Posting Back: Exploring Platformed Black Feminist Communities on Twitter and Instagram

Abstract

Black women have historically used unconventional, everyday spaces as sites of Black feminist intellectual production. Today, one of the most common spaces in which Black women produce intellectual thought is social media. However, very little research has broadly examined the dynamics of these online communities for Black feminist theorizing beyond individual hashtag conversation. In this study, I conducted 21 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with individuals who engaged in eight different Black feminist hashtag conversations across Twitter and Instagram to expand our current understanding of how Black feminist intellectual production has developed and broadened through the affordances of social media. Findings suggest that while Black feminist hashtag discussions have allowed Black women to “talk back” to hegemonic mainstream and popular discourses about Black women, these conversations are constantly at stake of appropriation and co-optation replicating historical erasure of Black women’s intellectual production.