Abstract
Political social media influencers are taking increasingly central and agenda-setting roles within contemporary media ecologies; however, little in-depth research has been conducted with regard to their agency and the practices of the specific agents involved. This article examines Scandinavian Instagram feminists’ practices and experiences in light of the #MeToo campaigns. Building on observations and interviews with feminist influencers whose followers exceed 10,000 each, the article seeks to contribute new insights about social media user agency, concentrating on some of the most powerful voices in digital activism. By regarding #MeToo an assemblage of various homogenous and shifting elements, the article highlights how feminist influencers in the Scandinavian context have taken positions as defining agents of feminism through employing Instagram’s user options for performing affective acts of labor. Though they do not utilize Instagram as a means for making money through advertising the way mainstream influencers do, nonprofit influencers such as microcelebrity feminists have large social media followings and are still arguably important players in the platform economy because of their significant reach and ability to influence political agendas.
Keywords
Introduction
The #MeToo campaigns have generated enormous engagement worldwide since the Harvey Weinstein case broke in the New York Times on 5 October 2017, and in the first 24 h alone, the hashtag was used 12 million times (Mendes, 2021). The Scandinavian countries, renowned for their focus on gender equality (see e.g., Borchorst and Siim, 2008), saw immense media coverage of the hashtag and stories detailing sexual harassment emerge during and after autumn 2017. 1
Whereas #MeToo can be understood first and foremost as a digital response to a major news story, as Karen Boyle argues in her book #MeToo, Weinstein & Feminism (Boyle, 2019), the social media activity of Scandinavian feminists has shown examples of how digital opinion leaders (see e.g. Walter and Brüggemann, 2020) or political influencers (see e.g. Soriano and Gaw, 2021), can ‘expose, critique, and educate’ (Mendes, 2021) both the public and broadcast media and hence bring feminist issues before the public eye. Such users are playing an increasingly important role in the current media ecology, and this was also the case during the #MeToo campaign. Some of the most profiled cases in Scandinavian broadcast media built on posts originating on large feminist accounts on Instagram, where stories of sexual harassment, sometimes involving named perpetrators, would soon create headlines, generate public awareness and make room for new campaigns in the vein of #MeToo.
Though they do not utilize Instagram as a means for making money through advertising the way mainstream influencers do, nonprofit agenda-setters such as microcelebrity feminists have large social media followings and are still arguably important players in the platform economy because their significant reach and ability to influence media agendas make them figures of power in their respective networks. Their position as feminist leaders and, as I argue, personifications of #MeToo due to the posts largely surrounding first-person stories are gained through and depend upon their continuous content production and networking capabilities.
However, little empirical research has inquired into the power and agency of political influencers – and feminist influencers in particular. Addressing this research gap, this article seeks to contribute new insights about social media user agency, specifically regarding feminist activism occurring on Instagram, which actors can be regarded as having agency, and what that entails. The current study draws from 3 years of non-participatory digital observations during and in the years after #MeToo as well as interviews with eight profiled Scandinavian feminist influencers with over 10,000 followers each.
My understanding of agency here draws from assemblage thinking (agencement in French), allowing for a consideration of ‘the creative and critical role of images, bodies, technologies and affects’ (Chidgey, 2018: 196) in entangled constellations of human and nonhuman entities that are never finalized but rather always move and evolve. Both the feminist influencers and #MeToo as a hashtag and point of affective association are here viewed as elements that territorialize (DeLanda, 2011); in other words, they stabilize and define the assemblage in question as a whole but dynamic entity. Due to the similarity of languages, political systems, and cultural values in the three countries, I here see Scandinavian feminists as – although oftentimes holding differing viewpoints – sharing the same affective and cultural associations and hence be part of defining a specific, stabilized Scandinavian #MeToo assemblage.
While highlighting how agency is an interplay between human and nonhuman forces, this article foregrounds the experiences of humans (i.e., the feminist influencers). I here seek to take up the recommendation of Nick Couldry and Alison Powell (Couldry and Powell, 2014: 1), who argue that the need for centralizing agency in studies of datafication must not simply highlight the power of algorithms; studies should be grounded in everyday practices and contexts, focusing on central players and ‘the variable ways in which power and participation are constructed and enacted’.
Drawing on these insights, the article asks the following question: How was Scandinavian feminist influencers’ agency affected by #MeToo? The article provides novel insights into how contemporary feminist activist groupings depend upon working out and acting upon the interrelationship between technological affordances and networked affect to influence political agendas, especially focusing on the acts of labor involved in transforming the #MeToo assemblage and how individual actors can gain powerful positions in that respect.
Techno-affective agency and digital feminist assemblages
In the past decade, multiple studies have discussed the notion of user agency in relation to social media platforms, with José van Dijck’s scholarship being frequently cited and seminal in that regard (e.g., Van Dijck, 2009, Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Considering how users’ actions on platforms are entangled with the technology’s affordances, van Dijck emphasizes that studies of user agency in the digital media age must have a multidisciplinary outlook ‘as the social, cultural, economic, technological and legal aspects of [user-generated content] sites are inextricably intertwined’ (2009: 55). Extending van Dijck’s argument to also consider the affective aspects of user agency, Tero Karppi (2015: 225) argues that the ‘affective dynamics of social media give rise to a human subject who is both an agent of digital labor and an object of processes of data extraction’. With this, Karppi refers to how ongoing affective relations produced through social media networks activate and empower users, yet largely through non-conscious and irrational user engagement.
Incorporating these ideas, I view #MeToo as an example of ‘doing feminism’ (Rentschler and Thrift, 2015) on Instagram which entails a co-construction of human and nonhuman elements and the affective dynamics between these. I here draw on assemblage thinking (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, De Landa, 2006) in addition to feminist scholarship on affect (e.g., Ahmed, 2004, 2017), suggesting techno-affective agency as the best-fitting description for the kind of feminist agency at play. That agency is techno-affective entails that it depends on affective intensities and technological components to materialize and to produce action; it regards ‘an intense attachment that produces an alignment between a specific technological formation and a particular kind of subject’ (Amrute, 2019: 61). In considering the affective underpinnings of #MeToo and their influence on this assemblage, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s scholarship regarding what affect and emotions 2 do as they ‘stick’ to and together different entities (Ahmed, 2004). A central aspect of Ahmed’s approach to affect is that it is not placed within bodies. Rather, it circulates between bodies and signs and is produced only as an effect of its circulation.
In linking affect, agency, and assemblage theory, Müller (2015: 27) argues that assemblages allow for ‘rethinking the relations between power, politics and space from a more processual, socio-material perspective’ where affect also is situated as socio-material and can be distributed between the homogenous components of the assemblage. An important aspect of the latter is the ontological diversity of agency, and, as Müller remarks, the translation from the French word agencement into English loses the conception of assemblages as arrangements that create – and can transform – agency. Drawing from central assemblage theorists Deleuze and Guattari, Müller focuses on assemblages mainly as analytical tools that help illuminate the assembled aspects of certain realities, something I have adopted in the present study. Thus, he outlines five features that are (at minimum) required for assemblages to materialize, namely, that they are 1) relational, 2) productive, 3), heterogeneous, 4) can mutate or be destabilized (through deterritorialization or reterritorialization) and 5) that they are desired. These were central in the analysis of the paper, as I will return to.
To be able to point to what is explicitly feminist activist about the #MeToo assemblage, I look to Red Chidgey’s (2018) concept of protest assemblages in her study of feminist remix culture. Chidgey highlights the necessity ‘to attend to the acts of labor behind the assemblage’ in order to point at ‘[w]ho has the ability to mobilize and bring together action/materials within social movements’ (2018: 197). This is also central to the present article, where techno-affective agency can be regarded as the feminist acts of labor holding the #MeToo assemblage together.
#MeToo as feminist snap: From moment to movement
Although the hashtag has been attributed to actor Alyssa Milano, the original founder of #MeToo was African American activist Tarana Burke who since 2006 had used the ‘me too’ term to spotlight young Black girls’ experiences with sexual abuse. Both #MeToo and other hashtag campaigns, such as #BeenRapedNeverReported (Mendes, 2019), #WhyIStayed (Clark, 2016) and #safetytipsforladies (Rentschler, 2016), have been thoroughly researched in recent years, however, there are still few qualitative analyses foregrounding platform users’ experiences of utilizing the hashtags (see Quan-Haase et al., 2021). In terms of mixed methods approaches, Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles’ book #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Jackson et al., 2020) utilizes both network and discourse analyses to point to the importance of Twitter for marginalized communities in making their voices heard through #MeToo and other hashtag campaigns.
Otherwise, the extensive #MeToo literature that has emerged since the fall of 2017 has largely been approached through studies of the mediation of feminism through media texts (see Boyle, 2019), prompting discussions about whether the events should be situated as merely a hashtag and a moment – or as a movement.
This article argues that assemblage thinking encompasses both moment and movement and especially looks to Sara Ahmed’s scholarship for theorizing #MeToo through an assemblage lens. Her accounts of affect and emotions as doings have informed many recent feminist media studies such as Mendes’ seminal work on digital feminist activism in addition to three of the 19 independent chapters in #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change from 2019 edited by Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes (2019), to name just a few.
Ahmed (2017: 3) argues, ‘A movement comes into existence to transform what is in existence. […] We might say a movement is strong when we can witness a momentum.’ #MeToo as a form of media event (see Hepp and Couldry, 2010) is a prime example of such a momentum, which I here see as embodying what Ahmed describes as a ‘feminist snap’ (2017). A snap, Ahmed contends, ‘is quite a sensation’ (2017: 188); it is an ‘affective breaking point’ that for feminism can be both affirmative and creative. When people react in synchroneity, a snap can also be collective. Ahmed contends that snap is something that occurs after slowly building up with time through several small, noticeable events and is thus not a starting point of something but can be the start of something. This is thus in line with assemblage theory in regarding affect as not residing in bodies yet seeing affected elements as entanglements of already existing entities reconfiguring into new compositions of elements.
Furthermore, Ahmed explains, ‘[r]ebellion becomes a feminist mirror; a way of reflecting each other’ (ibid: 204). Seeing one’s continued senses of injustice reflected and multiplied hence intensifies and affirms them. To quote Basner et al. (2018: 904), who utilize the snap as an analytical device for discussing affective activism, ‘That snap moment is when I re-gain agency’. It thus initiates movement in both senses of the word. Feminist snap, then, provokes movement, initiates action, and moves or influences those in its way.
Defining the feminist influencer
Influencers can be defined as key users who, through commercial partnerships and careful use of affordances to maximize followers’ attention, ‘filter and disseminate content for their audience’ (Abidin, 2018: 72). Scholars from various fields, including media and communication as well as psychology and marketing, have studied this phenomenon in the past decade (e.g., Chae, 2018; Freberg et al., 2011; Gräve, 2019; Lou and Yuan, 2019).
Within media studies, danah boyd (boyd, 2008) provided an early account of especially influential players in digital networks in her study of how the sociality of American teenagers is shaped through the available technological architecture. She describes how there is often a niche group within a networked community that gains visibility, sometimes reaching microcelebrity status. In the past few years, these niche groups of central users with many followers have been attractive to advertisers for their ability to promote products while simultaneously posting everyday material, soon being branded as social media influencers. However, whereas professional influencers use social media for economic purposes, political influencers (Soriano and Gaw, 2021) are idealistic individuals who utilize social media platforms for activist work. Yet, little scholarship on their impact or experiences exists.
Within feminist media studies, a multitude of analyses has been conducted centralizing platformized labor (e.g., Bishop, 2019, Duffy and Pruchniewska, 2017, Mendes, 2021), providing valuable insights into how feminized entrepreneurship in the platform economy relies on technical, creative, and self-promotional skills. Several studies have also examined how part-taking in feminist activism on social media platforms entails technical knowledge and affective labor (e.g., Mendes, 2019). Nevertheless, research still needs to be conducted on the unpaid activist work taking place on platforms by feminist influencers; social media users with large followings due to their frequent posting of feminist content and who are also considered spokespeople for feminist causes outside social media. The current study thus seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature of feminist platform studies.
I here employ the term ‘feminist influencer’ rather than, for example, ‘feminist opinion leader’ for two reasons. First, I am interested in how these users influence action in the feminist assemblages in question. Second, although not making money from their platform content like regular influencers, I see this type of idealistic influencing as comprising a form of affective economy (Ahmed, 2004) entailing that the ability to direct affect and facilitate affective networks can accumulate into value and power. As Ahmed puts it, the more certain signs, such as the hashtag #MeToo, circulate, ‘the more affective they become, and the more they appear to “contain” affect’ (ibid: 120). This can thus be regarded as an example of how techno-affective agency plays out on feminist Instagram accounts.
Methodology, data and analysis
I chose Instagram as the platform to focus on for this article because it was the central social media platform for #MeToo-related content in Scandinavia and was also the most frequently used by the informants with the purpose of posting feminist material. McCosker et al. (2020: 1) describe Instagram as giving ‘intimate visual access to events, experiences, and situations in a manner that is mobile and contextual’, and its architecture, which is built around personal profiles, is better suited to both posting extensive opinions and engaging in discussion with a specific community than, for example, Twitter or Facebook. This also meant that I could capture #MeToo in a larger context and not just the posting of the actual hashtag, which could be the result on Twitter.
The data collection began in October 2017 by following the actors (Latour, 2005) and especially the #MeToo hashtag. First, I identified and followed a handful of profiled feminists on Instagram that through their visibility in both traditional media outlets and on social media have earned a position as what one informant referred to as ‘go-to feminists’ for the media in news stories relating to feminist issues. Thus, most of their posts concern feminist activist content, meaning that they also feature little to no sponsored posts. They have reached a large following (10,000 to over 120,000 followers each) through their rigorous posting practices (at least every week, but most of them post every day) while utilizing multiple of Instagram’s options for use (e.g., regular posts, Instagram Stories that disappear within 24 h, commenting on their own and others’ posts, Q&As, and live streaming). Eventually, I identified 15 profiles that were definable as feminist influencers on Instagram following the above criteria. I managed to set up interviews with eight of these; however, data from all 15 profiles were used in the observations.
The informants have varied backgrounds. While some work in the media and entertainment industries, others have jobs in the service industries or at nonprofits. They all live in and originate from Scandinavia, identify as women, are white or white-passing, and are aged between 25 and 54. Some of them post in English, while others use their local language, which largely can be understood by people from other Scandinavian countries. A few have been directly involved with the various campaigns spurred in the wake of #MeToo, while others have not.
Following assemblage thinking, I regardless see these women as central players because they have all discussed or facilitated discussion around #MeToo and related feminist topics and are hence relationally entangled (see Rodríguez-Giralt, 2018) with the wider #MeToo assemblage. This entails, for example, that they have been central in defining the hashtag within the realm of contemporary feminist activism for a wider audience, directing the Scandinavian public’s associations of #MeToo to the structural problems of sexual harassment. And most importantly, these influencers are those who predominantly can facilitate the ‘acts of labor’ (Chidgey, 2018) involved in mobilizing for and bringing together the feminist assemblage being studied.
The corpus comprises observational data (field notes, screengrabs, and archived comments) and interviews. The observations focused on the specific profiles of each of the feminist influencers, and I analyzed posts published between September 2017 and September 2020. The comments sections under these profiles’ posts were hence viewed as central spaces for feminist debate, where issues are discussed relating to the posts from the profile in question. Checking in on the 15 profiles daily, I for instance noted which feminist issues were featured on these Instagram profiles; how these were presented and discussed both by the profile in question and by their followers in the comments sections through, for example, the use of hashtags or images; and how often material was posted through which Instagram feature. In the case of news articles being referred to on Instagram, I focused only on the way these were presented and discussed in the Instagram context.
I conducted the interviews at the end of the observation period, which meant that I already had a basis of significant knowledge on which to build interview questions as well as the ability to ask the informants personalized questions based on specific posts or activities on their platform within the chosen period. The interview guide featured extensive questions about their experiences with having a large following on Instagram, what opportunities and restrictions this role gave them, as well as #MeToo, focusing on its significance in their personal lives as well as for the feminist cause. The interviews lasted from 40 to 120 min, median time of 80 min. Interviews were then transcribed verbatim, and selected quotations were translated into English. Following Hepp and Couldry’s (2010) understanding of globalized media cultures, I did not set out to emphasize the different countries from which the informants originated. Interviews were conducted in line with the guidelines of the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD), and following these, all individuals were given pseudonyms to protect their identities. I utilized a private Instagram account for the study, which was almost solely used for research during the 3 years.
As previously outlined, the analytical framework of this article draws from Müller’s (2015) reading of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) viewing assemblages as analytical tools. The coding approach was inspired by latent thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), identifying, and interpreting underlying conceptions in the data material. Three of Müller's (2015) listed assemblage features, namely productivity, relationality, and (de)territorialization, became the overarching themes found to best illuminate the different aspects of the techno-affective agency at play through the individual influencers’ ongoing work. Productivity refers to the emergence of ‘new behaviors, new expressions, new actors and new realities’ (ibid: 29), and relationality regards how ‘arrangements of different entities [link] together to form a new whole’ (ibid: 28). (De)territorialization surrounds how ‘[a]ssemblages establish territories as they emerge and hold together but also constantly mutate, transform and break up’ (ibid: 29). To provide a clearer understanding of the topic at hand, I here also build on how the latter terms are utilized within media studies (e.g., Hepp, 2005, Tomlinson, 1999) in relation to physical territories and communities. Especially useful for understanding how online communication during #MeToo shifted the discourse on sexual harassment is Andreas Hepp’s (2005) suggested extension of the term deterritorialization to include also ‘communicative deterritorialization’. This entails that there are ‘translocal connections between different “present contexts” and across various territories’ (2005: 7), a suitable description to also pinpoint the shifting communicative territories in the Scandinavian countries during and in the aftermath of #MeToo.
Due to the analytical guidance of the above three assemblage features, the following analysis is divided into three thematic sections reflecting these.
Setting off change: The productiveness of #MeToo
I thought ‘it’s finally happening. A revolution is coming’. And that … That’s what’s so great about social media, that it has the ability to spread so fast and so extensively, you know? It’s so big. And it has no boundaries. […]. And I think it’s exciting to see ‘now the cup has runneth over’. That effect. That now you just can’t ‘unsee’ it, in a way. Because you have been made aware and one holds power accountable. That is what a revolution is. So it’s very empowering. Yes, that’s probably the best word, really. I found it very empowering. And that … it was very, very nice to see that anyone could speak up. There was a very low threshold for being able to write ‘this has happened to me too’. That’s what it is, right; me too.
So explained Maria, a Norwegian in her late 20s, regarding her reaction when she realized that #MeToo had grown out of its social media origins, becoming a global phenomenon discussed by the largest newspapers and TV channels. All the Norwegian and Swedish informants had similar reactions and highlighted the empowerment and even life-altering experience of seeing all media outlets, both digital and non-digital, personal and public, provide space and time for sharing and affirming particular feelings of frustration toward everyday experiences of sexism. As another informant stated, ‘When #MeToo came to Norway, it was like “wow, now my life will actually change because everyone will now see that it’s wrong”’.
Hence, the massive news value of #MeToo and the many cases emerging in its aftermath had an undeniable impact on both the content being uploaded to Instagram and how users communicated with each other on and through the platform. It thus shows exactly how #MeToo was productive in the sense of allowing for new expressions, behaviors, and actors to emerge, spurred by the ‘affective dynamics’ (Karppi, 2015) of Instagram.
Heidi, a 30-year-old informant, told me she was in the middle of a ‘#MeToo case’ at work in the autumn of 2017. She explained how seeing the rigorous media coverage of the campaign made her feel, saying, [I]t was very liberating because I realized my emotions were right, in a way. That it had been so many years I had not been heard, or like, when I spoke out, nothing happened. Or, things I knew were wrong, but others did not seem to think they were wrong.
This, then, points to how news media’s rigorous coverage of #MeToo also functioned as a confirmation for the activists that these issues are worth fighting for. Several of the informants mentioned the powerful feeling of centering women from all over the world around shared experiences of sexual harassment, pointing to #MeToo as representing what Hepp and Couldry (2010) call ‘thickening’ of mediatized intensity. The concept of thickening can here also describe the assemblage forming around the #MeToo hashtag in the days and weeks after the Weinstein case broke due to the consistent postings by feminists and survivors: It was dense with affective testimonials and first-person narratives, their accompanying selfies, and a plethora of news articles, to name but a few.
Moreover, the emotional and technological guidance – through encouraging followers to use social media to share their own stories – of feminist influencers during #MeToo pinpoints a central principle of assemblage thinking, namely, what Red Chidgey refers to as ‘emergent practices through which power and authority are both concentrated and dispersed’ (2018: 198). During the weeks of heavy broadcast media coverage of #MeToo-related material, several of the informants frequently used the stories function on Instagram to share screenshots of news stories, often with celebratory exclamations if the story referred to the magnitude of the campaign, sometimes just with an emoji such as the fist symbol. The emoji use was generally interesting in the comments sections and under posts commenting on #MeToo-related content. Instead of using sad emojis such as crying faces or hearts to respond to stories of sexual abuse, comments made frequent use of the fist emoji, the muscle emoji, and the fire emoji, sometimes combined with hearts in different colors, indicating fighting spirit and what Sara Ahmed refers to as ‘constructive anger’ (2004). Relating this to Müller’s assemblage features, then, the accumulation of anger became a productive force for the feminists, significantly increasing their techno-affective agency.
Ahmed’s theory of feminist snap is also useful for describing the influencers’ actions and assembling abilities within their respective networks during #MeToo. She writes that snap ‘can be rethought of not only as an action but as a method of distributing information that can counter what is already known; sending stuff out that will enable a snap to be shared as a form of waking up to the world’ (2017: 210). Operating as both self-affirmation and collective affirmation, the similarities of the stories published on Instagram were ‘interwoven with each other, told together, creating a feminist tapestry’ (Ahmed, 2017: 202). Consequently, this tapestry or territorialized assemblage (DeLanda, 2011) of #MeToo hashtags, specific uses of emojis, and sharing of the same news stories also seemed to awaken visions of a united front against misogyny, seeing past the differences that at other times set feminists apart.
#MeToo not only involved the sharing of personal stories; in its aftermath, a plethora of new feminist projects and productions bloomed, many of which grew out of feminist Instagram communities. In addition to informative texts being written and shared, several podcasts, art and book projects were soon in the works. One of the Norwegian informants who was involved in a book project in the wake of #MeToo told me how this gave her the opportunity to travel and speak about feminism to various Scandinavian audiences. When asked how she experienced the different attitudes toward feminism in the three countries, she said, It’s very easy to rank. Sweden is far ahead of Norway, and Norway is ahead of Denmark. I noticed this well at [events]. In Denmark, I heard from other women that ‘it hasn’t been a big buzz around #MeToo, I don’t experience that we have talked much about sexual harassment in Denmark’. This was a recurring theme when I talked to Danish women, that it got there much later. That it was a bit like ‘wow, finally’.
This demonstrates how the acts of labor performed during #MeToo opened spaces for discussion and allowed the influencers to inspire others to act upon these issues both online and offline, providing a language for speaking about unconscious sensations of discomfort and pain that for many women had built up over several years.
By rigorously producing media texts and actively discussing feminist issues both on Instagram and in offline forums, feminist influencers ‘[make] sense of what does not make sense’ (Ahmed, 2017: 22), urging others to do the same. An example here includes the growing feminist art communities that particularly in Sweden have grown out of people commenting on and sharing each other’s content. Many of the communities highlight #MeToo as an indicator of when they took the step from merely commenting on each other’s public posts to starting chats and eventually friendships in direct messages (DMs; i.e., Instagram’s private inbox). Another example is the #MeToo manifestation at Sergels torg, a major public square in Stockholm, on 22 October 2017. Counting hundreds of participants protesting sexual harassment and with speakers such as the Minister of Gender Equality, Åsa Regnér, the event was heavily mobilized and covered on Instagram, with several of the most profiled feminists posting pictures from the events posing together. This also highlights both the organizational capacities of feminist influencers and how the assemblage studied breaks the online/offline binary, creating augmented feminist realities (see e.g., Jeong and Lee, 2018).
Co-creating #MeToo: Relations and acts of relational labor
My interview with the only Danish informant occurred the week after Danish media personality Sofie Linde told her own #MeToo story on stage at the Zulu Comedy Awards in August 2020. This performance soon went viral and produced headlines in all three Scandinavian countries. The informant, May, told me how it was important for her to use her influence to share accurate information about this incident to educate and create bonds with her followers, Right now, in Denmark, we have a big situation around a big, like, a second #MeToo. […] So, I did a [series of Instagram posts] about, you know, what is the situation? What does it mean? How can we be better at understanding what’s going on? And then a lot of people will share it to their [Instagram] stories. So, I try to use it in an informative way, basically. Yeah. So people mostly just, you know, say ‘Thank you for sharing the information’. And ‘that’s very useful’, and stuff like that.
All of the informants interviewed and observed for the study not only responded to #MeToo as a news story but simultaneously produced material that followers could make use of, and broadcast media could refer to in their #MeToo coverage. Some of the central informants were also frequently interviewed and featured on television as both ‘feminist experts’ and contributors to the discourse, providing them with a voice to bring their views and experiences to a wider audience. Similarly, several informants highlighted the importance of supporting and reposting material from other feminists on Instagram. Sandra said, ‘[Because of the visibility I have], I find it important to back others. So, you can lift many important issues. And that is vital to be a good feminist’.
Understanding the above in the framework of feminist snap, then, #MeToo can be interpreted as ‘circulating feminist snap through a mediated, affective network of refusal that operates in part through the connective capabilities offered by social media’ (Keller, 2020: 835), where the feminist influencers’ work to create relations and networks is central. As Sara Ahmed contends, the effect of feminist response is relationality and creativity, where collective anger functions as a constructive force. Ahmed explains, ‘Anger is creative, it works to create a language with which to respond to that which one is against, whereby “the what” is renamed and brought into a feminist world’ (2004: 176).
And the latter was a central part of feminist influencers' acts of labor during #MeToo. Yet, the interviewees did not just create relations through their positions as educators and supporters of each other. All the interviewees said that they usually receive DMs or emails every day from followers asking them for advice about issues such as eating disorders and sexual abuse, usually regarding topics the profile in question frequently covers on their Instagram accounts. One Norwegian informant, Karin, had taken her role as a digital advisor even further than the others, saying, A lot of people ask for advice … And I think this is a very difficult ethical challenge. Because I stand there ‘available’ and say in a way that I have the answer. At the same time, I’m talking about myself, right? But it’s not so strange that I become like a kind of ‘health service’ that you can contact, if you understand what I mean. […] Many people ask if we can have a coffee one day because they need to talk to someone. And that … I don’t have the professional competence for that. But … and this probably sounds a bit silly, but I actually take further education now in [tutoring] to be able to meet these people in a different way.
As a prime example of idealistic labor, then, this shows how relationship building and maintenance are expected of the central feminist influencers, and they feel that because they partly earned their agency, visibility, and activist power through their followers’ support, being present for their followers when they need it was part of the influencer role. Sandra reflected on this responsibility, likening herself to a role model to whom her followers listen, saying, I think it is … I don’t want to say ‘honorable’, because … But it’s like, it’s a sign of trust. And that I must show that I am worthy of that trust. So, I treat it with great respect. And caution. But I definitely take my time and answer thoroughly, and I have followed up with several young girls who have contacted me and told me about things that have happened to them in their lives, [for example] at school. And first I encourage them to contact someone they trust, whether it is a parent or teachers or a nurse. So … I experience that several have done that. And that maybe it is … That’s what’s nice about influencers, or call it ‘role models’ or profiles they follow, that they feel that they know you and that it is … Well, there is a low threshold for getting in touch.
This form of affective labor, however, took its toll on the informants both in terms of creating feelings of guilt for not being able to help everyone who reached out but also regarding the time spent posting, replying, and networking on the Instagram platform. Several mentioned that they could spend up to 3 hours just responding to people’s messages, with Karin saying that she purposefully never used any feedback buttons, such as Q&As, on her Stories because that would completely ‘clog up’ her inbox.
One way for Swedish feminist influencers to stay true to their idealistic, largely nonprofit stance (apart from some who promote body-positive campaigns or otherwise politically correct initiatives from socially responsible commercial actors) while simultaneously accumulating some kind of economic value for their activist time is opening up to sponsors through Bottler Community. 3 In this way, followers can sponsor their content creation with 30 Swedish crowns (approximately US$3) per month as a way to show appreciation for the influencer’s time and effort spent serving the feminist community.
Not all the informants see earning money from one’s activism as acceptable, however. Although she views her content creation and networking as a form of labor, Marie does not like the influencer stamp due to the economic aspect. She explained, I feel like the concept of the influencer entails a kind of economy … Or some kind of marketing. And with that, I am mega strict and have never earned a penny on social media. So, I’m more of an activist who … or a fellow sister, who … yes, takes that role seriously. It is a big responsibility, but it is also, well … It’s part of the job.
Shifting agents: The deterritorialization of #MeToo
Despite what seemed like a renewed interest in feminism in the autumn of 2017, several media and gender scholars (see e.g., Boyle, 2019, Sharoni, 2018
Through the lens of assemblage theory, then, one can argue that this is an example of deterritorialization, entailing that the elements comprising the assemblage are altered, destabilizing earlier meanings. For the feminist influencers being studied, this meant that their agency and capability to act and have their opinions heard and validated also shifted. This suggests that what causes snap (Ahmed, 2017) in a feminist sense can with simple reframing or shifting of elements such as the addition of the ‘counter hashtag’ #NotAllMen also cause action in the non-feminist sense because the sensationalism and headlines spurred by #MeToo also awoke the fighting spirit among antifeminists. When questioned about whether she had seen any change after #MeToo regarding the amount and nature of sexually harassing messages from men in her Instagram inbox, Norwegian informant Marie said, I feel it is more now because … That’s what happens in the public discourse, that it becomes polarized, you know? And those who have been, call it opponents, or those who don’t like the world moving forward. Then they feel they definitely have to call it out. ‘Now it has gone too far.’ […] Those who disagree or have something they should have said, they feel very much that ‘no, this should not go unchallenged’, sort of. ‘Now I have to speak up’.
Tying these stories of feminist backlash in with the notion of snap, Jessalynn Keller introduced the term ‘snap backlash’ in her study of Teen Vogue’s feminism. The term refers to the scrutiny faced by those who raise their voice, which ultimately leads to ‘gaug[ing] the impact of feminist snap’ (2020: 828). Danish informant May told me how the backlash had increased the negative affects she experienced through Instagram use, in turn influencing a shift in her practices. Saying that she had almost given up activism due to harassment and death threats after being visible in the public eye due to her feminist activism, she explained the nature of these messages as such, It’s about how, you know, I’m trying to wreck the entire society and I’m a cockroach that should be squished because I’m trying to destroy Danish society from its traditional roots. I’m much more in kind of like the incel conservative, neoconservative rage more than personal – I think I’m seen as a representative of like a politically correct […] agenda.
May then explained how this has made her more restrictive in her Instagram use and that she now focuses more time on conversations outside of social media.
The Norwegian and Swedish influencers did not report the same changes regarding their Instagram practices, however, a few reported that they had received fewer requests from – and hence become less visible – in broadcast media after the #MeToo spectacle had calmed down. This also made them reflect on what #MeToo had meant for the feminist movement and their own role as profiled opinion leaders. When asked what she thinks #MeToo means for contemporary feminism, Swedish informant Hanna said, I don’t think we know yet. [It meant] a lot for awaking a kind of collective force, and made more people understand […] But then the question is, I mean we have name publications and ‘outings’
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and … I think the discussion has ended up surrounding certain people’s actions rather than changing structures, it quickly moved in the wrong direction … or not wrong, but now I experience that people just … It’s the only thing left in the conversation. And I find that sad.
Several of the informants echoed Hanna’s thoughts, and, in hindsight, criticized other feminist influencers’ self-centering practices during the campaign. Ironically, what possibly made Instagram the central medium for #MeToo – and provided the influencers with a voice – in the first place, was likely connected to the fact that the visually-focused platform literally gave a face to the issue of sexual harassment. Commenting on this in a global context, Karen Boyle (2019: 12) argues that the emphasis on visibility over action makes popular feminism ‘fundamentally about being seen – as a feminist, supporting feminist issues – rather than, necessarily, about doing feminism’ (emphasis in original). This suggests that Instagram and its visual, intimate focus and possibilities for embodied activism are ideal for spurring action, yet also may entail a rapid shifting of assemblage entities toward an antifeminist agenda.
Additionally, it shows that although feminist influencers’ affective acts of labor were crucial for the assemblage formation around #MeToo, these individual actors also depended on other components such as broadcast media coverage and the wider public’s support for #MeToo to be positioned as collective feminist activism, and not merely as, for example, individual users’ testimonies spurred by a Hollywood tabloid story. As such, not only did the individual feminist actors influence the associative positioning of the broader assemblage, but the assemblage itself also influenced the position of the individual Instagram feminists and their roles as agenda-setters and faces of contemporary Scandinavian feminism. Relating the above to the more tangible territorialization concepts found in media studies literature, one can follow John Tomlinson (1999) in describing the agency-formation around feminist influencers in their respective countries as a result of the reterritorialization of the #MeToo campaign. Hence, it might also be useful here to extend Andreas Hepp’s (2005) term ‘communicative deterritorialization’ to speak of a communicative reterritorialization post-#MeToo.
That #MeToo as an agenda-setting assemblage had shifted from being intense and highly territorialized during the most omnipresent parts of the #MeToo events was also obvious in the ways that the informants both spoke and posted about it in hindsight a few years later. In reflecting upon the 3 years that had passed since #MeToo began, a profiled Swedish feminist wrote in a post in October 2020 under a selfie with the hashtag written on it, Three years ago today since the revolution was a fact and we will never be silent again. It was such a rollercoaster of emotions. I shuddered, cried, and laughed with freedom bubbles in my chest interchangeably’. In the comments section, almost 100 followers responded to her post, reminiscing about the way they felt in the initial days of #MeToo. Similarly, another informant stated while looking back on the days when #MeToo at its most intense put feminist issues on the agenda daily, ‘I miss feeling like I’m part of a revolution’.
This indicates that the powerful collective notion of feminist agency and ‘being part’ had vanished and become merely a point of nostalgia.
Conclusion
Measuring the impact of feminist activism or agency is difficult (Mendes, 2019: 187). However, as the present article has shown, there is little doubt that the efforts of the feminist influencers studied here have impacted both the signification of #MeToo in their respective countries and their respective followers in various ways. By regarding #MeToo as an assemblage of various homogenous and shifting elements, I have highlighted the ways in which the feminist influencers in the Scandinavian context have acted as durable (Latour, 1990) and hence powerful elements that through the use of Instagram’s affordances and affective acts of labor have taken up fairly stable positions as agents of feminism.
However, I have also shown how assemblage formation is a two-way process. The article points not only to the stabilizing results of the feminist individuals’ rigorous postings and how the #MeToo campaigns opened opportunities for them to position themselves as political influencers; the findings also indicate that there are clear limits to the formation of feminist agency for digital activism – at least at the collective level. My material suggests that other types of media outlets than social media platforms were necessary for the collectively experienced and enacted techno-affective agency to be established, as it was during #MeToo. Feelings of feminist unity seemed to vanish as soon as the backlash campaigns set in, and hence techno-affective agency might only be felt as impactful feminist activism if experienced by feminist Instagram users as impactful also outside the Instagram sphere.
As a result of their role in the collective snap of #MeToo, held together by the stickiness (Ahmed, 2004) of techno-affect, several of the feminist influencers were regarded as personifications of the hashtag. This resulted in further attention, gaining them more followers and likes on Instagram and making them media celebrities. One can hence speculate about whether the feminist influencers’ performances also inhabited strategic affective framings to gain more attention around feminist understandings of #MeToo and perhaps also to themselves as individual actors. This thus prompts the question of which individuals get to occupy the political influencer position in terms of class, race, and social and cultural capital. Several of the feminists under study had reflected upon their privileges in this regard, with all being white or white-passing, fitting into a relatively normative beauty standard, possessing the digital literacy, convenient time schedules, and economic resources available to successfully operate popular social media accounts.
This article has offered novel insights about the political agency of feminist influencers, pinpointing a new, important actor in the media ecology in Scandinavia previously not yet theorized in either feminist media studies or in research on #MeToo. For political influencers, then, agency is enacted in a platformized context, and is dependent upon working out the affective anticipation of their audiences and acting upon and directing this through platform affordances. Future researchers exploring these insights should however pay closer attention to the variations in the reception of #MeToo in the three different countries, to further investigate the social and cultural entities produced through cross-cultural digital activism and the national contexts in this respect.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
