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‘Intersectional, Queer Feminist Magazine’ Made by White People? An Analysis of Digital Feminist Debates on Popular Intersectionality in Germany

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Women’s Activism Online and the Global Struggle for Social Change

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Abstract

This contribution analyses popular articulations of intersectionality in contemporary German-speaking digital feminism. Popular intersectionality can be understood as a cultural sentiment mainly articulated and performed by white people. Based on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s notion of ‘popular feminism’, popular intersectionality is marked by a high visibility, particularly on social media, however, popular intersectionality addresses the issues that popular feminism deals with only superficially. It therefore describes a backlash against popular/white feminism, while simultaneously being performed by feminists who declare their whiteness and other privileges in order to manifest themselves as ‘good’ white feminists. This chapter discusses the workings of popular intersectionality through a critical discourse analysis of Zine_X, a German-speaking feminist blogger collective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All interview and blog quotes discussed in this chapter have been translated from German to English by myself.

  2. 2.

    It used to be common practice among German feminists to spell ‘women*’ with an asterisk to indicate the social construction of the term, and to include trans women—a practice that recently has been debated as it actually singles out trans women from the status of womanhood.

  3. 3.

    A fair number of articles also address white cis men which, due to limited space, I am unable to discuss here.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Katrin Schindel

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  1. Katrin Schindel
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Correspondence to Katrin Schindel .

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  1. Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem, Israel

    Carmit Wiesslitz

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Schindel, K. (2023). ‘Intersectional, Queer Feminist Magazine’ Made by White People? An Analysis of Digital Feminist Debates on Popular Intersectionality in Germany. In: Wiesslitz, C. (eds) Women’s Activism Online and the Global Struggle for Social Change. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31621-0_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31621-0_12

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