1. Toxic WOCs:
Constructing Race and
Gender in Digital Spaces
Roopika Risam
Salem State University
@roopikarisam

2. #WOCHashtagsRising

3. #TheNumbers

4. #TheNumbers

5. #FemFuture
―Women of color and other groups
are already overlooked for adequate
media attention and already struggle
disproportionately in this culture of
scarcity.‖
–Courtney Martin and Vanessa
Valenti

6. #FemFuture
―An unfunded online feminist
movement isn’t merely a threat to the
livelihood of these hard-working
activists, but a threat to the larger
feminist movement itself‖
–Courtney Martin and Vanessa
Valenti

7. #Reactions
―Where is the space in all of
these #femfuture movements for
people who don’t have internet
access?‖
-Mikki Kendall

8. #FeministBlogospheres
―Freed from the boundaries of print,
writers could blur the lines between
formal and casual writing; between a call
to arms, a confession, and a stand-up
routine—and this new looseness of form
in turn emboldened readers to join in, to
take risks in the safety of the shared
spotlight.‖
-Emily Nussbaum

9. #FeministLandmines
―Many of the most avid digital feminists
will tell you that it’s become toxic. Indeed,
there’s a nascent genre of essays by
people who feel emotionally savaged by
their involvement in it—not because of
sexist trolls, but because of the slashing
righteousness of other feminists.‖
-Michelle Goldberg

10. #SpatialWebs
―The Internet is the modern-day agora. It
is increasingly a place where so many
people are coming together and doing
very meaningful, very real things, so that
the social patterns prevailing on the
Internet are of interest to everybody.‖
-Katherine Cross

11. #WhoTweets
# Total registered users: ~1 billion
# Unique monthly visitors to
Twitter.com: 36 million
# Country with Most Users: U.S.
# Percentage of Twitter MAUs
located outside U.S.: 77%

12. #WherePeopleTweet

13. #TweetsPerCapita

14. #USTweeters

15. #Implications
# U.S. media muckracking
# Replication and amplification of race
and gender on Twitter
# Viral movement of toxicity discourses
# U.S. and U.S. feminist co-optation of
Twitter