Abstract
This chapter examines the fourth wave of feminism within the UK, discussing current literature and scholarship on the topic. The discussion includes five case studies: the Slut Walk, FBook Rape Campaign, Bahar Mustafa and #killallwhitemen, Everyday Sexism and the £5 Note Campaign. Each campaign or activism offers an insight into the technologies, modes of dissemination and central affects of this wave. In doing so, the chapter also recognises that the fourth wave is still nascent and therefore difficult to understand fully.
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Notes
- 1.
Steubenville was a particularly famous rape case, in which two young athletes carried an unconscious girl between parties, sexually assaulting her as their peers and friends filmed and photographed it. Their high school and local community defended the boys, due to their athletic records and places on the football team. Laurie Penny, ‘Steubenville: this is rape culture’s Abu Ghraib moment’ in The New Statesman (19 March 2013) < http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/03/steubenville-rape-cultures-abu-ghraib-moment> [Accessed: 30 November 2013].
- 2.
Tara Culp-Ressler, ‘Hacker who Exposed Stuebenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars than Rapists’ in Think Progress (7 June 2013) <http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/06/07/2119171/anonymous-hacker-steubenville-jail/> [Accessed: 30 November 2013].
- 3.
The BBC created a documentary called ‘India’s Daughter’, which conducted interviews with those who had been found guilty of the gang rape. The documentary itself was banned in India and there was a significant amount of criticism about the piece itself, in that it focused purely on women as ‘daughters’ as opposed to addressing wider systemic problems: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/i-am-not-indias-daughter/387574/.
- 4.
A press release from the Government Equalities Office in 2015 indicates that 75% of the victims of revenge porn seeking legal advice and aid are women: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hundreds-of-victims-of-revenge-porn-seek-support-from-helpline
- 5.
Rape Crisis states that approximately 90% of rape victims know the perpetrator. This goes some way to debunk the idea that a woman dressed provocatively in a public place will be more likely to receive unwanted sexual attention. The fact that the overwhelming majority of victims know the perpetrator suggests that rape itself is far more complex than the repercussions of a revealing outfit.
- 6.
In this chapter, I have chosen to use the word ‘victim’ instead of ‘survivor’. This relates to the fact that I am discussing rape as a crime, of which there are victims. Rather than drawing on discourses of empowerment, which are very necessary in relation to sexual assault, I am focusing purely on the criminal and legal aspects of rape.
- 7.
The Crown Prosecution Services advises that the maximum sentence for rape is life: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/sentencing/.
- 8.
Regarding access to justice for women victims of violence, a crucial concern raised was in regard to the changes and cuts to legal aid, following the adoption of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Through this law, the majority of family law proceedings, including disputes involving access to/residence of children, were reportedly made ineligible for legal aid funding. Exceptions were made for applications for protective injunctions for domestic violence or forced marriage, as well as for divorce, matrimonial finance and cases relating to children where evidence of violence is provided advocates argue, however, that the evidence required to demonstrate domestic violence places an onerous burden upon victims. For example, women are required to pay for documentary evidence (£50 for a letter from their doctor and £60 for a memorandum of conviction), even when on welfare benefits, with no recourse to public funds: http://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/data/files/UNSR_VAW_UK_report_-_19_May_2015.pdf
- 9.
Jimmy Savile was a celebrity who used his position to abuse girls and boys, as well as men and women, often seeking out the most vulnerable. His abuse is thought to have lasted from 1940 to 2009. For a profile of Savile, see the BBC’S reportage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19984684.
- 10.
Roiphe’s The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism is especially notorious for its rejection of contemporary feminism. While acknowledging the progress of previous waves, Roiphe claimed that the incarnation of the social movement in the 1990s was built on fear and victimhood. This approach to feminism undermines rape culture, and places responsibility for sexual assault on victims as opposed to perpetrators. Importantly, then, this fourth wave moment recognises that we do exist in a rape culture, which has been consolidated through the number of high-profile sexual abuse cases gaining media recognition. These cases have made evident that sexual assault can occur without risk.
- 11.
For further information on this see Natasha Walters Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010), Ariel Levy Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005), Kat Banyard The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Women and Men Today (2010) and Gail Dines Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010).
- 12.
The full letter was printed in a number of news outlets, including Huffington Post, which can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-brison/slutwalk-black-women_b_980215.html
- 13.
Both the Women’s Library and Feminist Library house archives of women’s history as well as the history of feminist activism. The Women’s Library has resources that span the last 500 years, with a real emphasis on European Women’s history, while the Feminist Library has been archiving ‘herstories’ since 1975. Both organisations, however, have had to battle in order to stay open. In 2016, The Feminist Library discovered that it would be evicted from its current building on the 30th October of that year. They now need to find a new space as well as raising the requisite funds to maintain the library there. The Women’s Library, in contrast, was forced to move from a warehouse run by London Metropolitan University in 2014, when the university could no longer afford to run it. The library is now housed at LSE.
- 14.
Dawn Foster wrote Lean Out (2016) as an answer to Sandberg’s Lean In. The work looks at corporate feminist culture, thinking about how the politics needs to respond to the increased wealth gap post financial crisis.
- 15.
For further information on the dialogue between FBrape campaign and Facebook, see Christopher Zara’s ‘Facebook Rape Campaign Ignites Twitter: Boycott Threats from #FBrape Get Advertisers’ Attention’ here: http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-rape-campaign-ignites-twitter-boycott-threats-fbrape-get-advertisers-1278999.
- 16.
See Facebook’s terms and conditions: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/controversial-harmful-and-hateful-speech-on-facebook/574430655911054
- 17.
Dove launched a self-esteem project for women, with the tagline that ‘A girl should feel free to be herself’. Having discovered that body anxiety presents a number of girls from participating in activities, Dove established a programme with parents, teachers, mentors and youth workers to boost self-esteem and body confidence: http://selfesteem.dove.co.uk/Articles/Written/Our_Mission_in_Practice.aspx. Dove has also attempted a reconsideration of the concept of ‘beauty’ to empower and enable women to undo society’s standards: http://www.dove.us/Social-Mission/campaign-for-real-beauty.aspx.
- 18.
No More Page 3 founder Lucy-Anne Holmes has discussed her activist burn-out in an article for Huffington Post in 2015. However, she does celebrate the way in which her campaign changed Page 3, emphasising the useful support of supermarkets: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/03/08/lucy-ann-holmes-no-more-page-3-the-sun_n_6826762.html.
- 19.
For further information see the article reporting the arrests of two people for online abuse: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/24/two-jailed-twitter-abuse-feminist-campaigner
- 20.
In the Summer of 2014, American blogger Anita Sarkeesian was forced to leave her house after her home address and death threats were posted online. In the UK, Laurie Penny, Hadley Freeman, Grace Dent, Catherine Mayer and Mary Beard all received bomb threats, with Penny tweeting that police had recommended she stay somewhere other than her home for the night. In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez left London for Kent in order to escape both death threats and her address having been put up on Twitter.
- 21.
Mustafa’s statement ‘excluding’ white men from her diversity event was reported within a number of national newspapers. The Guardian included a summary of the fall-out as well as the petition instated to remove Mustafa from her post: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/20/goldsmiths-racism-row-divides-students-bahar-mustafa.
- 22.
National papers covering the story included the Daily Mail, Guardian, Standard, Huffington Post, Vice magazine, The Independent and the Telegraph.
- 23.
My focus in this chapter is not on whether Mustafa actually did tweet ‘kill all white men’. Although she has released a statement about the trial and claimed, through an interview with Vice magazine, that she never actually used the phrase, I am more interested in public outcry. The fact that she was perceived to have written something so opposed to white men, and the resultant widely reported police investigation is most important to the way that I am approaching irony.
- 24.
For Mustafa’s claim, see her interview with Vice magazine: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/bahar-mustafa-exclusive-interview-893.
- 25.
For Emma Thompson’s comments on the whiteness of the Oscars, see coverage by Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/emma-thompson-oscars-so-white.
- 26.
Ahmed has written on this subject on her blog, Feminist Killjoys in a post titled ‘You are Oppressing Us!’. She writes that: ‘Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power’ (Ahmed 2016). Ironically, after both Bindel and Tatchell were no platformed in March 2016, they were included in a double spread in the Sunday Times with red tape over their mouths, discussing how their voices were not being heard: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Features/article1675950.ece.
- 27.
Fran Cowling, the LGBT representative of the National Union of Students, said that Tatchell had made both transphobic and racist comments in the past. For further information on the alleged snub, read the following article: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/13/peter-tatchell-snubbed-students-free-speech-veteran-gay-rights-activist.
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Chamberlain, P. (2017). Why Fourth Wave Now?. In: The Feminist Fourth Wave. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53682-8_5
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