Drawing on theories of feminist reflexivity and our own fieldwork experiences, we articulate the margins-as-methods approach through two sets of practices: deconstructing the power politics behind theories of alterity and identifying how these power politics shape every stage of the research process. We conclude by offering guiding questions for researchers to reflect on as they evaluate the methodological and ethical challenges specific to their projects. The margins-as-methods approach and the reflexive questions it raises build accountability for how our research process may reinscribe the very power relationships that we, alongside our interlocutors, work to contest.

This article analyses hunting television shows selected from three cable channels dedicated to outdoor programming. Despite this genre’s long standing and its influence on mainstream spin-offs, such as Duck Dynasty (2012–present), almost no research examines hunting television. This study pays specific attention to commercial sponsorship and the depiction of killing. Against claims that these shows are designed to educate viewers about conservation, safety and sporting ethics, we find that hunting television is oriented primarily around product marketing and ‘killing on camera’. These findings illustrate the need to examine the confluence of consumerism, entertainment media and hunting culture.

Sexual harassment and assault are longstanding social justice issues at universities and colleges around the world. Recent activist movements, including #MeToo and #LoSHA, have drawn renewed attention to sexual violence in campus communities and academic departments. Through public testimony, survivors have made the widespread nature of assault and harassment in higher education undeniably clear. Less clear, however, is what faculty, staff, and students can do to address sexual violence on campus and hostile climates in academia. This collection of articles considers these issues across a variety of contexts and advances an array of different tactics for responding to assault and harassment and dismantling the norms and attitudes that enable misconduct to persist.

Safe spaces emerged as an important activist tactic in the late twentieth-century United States with the rise of feminist, queer, and anti-racist movements. However, the term's ambiguity, while denoting its wide applicability across movements, has led safe space to become overused but undertheorized. In both theory and praxis, safe space has been treated as a closed concept, erasing the context-specific relational work required to construct and maintain its material and symbolic boundaries. The emergence of online communities promising safety for marginalized groups calls for renewed investigations into the construction of these activist spaces. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the cultivation of safe space within Girl Army, a Philadelphia-based feminist Facebook group. Through participant observation and interviews with Girl Army members, I trace the group's technical and discursive enforcement of safety and the role this space plays in members' activism and everyday lives.

In We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl®, The Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, Andi Zeisler, cofounder of Bitch Media, takes readers on a whirlwind tour through what she calls contemporary feminism’s “uncanny valley” (p. 74). From “empowering” commercials for tampons, to underwear emblazoned with feminist slogans, to celebrities embracing the once maligned f-word like the latest designer handbag, to corporate CEOs aligning the movement’s rhetoric with capitalist values, Zeisler documents popular culture’s cooptation of “facsimiles” of feminist “ideas, objects, and narratives that are, on closer inspection, almost exclusively about personal identity and consumption” (p. 74). Zeisler’s book, as entertaining to read as it is thoroughly researched, draws on a plethora of media texts, consumer goods, historical moments, and cultural phenomena to introduce a popular audience to the steady rise of marketplace feminism. Marketplace feminism presents a world in which “there’s a mainstream, celebrity, consumer embrace of feminism that positions it as a cool, fun, accessible identity that anyone can adopt” (p. xiii), a significant shift from the well-documented cultural moment of postfeminism, in which feminism was acknowledged but repudiated. For feminist activists, the diffusion of the movement into mainstream consumer culture may feel like cause for celebration, given that, particularly in the United States, feminism has struggled against decades of stereotyping, belittlement, and backlash. Zeisler, however, goes to great lengths to warn her readers not to buy into marketplace feminism’s powerful images, like Beyoncé putting feminism’s name in lights at the 2014 Video Music Awards. Rather than indicating a moment of true feminist revolution, marketplace feminism obfuscates the fact that “most of the problems that have necessitated feminist movements to begin with are still very much in place” (p. xii). This includes, in the United States, the continued cuts to welfare programs, the systematic retraction of women’s reproductive rights, the gendered wage gap, the lack of childcare resources or paid family leave, and the perpetuation of rape culture, to name just a few. The book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, Zeisler traces consumer culture’s “new embrace” of feminism, albeit a version decoupled from political analyses of structural power and focused exclusively on individual experiences. The first chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book with a rich historical analysis of the development of “the idea that purchasing itself was a feminist act” (p. 4). From Lucky Strike cigarettes’ 1929 “torches of freedom” to Always’ 2015 “Like a Girl” campaign, Zeisler argues that feminism’s emphasis on women’s autonomy has dovetailed all too nicely with capitalism’s emphasis on self-actualization through consumption. These parallels became even more salient with the 1980s rise of “choice feminism” in tandem with the spread of neoliberalism, both of which boiled “empowerment” down to individual decisions rather than collective action. The marketplace’s emptying of feminism’s politics in favor of a one-dimensional Book reviews 694043 CTP0010.1177/2057047317694043Communication and the PublicBook Reviews book-reviews2017

Activist media refer to media forms that serve activist purposes. Activism can be radical or moderate; media have multiple forms, encompassing television, photography, cartoons, radio, newspapers, zines, the Internet, and even the body. We use both concepts in a broad rather than narrow sense in order to be more inclusive in selecting our entries. Many studies of alternative media, radical media, citizen media, underground press, and social movement media fall under our broad definition of activist media. Mainstream media do not, even though sometimes they help to stir or deter contention and sometimes are appropriated by activists. Activist media are not a new phenomenon. In fact, the rise of modern social movements and nationalism in the 18th century coincided with the development of print capitalism. In the early days of the Internet, many independent web sites, discussion lists, and personal websites were activist media. Dominant digital media platforms of the 21st century, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Weibo in China, are commercial enterprises; they resemble mainstream media more than activist media. Yet some of their spaces are used so deliberately and persistently by citizens or civil society groups to voice dissent or make political claims that they take on functions of activist media. Examples are hashtag activism such as #WhyIStayed and #Ferguson.

Zines have made a resurgence in the United States. What functions do these humble, self-published booklets perform in the current media landscape, where digital reigns supreme? This article explores the political salience of zines for feminists, whose social media tactics have pushed feminism into popular culture and yet who continue to make zines. While much has been written about feminist zines, little research has considered their relevance in the digital age, nor have researchers grappled with the complex relationship between digital and print activist media. Drawing on interviews with zinesters, I argue that feminist zines and online feminism are not materially polarized outlets, but practices with distinct yet symbiotic advantages working in tandem within a repertoire of feminist media tactics.

Abstract Hashtag feminism, or feminist activism that unfolds through Twitter hashtags, has become a powerful tactic for fighting gender inequities around the world. Feminist media research, however, has yet to grasp the implications of this new form and social movement research has yet to model the conditions under which activists successfully mobilize online. This article builds on research regarding the potential and limitations of hashtag feminism to consider a question that remains understudied: what is the process through which a feminist hashtag develops into a highly visible protest? Through a case study of #WhyIStayed, which arose in response to a 2014 NFL domestic violence controversy, I frame hashtag feminism as an extension of the movement’s historically rooted discursive tactics. Hashtag feminism’s narrative form implies that the conditions for a successful online feminist protest parallel the elements of an effective dramatic performance. Using data collected from Twitter and news media, I identify the dramatic elements that propelled #WhyIStayed tweets from online personal expressions to online collective action.