Platform Feminism: Protest and the Politics of Spatial Organization

This article brings into question the political utility of platforms as media for feminist resistance. Using examples of #MeToo

The stage at the 2017 Women's March on Washington was large and draped with vinyl banners that could be read from a distance. In news footage and in images that circulated online in the days following the march, the black platform, and the few bodies that stand on it, are raised in the center of a space packed with pink hats and protest signs. Protesters center themselves around the stage. The stage acts as an anchor so that individual bodies, and by extension the crowd, become oriented around it. The role of the stage, the raised platform, occupies an enduring place within histories and practices of feminist activism. Contemporary discourse around platforms and feminism though, focuses not on the material stages that have become places from which feminist politics are articulated, but rather on the digital platforms that have are understood to be important tools for feminist projects. We might think of Twitter, blogging, and other digital apps as media to raise one's voice -a digital soap box that amplifies an individual's voice. In this paper, I reconsider digital platforms as places for feminist activism. I introduce and question the platform as a significant media that structures feminist politics today. How can we begin to understand the different spatial Significantly each of these recent feminist mobilizations rely on digital media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Such social media platforms lend themselves to making feminism visible and accessible. The platform has become synonymous with social media and mobile apps in the context of digital culture (Gillespie, 2010;Hands, 2013;Langlois and Elmer, 2013;Taylor, 2014;Snerick, 2017) and it is this iteration of the word that is most commonly associated with mediated contemporary feminist movements.
But, sometimes such movements also sometimes employ physical platforms. For example the stages at the Women's March gave a platform to feminist politics by way of celebrities and other popular feminists.. The role of the stage, the raised platform, occupies an enduring place within histories and practices of feminist activism. Stages, podiums, and soap boxes and digital platforms are all media that amplify, elevate, and make bodies visible. But all of these rather common media platforms tend to infer an underlying assumption of safety, privilege and power in relation to social space. The focus on platforms tends to obscure the needs of those who do not take so readily to platforms. Since platforms both elevate only some voices and regulate action, they also necessarily reproduce a certain kind of feminism. Some ways of resisting are deemed acceptable, while others are not. For instance, those more subject to misogynist, racist https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-singh/ 3/10 and homophobic abuse either look to resist differently or are not amplified by platforms. This is at odds with the logic of intersectional feminism as simultaneous forms of oppression are not given equal footing on the platform. This is not to say the online tools cannot or should not be used for feminist political projects, but that platforms might limit the possibilities of feminist politics. By making connections between the material stage at the Women's March on Washington, and the digital platforms of other expressions of contemporary popular feminism, I argue that for feminist political activism to be generative, the platform needs to be put aside.
I approach the platform as a medium that is significant for altering political and social relations. I am not so much interested in the content shared on platforms but rather in the possibility of platforms as media that structure the political and that have their own For those who experience life as intersectional, many of whom are women and black, brown, queer, trans and disabled, space has to be negotiated differently. Spatial strategies of marginalized bodies include everyday methods of negotiating space and moving through the world. This might include things like travelling in groups, choosing to walk the streets only at specific times of the day, setting up protests in places that are proximate to particular locations like police stations or hospitals or practicing self-care.
Another example can be located in The Winter We Danced (2014), where the Kino-ndaniimi Collective gathers writing from the Idle No More movement which centers on the indigenous practice of invading North American malls to perform round dances as an act of resistance. The practice of round dance as resistance can also be read as a differential spatial strategy. These strategies are developed both in response to dealing with institutional rules of particular spaces and for survival. For some, the differential spatial strategies that emerge are focused on factors like safety, escape, concealment and care over that of amplification and popularizing resistance movements. But this https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-singh/ 4/10 focus on strategies and survival is not antithetical to organizing protest or the climactic taking to the state. The need to constantly reconfigure ways of convening need to be read as significant practices of political resistance.
In 2016  refusal. In other words, the material platform of protests and marches is quite often a media that is refused. What we might consider uncovering and amplifying instead are the differential spatial strategies that marginalized feminist activists employ.
(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/singh- applicants. This is all to say that the rise of the platform as an object of study has been rapid, and as a result, the platform as a site of study has gone unchecked in particular ways. Specifically, a materialist reading of the platform from a feminist perspective has yet to be developed. Prevailing approaches to the platform can be categorized into work https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-singh/ 6/10 that fits squarely into what has come to be called "Platform Studies", scholarship on digital activism, and feminist approaches to the platform. Across these approaches, few questions are raised about whether or not the platform is actually doing productive work for feminism; it instead has an assumed utility or political necessity. To question the platform and its role in feminist resistance is also to destabilize an understanding of feminist digital resistance that does not function as it should for feminists on the margins. Prevailing contemporary discourse about 'the platform' in Platform Studies doesn't focus on material stages, and other raised surfaces in physical space, but rather on media theorists who look to make visible differentiated bodies and voices that operate on digital platforms (Hedge 2011;Gajalla 2012;McPherson 2014). André Brock (2012) for example (2012), in his work on Black Twitter problematizes "social science and communication research that attempts to preserve a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else" (546). This shift in thinking might help develop a model for difference, rather than reifying existing power structures.
When online platforms figure into feminist scholarship in media and communication studies it is through discussions of the political possibilities allowed via digital media (Keller 2012;Rentschler 2015;Baer 2016 Through intervening in these fields by raising questions about the platform and its role in structuring intersectional feminist struggle it might be possible to uncover or at least highlight, the important ways in which women who are also POC, queer, trans and/or disabled, develop differential spatial strategies in moments of resistance. We need to begin to think about how feminist struggle has been bound to various iterations of the platform and by extension to normative spatial organizations and how these arrangements are constantly being renegotiated.