Octavia Calder-Dawe

Rape culture and social media: young critics and a feminist counterpublic

Abstract Social media sites, according to Carrie A. Rentschler, can become both “aggregators of online misogyny” as well as key spaces for feminist education and activism. They are spaces where “rape culture,” in particular, is both performed and resisted, and where a feminist counterpublic can be formed (Michael Salter 2013). In this New Zealand study, we interviewed seventeen young people who were critical of rape culture about their exposure and responses to it on social media and beyond. Participants described a “matrix of sexism” in which elements of rape culture formed a taken-for-granted backdrop to their everyday lives. They readily discussed examples they had witnessed, including victim-blaming, “slut-shaming,” rape jokes, the celebration of male sexual conquest, and demeaning sexualized representations of women. While participants described this material as distressing, they also described how online spaces offered inspiration, education, and solidarity that legitimated their discomfort with rape culture. Social media provided safe spaces that served as a buffer against the negative effects of sexism, and allowed participation in a feminist counterpublic that directly contests rape culture.

The Choreography of Everyday Sexism: Reworking Sexism in Interaction

Sexism thrives in the present because it appears to dwell in the past. Shielded by the claim that we have successfully dispatched it, contemporary sexism flourishes as ‘retro’, ‘hipster’ or ‘ironic’, or else passes unnoticed. Accusations of sexism sound amusingly out-dated and those speaking seriously of sexism may be dismissed as out-of-date themselves - or else as unreasonable and oversensitive. Under these conditions, the persistent presence of sexism has appeared virtually ‘unspeakable’. In this essay I examine this dynamic at close quarters, asking how sexism is performed and resisted in young people’s everyday interactions. Drawing from interviews with twenty secondary school students aged sixteen to eighteen, I develop an account of the ‘choreography’ of sexism: the organising patterns through which sexism is communicated in interaction. This choreography shapes what is said, but also what is felt: how bodies are hailed by sexist communication and recruited into particular patterns of feeling and response. I focus my attention on the moves those I interviewed made to challenge sexism, and the possibilities these manoeuvres hold for unravelling sexism in interaction.

A Prefigurative Politics of Play in Public Places: Children Claim Their Democratic Right to the City Through Play

Children have as much “right” to the city as adult citizens, yet they lose out in the urban spatial justice stakes. Built environments prioritizing motor vehicles, a default urban planning position that sees children as belonging in child-designated areas, and safety discourses, combine to restrict children’s presence and opportunities for play, rendering them out of place in public space. In this context, children’s everyday appropriations of public spaces for their “playful imaginings” can be seen as a reclamation of their democratic right to the city: a prefigurative politics of play enacted by citizen kids. In this article, we draw on data collected with 265 children in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, to consider how children’s playful practices challenge adult hegemony of the public domain and prefigure the possibilities of a more equal, child-friendly, and playful city.