Abstract
Desborough provides an account of the role of digital technologies in enabling the emergence and development of the global anti-street harassment movement. The chapter argues that feminist activists have leveraged the affordances of digital technologies to create, organize, and participate in anti-street harassment activism, thereby facilitating the formation and expansion of the movement. Desborough examines how digital technologies help to, first, reduce the costs of organizing and participating in collective action, and afford women new opportunities to speak about and resist street harassment; second, promote collective identity, which helps to foster and maintain participation; and third, and relatedly, enable the formation of online communities of (primarily) women resisting street harassment.
I would like to thank Elizabeth Evans, Eric Herring, and Jutta Weldes for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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- 1.
Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Germany, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, the U.K., and the U.S.
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One of the ways to respond to street harassment advocated by Hollaback! (2016a).
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) and gender non-conforming people, are also particularly susceptible to street harassment.
- 4.
Although there is a long history of sporadic feminist resistance against street harassment, especially coinciding with the Suffrage movement in the early 1900s and with second wave feminism between the 1960s and 1980s, it was not until the 2000s that numerous grassroots efforts emerged focused on street harassment specifically (Kearl 2015, pp. xii–xvi).
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Desborough, K. (2018). The Global Anti-Street Harassment Movement: Digitally-Enabled Feminist Activism. In: Vickery, J., Everbach, T. (eds) Mediating Misogyny. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72917-6_17
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