This important and timely collection examines the troubling proliferation of anti-feminist language and concepts in contemporary media culture. Edited by Michele White and Diane Negra, these curated essays offer a critical means of considering how contemporary media, politics, and digital culture function, especially in relation to how they simultaneously construct and displace feminist politics, women’s bodies, and the rights of women and other disenfranchised subjects. The collection explores the simplification and disparagement of feminist histories and ongoing feminist engagements, the consolidation of all feminisms into a static and rigid structure, and tactics that are designed to disparage women and feminists as a means of further displacing disenfranchised people’s identities and rights. The book also highlights how it is becoming more imperative to consider how anti-feminisms, including hostilities towards feminist activism and theories, are amplified in times of political and social unrest and used to instigate violence against women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. A must-read for students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies, gender studies, and critical race studies with an interest in feminist media studies.

Gender Hate Online addresses the dynamic nature of misogyny: how it travels, what technological and cultural affordances support or obstruct this and what impact reappropriated expressions of misogyny have in other cultures. It adds significantly to an emergent body of scholarship on this topic by bringing together a variety of theoretical approaches, while also including reflections on the past, present, and future of feminism and its interconnections with technologies and media. It also addresses the fact that most work on this area has been focused on the Global North, by including perspectives from Pakistan, India and Russia as well as intersectional and transcultural analyses. Finally, it addresses ways in which women fight back and reclaim online spaces, offering practical applications as well as critical analyses. This edited collection therefore addresses a substantial gap in scholarship by bringing together a body of work exclusively devoted to this topic. With perspectives from a variety of disciplines and geographic bases, the volume will be of major interest to scholars and students in the fields of gender, new media and hate speech.

"For anyone interested in what the contemporary backlash against feminism looks like - this book is for you. Gamergate and Anti-Feminism in the Digital Age tells the important story of anti-feminist rhetoric and hostility towards women in the gaming community that has been brewing for years." -Kaitlynn Mendes, Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Inequality and Gender, University of Western Ontario This book provides an in-depth, feminist and sociological analysis of Gamergate, a major social movement and anti-feminist harassment campaign. Gamergate provides a clear example of both how a modern anti-feminist 'backlash' is enacted, and how feminists in the digital age respond. Chapters connect Gamergate to the broader Men's Rights Activism (MRA) political movement, examining men's anxieties surrounding what they see as an erosion of male privilege, their conflation of privilege with rights, as well as their use of social media to harass and attack women as a response to their perceived oppression. Likewise, the author analyses the online strategies used by feminists to respond to this backlash, how social media is harnessed to build a feminist movement, the effectiveness of these online strategies, and the parallels that these actions have with those from previous waves of feminism. Finally, the author reflects on what has changed with regards to MRA, online harassment, and digital feminism after the height of Gamergate. This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender Studies, Sociology, and Media Studies. Jessica O'Donnell is an independent scholar with a PhD in Sociology from Northumbria University, UK and an MA in Gender Studies (Research Methods) from the University of Leeds, UK. She has published in Media, Culture and Society and worked as a research assistant for multiple feminist research groups.

Contending that the anti-feminist backlash in the academy is part of the broader "politically correct" rhetoric, this collection of writers, academics and activists is a much-needed response to the assault on feminist thinkers and critics in the academy today.

This work scrutinizes the prefix-based language of post-backlash feminism and calls for a reclamation of American feminist terminology. Questioning the merits of "Do-Me-feminism," "Eco-feminism," and "girlie," among other isms, the author argues that the proliferation of so-called "prefix feminisms" has weakened the feminist movement by narrowing its focus into shallow interpretations of a broad social and political cause. The author assesses anti-feminist media coverage, particularly following the Reagan administration and the Clinton-Lewinski affair, and concludes that efforts to reclaim a pro-woman politic must begin with reclaiming pro-woman language.

Through twelve chapters that historicize and re-evaluate postfeminism as a dominant framework of feminist media studies, this collection maps out new modes of feminist media analysis at both theoretical and empirical levels and offers new insights into the visibility and circulation of feminist politics in contemporary media cultures. The essays in this collection resituate feminism within current debates about postfeminism, considering how both operate as modes of political engagement and as scholarly traditions. Authors analyze a range of media texts and practices including American television shows Being Mary Jane and Inside Amy Schumer, Beyonce’s "Formation" music video, misandry memes, and Hong Kong cinema.

Considering the role of feminist movements in history as fundamental as much as in the current period and given the brutal attack that women’s rights are undergoing worldwide today, I wondered why feminism has grown so unpopular and, more specifically, why the mention of the word “feminism” so frequently gives rise to negative, disdainful responses. I wondered if the increasing violation of women’s rights had, to a certain extent, a connection with this feeling of detachment and rejection of feminism, which is a reality that feminists must take into consideration. I have, thus, decided to undertake an analysis of antifeminism to understand the profound reasons for this denigration and refusal.I tried to use a feminist methodological framework to select, describe and analyse the data and the literature in this book, in the belief that feminist research is a perspective in a given field of inquiry rather than a specific set of research field in itself. The book is addressed to my students and testifies to a little piece of the journey I have made with them reasoning about this and everything that has to do with freedom.

Modern Misogyny explores the landscape of popular culture and politics, emphasizing relatively recent moves away from feminist activism to individualism and consumerism where "self-empowerment" represents women's progress. It also explores the retreat to traditional gender roles after September 11, 2001. It interrogates the assumption that feminism is unnecessary, that women have achieved equality, and therefore those women who do insist on being feminists want to get ahead of men. Finally, it takes a fresh look at the positive role that feminism plays in today's "post-feminist" era, and how feminism does and might function in women's lives. Post-feminist discourse encourages young women to believe that they were born into a free society, so if they experience discrimination, it is an individual, isolated problem that may even be their own fault. Modern Misogyny examines that rendering of feminism as irrelevant and as the silencing and marginalizing of feminists.

The relative rise or decline of feminist movements across the globe has been debated by feminist scholars and activists for a long time. In recent years, however, these debates have gained renewed momentum. Rapid technological change and increased use of digital media have raised questions about how digital technologies change, influence, and shape feminist politics. This book interrogates the digital interface of transnational protest movements and local activism in feminist politics. Examining how global feminist politics is articulated at the nexus of the transnational/national, we take contemporary German protest culture as a case study for the manner in which transnational feminist activism intersects with the national configuration of feminist political work. The book explores how movements and actions from outside Germany’s borders circulate digitally and resonate differently in new local contexts, and further, how these border-crossings transform grass-roots activism as it goes digital. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Women are leading the fight against feminism and women's rights. The question is, why? From pop icons to working mothers, women are abandoning feminism in unprecedented numbers. Even scarier, they are also leading the charge to send it to its grave. Women head anti-feminist PR campaigns; they support anti-feminist politicians; they're behind more than 70 lawsuits across North America to silence the victims of campus rape; they participated in Gamergate, the violent, vitriolic anti-women-in-technology movement; and they're on the front lines of the fight to end reproductive rights. Everywhere we turn, there's evidence anti-feminist bombs have exploded, sometimes detonated by the unlikeliest suspects. Between women who say they don't need feminism and women who can't agree on what feminism should be, the challenges of fighting for gender equality have never been greater. F-Bomb takes readers on a witty, insightful, and deeply fascinating journey into today's anti-feminist universe as investigative journalist and feminist Lauren McKeon explores generational attitudes, debates over inclusiveness, and differing views on the intersection of race, class, and gender. She asks the uncomfortable question: If women aren't connecting with feminism, what's wrong with it? And she confronts the difficult truth: For gender equality to prevail, we first need to understand where feminism has gone wrong and where it can go from here. In a world where sexual harassment allegations regularly dominate news coverage and in which 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump, F-Bomb presents urgent and necessary discussion on women's lives today. This book is not authorized by and has no relationship to the WMC FBomb, an inclusive feminist blog that has been publishing since 2009. See www.womensmediacenter.com/fbomb.