“Always perfect,discrimination free,and informed”: The perfect intersectional feminist and digital feminist allyship discourses

Abstract

This article examines how popular intersectional allyship discourses in contemporary digital feminism align with the neoliberal ethos of self-actualizing encouraged by the capitalist social media platforms on which these discourses circulate – and how this ethos materializes in feminists’ subjectivities through “the perfect.” Drawing on interviews with German-speaking feminists about their perceptions of and affective engagements with intersectionality and allyship discourses in digital feminism, I demonstrate that these discourses converge in producing “the perfect intersectional feminist.” Unpacking this theoretical figure, my analysis elucidates its three key tenets in line with neoliberal subjectivity – self-competition, self-improvement, and individualized responsibility – and how these reproduce ideals of perfect white middle-class femininity. My analysis further highlights how the perfect intersectional feminist is conditioned by the judgment-enticing design of social media platforms, enabling not only self- but also peer surveillance, which produces intra-feminist callouts, as well as (self-)competition, exhaustion, insecurity, and anxiety.

Introduction

The visibility afforded by contemporary social media has not only accelerated the rise of popular feminisms over the past decade (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Mahoney, 2020), but also increasingly facilitated the neoliberal co-optation of Black, anti-racist, and decolonial discourses (Kanai and Gill, 2020; Sobande et al., 2022). Intersectionality, a concept rooted in Black feminist activism and theorizing (Combahee River Collective, 1982 [1977]; Davis, 1981; Lorde, 1984), marks a prominent example of this neoliberal mainstreaming. Coined by legal scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989: 140) to challenge Black women’s subordination in US law by highlighting that Black women’s “intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism,” intersectionality has become a popular “buzzword” in feminist scholarship (Davis, 2008; Nash, 2019). In recent years, intersectionality has also widely circulated in social movements, brand cultures, and digital feminist spaces (Banet-Weiser and Glatt, 2023; Kanai, 2020, 2021; Morrison, 2021; Sobande, 2019). Focusing on the latter context, I have theorized the emergence of a “popular intersectionality” which manifests as a digital feminist discourse articulating intersectionality as a new feminist “imperative of inclusion” (Schindel, 2026). Popular intersectionality, I have further argued, works as a technology of self, governing digital feminists’ affective engagements with intersectionality, and allures them into performances of normative white middle-class femininities through discursively enacting notions of “care” and “kindness” in their digital feminist practices.

In this article, I closely examine how popular intersectionality discourses about allyship align with the neoliberal ethos of self-actualizing and self-transformation encouraged by the capitalist platforms on which these discourses circulate – and how this ethos materializes in feminists’ subjectivities through the ideal of “the perfect” (McRobbie, 2015, 2020). Such a subjectivity is not surprising within the wider cultural landscape, in which neoliberalism operates as a continuous self-governmentality for women and marginalized groups especially (Gerodetti and McNaught-Davis, 2017; Kanai and Gill, 2020; Scharff, 2015), and where “perfect femininity” (Gill, 2023) is also increasingly expected from feminists (Kanai, 2020; Scharff, 2024). Drawing on interviews with German-speaking digital feminists conducted in 2021 about their perceptions of and affective engagements with intersectionality and allyship discourses in contemporary digital feminism, my analysis demonstrates that these discourses converge in producing another category of “the perfect” (McRobbie, 2015, 2020), what I propose we call “the perfect intersectional feminist.” The figure of the perfect intersectional feminist, I contend, embodies another version of the aspiration to the “good life” (Berlant, 2011) through perfect femininity (McRobbie, 2015, 2020), where the “good life” can be substituted with “good feminist/ally.”

Unpacking this theoretical figure, my analysis elucidates the perfect intersectional feminist’s three key tenets in line with neoliberal subjectivity (Scharff, 2015) – self-competition, self-improvement, and individualized responsibility – and how these reproduce ideals of normative white middle-class femininity (Kanai, 2020). Following Caldeira et al. (2018) in reading contemporary social media like Instagram as a “technology of gender” (de Lauretis, 1987), I suggest that social platforms encourage expressions of perfect femininity in popular intersectional allyship discourses. Specifically, my discussion focuses on how the perfect intersectional feminist is conditioned by the judgment-enticing design of social media platforms, enabling not only self- but also peer surveillance, which in turn, produces intra-feminist critique and callouts, as well as (self-)competition. The resulting affective responses are described by my participants as pressure, exhaustion, anxiety, and insecurity. I argue that if contemporary notions of intersectional allyship continue to be articulated in neoliberal terms of perfecting the self, which center “perfect” white middle-class femininities and responsibilize the individual for achieving social change, popular intersectional allyship fails to meaningfully disrupt structural and institutional forms of intersecting oppression.

“The perfect” in the digital age

In theorizing the “psychic life” of contemporary neoliberal media cultures (Gill and Kanai, 2018; Scharff, 2015), Angela McRobbie (2015: 4) elucidates how “the perfect” serves as “a leitmotif for contemporary femininity.” Embodying white, middle-class aspirations toward “having it all,” the perfect operates as a new form of “governmentality” in all domains of women’s lives, including health, beauty, work, family, and relationships (McRobbie, 2020). Rather than outrightly “repudiating” (Scharff, 2012) feminism in a postfeminist sense, the perfect absorbs a neoliberal feminist paradigm and transfigures as a “set of self-directed goals” (McRobbie, 2015: 12) in the aforementioned areas. Ideals of perfect femininity are therefore marked by heteronormativity and “inner-directed” as well as “outer-directed competition” (McRobbie, 2015: 15), rendering women into “subjects of chronic anxiety” (McRobbie, 2020: 52).

Mainstream media and popular culture have long inundated women with messages about achieving ideal femininity (De Benedictis and Orgad, 2017; Dosekun, 2020; Gill, 2007). Over the past decade, attaining the perfect has arguably been intensified by the panoptical nature of digital media. Digital technologies such as smartphones and beauty apps encourage “digital self-monitoring” (Elias and Gill, 2018) and an understanding of the self as “editable” (Coffey et al., 2025) toward ideals of feminine perfection. Moreover, contemporary social media, which not only have normative gender performances “baked” into their affordances (Bivens and Haimson, 2016), but also the judgment of these performances (Nurka, 2014), enable peer surveillance and judgment (Gill, 2023). Female influencers regularly receive abuse for simultaneously being “too real” and “not real enough” (Duffy et al., 2022). Yet, being “real,” or “authentic,” on social media is often code for “a performance of idealized white cis-gendered identity” (Banet-Weiser, 2021: 144). Those falling outside of this ideal, that is, Black, queer, trans, disabled, and working-class women and non-binary folks, are therefore disproportionately affected by what has been called “gendered authenticity policing” (Duffy et al., 2022). This kind of policing also scrutinizes everyday users, who, while increasingly educated and aware of how digital media and cultures reinforce norms of white femininity, remain “critical but caught” (Gill, 2023: 182), unable to resist the pressures of perfect femininity online.

In the context of digital feminist organizing, a “perfect standard” of activism, which dictates that one should “live the issue” (Bobel, 2007: 153), has been observed as well, where “investments in pursuing ‘perfect’ forms of activism can be read as a way of performing femininity” (Scharff, 2024: 464). Instagram, for instance, has become a seemingly accessible platform for digital feminisms (Barbala, 2022), as it allows feminists to visually depict their feminist politics, yet, more platformed visibility also leads to bigger audiences and hence increased “accountability” of one’s politics (Mahoney, 2020). Digital feminists have thus been described as adopting an internalized “neoliberal self(ie) gaze” (Saraswati, 2021) and carefully curating and “filtering” their feminist content (Savolainen et al., 2022), driven by intense fears about “getting it wrong” (Gill, 2023). Akane Kanai (2020: 38), for instance, observes in her participants’ engagement with intersectional feminism “palpable anxieties in relation to regulating and perfecting the self.” The digital feminist self thus requires a constant perfect self-representation – and this includes enacting perfect intersectional politics (Kanai, 2020), and, as I demonstrate in this article, perfect intersectional allyship.

Digital allyship and callout and cancel cultures

In recent years, following the police killing of George Floyd and the subsequent global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, terms like “allyship” and “wokeness” have risen to popularity in mainstream media and digital cultures (Sobande et al., 2022). During what has been dubbed the “Great Antiracism Summer of 2020” (Jackson and Rao, 2022: 110), so-called “social justice slideshows” (Nguyen, 2020) circulated widely on digital platforms and “the proliferation of allyship guides became overwhelming” (Dabiri, 2021: 7). Much has thus been said and written in public, activist, and academic culture about allyship, yet understandings of what allyship entails often differ. Education scholar Ellen M. Broido (2000: 3) defines allies as “members of dominant social groups (e.g., men, Whites, heterosexuals) who are working to end the system of oppression that gives them greater privilege and power based on their social-group membership.” In contemporary digital feminist “knowledge cultures” (Kanai, 2021), I contend, the work toward ending such systems manifests as individualized responsibility and narratives of self-transformation in keeping with the neoliberal ethos of “the perfect” (Kanai, 2020; McRobbie, 2015, 2020).

The ideal of perfect intersectional allyship is further complicated by the high-stakes nature of feminist and other left-wing online cultures (Kanai and Zeng, 2024; Schindel, 2026). “Digital allyship” (Clark, 2019) has increasingly been criticized as “performative,” most prominently in response to millions of Instagram users and brands sharing black squares on #BlackOutTuesday (Wellman, 2022). “Performative allyship” hence commonly refers to “allyship that is more strongly motivated by personal needs than a genuine concern for the disadvantaged group” (Kutlaca and Radke, 2022: 8). Unsurprisingly, feminist scholars have noticed such policing behavior in digital feminist communities as well (Curran-Troop, 2026; Hannell, 2024; Kanai and Coffey, 2023). Indeed, Rosalind Gill (2023: 183) observes “a prohibition against failing” where not knowing something “can be constructed as blameworthy.” (Not) living up to the ideal of the perfect is thus “morally charged” (Kanai, 2024: 1048), and further complicated by contemporary digital callout and cancel cultures (Clark, 2020; Ng, 2022).

Rooted in womanist and queer communities of color, canceling has been associated with withdrawing support for someone’s work when their “values, (in)actions, or speech are so offensive, one no longer wishes to grace them with their presence, time, money” (Clark, 2020: 88). However, in the context of rising mobilization on the far right in recent years, canceling now resembles “a policing discourse, looking less and less like a call for accountability and more and more like an effort to control the boundaries of what can be said, how and by whom” (Farries et al., 2025: 3; see also Ross, 2025). Importantly, social media play a crucial role in the shifting understandings and uses of cancel culture, as platforms become “themselves actors” (Farries et al., 2025: 4), governed by their owner’s politics and wider underlying racist, sexist, and capitalist ideologies (lasade-anderson and Sobande, 2025).

Callout and cancel culture are of course not exclusive to digital feminisms or specific platforms. However, I contend they are particularly pronounced in the figure of the perfect intersectional feminist. I argue that the meaning of allyship, in this context, has transformed into a new feminist imperative which demands continuously perfect intersectional allyship from digital feminists. As my analysis in this article shows, feminists ought to be informed about every possible social justice fight and always behave “correctly” as an ally. To achieve this, feminists need to constantly consume knowledge, self-reflect, and actively work on becoming a perfect intersectional feminist and ally. However, in contrast to common conceptions of “performative allyship” in the scholarly literature (see Kutlaca and Radke, 2022; Wellman, 2022), I suggest that the aspiration toward perfect intersectional allyship reaches beyond motives of white guilt or securing a certain social status. Rather, the care and empathy demonstrated toward the marginalized Other reflects a genuine desire for a socially just feminism (see Scharff, 2023b). Yet, these ideals are also deeply intertwined with ideals of white middle-class femininities. My analysis thus aims to critically examine how neoliberal-capitalist platform affordances and cultures enabling the performance of perfect normative femininity encourage this desire.

Methodology

My analysis draws on interview data collected as part of a study examining the popularization of intersectionality in digital feminist spaces (Schindel, 2024). German-speaking digital feminism formed my case study, however, I argue popular intersectionality discourses can be observed in other Western contexts as well (see Kanai, 2020, 2021; Morrison, 2021). My research explored both digital feminists’ articulations of intersectionality and their affective engagements with popular intersectionality debates. As part of a mixed-methods approach, I conducted 22 in-depth online interviews (15 via video call, 7 via email) with self-identified digital feminists in the spring and summer of 2021. I obtained formal ethics approval for this research from King’s College London and all participants provided written informed consent prior to participation. Participants were recruited via multiple channels, including personal networks, gender studies mailing lists, in feminist Facebook groups and on Instagram, as well as directly contacting feminists who had posted under #intersektionalität [#intersectionality] on Instagram.

My interviewees form a heterogenous group in terms of age (22–64), gender (16 female, 2 male, and 4 non-binary or agender identities), and sexuality (half identified as “queer” or on the bi + spectrum, nine as “heterosexual,” one identified as “asexual/aromantic,” and another preferred no labels but felt “straight” would be the most accurate). The majority of participants (18) self-identified as white, while four individuals described themselves as “white/Russian/post-Eastern/Jewish;” “white & Jewish;” “Italian, Spanish, Turkish, & Kurdish;” and “Mixed (Irish, German, Native American, Ivory Coast).” All participants resided across Germany, though one participant indicated that they were from Austria originally. Moreover, all interviewees were university educated (although some mentioned a working-class family background), with many having completed degrees in the arts and humanities or social sciences. Many participants worked in social or media and culture-related professions, such as teaching, diversity and inclusion, translation, journalism, or social media. Three interviewees disclosed living with a chronic or mental health condition and one participant mentioned having autism. Participants engaged in a range of on- and offline feminist activities, including posting, liking, and commenting about feminist issues on social media, running a feminist book club or showcasing their feminist art on Instagram, blogging and YouTube-ing, reading feminist newsletters, producing a feminist zine, and “doing activism at work.” While this brief overview shows that my interviewees engage with feminism on a range of digital platforms, Instagram stood out as the most popular, which resonates with other recent research on digital feminisms (Barbala, 2022; Mahoney, 2020).

Interview quotes have been translated from German to English by myself. To protect participants’ anonymity, ¹ I use pseudonyms and do not include identity markers such as race, sexuality, or class (I do include the interview format to account for stylistic differences). Removing this information also enables me to highlight the hegemonic nature of popular intersectional allyship discourses across gender and racial formations (see Hemmings, 2011). Finally, it should be emphasized that my participants are both “providing accounts” of their own engagement with intersectional allyship while also acting as “informants” (Kanai, 2020: 33) about contemporary digital feminist cultures and discourses.

The perfect intersectional feminist: key tenets

“I am not enough” – self-competition

The first key tenet of the perfect intersectional feminist is self-competition marked by aspirations toward perfect intersectional activism and allyship. This reverberates through a common belief many interviewees articulate: that they “do not do enough.” In Alexis’ case, this refers to the label “activist”: “I struggle calling myself an activist, because I look up to many activists like eg Tupoka Ogette and then I think: I don’t do enough, by far” (email). Later, Alexis explains that she regards her feminist Instagram account as “spare time activism,” in contrast to Ogette who works full time as author, podcaster, keynote speaker, and workshop facilitator on anti-racism. Statements like these reflect the “perfect standard” of activism (Bobel, 2007), which demands that one “lives the issue” to be considered an activist.

In the context of digital feminist allyship discourses, intersectionality functions as another “perfect standard,” as Romy’s critical self-questioning demonstrates: “That is indeed the topic I am constantly laboring on. Am I, in my work, anti-racist enough? Am I intersectional enough?” (video call). Likewise, Maria’s ruminations show that applying intersectionality in one’s feminism opens up multiple avenues in which one could “do more”:

Once you’ve realized one thing, then the next follows, but you also recognize that you could do better. And then also this and also that. That means, you have already internalized this constant conflict [. . .] I am not enough, I don’t do enough, I have to do more [. . .] and actually you end up in a constant conflict with yourself, and that is based on the kind of thinking, I am not enough. I have to do more. (Video call)

The notion of “not doing enough,” or in its extreme form, “I am not enough,” exemplifies the self-competition of the perfect intersectional feminist. The striving for the unattainable goal of perfection in relation to intersectional allyship thus serves as a “neoliberal spreadsheet, a constant benchmarking of the self, a highly standardized mode of self-assessment” (McRobbie, 2015: 10).

Another version of the perfect intersectional feminist’s self-competitiveness is “not knowing enough,” which also affects how much feminists actively participate in digital feminist debates. As Franzi intimates, “With my current level of knowledge, I currently feel more in the position that I can listen and learn – but not properly help shape the discourse” (email). “The perfect” materializes here as a “level of knowledge” that one needs to reach in order to participate in digital feminist “knowledge cultures” (Kanai, 2021), which highlights the classed nature of these cultures (Scharff, 2023a). In addition, the assumption that only some very knowledgeable digital feminists are in a position to “help shape the discourse” suggests that digital community-building (Jackson et al., 2018; Keller, 2012) has increasingly been replaced by individual activists and feminists shaping the discourse – a reflection of contemporary influencer cultures (Dean, 2023; Scharff, 2024).

“Change something in your behavior” – self-improvement

Self-improvement marks the second key tenet of the perfect intersectional feminist, which presents most prominently in the common allyship imperative to “listen, learn, and reflect on yourself” (see Carlson et al., 2020). As Noa puts it,

You are a good ally if you inform yourself about forms of discrimination, reflect on yourself, whether you display problematic behavior or problematic thinking structures, listen to those affected [by discrimination], and especially, intervene in everyday situations when you witness problematic behavior. (Email)

As this example indicates, learning and self-reflection should be followed by behavioral changes. Similarly, Leah explains that it is important “that you inform yourself about other lived realities and that you change something in your behavior, too, so that it gets better for everyone” (video call). Self-improvement is also the focus of the following email extract:

For me it is the logical first step: If I want to engage myself for a cause, then I really need to understand it myself first and ask myself, how do I contribute to that problem. [. . .] If all people would do that, imagine the world we could live in ² . . . [. . .] If I start with myself, then I can at least see with “open eyes” what I can change about my behavior in everyday life – that would make a huge difference. (Alexis, email)

Rather than assuming an ally should be able to understand how systems of oppression work on a structural level, the importance of understanding “how do I contribute to that problem” is emphasized in the above examples. Self-improvement through learning and reflection in this sense, then, can be understood as a form of “everyday activism” (Mansbridge and Flaster, 2007). Articulating allyship as a journey of reflection and transformation is in keeping with the positivity expected from women and marginalized groups under neoliberalism (Kanai and Gill, 2020; Scharff, 2015), which the perfect intersectional feminist embodies as well. These allyship imperatives thus function as a technology of self-government and reflect the continued entanglement of neoliberal ideals and popular and digital feminisms (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Saraswati, 2021). In other words, “fixing” the self becomes a project through which racism, sexism, and other social justice issues, supposedly, are “fixed.” However, as Sara Ahmed (2004: para. 37) critically notes, “one problem with being so used to the learning = good equation, is that we might even think that everyone should aspire to such learning, and that the absence of such learning is the ‘reason’ for inequality and injustice.”

Moreover, following my participants’ accounts, listening to and learning about marginalized identities occurs primarily through creating a “diverse” social media feed. That is, many interviewees describe a “conscious decision” (Romy, video call) about whom they follow, which is influenced by which “identity group” the person/account embodies. As Louisa explains, “It is important to me to have a diverse feed, and to read many different voices [. . .] On the Internet, I can extend my views, like it wouldn’t be possible in offline life as an introverted human” (email). Similarly, for Laila, it is important to read about “how people of various gender identities and sexualities report about their histories (of suffering). It’s only then that I feel properly connected with the topic and the people” (email). However, while the affective need to be exposed to different viewpoints resonates in a post-2020 “woke” culture, I contend it also showcases a tendency of consuming the Other, as bell hooks (2015 [1992]: 21) eloquently argued several decades ago: “the commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling.” The notion of self-improvement through consumption of the social media accounts of marginalized Others appears to be further driven by neoliberal logics of individual responsibility and “the perfect,” in which a “toxic individualism [. . .] places the onus for progress and improvement on an individual, and it erases the need for systemic change” (Jackson and Rao, 2022: 130–131). Individualized responsibility thus marks the third key tenet of the perfect intersectional feminist.

“Using my privilege” – individualized responsibility

Self-improvement, following my participants’ talk, can be achieved through “recognizing” and “using” one’s privilege(s). As Louisa puts it, her goal is “to always be aware of my privileges and to be aware of prejudices in my worldview” (email). This sentiment exhibits an individualized responsibility in keeping with neoliberal logics (Scharff, 2015) and marks another unattainable tenet of the perfect intersectional feminist. Privilege, in my participants’ talk, engenders the individual’s responsibility to use this position to “do good,” particularly as a feminist who is privileged in several regards, as Jessica’s and Fabienne’s reflections indicate:

Now you could say, I am white, I am cis, and so on, am I actually allowed to articulate myself in the context of intersectionality, and I think, I actually have to, because I, of course, have a somewhat privileged position compared to others. And this concept of intersectionality cannot be established just from the bottom, yeah. And it needs its allies in the privileged zones, so to speak. (Jessica, video call)

If you look at all the discriminating factors, white women are the ones who have it a little bit easier, then you could say that they should use their priv-, or that I as a white woman should use my privilege and raise attention to other topics. (Fabienne, video call)

Two things are noteworthy in these examples: First, the discursive focus on “I as a white woman” illustrates the perfect intersectional feminist’s inner-directed self-competition. Second, as feminist philosopher Sonia Kruks (2005: 181) observes, “when feminists, notably white feminists, come to reflect on their own privilege a peculiar analytical shift usually takes place. Privilege generally ceases to be thought about as structural.” Yet, when structural dynamics of privilege are negated in this way, the individual’s efforts to undo the effects of their privileged positionality become foregrounded, ultimately responsibilizing the individual to create social change, rather than dismantling the political and institutional structures that produce privileged positionalities in the first place.

Moreover, articulations which emphasize the importance of “using privilege” for intersectional allyship also embody white middle-class femininity through “notions of virtue, hospitality and self-negation” (Kanai, 2020: 41). As one participant puts it, being a feminist

means to me to move life from suffering towards empathy and solidarity every day. It means to me, to be in solidarity with the marginalized, to place my privileges at the disposal of others and to oppose injustice and violence loudly. (Elizabeth, email)

While the emphasis on empathy and solidarity as goals of “doing” feminism reflects common feminist affects and values (Hemmings, 2012; hooks, 1986), the striving for “placing privileges at the disposal of others” reverberates notions of self-sacrificing femininity rooted in colonial ideals of white womanhood as “good,” innocent, modest, and putting oneself last in order to help others (Jackson and Rao, 2022; Srivastava, 2005). Such “declarations” (Ahmed, 2004) thus preserve hierarchical dynamics of “privileged” saviors and the “non-privileged” Other in need of saving (Mohanty, 1988; Schindel, 2026), and are further promoted by the ideal of the perfect intersectional feminist.

Platforms and intra-feminist judgment: perpetuating “the perfect”

In line with McRobbie’s (2015, 2020) theorizing of “the perfect,” the invisible benchmarking of perfect intersectional allyship produces not just inner-directed competition, but also competition between digital feminists, resulting in intra-feminist callout cultures in which digital feminists police and silence each other. As Victor informs me, tone policing “is the standard form of reacting to critique. Some master it so subtly that it is difficult to recognize” (email). Tim describes practices of gatekeeping: “You haven’t read this or that book, what are you doing here? [. . .] it has become an intellectual bubble in itself, where terms are thrown around” (video call). These observations highlight conflicts over the prerogative of interpretation of intersectionality-related concepts, phrases, and terms, as well as the canon of books to read. They further expose the classed nature of digital intersectionality debates, which, as previously noted, appear to require a certain intellectual capital in order to participate in (see Scharff, 2023a). Besides being “in the know,” it is also important to embody the “right identity” to engage in feminist discussions, as Céline’s account reveals:

I experienced it, in queer feminist or feminist debates in general, that one’s own identity or the identity of their counterpart is being used to silence others. [. . .] one gets accused of not having the right identity to speak about something, and that goes both ways, that people after critically reflecting on themselves think that they are allowed to speak about everything and don’t accept any critique anymore. And yeah, it can be, especially when you’re mentally not that extremely stable, it can be really toxic structures. (Video call)

Importantly, these “toxic structures” are enabled by the archival features of social media (Robards et al., 2018), such as user profile pages which contain a timeline of every post and “reaction” a user ever posted on the platform. As Céline contemplates, “one can take screenshots or something like that. That means one can confront people – But you said this! – Doesn’t matter how long ago it was, and whether one has atoned for it or apologized” (video call). In addition, contemporary social media affordances, such as algorithms favoring content that produces outrage, and design features, such as “like” buttons, operate in ways that entice judgment of others. As Eve Ng (2022: 43) highlights, “the longer users stay engaged, the more profitable it is for a platform, and the algorithmic promotion of content that feeds back into users’ affective intensity favors extreme over moderate political expression.” Moreover, as Camille Nurka (2014: 493) reminds us, polling platforms designed to judge the desirability of women “served as an early inspiration” for platforms like Facebook, whose parent company Meta also owns Instagram. Thus, judgment-enticing social media affordances enable a “gendered authenticity policing” (Duffy et al., 2022) in contemporary digital feminisms and hence condition the notion of perfect intersectional allyship.

Yet, while my participants are both aware and critical of platform architectures and how these encourage intra-feminist judgments and callouts (Gill, 2023), their talk also reverberates conflicting discourses that lead to (tone)policing in the first place. For instance, shortly after her description of silencing in feminist circles, Céline utters the following: “I do not expect that all people are perfect, yeah. [. . .] But one should be able to, when one is made aware of it, to reflect on themselves and to change one’s behavior” (video call). Notably, a key tenet of the perfect intersectional feminist, self-improvement, is mobilized here, which stands in contrast to the earlier articulated critique of digital feminist policing, and how mentally challenging these “toxic structures” can be. The following email extract contains a similar tension:

Principally, I am of the opinion that all activists should have empathy – but that is sadly often not the case. I have often encountered that people were downright attacked or blocked, just because they didn’t report about some topics or not enough. [. . .] [The way feminists deal] with mistakes in the community is often problematic. Everyone can make mistakes and often mistakes are helpful to learn from. It is important that one openly admits their mistakes, realizes the mistake and informs oneself, to make it better – potentially deleting problematic content and realizing that other people were hurt. A “shit storm” can break out quickly, especially on social media, when someone makes a mistake and does not stand up for it and the apology is questionable. (Franzi, email)

On the one hand, the need for more empathy in a culture where digital feminists are always at the danger of facing a “shit storm” is expressed. Yet, on the other hand, the common allyship mantra that one should realize mistakes, learn from mistakes, and inform oneself – “to make it better” – responsibilizes the individual to achieve social change.

Looking at these tensions in my participants’ talk, I suggest that it is the figure of the perfect intersectional feminist, governed by its neoliberal key tenets and conditioned by judgment-enticing platform architectures, which provokes the intra-feminist callout culture described by many interviewees. That is, feminists are quicker and harsher to judge those not adhering to the “perfect standard” (Bobel, 2007) of intersectional feminist allyship, as Samantha observes: “especially in digital feminism, I often witness people being accused: Yeah, you’re just an Instagram feminist, but you don’t live the issue” (video call). Moreover, according to Victor, it is predominantly allies who call each other out:

I see this behavior rather among allies, who surely mean well. In my experience, marginalized people do not have the energy to be appalled at every “problematic” phrasing. I wouldn’t have anything else to do if I always attacked the people who misgender others ;). (Email)

Crucially, the notion of “meaning well” is reminiscent of perfect normative feminine behavior which, again, self-sacrifices and prioritizes the well-being of others (Kanai, 2020). This suggests that the ideal of the perfect intersectional feminist, which embodies such femininity, leads to allies’ perceived responsibility to educate others (Kanai and Coffey, 2023), and in the worst case, call out and police those who make “mistakes” such as misgendering someone, not knowing the right terms to discuss a feminist issue, or wrongly speaking on behalf of another identity group. Moreover, since “the perfect” functions as a “moral imperative” (McRobbie, 2020: 45), allies’ callouts can be understood as an “attempt to position themselves as morally, ethically superior” (Nakayama, 2017: 71). This is not surprising given that “doing good” is an essential requirement of a popular intersectional feminism which promises to be socially just (Schindel, 2026). Thus, digital feminists engaging in popular intersectional allyship discourses might “perform outrage” (Nakayama, 2017) and “righteousness” (Kanai and Coffey, 2023) in response to other’s “mistakes,” in order to discursively highlight their allyship (Ross, 2025), and to perform perfect intersectional feminism. However, as I demonstrate next, such a moral imperative leads to feminist fatigue and feeling overwhelmed by these demands of perfection.

Affective responses to “the perfect”: exhaustion, pressure, insecurity, and anxiety

While several participants expressed positivity in the context of self-actualizing allyship discourses, they also reported feeling exhausted and overwhelmed in light of the increased volume of digital feminist content during isolating lockdown periods, which Maria describes as “going empty” (video call). Victor explains the impossibility of staying on top of digital feminist discussions, because

incredibly much happens and incredibly fast. And me? [. . .] there are things that I have to do and I’m not on Instagram for hours. When I then [. . .] try to understand everything in its depth and complexity with references to other profiles, then it is an enormous amount. (Video call)

In a similar vein, Hannah describes the effects on people’s mental health when aiming to continuously perform perfect intersectional allyship:

We’re just living during a glaring pandemic, we realize more and more that we are being exploited, we are all mentally at the end of our tether [. . .] And then you have to fulfil your own aspiration to be morally good, whatever that means. [. . .] I think the pressure is so high, especially in the leftist bubble, to always be as perfect as possible and as discrimination free as possible, as informed as possible, and always keeping the newest debate in mind when doing feminism. This pressure is not healthy, yeah, we need to allow ourselves to make mistakes, as long as these mistakes can be made up for. (Video call)

Against the backdrop of pandemic exhaustion, Hannah highlights both her “own aspiration to be morally good” and the pressure to always be a perfect ally who does not discriminate and is informed about every social justice cause – in other words, the perfect intersectional feminist. At the same time, however, “the perfect” continuous to be perpetuated by only allowing “mistakes that can be made up for.”

The pressure to attain perfect intersectional allyship is noticeably accompanied by anxiety and insecurity, which often leads to avoidance of “difficult conversations” (Kanai, 2023: 90). For instance, Céline worries about her tweets going viral: “I don’t want something that I wrote on [Twitter] to be commented on by thousands of people who sometimes take it out of context” (video call). The fear of doing something wrong or not being in the right position to talk about certain things is also reflected in some participants’ decision to delete posts or statements from their social media feeds and profiles, such as Sky who took down a re-tweet when the original tweet received critiques. Although they did not fully agree with these critiques, Sky concludes that they must have been “not informed enough” when they shared the tweet initially. Likewise, Maria tells me she deleted “intersectional” from her Instagram profile description:

It said “intersectional feminism”, now it only says “feminism”, because I didn’t feel safe with that anymore. [. . .] Is my activism maybe performative? Do I want to be liked? You know, these are things that make me so insecure, but I’d rather take [“intersectional”] out to not get stuck in a discussion where I can’t explain it. And so I’m currently at a point where I need to do more work and think, okay, how and where might I actually be active and where do I want to be active? (Video call)

Notably, as a consequence of the intra-feminist callout culture that many participants describe and are afraid of, they do not permanently remove themselves from these digital feminist spaces, similar to the young women and non-binary people in Gill’s (2023) study, who “quit” social media only temporarily before returning to the platform. Rather, individual feminists appear to have internalized the mantra that they need to do even “more work and think[ing],” which exemplifies the self-competition of the perfect intersectional feminist. My participants hence are similarly “critical but caught” (Gill, 2023: 182) in the pressures and aspirations of self-perfecting digital feminist allyship discourses. Moreover, as Céline explains, “it is in parts also important to get a response, ideally of course positive, from certain people” (video call). This reasoning reverberates feminized insecurity (Gill and Kanai, 2018) and illustrates that social media can indeed be a place of positive affirmation about doing or saying the right thing in relation to intersectional politics, while simultaneously being a huge source of anxiety.

Conclusion and discussion: the future of digital feminist allyship

This article has introduced the figure of the “perfect intersectional feminist” to critically analyze the neoliberal ethos of perfection in contemporary digital feminist allyship discourses. The perfect intersectional feminist, which forms a new dimension of Angela McRobbie’s (2015, 2020) notion of “the perfect,” manifests in my participants’ talk through allyship imperatives of self-competition, self-improvement, and individualized responsibility in line with dominating neoliberal logics. I have further argued that the ideal of perfect intersectional allyship perpetuates digital cultures of intra-feminist judgment, which results in the affectively experienced pressure to always be informed and never make mistakes, the exhaustion of keeping up with everything intersectionality-related during the pandemic, as well as feelings of insecurity and anxiety about “doing intersectionality wrong.”

Crucially, the here examined discursive dynamics feed into the capitalist orientation of digital platforms. As feminist media scholars have argued, the performance of anxiety, insecurity, and vulnerability is actively encouraged in contemporary influencer and social media cultures (Duffy et al., 2024; Lehto, 2021). “Anxiety is useful,” Mari Lehto (2021: 209) proposes, “as it works to drive a relentlessly renewed resolution to make a self who is appropriate to and acceptable within the system.” Similar dynamics are at play in current digital feminisms. If digital feminists worry that their knowledge of intersectionality and their feminism/activism is never “good enough,” or even “perfect,” they will return to these platforms to continue to “learn,” “self-reflect,” and “change their behavior.” Structural inequalities, however, are not “fixed” solely by individuals who “listen” to discriminated groups and “learn” about their experiences and perspectives. Instead of focusing on the acquisition of “knowledge” about the Other (Dabiri, 2021), it might be more productive to focus on “listening across difference” (Dreher, 2009: 451), which aims toward “understanding networks of privilege and power and one’s own location within them.” It thus prioritizes comprehension of how processes of structural oppression operate, how they relate, connect, and intersect (Crenshaw, 1989), rather than accumulating increasing amounts of information about marginalized groups. Listening is also an integral practice of “calling in,” which human rights activist Loretta Ross (2025: 182) describes as “a loving, non-hostile alternative” to callout culture. However, as my analysis has indicated, contemporary social media are not necessarily conducive to “listening across difference,” nor do they encourage systemic analyses and the kinds of slow-paced and thoughtful “call ins” Ross advocates for.

To break this cycle, feminists need to critically question whether contemporary understandings of (digital) allyship are truly helpful in dismantling oppressive structures. Following Emma Dabiri’s (2021: 19) assessment, “allyship is not only not up to the task, it is in many ways counterproductive.” My analysis uncovered some of the ways in which contemporary understandings of intersectional allyship fail to be “up to the task.” What remains is the question of how allyship can be meaningful and productive. Instead of engaging further in discourses about perfect intersectional allyship, Dabiri (2021: 25) proposes that we need to build coalitions through linking various social justice struggles in “an understanding, not so much of an intersectionality of identities, but an intersectionality of issues” (emphasis in original). This proves increasingly difficult in contemporary digital feminist cultures. The ideal of perfection is not just encouraged by the neoliberal-capitalist platforms my participants engage with feminism on, but also in their own discourses about perfect intersectional allyship. As Jonathan Dean (2023: 535) poignantly argued, “in an age of digital capitalism, left-wing citizens have become so accustomed to aligning our styles of political discourse with the imperative of neoliberalism that it has become second nature for many.” It is therefore essential to pay closer attention to the dynamics that render popular discourses about perfect intersectional allyship “second nature” for many digital feminists, including my participants.

Moreover, I want to highlight that my analysis here may well contribute to the above described anxiety-laden culture. Although my aim has been to provide a scholarly critique that improves our understanding of contemporary digital feminist dynamics, I am fully aware of the risks of perpetuating this fearful culture with my critique. However, I hope to have successfully argued for the necessity of critical feminist analyses of social media cultures and platforms to improve our understanding of how popular intersectional allyship discourses further promote this culture of fear and anxiety, and the role social media play in promoting perfect intersectional allyship. Ultimately, if contemporary notions of intersectional allyship continue to center “perfect” femininity and responsibilize the individual for achieving social change, popular intersectional allyship indeed fails to be “up to the task” of meaningfully disrupting structural and institutional forms of intersecting oppression.