Women’s activism

Intersections between women’s activism and media existed well before the digital age. In the suffragist movements as much as in the most recent feminist mobilizations, instances of women’s activism are endowed with specific media artefacts; women activists perceive and exploit these technologies in different ways depending on their needs, goals, and skills; and media discourses contribute to the broader gendered opportunity structure by supporting or opposing protest actions and claims. Thus, media cross the long-term struggle for gender equality, empowerment and the recognition of women’s rights in two main ways. On the one hand, media intersect movement strategies insofar as women activists account for mass and digital media in their courses of contentious action. On the other hand, media are also protest targets in all those cases in which activists struggle to change media working logics, stereotyped representations of gender and the overall tendency to maintain largely exclusionary governance structures and decision-making procedures.