This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work.

This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all

the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources has been acknowledged.

4

5

6

Figure 1: List of activists and attributes ............................................................................... 64

Figure 2: #destroyingthejoint tweet ...................................................................................... 67

Figure 3: #destroyingthejoint tweet ...................................................................................... 67

Figure 4: Growth in the number of Facebook likes of Destroy the Joint over time ............... 72

Figure 5: Word Cloud illustrating frequency of core concerns.............................................. 96

Figure 6: Counting Dead Women tweet ............................................................................. 122

Figure 7: Sentiment score on campaign posts (CrowdTangle) ............................................ 132

Figure 8: Destroy the Joint post after Telstra campaign ...................................................... 138

Figure 9: Destroy the Joint post after Telstra campaign ...................................................... 139

Figure 10: Destroy the Joint campaign post ....................................................................... 141

Figure 11: Destroy the Joint post during domestic violence campaign ................................ 142

Figure 12a: Destroy the Joint post on the Counting Dead Women campaign ...................... 148

Figure 13: Graph showing temporal dynamics of Destroy the Joint posts ........................... 150

Figure 14: Table of posts by CrowdTangle sentiment score ............................................... 151

Figure 15: Impact of boosting Counting Dead Women posts .............................................. 152

Figure 16: Image used in a typical Counting Dead Woman post…………………………...151

Figure 17: Results of Google search for "Counting Dead Women" and SBS ...................... 162

Figure 18: Search on Saturday Paper and Counting Dead Women ..................................... 163

7

Destroy the Joint is a feminist movement born in the digital era and a productive example of

information activism. It shows that digital activism can be sustained in the longer term,

particularly through the performance of emotional labour and the accumulation of emotional

capital. I interviewed thirty past and present moderators and administrators of

Destroy The Joint (DTJ), and this thesis explores the ways in which these contemporary

digital feminist activists use connective action to build progressive change. I introduce the

transnational digital solidarity frame as a particular form of information activism, seen in the

unique Counting Dead Women campaign on fatal violence against women. The activist

backgrounds and experiences of individuals themselves also contributed to successful

campaigning and helped to make them and their community resilient. Throughout the thesis I

have applied Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and various forms of capital to consider the

specific attributes and labours of activists as a foundation for sustainable activism. Building

on Arlie Hochschild’s research on emotional labour I unpack the experiences of,

and labour involved in, feminist digital activism, and argue for more recognition of the

centrality of emotional capital to feminism. The emotional labour in feminist digital activism

includes being supportive, being kind, being resilient and being perennially available. These

aspects of emotional labour are heightened within the digital context. This thesis has

implications for the practice of feminist digital activism, including the benefit of including

members with previous structured activist experience, tools and practices for using online

groups as forums to provide support for other activists, and the importance of including

activists with a diversity of skills and interests for long-term sustainability.

8

My supervisor Professor Ariadne Vromen is a truly remarkable person.

One of Ariadne’s former PhD students, in her own acknowledgements, described Ariadne’s

‘relentless’ supervision. That’s a very good way of putting it. She is both very demanding and

highly supportive. I would add that she is ambitious on behalf of all her students (and her

colleagues. I’m always running into people who say, Ariadne helped me do this or that). She

has the balance between support and useful critique absolutely right. Also, just so you know,

mythological Ariadne helped people navigate labyrinths so the real Ariadne has a serious

case of nominative determinism.

Ariadne turned me into a researcher through her intense emotional labour. Despite sending

me away after our first conversation to speak to someone in another department, she was kind

enough to respond to 14 separate emails before I made my initial PhD proposal; and has been

Gibraltar ever since. There is not one iota of bullshit about her and I love that so much. If

anyone wants a high recommendation for a supervisor, she’s mine. Or, as Pierre Bourdieu

puts it:

“One can really supervise a research, since this is what is involved here, only on

implies that you work on questionnaire construction, on reading statistical tables or

inter-preting documents, that you suggest hypotheses if necessary, and so on. It is

clear that, under such conditions, one can supervise only a very small number of

research projects and that those who pretend to supervise a large number of them do

not really do what they claim they are doing.” (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 221)

To the activists of Destroy the Joint, you are staunch women, ones you can trust at both the

digital barricades and the ones where we might stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Thank you, all of

you. This thesis wouldn’t exist without you but far more importantly, the activism wouldn’t

exist without you.

9

Only my choice of supervisor makes me unbearably smug. Everything else about writing a

PhD makes me unbearably anxious and so I’m grateful to those who helped me battle that

anxiety. On the home front: John, Gabe, Mary, Dominic. Piles of stuff everywhere and not

just in my brain.

It makes a big difference having a cohort of PhD students who are with you on the trip. I was

furious when the then HDR coordinator at the University of Sydney Adam Kamradt-Scott

insisted PhD candidates come to seminars and hear their colleagues present but he was right.

The experience of watching others present their work, asking ourselves where we could

improve and, with a few exceptions, discovering how constructive we all were was a great

idea. I particularly want to thank Michael Vaughan, whose support and humour got me

through some bad bits. I’d also like to thank Christine Winter, Lucy Sunman, Abi Taylor,

Colombina Shaffer (she was the former PhD student who described Ariadne as providing

‘relentless supportive’), Stephen Beverley and Francesco Bailo, Luke Craven, a little

community of research students. Lovely. I’ll miss it. Max Halupka was not a University of

Sydney student but it felt like he was in my cohort. Same with Blair Williams. In addition,

the research culture at the University of Sydney was brilliant and I’d argue that was because

of a series of academics who wrangled the government and international relations PhD

students. Thank you to Ariadne, who was one of those; Adam Kamradt-Scott who I’ve

already mentioned; Megan Mackenzie, who was also my supportive associate supervisor,

Susan Park and Rodney Smith.

More thank yous. Virginia Watson deserves all the kudos for recommending Ariadne as a

supervisor. Also, thanks to Christina Ho, Catriona Bonfiglioli, Maureen Henninger, Eurydice

Aroney, Jo McKenzie, Frances Shaw, Cynthia Nelson. You have no idea how good it is to

hear encouraging noises. To my darling friend Robin McKenzie, you too are nearly there.

A few things: it is infuriating that at a time when we are all going to live to 90, or many of us

anyway, that a constant response to my decision to do a PhD was, why would you do this

now? No one would ever stop tending a garden after a few years so I’m not sure why I should

stop tending to my thinking. Also, to the men, most men, to whom I spoke about my project,

I have some advice. Be supportive of women and their endeavours. Try to encourage rather

than discourage. Be generous. It is not helpful to ask: “Why do you want to do that?” No-one

10

would embark on this process without reason. I gave my first paper at a POP workshop

(Political Organisations and Participation group, a standing research group of the Australian

Political Studies Association) in Melbourne. The male professor who had been at once

discouraging and patronising when I first applied to do a PhD came up to apologise for

doubting my ability. Five years later, I’m still furious.

That’s the same advice I give to the young men, some men, in the various PhD seminars I

attended. There is no need to flaunt your intelligence. You are in a PhD program so we know

you are pretty smart already. Try to encourage your peers rather than discourage.

Also, when looking for a home to do your PhD, find a place where there is a tradition of

supportive research, where people speak to you like an adult and where people’s individual

circumstances are considered. Find an institution which resists a neoliberal approach to

postgraduate qualifications. If it’s all forms, punishments, fines and people who will never

respond unless there is an emergency, run the other way. It’s hard enough already. I could

not speak more highly of the research culture at the University of Sydney in the Department

of Government and International Relations. Even staff members who were not my

supervisor/s would ask how I was going. Thanks Anika Gauja and Chris Pepin-Neff and

Madeleine Pill. I’d also like to thank the University of Sydney for its generosity when it

comes to funding postgraduate students to attend conferences and workshops. In my case, it

meant presenting my PhD research at two international conferences and that felt pretty

exciting.

To my various editors, at various levels, over the years, thank you for supporting me and my

determination to write about what matters. In particular, Eric Beecher, Max Prisk, Michelle

Grattan, David McLennan, Julie Lewis, Grant Newton, Mark Baker, Sarah Oakes, Candice

Chung, Natalie Reilly, Wendy Tuohy.

To anyone wanting to do a PhD, keep going.

I had a lot of self-doubt. These people didn’t doubt me for one second (and if they did, they

kept it to themselves). Thank you all.

11

Just a couple of things you should know about the thesis. Parts of chapter four appeared in

Destroying the Joint, edited by Jane Caro; and in a story I wrote for the Walkley magazine.

Frances Shaw edited my thesis mainly to improve structure and remove repetition. Her

research is on digital political networks and digital ethics. Heather Goodall proofread my

thesis. And two brilliant women, Indra McKie and Krystal Campbell, helped me repair my

EndNote after it corrupted.

12

I was one of the first people to join the online Australian feminist action group Destroy The

Joint. It is now seven years later and I am still involved as an activist. This thesis on Destroy

the Joint (DTJ) tells some of the stories of why this movement mattered to me and to others,

and why it still does. It also reveals how the activists in DTJ sustained this activism and each

other, and documents our successes thus far. It has been very different to any of my previous

activist experience. Activists will always talk about the hard grind of activism; or the boring

slog of activism or the tears, stress and shouting. As Robin Leidner wrote in 1993, many

difficulties arise in feminist organisations: emotional intensity, factionalism,

structurelessness, refusal to acknowledge discord. She does not mention boredom or

burnout which could be added to that list. In DTJ, sometimes there was and is boredom but

there was far less burnout than I expected. I have not burnt out and a number of the other

women involved in the project have not burnt out either. DTJ made some of the activists feel

positive about activism and that feeling of positivity made them feel as if they could keep

going, that we could all keep going. Feelings, emotions, affect turn out to be very important

in this story of activist resilience. I wanted to investigate the online Australian feminist

activist experience and discover what, if anything, was unique to DTJ and if the results from

my analysis would help sustain future activists. As a long-time activist, feminist activism is

central to my life so any evidence to guide future activists and reveal frameworks for building

activist resilience more generally, and build understanding about what makes some activists

more resilient than other activists, may be useful. I wanted to understand what made them

stay or in some cases, what made them leave. What was there about DTJ as an activist group

which encouraged people to commit?

My name is Jenna Price. I am not now and never have been a member of the Australian

Labor Party, a union official, a slut or a whore. I mention this because I spend a lot of time on

the internet, either as a DTJ activist, as a journalist or as a member of the general public. I’m

also a woman. These are key factors in the level of trolling I experience (Citron 2014; Henry

& Powell, 2017; Jane, 2016; Tandon, 2015) so when it comes to those particular accusations

- member of the Australian Labor Party, union official, slut or whore - the first two are

plainly incorrect. The second two are more a matter of opinion but of all the names feminists

are called, of all the accusations I’ve fielded, the one which irritates me the most is the

suggestion that I’m a member of a political party, as if no-one can ever be politically

13

organised unless they are a functionary of a political party. I would have had to argue, from

my own experience and well before I did the research for this thesis, that if one wanted

organisation, look no further than the survivors of government school parent fundraising

groups. Now, my research says that if one wants organisation, then recruiting women trained

in the union movement or in family life or in both, is useful.

I have been a journalist for 40 years and an activist for longer - but it’s only once I became an

academic in my fifties that I was able to recognise that journalism, activism, social

media interconnected, that they could interact. I decided I wanted to write a PhD rather than

to write journalism about this phenomenon because I needed to understand the theoretical

context and also wanted to spend time reflecting on what happened and how a group of

mostly women (and, briefly, men) managed to keep going without tearing each other to

shreds, without flaring out. And - mostly - without hating each other. I also knew that I

needed to read more about how social movements work to better grasp what happened. To

appropriate Flavia Dzodan (2011), my feminism will be theoretical or it will be bullshit. My

aim was to claim that feminism sits in the broader context of social movements and that its

collective expression exemplifies Tilly’s concepts of political movement theory in particular

the theory of worthiness, unity, number and commitment (1999). If DTJ operated in the

overlap of contention, politics and collective action, then I needed to read much more to be

able to demonstrate that. To do that, I would survey both social movement theories, theories

of political participation and current feminist scholarship around online participation.

14

the responsibility for the long-term direction of DTJ, including its campaigns. The admins

may also mod (or moderate) the page.

-cultural capital: what we know

-social capital: who we know

-emotional capital (Nowotny, 1981): relationships and emotional skills

social change, an emerging form of democratic mobilisation (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012,

2013)

employment (Hochschild, 1983)

moderate interactions on the page and also contribute to the formations of the campaigns

messages which appear on the Destroy the Joint Facebook page. Also, the words post and

posted appear as verbs to describe the act of putting those public messages on the

page. Public comments appear beneath a post.

15

This thesis begins in the context of the intransigent rate of violence against women,

continuing gender inequality, and increasing feminisation of poverty. These factors have

combined to propel us along feminism’s fourth wave, or regeneration, as a social movement,

and the platform for that regeneration is digital. In response to that regeneration and

following on from decades of research on feminism, my thesis analyses contemporary digital

feminist activism in Australia, using the case study of DTJ, a series of connected campaigns,

led by Australian feminists.

There are many different iterations of feminist activism online, and research focussing on

digital activism reveals that it acts as a gateway to other activism, actions and engagement

(Brunsting & Postmes, 2002; Xenos, Vromen & Loader, 2014). My thesis is an investigation

of the Australian feminist action group DTJ, a feminist movement born in the digital era, to

analyse both how it functioned internally and how its campaigns functioned. I argue this

feminist digital activist community was successful in organising and community-building

because of specific attributes and labours of its member activists, and was thus able to

operate as a productive example of information activism. This analysis and subsequent

findings may be beneficial to activists in Australia and elsewhere by showing how the

campaigns of this social movement operated; and how the organisers engaged with the

movement.

This thesis will first seek to provide the background to the creation of the online feminist

action group which operates through the DTJ Facebook page. It will summarise and analyse

key campaigns and outcomes of those campaigns to provide a framework for the subsequent

analysis of feminist activism in Australia through the continued online organising of DTJ,

which is still considered influential seven years after its inception (Casey, 2016;

McLean, Maalsen & Grech, 2016). Most importantly, it will examine the social, cultural and

emotional capitals of those who came to DTJ as administrators and moderators and what

impact that had on the nature of DTJ.

The introduction of this thesis has several functions. Firstly, it outlines why research on

activism is important and sets out a general overview of both activism and feminism.

16

Secondly, it provides an overarching theoretical framework which provides context for the

specific literature reviews in each analysis chapter. In addition, my research as an insider

exploring the work of Australian feminist online activist group DTJ will use the theories of

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to explore how the habitus and capitals of those activists

built resilience within their activism and, in addition, provided novel campaigning methods.

Destroy The Joint flowered alongside Australia’s first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard,

from 2010 to 2013. An unusually broad cross section of Australian women took an interest in

Gillard’s prime ministership explained by Marian Sawer (2012) and David Denemark and his

co-authors (2012) as the gender affinity effect, that is, women reacting more favourably to

women, and, as referred affinity through increased political engagement (Denemark et

al., 2012), in Destroy The Joint. In fact, the ‘gender card’ and ‘gender wars’ were also both

sites for increased interest by media (Johnson, 2015; Trimble, 2016). In 2011, between 31

August and 4 November, a search on the news database Factiva, found 125 mentions of

sexism in the Australian media it searched. In the same period of time for the following year,

destroying the joint, naming Gillard and a number of other prominent Australian women,

then gave a speech at a dinner to raise money for the youth arm of the conservative Liberal

Party in Australia where he said that Prime Minister Gillard’s father had died of shame until

4 November 2012 there were well over 1000 mentions (Price, 2012). The time was right for

increased feminist political participation, a direct effect of the symbolic power of women in

elected office on women’s engagement (Karp & Banducci, 2008).

Seven years on, the context for feminist activism is both more complex and more layered, yet

never more necessary. The #metoo movement, focussing on sexual harassment and sexual

assault, has slowed in Australia, victim both to this country’s poor workplace protections and

its constraining defamation laws (Lim, 2019). In 2019, as this introduction is being written,

gender reveals itself again as key in the political landscape, in political participation as

politicians and as voters, as the central problem at work and play, as a driver of

the economy. Feminism has made it clear that if men are the default setting, then that setting

will be questioned. Gender representation in parliament is in the news every day as the

federal Coalition government in Australia struggles to either preselect women as candidates

17

for elections or fails to hold on to them once they are preselected. Feminist generation after

feminist generation works to manoeuvre gender to the front: getting the vote; entering the

workforce; getting equal pay; being free from sexual harassment; from sexual assault; from

family violence.

In this particular moment in time, from 2010 to 2019, the current Australian feminist

generation has embraced digital activism (Casey, 2016; Gleeson, 2016; 2017; 2018; McLean

& Maalsen, 2013; 2015; 2017; Lupton, 2014; Trott, 2018; 2019). The role of feminism and

the role of women in politics in Australia has been canvassed by many, however the digital

aspect of feminist political activism also requires investigation. Contemporary feminists

conduct campaigns and use different strategies to conduct those campaign, in a state of

constant negotiation. It is through this constant negotiation that feminists claim a collective

identity which struggles towards equality and this will be analysed in the next chapter about

the generations of feminism (chapter two). Today much feminist organisation occurs online

but the challenges remain. Scholarly research into new forms of politics facilitated by the

internet has focussed on whether it would be an effective tool or just a replication of existing

power structures. Feminists are digital citizens, part of a networked society (Castells, 1996)

and both the value of the digital communication and the ease with which it occurs contribute

to impact. In some respects, this may make it easier to see the contradictory structure of

interests and values that constitute (feminist) society. The concept of digital activism (Hands,

2011) builds on what was described as cyberactivism, the notion that activists organised

online though the use of platforms such as email, blogs and social networking sites to act and

to advocate. Martha McCaughey and Michael Ayers (2003) argued online activism had

transformed our understandings of the way in which traditional activism operated but claimed

it could only achieve progressive social change if it was used alongside traditional

organising.

The best fit for a theory of how digital activism works was Bennett and Segerberg’s theory of

connective action (2012; 2013). Novel ways of conceiving of political participation emerge

rarely but Bennett and Segerberg not only identified a new form of political participation in

their 2012 article but also developed a new conception of how that new form – connective

action – could be applied. While Castells (2012, p. 244) argued that networked social

movements would “fade away in their current states of being” or be transformed into an

18

actor, he did not see a possibility that those two entities – networked social movement and

political actor – can exist at once.

In contrast, Bennett and Segerberg’s work (2012; 2013) also showed crowds organised

broadly, rather than the top-down political organising more familiar in collective action, and

these crowds were both resilient and persistent both in what they chose to campaign about

and how they campaigned. Because of the ease of access to the organising platform - and its

responsiveness - a crowd-enabled response would often be more flexible and spontaneous.

Other scholars were quick to use these concepts (Bastos & Mercea, 2015; Dahlgren, 2014;

Hadden, 2015; Loader, Vromen & Xenos, 2014; Sloam, 2014; Theocharis, 2015; Vromen,

2016) or build on them as a basis for developing new concepts (Mattoni & Treré, 2014;

Mortensen, 2015).

Connective action was a transformational conceptualisation of activism in the digital age,

emerging after an investigation by (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012, 2013) of major

mobilisations in the early 21st century, including the Occupy protests which took place in the

United States and elsewhere in 2011. This form of contentious political action deserved

special attention because it established that activists could work together in a loose network,

and not necessarily come to a collective agreement on each aspect of a particular campaign.

Even more significantly, it was the first research which comprehensively revealed how these

social media platforms worked as organising mechanisms. These digital networks did not

share the same messages at the same times. Indeed, the communication was multilayered, and

in many cases personally adapted to and from the individual communicator. The most

shareable parts of many of these campaigns included personal action frames (Bennett and

Segerberg, 2013, p. 6), that is, shareable frames which were easy to personalise, as both a

political message and a medium in itself. The key elements in the personalisation of these

frames, which operate as calls to action, are the use of “symbolic inclusiveness” (2013, p. 37)

and “technological openness” (2013, p. 37), which together provide leverage to the formation

of connective action.

At the outset of this research, I hypothesised that all shared imagery of a political nature, to

achieve a political end, could be categorised as a personal action frame. My own

19

investigation extends this by contending that some of what is shared on the internet for

political purposes is about building solidarity, adapting to a personal circumstance.

The other apposite theoretical aspect of Bennett and Segerberg’s work was their typology of

the three models of action most likely to be found in contentious politics: organisationallybrokered,

organisationally-enabled and crowd-enabled (2013, p. 47).

Briefly, the organisationally-brokered network model (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013) is

familiar in the sphere of activism and is the foundation of collective action. Whether the

organisation is influential or inconsequential, the method of organising and communication is

the same; issues and actions are collectively framed, the message is spread top-down and

there is a strong leadership which builds coalitions around the issues, provides strong

organisational coordination of action, and controls the communication and therefore the

message. This is particularly evident in the use of social media where all posts are

manufactured in-house and the conversation is one-way, heavily moderated or even premoderated

with filters applied to the group or page. It is individual personal outreach to other

compatible people. Australian examples would be the Facebook pages of both major political

parties: the Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Labor Party.

The model of organisationally-enabled places more emphasis on loose coalitions of

organisations which are like-minded. However, they encourage participants at both an

individual level and at an organisational level to somehow adapt the message, to make it

more personalised. They also leverage their digital media networks to enable this process.

This model uses organisational networks but within and among those networks, the mode of

operation is connective. An Australian example is GetUp, an Australian digital

campaigning organisation (Vromen & Coleman, 2011).

The third model devised by Bennett and Segerberg is crowd-organised and enabled by

technology. There is no centralised coordination of action; and any actions or expressions are

both personal and supported by industrial scale access to what the authors describe as “multilayered

social technologies”. In addition, these groupings which form, big or small, may

reject more formal organisations and may not have lead agents. More importantly, any

previous experience of activism within those groupings informs the group as an entity. This

20

makes it possible both for individual actors to reflect-in-action, which is the phrase Donald

Schön (1986) uses to describe when actors in fields have enough knowledge and experience

to react in a way which is automatic or instinctive. In addition, because of the rapidity of

activism in internet time, I contend that this kind of response, where activists can reflect-inaction,

is likely to be developed over a much shorter time. In any event, these movements

respond quickly, their activists reflect-in-action (Schön, 1986) and, through social media,

continually participate in actions, maintaining a constant pressure on the opposition

(Alinsky, 1971). A number of scholars have ascribed this action to particular iterations of

activism, for example Trapenberg Frick (2016) on the Tea Party movement and related

property rights groups, Shepard (2014) on community projects as social activism, and shared

economy based communities (Olariu, 2014).

This last model, crowd-organised and enabled by technology, best describes the formation of

DTJ which, from the outset, was enabled and organised by digital platforms (Bennett &

Segerberg, 2012; 2013). While that research focused on Twitter, I argue that connective

action in this instance began on Twitter but migrated to Facebook and that DTJ moved from

purely crowd-enabled to the more hybridised form of crowd-organised and organisationallyenabled.

The work on connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; 2013), along with the work of

Darren Lilleker and Thierry Vedel (2013), will be examined in the context of the digital

environment, in particular, the work of Henrike Knappe and Sabine Lang (2014). These

scholars investigated the outreach and mobilisation capacity of women’s movements in

Germany and the UK and ascribed the term ‘communicative turn’ to contemporary

feminism’s shift from offline to online.

Therefore the communicative turn, as applied to feminism, provides a direct link between

feminist activism and connective action (Knappe & Lang, 2014). Bennett

and Segerberg (2012; 2013) illustrate the way in which communication is utilised in

connective action and the importance that plays in activism while Knappe and Lang

(2014) define this as the communicative turn. The communicative turn, now clear in activism

(Norman, 2017; Lopez, 2018; Polino, 2018) and in the face-to-face political arena

(Mansbridge, 2018) is a crucial lens through which to examine feminist digital activism and

21

the organising which structures that activism. Through each communicative act, this will

provide insight into the development of policies, resulting strategies, and devised actions.

These instances allow a contemporary feminist framework for activism to be understood.

In many ways these questions about cyberactivism, or what is now called digital or online

activism, are ones which have preoccupied feminists about all activism through the four

waves. That is, feminist activists have consistently been confronted with the question of how

to get the message across most effectively, how to build a community of feminist concern

and action, and how to transform the public sphere. These questions provide a context to the

particular study of feminism and its effectiveness in Australia. Sarah Maddison and Marian

Sawer (2013), in their unique longitudinal study of feminism’s institutional outcomes, argue

for a multiplicity of repertories: “It is now recognised that most movements have engaged

with conventional politics, through lobbying and institution-building, at the same time as

pursuing more adversarial and performative tactics” (Maddison & Sawer, 2013, p. xii). This

multiplicity of repertoires broadens capacity, is more inclusive and; as Marshall Ganz says, it

increases the possibility that one of these repertoires might actually work (Ganz, 2005).

This thesis is located at the intersection of these issues. In particular, I am interested to

interrogate the ways in which feminists have used the internet, turning themselves into

cyberactivists to achieve social change. Employing traditional political strategies from

lobbying to institution-building, feminists have been able to secure significant social and

economic change for women. However, as Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer (2013) also

point out, these more orthodox strategies have always run in parallel with more adversarial

and performative tactics. It is these adversarial and performative tactics which are

characteristic of the cyberactivism that this thesis interrogates via a specific case-study of

feminist digital activism: the Destroy the Joint movement.

The online feminist activism of DTJ was built on social media, at once highly flexible but

also an organising platform (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; 2013). In addition, DTJ benefitted

from the work of journalists, including my own work, often using that work to provide

contexts for calls-to-actions, campaigns and the broad discussion of sexism and misogyny.

This intersection of journalism and activism has always existed (Dorf & Tarrow, 2017) and

22

that intersection received a signal boost because of the impact of social media (Dubois,

Gruzd, & Jacobson, 2018) and the broad understanding that the power of media may shape

political participation (Russell, 2017).

In the background to all this, I was also developing as an academic in the traditional sense of

the word. When I was employed as a tenured academic, it was as a practicing journalist rather

than as a scholar. However, it is hard to resist the enculturation of practitioners by the

academy so I began to teach in areas which were theoretical, particularly in the areas of

citizenship and participation. That provided a broader context for how DTJ worked. So, these

were five threads with me all the time throughout the process of my research: feminism,

journalism, social media, activism and academia. I learned about the tradition of activist

scholars (Hale, 2008; Sudbury & Okazawa-Rey, 2015). In my own workplaces, my own

activism has always been a site of some contention.

I also wrote more and more as there were three strands of my life which required that:

teaching, being a columnist, and being an activist. Some journalists are also activists (Dorf &

Tarrow, 2017), or at least try to take a position which might challenge what is going on in the

real world, and that has been true for me. My whole life was waiting for all these separate

parts of my life to come together to try to make change. It was only when I became an

academic and not long after DTJ began that it became clear there was room for a useful – and

hopeful - narrative about online feminist activists in Australia.

As I began my proposal for this PhD, scanning what had been covered, I tried to grasp the

many and varied work of feminist academics in Australia before me. There were all the

Australian women whose work which had been influential when I first went to university

(Greer, 1970; Kingston, 1977; Summers, 1975); and a host more across all disciplines.

Feminist researchers had looked at the history of the Women’s Electoral Lobby

(WEL) (Sawer & Radford, 2008), the history of Louisa Lawson (Ollif, 1978), the history of

those who campaigned for the vote (Oldfield, 1992). There were the stories of successful

campaigns, such as securing the vote, and campaigns which were still waiting to be

successful in some states and territories, such as abortion law reform, parental leave and child

care. There was room to further explore the nuts and bolts of feminist campaigns from the

inside and this provided an area for more extensive research. Much has been written about

23

DTJ from the outside, particularly in mainstream media and in academic research. In

summary, that coverage has been surprised, sceptical, enthusiastic. In less mainstream media

and on social media, the coverage has sometimes been less than enthusiastic and, in a number

of cases, highly critical. For the most part, from the outside, and with a handful of interviews

with participants who left DTJ after a short time, which did not provide extensive insight into

the group. This is the first comprehensive analysis of DTJ.

This intersection of insider research and more traditional systematic social science research

may provide a useful insight into happens inside an Australian online feminist social

movement and form new knowledge to assist in sustaining feminist activism in a society

where women are still not equal, where women are murdered by men at the rate of at least

one a week, and where the cost to the community of family violence alone is predicted by the

Productivity Commission to be $609 million by 2021 (Department of Social Services, 2014).

As I submit this these, in June 2019, three women have been murdered in three days. In

October 2018, 11 women were killed in 31 days, mostly by men they knew. In September

2015, three women were killed over 24 hours. We need a better understanding and urgently

needed theoretical perspectives on how to change violence and while we wait for society to

change, a better understanding of how to raise awareness of the impact of violence against

women.

In this thesis, I broaden the examination of DTJ to extend the work of Lance Bennett and

Alexandra Segerberg in their ground-breaking research on connective action (2102; 2013) by

developing a frame beyond the personal action frame; and by exploring the shift in one

organisation from crowd-enabled to organisationally-enabled connective action. In addition,

I use Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus (1977) and various forms of capital (1986). While

habitus and capital are more fully explored in chapter five, they are also utilised in earlier

chapters so a brief explanation beyond that in the glossary may be useful. Habitus is the

embedded dispositions and traits, culturally and socially produced, our socialised norms.

Habitus guides how we respond (Bourdieu, 1990). Capital is “understood as the set of

actually usable resources and powers” (Bourdieu, 1986). It is what we know, how we know

it, who we know; and together it confers status. This thesis uses cultural capital (what we

know) and social capital (who we know, our networks). I analyse the characteristics of the

feminist digital activists of DTJ to reveal the cultural and social capitals necessary for such

24

activism and highlight specific aspects of the capital which contributed to that activism,

including an elaboration of the existing work on information activism (Halupka, 2014; 2015).

While much of the research so far has stated that DTJ is a platform which enables social

change, I will compare and contrast three early campaigns of DTJ and then undertake a more

detailed analysis of Counting Dead Women as an example of information activism. That

there is emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) in activism is well understood – however, I

extend the understanding of emotional labour in activism, including that some aspects of

emotional labour, largely seen as negative, accrue as emotional capital, a form of social

capital (Nowotny, 1981) acquired in the private sphere including “knowledge, contacts and

relations as well as access to emotionally valued skills and assets which hold within any

social network characterised at least partly by affective ties” (Nowotny, 1981, p. 148). I

build on Jessamy Gleeson’s work (2016; 2017; 2018) to expand on her concept that

emotional labour of digital activism is tied to activist burnout, to challenge her hypothesis

using the interviews from my research so the activists themselves can propose ways in which

to develop resilience within the feminist digital labour space. In addition, I have undertaken

the first insider research on DTJ which provides a more comprehensive insight into how this

iteration of feminist digital activism operates.

Three key research questions and sets of subquestions have emerged for this thesis.

First, who builds digital feminist activist communities and how are they are built? What are

attributes of a sustainable feminist collective and how are those characteristics developed and

sustained over time?

Second, how is information about the key concerns of social movements communicated?

How do digital feminist activists get their messages, ideas and concerns out there? In what

ways do feminist online/digital activists contribute to and transform the public sphere?

Third, what is the experience of these feminist digital activists? Are there ways to minimise

burnout?

I selected the case study method because it allows an intense study of social phenomena

through intensive analysis of a single case, while drawing on all aspects of the case. In this

25

way, I could examine the case study over time (particularly in analysing the three campaigns

of this group). As well, case studies are frequently used in both feminist research and activist

research, which is where this thesis sits (Ackerly & True, 2010).

I interviewed 30 DTJ activists, past and present. I then transcribed those interviews and

loaded the transcriptions into coding software NVivo. I printed out transcripts so I could read

them over and over again. I then used NVivo to code each interview, and emerged with many

common themes across the interviews. As I explain more fully in chapter three,

methods and methodology, I chose thematic analysis as a way to interpret what was in the

interviews. I looked for themes – for patterns – which emerged across the data set and which

provided what Shoshanna Sofaer (1999) described as “rich descriptions of complex

phenomena” while also “giving voice to those whose views are rarely heard”. Indeed, some

of the activists I interviewed were older women who had never been asked for their views on

activism. Stories of emotions emerged from every single interview undertaken. In the chapter

on emotional labour and capital, my research interrogates feelings including the positive, and

found activist experiences beyond burnout.

It had not occurred to me how often activists would experience joy, or even that activists do

activism every single day. These are small, surprising findings. As Ayres (2008) says, an

inductive approach matters. I tried to use feminist thematic analysis as a way to give power to

my research participants, to look at themes which the participants themselves raised, either

directly (“you should write about this”) or indirectly. Although there does not appear to be a

direct definition of feminist thematic analysis, I tried to emulate those researchers in nursing,

in particular, to “capture the values and meaning that these [participants] attributed to their

understanding of feminism and feminist identity” (McDougall, 2013).

As explained earlier, chapter one functions as both an introduction and a brief literature

review; setting out both the theoretical realm in which this thesis operates and providing an

insight into why it is crucial to reflect on our activism.

26

In chapter two, I lay out a brief historical overview of feminism from a social movements

perspective and of Australian feminism, eventually focussing on the trajectory of feminist

organising in the digital space.

Chapter three is the methods and methodology chapter, which also includes a section on the

challenges and benefits of researching as an insider, and a reflection on my own feminist

research methods. As I argue in this chapter, a case study provides a rich data set; and in this

particular case study, the data set provides both the outward facing data and the behind-thescenes

data. This case study uses several examples: individuals, groups, processes, societies,

episodes.

Chapters four to eight each contain empirical analysis using relevant existing research and an

analysis of my primary data, interviews with activists. Each chapter has an overview of

relevant literature to the key themes discussed within and will then introduce the key

argument or arguments to be explored more fully. In each chapter, I will attempt to make

clear why I am making claims of new knowledge which are relevant in the realm of online

feminist Australian activism which in some instances could also be pertinent to online

feminist activism elsewhere.

Chapter four is a brief history of Destroy The Joint’s emergence and key events throughout

its history, as well as summary of key critiques of the page. It uses analytics applied to

Facebook data to describe the growth of the page; and also considers the structures and

leadership within the organisation of DTJ.

In chapter five I explore the impact of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) and capital (Bourdieu,

1986) on the becoming of feminist activists in Destroy The Joint. As well as using

Bourdieu’s theories to undertake that exploration, and also the concept

of prefiguration (Boggs, 1977), where activists bring their embedded values to bear on their

next activist experience, in this case Destroy The Joint. In the sharing of the skills,

knowledge and attributes which shape capital, capital both structures agents on the field and

also structures the field itself. In the strictly Bourdieusian sense, capital has three forms:

economic (money, property rights); cultural (education, skills, class, taste, preferences) and

social (connections and networks).

27

Chapter six expands on Max Halupka’s work on information activism (2014; 2015). In

particular, I examine the concept of information activism as a function of cultural capital and

apply that concept to activism. This chapter illustrates what these activists brought with them

to the Australian online feminist activist group, how their activism evolved during their

involvement with Destroy The Joint, and how what these activists brought to their activism

shaped that activism.

Chapter seven “On campaigning and Counting Dead Women in Australia” examines both the

campaigns within DTJ and the multiplicity of strategic repertoires used by the DTJ organisers

in their hybrid campaigning. It explores how the admins and moderators of DTJ each

personally felt about the campaigns of the page and what the admins and moderators

considered to be effective and ineffective. In particular, it analyses the Counting Dead

Women campaign, which keeps track of - and disseminates - a toll of fatal violence against

women in Australia. I explore how the campaign was devised and then implemented. It will

also examine what, if any, impact that campaign has had on the mainstream media coverage

of fatal violence against women. I also examine the artefacts of the Counting Dead Women

campaign, including the imagery of the campaign, how those artefacts were shared and the

way this campaign performed on Facebook. Using that imagery and the way it is shared, I

illustrate the shift from the concept of the personal action frame (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012;

2013) as a form of political participation to a transnational digital solidarity frame, where

those who participate online through the sharing of images do so to state their position in

solidarity with others. I argue that this too is a form of connective action, enabled by the

internet, which, unlike the personal action frame, emphasises more than shared values, more

than individual interpretation and adaptation.

Chapter eight looks at the findings around the emotional labour of feminist activists in

Australia, and its accrual and transformation to emotional capital; In this chapter, I look

closely at another form of capital, one which was only lightly touched upon by Bourdieu but

then more thoroughly explored by Helga Nowotny (1981). Emotions are a huge part of

activism. Activists are driven by urgency, purpose and passion and, as Gould (2002) puts it

well, “[m]ovement participants, animated by a tangled mixture of feelings and calculations,

are much more than rational actors”. Those feelings and calculations propel us. They also

lead to burnout in feminist organisations. However, burnout was not a big factor in attrition in

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DTJ, and indeed some of the activists have been there for nearly seven years. Through my

data, I explore whether the connectedness of those in the group has an impact on resilience.

This chapter explores emotional labour and emotional capital and how those concepts sit in

the broader study of the politics of emotion. I analyse what the interview subjects themselves

said about three distinct but intertwined themes: the emotional labour of activism in the

feminist sphere, the emotional labour of dealing with attacks on the page, and the emotional

labour of dealing with other activists. Emotional labour is unpaid because it is not recognised

as labour, however I argue it is identified and recognised as a form of exchange within the

volunteer digital feminist activist workplace.

I outline what these activists convey about emotional capital, and argue they accumulate

emotional capital through this activism. They accumulate capital because they labour, they

accumulate emotional capital because of their emotional labour as they carry out their

activism. Emotional capital was once identified as being acquired solely in the private sphere

but as women have inhabited the public sphere, they bring with them emotional capital and

its benefits. Emotional labour was always identified as being in the public sphere. While

volunteer work as an activist is in the public sphere, Arlie Hochschild (1983) formulated the

concept as one which occurs only in paid employment. Yet I do not think I have ever felt

more beholden to any work activity - volunteer or not - than I did and do to DTJ. Seven years

after its inception, I still think about it daily, sometimes hourly. This chapter tells the story

about how the Destroy the Joint activists felt about their work; and in what ways those

feelings shaped their participation in this activism.

Chapter nine, the conclusion, summarises the findings of this thesis, its limitations and what’s

next. At this feminist regeneration, I conclude there is some hope that feminist digital

activism makes change. I hope my thesis has the potential to contribute significantly to a new

understanding of the feminist political struggle. Specifically, the project challenges current

practices and ideologies which see online activism as a largely top-down movement (in

the vein of 'progressive' 'authoritarian' groups, or top-down movements, such as GetUp and

Avaaz). As Shaw (2012, p. 196) writes: “Online communities… function to develop new

activist discourses, ideologies, and ideas, and [to show] areas for activism”. She identifies

some feminists as wishing to convert others to feminism through their online practice of

feminism. It is nearly impossible, in an overarching sense, to measure impact, but it is

29

possible to make claims about change and how that change was brought about. This group

has not yet ‘destroyed the joint’, but it continues to work towards its goal.

This thesis has implications for the practice of feminist digital activism, including the benefit

of encompassing members with previous structured activist experience, tools and practices

for using online groups as forums to provide support for other activists; and the importance of

including activists with diversity of skills and interests for long-term sustainability.

30

Back in 2005, I heard a young woman ask the feminist media critic Judith Williamson

what was to be done about the parlous state of representations of women in

advertising. Williamson paused, and then replied, ‘The problem is that sexism didn’t

go away, we just stopped talking about it.’ She then went on to explain how ‘we’ (the

assumed feminist audience) had allowed the word to be mocked and hijacked by the

media, and because no one wanted to be seen as ‘uptight,’ ‘frigid,’ or ‘humourless’

the term sexism fell out of use, latterly acquiring a quaint, old-fashioned ring to it—in

a way that was strikingly not paralleled by notions of racism or homophobia. ‘One

thing we could do, then,’ Williamson concluded, ‘is simply start using the term

again.’ (Gill, 2011, p. 61)

And we did.

In this chapter, I will briefly review the existing research and theory on feminism as a social

movement, with a view toward the contemporary trajectory of feminist organising through

digital media. This chapter also situates DTJ in a continuum of feminist activism in

feminism’s - perhaps - fourth iteration, generation or wave, and situates this Australian

activist group in feminism as a social movement, as a demonstration of what Alison Crossley

(2017) calls waveless feminism, a feminism which is not “serene or flat” (p. 20) but which

has myriad currents, some stronger than others. Debra Minkoff (1997) argues that social

movements experience different trajectories, with differing and competing contexts which

impact those trajectories. This chapter provides this context for this particular form of

feminist digital activism.

Feminism is often described as a series of waves (Nicholson, 2010; Munro, 2013; Taylor,

1989; Dahlerup, 2013; Donovan, 2012). However, I argue along with, for

example, Deborah Stevenson, Christine Everingham and Penelope Robinson (2011) that the

term generation is more helpful. The idea of waves tends to minimise the work women do

between what is constructed or perceived by others as crests or peaks in movements. The

Australian feminist generation, circa 2012, took a communicative turn in the instance of DTJ.

However, social movements are reproduced by their histories and feminism is as much

subject to its histories as any other social movement, bringing with it repertoires, politics,

31

what Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper (2001) describe as ‘tactical tastes’.

I contend that when feminists speak truth to male power, they can only enact this through

their own lived experience of activism, and through their collective agency. If the personal is

political, feminist activism, through the adaption of visibility politics, allows us to make the

political personal.

There is also some deliberation over whether waves of feminism exist, whether they can each

be delineated; and indeed, what each wave stands for. There is not the same trivialisation of

other social movements, no mention of labour movement waves or ‘new Left’ waves or even

waves of neoliberalism. In fact, the concept of what organisational continuity actually means

is contested. How many movements actually meet that test?

Feminism sits in the broader context of social movements and its collective expression

exemplifies Charles Tilly’s concepts of political movement theory (Tilly, 1999) and the

exposition of what he termed WUNC which encompasses the factors of common identity

constructed by those engaged in activism: worthiness, unity, number and commitment. This

is explored more fully later in this chapter and used in conjunction with Dahlerup (2013) but

briefly: worthiness evaluates the worth of the project; unity describes movement solidarity;

number is clearly the quantity of those involved; and commitment asks for continuity of

individual actors.

Key challenges of feminist movements are - more or less - the same today as they were when

identified by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin (1995) in their edited work based

on a 1992 feminist conference - how to organise collectively across gender, race and class -

and how to effectively deliver social change. To meet and defeat these challenges, feminists

conduct campaigns, use different ways to conduct those campaigns, and certainly fulfil at

least WNC. Sometimes feminism can be a little short of the U, made apparent by

contemporary debates on intersectionality, white privilege, sex work, trans

inclusivity/exclusivity, class and myriad other ways in which feminists divide

themselves (The TERFs, 2014; Ortega, 2006; Carby, 2007; Hamad and Liddle, 2017).

32

Among all the arguments which divide feminists from each other, there are two other

challenges facing feminism as a whole. One, it has a bad name, perhaps, as Joan Buschman

and Silvo Lenart (1996) argue, because it is identified with militant acts, bra-burning (just the

least of it) and man-hating, and is stereotyped in mainstream media and in popular discourse.

Two, it is considered unnecessary because the feminist battles are ‘won’. Post-feminism is

widely debated but Sarah Gamble (2004, p. 44) puts it best, it is used as a term to indicate

“joyous liberation from the ideological shackles of a hopelessly outdated feminist movement”

while pretending that there is also no need for the feminist movement

In addition, the concept of postfeminism, or of a feminism that ignored structural inequality,

emerged the further into neoliberalism we sank (Keller and Ringrose, 2015; Rottenberg,

2014; Scharff, 2016). I argue that the ‘feminism is dead’ argument could be perceived as a

tool to discourage women from working in feminist activism, as if collective activity had

been shown to be a failure; would be certain to invoke backlash (Reger, 2012) and the only

way to achieve equality would be to achieve it on your own terms, in your own way. In short,

neoliberalism urged us to forget our sisters. Despite longstanding media claims

(Bolotin, 1982; Razer, 2016; Hill, 2015), feminism is not dead. It is, instead, as a movement,

home to many niches while maintaining a collective identity. Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica

Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller (2019) have described this current wave - generation - as

popular feminism which rises up in response to popular misogyny (Banet-Weiser, 2015). As

Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer (2013) say, there is no necessity to write obituaries for

feminism.

In order to be a social movement, according to Tilly (1999), feminism must satisfy WUNC.

Drude Dahlerup (2013) also contends it must have organisational continuity, shared identity

and core ideological purpose (Dahlerup, 2013). These two definitions intersect with each

other, although it may not be surprising that it is the male social movement theorist who

insists that for something to be worthwhile, it also needs to be big in number.

In some respects, each of these attributes overlap with each other. Based on Drude

Dahlerup’s thesis, I argue that organisational continuity (or what Tilly might call

commitment) asks us to imagine a social movement where the activist network consists of the

same personnel, which would only really work if the social movement achieved its goals in a

33

lifetime. It could be more useful to consider if the goals of the social movement were

consistent over its existence, or even its - shared - or collective identity was maintained over

a lifetime. It would not matter if the people were different, as long as the aims or the core

ideological purpose were the same. It might also be useful to think about the repertoires

which are used within the movement both to achieve goals and also to stick together (Taylor

and Whittier, 1992; Reger, 2002; Taylor and Van Dyke, 2004).

Organisational continuity could be seen as a version of Tilly’s commitment. There is some

deliberation over whether waves of feminism exist, if that metaphor is even useful or if it

elides the feminist experience (Fernandes 2010; Nicholson 2010; Laughlin & Castledine

2010), whether they can each be delineated, and indeed, what each wave stands for. Verta

Taylor (1989) argues that social movement theory, which focuses on an “immaculate

conception” interpretation – births followed by deaths - fails to recognise the aspects of the

continuity of any movement, movements in decline or in equilibrium; and that it also

concentrates on the long held classical conceptions of effective social movements as big in

number, with a broad base. This is a heroic ideation which, in the lived moment, bears little

relation to the actual grind of being part of any social movement, of activism in particular,

which is always structured by the structures (Bourdieu, 1979). It may not be possible, for

example, for feminist activism to thrive if women have multiple competing priorities

(Randall, 1987). Social movements respond to context and that is also true of feminist social

movements. What makes social movements gain momentum and lose momentum is still a

study in progress, but given solid foundation by Charles Tilly’s (1986, p.10) “repertoire of

contention” which he says is triggered by what he describes as “current patterns of

repression”, still very relevant to feminism; the population’s “daily routines” and

its “accumulated experience with collective action”; and the “prevailing standards of rights

and justice”. There are different stages of mobilisation and those stages work concurrently

with shifts in both the underpinning ideology and the organisations which coalesce around

those ideologies. Taylor’s (1989, p. 772) view is that “movements do not die, but scale down

and retrench to adapt to changes in the political climate”, that there are bridges which cross

over between different stages of any movement, that all movements experience abeyance.

The discussion of the concept of collective identity - a core emphasis for social movement

status - by Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier (1992) the way in which a group shares goals to

34

maintain cohesion, underscores their original premise that feminism does experience

continuity, or, as Maddison and Sawer put it, “remarkable continuity” (2013, p. 8). Old-style

activism, based on collective action, is an accepted framework for change and new-style

activism, organised, for example, as connective action, is more likely to be treated by some

established feminists as trivial, ineffective and treated in an oppositional way. New-school

activists, in the other hand, argue that older activists render the new work as invisible. Sarah

Maddison (2013, p. 140) writes of a feminist conference in Sydney Australia in 2010:

One of the conference organisers, Gabe Kavanagh, also spoke directly of concerns

about an apparent ‘generational schism’ within the Australian women’s movement,

reportedly arguing that the work and politics of young feminists in Australia ‘are

seldom recognised by more established feminists’ meaning that, in many ways, they

are rendered ‘invisible to them’. Kavanagh expressed the view that while feminist

ideals have remained consistent, young women’s methods have changed, producing a

‘generational disconnect’. Now, she suggests, ‘Instead of protesting on the streets, as

in the 1970s, today’s young feminists campaign online.’

As a result, and as Julia Schuster (2017) argues, some of that online feminist work is invisible

to older feminists, who may not be active online or even present online. In addition, what is

considered to be the affect of older feminism – as “humourless victim” feminism (Bulbeck,

2010, p. 21) – is rejected by younger feminists.

Collective identity refers to the way that those involved in a social movement see themselves

as a group and articulate a shared or negotiated worldview. It is a result of a

distributed, collective conversation and the way that conversation is first individuated and

then returned to the collective identity. Of course, not all feminists are included in one big

collective conversation, but all may have the opportunity to participate in smaller

conversations which have been influenced by other discourses in a larger collective. A

collective identity, as far as it exists, is not a unanimous, homogenous position with no

contestation along the way. Collectives are not homogenous or even heterogeneous but there

may be an acceptance of a common position. Shaw (2012) in early work on feminist digital

activism finds that networks of Australian feminist bloggers negotiate political discourse with

35

each other through their blogs but also more broadly. Not everyone can see or hear everyone

else, and yet define themselves through a common language or sense of the collective. This

may even be true if many members of the collective disagree with one another, for example

moderation, linking and mutual support which appears in this kind of grassroots activism – as

well as the way in which participants move in and out of networks defining and redefining

their actions and their activism through the rearguing and reconstruction of argument which

she describes as discursive activism (Shaw, 2013) and which builds solidarity.

Collective identity is how those in the movement see themselves in opposition to others. That

collective identity permeates all aspects of any social movement. As Verta Taylor and Nancy

Whittier (1992, p. 170) put it, it’s the “shared definition of a group that derives from

members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarity”. When looking at collective identity

in digital feminist activism, it is vital to recognise the challenges that presents. Cristina

Flesher Fominaya (2018, p. 429) recognises analysis of collective identity formation in online

movements is difficult because of “the mediated nature of communication” where it becomes

fractured; where “social and material life are often infused with elements of anonymity,

modalities of hypermobility, ephemerality, and mutability” (Coleman, 2010 p.494).

Collective identity is, as Flesher Fominaya (2018) says, rarely permanent and even less so

online but there are some key elements which define the boundaries of a collective identity,

such as the effective socialisation into movement cultural practices by learning the codes in

operation and for members to feel as if they are part of something bigger.

It is quaint now to consider that once scholars and public intellectuals thought that what

happened online stayed online with no discernible impact in what was then termed the

real world. In fact, Evgeny Morozov (2009) argued it was slacktivism, “feel-good online

activism that has zero political or social impact” and Malcolm Gladwell (2010) claimed it

should be ignored because it wasn’t real activism with its more traditional thick collective

ties (Gladwell, 2010). By contrast, present-day scholarship increasingly suggests that social

media social movements develop a strong sense of collective identity (Harlow 2012; Milan

2015) in particular through the formation of digital comfort zones (Treré, 2015, p. 869) where

activists reinforced “their internal solidarity through practices of ‘ludic activism’.” In the

36

experience of the administrators and moderators of DTJ, that ludic activism, that playfulness,

was a form of support (discussed in chapter five).

However, the challenges of collective identity continue. It shifts shape, according to the

participants within each instance of discussion or negotiation, it is an of-the-moment

interpretation that is renewed and rehashed and moves within multiple contexts. As Nancy

Whittier (2017, p. 382) puts it, tensions emerge “because many groups want both to

deconstruct the barriers that separate them from the mainstream and simultaneously to

organise around their distinctness as a group”. This is how collective identity, shared values,

are forged, through multiple actions and processes. This identity is a key aspect of a social

movement.

We can define feminism through shared ideologies, some of which have moved to, more or

less, general acceptance (van Dijk, 2006). However, some aspects of this core ideological

purpose, belief or value have been tested because of the nature of third wave feminism

(explained later) where specific parameters of equality, such as race and class, are added to

the list. My argument would be that equality is equality and broadening it doesn’t diminish it

but strengthens it. Other central elements of the core belief system include the maintenance of

a “system of equitable power distribution” (Thomas, 1999) and more specifically, equality in

employment and the family setting (Schnittker, Freese, & Powell, 2003).

We can blame US journalist Martha Lear (1968) for the use of the word waves to describe

feminism, which metaphor is now the dominant discourse when discussing our particular

social movement. Are there waves? Does it matter? Is it possible that this added scrutiny

(hey, why isn’t your movement constant in its behaviour?) that women experience as

individuals (Mahdavi, 2009; Lapierre, 2008) is also directed at the one social movement

where gender equality is central? And why should we use the wave metaphor when it

paralyses feminism and sets us against each other? (Gillis and Munford, 2004).

In what has been identified as its earliest ‘wave’ form, feminism was the struggle for equal

voting rights, for labour rights and for freedom from violence. First wave feminism is

traditionally portrayed as reaching its peak with the struggle for women’s suffrage and along

37

the way, making major gains in the areas of “matrimonial law, property ownership, child

custody rights, work and educational opportunities, and government regulation of sexual

morality” (Sanders, 2004, p. 23; Magarey 2001) and shifting from Liberalism to socialism,

says Olive Banks (1986). Through largely polite, middle-class advocacy, first wave feminism

placed women’s rights on the political agenda (Sawer 2013). Second wave feminism, from

the mid-sixties to the late seventies, took the position that the ‘personal is political’ (the title

of Carol Hanisch’s 1970 essay) to illustrate the way in which patriarchal values and

behaviours influenced every aspect of the female existence (Thornham, 2004) and the

Women’s Liberation movement, as a foundation of the second wave, focussed primarily on

the undoing of patriarchy (Millett, 1970).

The third wave of feminism (Walker, 2001) responded to a number of incidents which

transected both race and gender; and in the US at least, was a response to high profile

incidents, such as the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Jodi Dean (1997) described

third-wave as a response to the attacks on the rights of women. Feminism, she argues, was

not dead, in fact it was “able to act with vitality” (Dean, 1997, p.149), able to gain power

“from coalition within its own diverse ranks as well as with other political groups” (1997,

p.140). Yet that opportunity for coalition also attracted critique, including that some of the

next generation feminists set themselves in opposition to second-wave feminism (Henry,

2004).

Third wave feminism turned its focus away from the foundations of inequality, away from

fighting poverty and male violence against women, towards an expression of - and

concentration on - identity and representation. As Nancy Fraser writes (2013, p.161): “It is no

longer clear that feminist struggles for recognition are serving to deepen and enrich struggles

for egalitarian redistribution,” While in some respects Fraser welcomed the shift towards

what she describes as recognition around “multiculturalism, human rights and national

autonomy” (2013, p.160), she also feared it undermined the broader goal of redistribution,

and argues for feminism to return to its roots of a deep connection with labour and of a

reconnection with equality and the restructuring of the economy.

Yet, these are second-wave views of third-wave feminism and entrench the divisions that

wave theory encourages. Ruth Lewis and Susan Marine (2015) develop a more nuanced view

38

of third-wave feminism, one which draws upon the metaphor of a tapestry, a

metaphor first developed by second-wave feminists Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson

(1989). The Lewis/Marine tapestry (2015, p. 133) replaces the waves and the generations and

reifies all the threads, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, “political, cultural and social

contexts” into a feminism that unites, rather than divides.

Even in this very brief summary of feminism as a social movement, there is evidence of

multiple competing priorities often used to attack feminism and to set feminist activists

against each other while at the same time appearing to be, as Jo Reger (2012) puts it,

everywhere and nowhere. This might be how you would describe a social movement which

gets quite a lot of mainstream media traction, including among celebrities such as Beyoncé,

(Keller & Ringrose, 2015) but which leads to very little real change at a policy level.

I argue, however, that social movements traverse a trajectory. The best-organised movements

incorporate history, current circumstance and the multiple goals of multiple actors (as

described above by Lewis and Marine, 2015), to move forward, meaning to recruit more

widely, to mobilise using a variety of repertoires, by broadening appeal through those

multiple goals (Polletta, 2014).

So how do these multiple competing priorities locate feminism in the 21st century where it

exists ubiquitously online? In the next section I will address this question. As Dean and Aune

(2015, p. 375) argue, the metaphor of the wave should “best be understood as a way of

framing feminist practice, rather than referring to discreet cohorts of feminists”. The framing

of feminist practice in this instance is provided by the role of the internet and social media

platforms, and the cohorts are intermediated by the digital organising platforms.

Donovan wrote the first edition of Feminist Theory: the Intellectual Traditions of American

Feminism in 1985; and the fourth edition (2012) nearly 30 years later. Although sceptical of

the use of the word wave, it is one she employs herself and argues the fourth wave

(Cochrane, 2013; Darmon, 2014; Munro, 2013; Martin & Valenti, 2012) will be a powerful

“resurgence and rearticulation of feminisms past” (Donovan, 2012, p. xiv) and dates its

beginning to the Hillary Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Of those

39

who identify a fourth wave, a clear commonality is the role of the internet and social media

platforms as a space for the feminist movement and women’s voices; women for many years

were the power users of social networking and more interested in using the internet for

communicating with friends well before the onset of social media (Weiser, 2000) and women

are still more likely than men to use Facebook to research, to look for information and to

learn new thing (Noguti, Singh, &Waller, 2019).

Today much feminist organisation occurs online but the challenges of organising remain.

Scholarly research into the new forms of politics facilitated by the internet in the nineties has

focussed on whether it would be an effective tool or just a replication of existing power

structures. Feminists are digital citizens, part of a networked society (Castells, 1996) and both

the value of the digital communication and the ease with which it occurs contribute to impact.

In some respects, this makes it easier to see the contradictory structure of interests and values

that constitute (feminist) society. According to Marian Sawer and Sarah Maddison (2013,

xii), traditional forms of lobbying continue but “adversarial and performative tactics” now

occur online. Athina Karatzogianni’s 2012 view, expressed just as DTJ emerged, was that the

digital affect of discontent and the desire for social change, are not realised; and that even

when they are, they don’t make a material difference. She says tangible effects can only be

operationalised once capitalism is undone.

These current models shall not manage effectively networks, flows, material

machines and productive labours at the libidinal, affective, and ideological levels,

unless the world system is rebooted as a whole (Karatzogianni, 2012 p. 249).

Her position must then discount social advances such as universal suffrage, divorce, and

minimum wage which advances she says only serve to prop up capitalism and buy into

oppression. However, I’d argue that the social web is an opportunity to recruit activists and,

as Gamson (1995, p. 85) said of recruitment, “activists can bridge public discourse and

people's experiential knowledge, integrating them in a coherent frame that supports and

sustains collective action”. Recruiting matters, participation matters, no matter the vector. As

Prudence Chamberlin (2017, p. 107) puts it, “[w]hile social media is not at the centre of all

fourth wave activism, it has transformed dissemination and participation such that the cultural

context is significantly different from that of ten years ago”.

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In 2007 (ten years before Chamberlin wrote) there was no opportunity for broadcast feminist

communities such as Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism. Harvey Weinstein’s behaviour was

still a secret. Now, feminism is seen. Feminism is on every social media platform, it’s the

word on every star’s lips, it’s a UN campaign led by Hermione Granger or at least her real

self, Emma Watson. It is, as Banet-Weiser (2018, p.884) puts it, both “hypervisible and

normative”.

In that moment of hypervisibility, at the time Chamberlin’s book was published in 2017, the

communities which aggregated around #beenrapedandneverreported and #metoo became

sites for activists to recruit, to organise and to mobilise (Mendes et al 2019) and that process

is now well-acknowledged and documented. Australian feminist bloggers negotiated political

discourse with each other through their blogs but also more broadly. Frances Shaw (2012)

wrote of feminist blogging networks in Australia they not only build networks among

bloggers, communities, but also build what she described as “investment in feminist claims”

by participants (p. 232). These investments in feminist claims may develop as microcampaigns

- or meeting points - which Jessica McLean, Sophia Maalsen and Alana Grech

(2016) posit as characterising the “ongoing productive space” that is DTJ.

More importantly, however, Shaw also discusses the process of moderation, linking and

mutual support which appears in this kind of grassroots activism – as well as the way in

which participants move in and out of networks defining and redefining their actions and

their activism through the rearguing and reconstruction of argument or discursive activism

(Shaw, 2013). Shaw’s participants used the word microactivism. But how does this kind of

activism translate to political change? How does this grassroots framework co-exist alongside

more traditional activist frameworks? Is it a kind of organising? And let’s recall Ferree who,

long after her work in 1995, now says the development of feminist organising makes

contemporary feminism transnational (at least in the English-speaking and digitally

accessible world): “For all these reasons, networks – informal, decentralized and increasingly

electronic – have become the hallmark of transnational feminist organizing in the present

time” (Ferree, 2007). Examples include #metoo and Slutwalk (De Benedictus, Orgad, &

Rottenberg, 2019), as well as Association of Women’s Rights in Development which began

as a more traditional form of organising (Harcourt, 2013).

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DTJ, an online feminist action group based solely on Facebook, fits the criteria of loose,

multi-issue (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; 2013), a contemporary activist network which

intimates a future – and even a present – that moves away from actions which operate in

traditional ways around advocacy and require high levels of organisational resources (read,

costs). Shaw (2012) documents this online or digital activism or ‘microactivism’ which may

complement the Bennett-Segerberg (2012; 2013) model at the grassroots level and may lead

to an exploration of the move away from collective action for feminists to connective action.

Digital activism is usually civil and non-violent, making what the Digital Activism Research

Project (Edwards, Howard, & Joyce, 2013) calls “an organized public effort, making

collective claim(s) on a target authority(s), in which civic initiators or supporters use digital

media” and Hands (p.47, 2011) argues that the concept of digital activism slips out of the

hands of capital at the urging of some of its handmaidens, technocapitalists, who urge

consumers to have their own mobile technologies and therefore their own control (internet

access willing):

By putting technology into the hands of people . . . technocapitalism is unwittingly

opening itself up to a new cycle of democratisation and social, economic and political

flux (Hands, 2011, p.47).

Digital activism provides a process to enable the construction of a social identity which can

be measured by the schematic of Worthiness Unity Numbers and Commitment (WUNC)

developed by Charles Tilly (1999, 2019) and discussed earlier, however this measure has

some interpretational challenges in the context of internet interaction. As Lance Bennett and

Alexandra Segerberg succinctly put it: “Critics doubt that loose multi-issue networks that are

required to produce political change” (2013, p. 59).

Some scholars have mentioned DTJ either in passing as an example of digital activism or as a

focus. To contextualise my research within a growing body of analysis, I will provide an

overview of this previous research on DTJ. The analysis and conclusions are all worthwhile

however they do not focus on the process of activism itself or the ways that activism impacts

42

on activists. In some instances, individual activists from DTJ have been interviewed but there

has not been a methodical analysis of its activists and their activism.

Several recent analyses of contemporary feminist activism in Australia now recognise the

pivotal organising role that DTJ has played, some more comprehensive than others.

Ann Curthoys (2014), in a broader overview of gender in the social sciences and citing a

renewal of feminism, reported that: “We have seen a rise in women’s organisation around

these issues, as in the remarkably successful Facebook site, Destroy the Joint.” Marian

Sawer too (2013) sought to place Destroy The Joint as a sign of feminist renewal. “A highly

successful feminist mobilization promptly took place on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

under the rubric ‘Destroy the Joint’ . . . its witty images of women destroying the joint ‘using

only their gender’ attracted a large following.”

Again, in passing, and in an update to their major work Key Concepts in Gender Studies,

Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan (2016) include Destroy The Joint’s work as an example of

cyberfeminist activism, a media watch organ, “selecting and exposing the worst instances of

sexism” and specifically mentions Counting Dead Women, “the running total of women in

Australia killed at the hands of violent men”. They set Destroy the Joint in the context of

networked feminism, where a public voice, a collective response to sexism, is fashioned on

the social web. “Cyberfeminist activism like this shows the power of the Internet as well as

the continuing hazards for women”, said Pilcher (2016, p. ix).” They also posit that the

“potential for global feminist organising is technically there but possibly not widely taken

up”. (Pilcher, 2016, p. 25)

Verity Trott (2019) describes Destroy The Joint’s peripheral role in the campaign against the

visit to Australia of a misogynist pickup artist. She considers Destroy The Joint to be a formal

feminist organisation because it has “a public collective identity, comprise[s] a formalised

(although not necessarily public) team of people behind the administration of the Facebook

pages, operate[s] under a set name and [is] contactable and publicly recognisable”. There are

no specific findings ascribed to Destroy the Joint although she does talk about the way in

which ‘formal’ digital feminist organisations straddle two of Bennett and Segerberg’s activist

typologies (2012, 2013): crowd-enabled and organisationally-enabled connective action.

Usefully, Trott extends connective action to make both crowd-enabled connective action and

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organisationally-enabled connective action more transparent, to examine the structures of

online feminist activism in Australia. It is possible in the smaller Australian setting, separate

from international mass mobilisations, to identify actors and their roles in connective

activism.

There is, however, in-depth research on Destroy The Joint. This included work by Jessica

McLean, Sophia Maalsen and Alana Grech (2013; 2015; 2016; 2017) and Jessamy Gleeson

(2017). McLean and Maalsen (2013) were the first to examine Destroy the Joint and examine

the “trajectory of the feminist revitalization in new media and beyond” looking at the way in

which DTJ occupies space and time and those authors use theories of human geography

rather than theories of activism, utilising the spatial analysis framework adapted from Rose

and Fincher (cited in McLean and Maalsen, 2013).

Through this framework, they identified the space DTJ occupied on the internet and explored

the context and the ramifications of both DTJ and Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. Broadly,

they found that “DTJ and its associated campaigns are precisely the type of social activism

and social life that do not leave organisations and institutions unaffected” (McLean &

Maalsen, 2013, p.254). McLean and Maalsen claim that through social media,

“women have the opportunity to engage in new spaces of resistance and be creative in this

resistance . . . a spatial account of these relational processes shows how powerful voices are

cutting across domains that may not be as easily compromised without the use of sites like

Twitter and Facebook”. They also cite the ubiquity of the technologies which enabled

Destroy The Joint in partnership with the reality of gendered disadvantage.

In 2015, the researchers used Destroy The Joint as a simplified and descriptive case study of

feminist revitalisation, “broad-based and effective, unified but not uniform” (McLean &

Maalsen, 2015, p. 327). They used their former paper (2013) and a brief summary of early

campaigns to argue that campaigns facilitated by social media are effective in producing

change. In 2016, joined by Alana Grech, McLean and Maalsen entered into a collaborative

research process with Destroy The Joint, asking those who participated on the page to reflect

on DTJ, place themselves on a map and complete a survey. The total number of completed

responses was 888 and the maps showed that those who completed the research activity were

not situated in any specific area or location. In addition, the analysis of those surveyed found

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online feminist activism, as practised by Destroy The Joint, used a variety of different

practices “in mundane and sometimes spectacular ways that are unpredictable and

compelling” (McLean, Maalsen, & Grech, 2016, p. 174).

Much of this research and analysis ignores the communicative aspect of DTJ, the discursive

activism (Shaw, 2013) which assists “in the definition of a continuously negotiated feminismto-

come” and that the claims developed online are made visible and therefore are able to have

“real-world effects, not least in the lives and lifestyles of participants and the ways that they

engage politically” (p. 130). In that context, she cites Destroy The Joint as an example of a

movement which has contributed to some of the renewed visibility of feminist politics (p.

118) but does not go into further detail. Casey (2016) described Destroy The Joint as

succeeding past its original campaign and an example of “collective-action activist groups”

(p. 13) but again mentions it only in passing. In addition, and to add to the analysis of the

communicative aspect, Zufferey (2018) recognises Destroy The Joint’s work as a

contemporary iteration of consciousness-raising and feminist resistance, in contrast to the

style of feminist activism which she had experienced. As she reflects:

Feminist activism remains important to challenging women’s ongoing oppression, but

it does not exist in the same form as it did in the 1970s. Banner-type protests continue

. . . [but] online feminist activism is now a powerful medium for women to get

organized and voice their concerns against violence and sexism. (Zufferey, 2018, p.

69)

Gleeson (2016; 2017; 2018) has explored Destroy The Joint in three papers through the use

of interviews with four DTJ activists in total. In her 2016 work, she examined three

online movements, ‘Sack Vile Kyle’, ‘Destroy The Joint’ and ‘Collective Shout’ and within

that, interviewed two Destroy The Joint moderators on the issue of digital labour in feminist

organising and what impact digital labour has on both activist labour and activist burnout.

She found that emotional labour was tied to activist burnout. In her 2017 work based on these

interviews, she found that Destroy The Joint was able to disrupt a dominant discourse while

at the same time, morphing into a long-lasting movement which has benefitted a wider

feminist cause by challenging existing power structures. Gleeson (2018) in her third paper on

DTJ and again basing her arguments on interviews with four participants and one external

45

activist, argues that DTJ, along with other online feminist activism, should develop policies

on intersectionality (further discussed in chapters three and five) in order to prevent what she

describes as the “silencing of digital voices” and, as such, “feminists risk isolating important

voices for the movement beyond the traditional white, middle-class woman”.

To conclude, there have been a number of findings about the operation and impact of Destroy

The Joint. These findings include that Destroy The Joint is an iteration of networked feminist

activism which has led to increased feminist visibility in Australia (Shaw, 2013; Sawer, 2013;

Curthoys, 2014; Trott, 2019). More specifically, Pilcher and Whelehan identify the key

campaign of Destroy The Joint, Counting Dead Women, as an example of cyberfeminist

activism which gives women a public collective voice.

In addition, a number of scholars, including McLean (2013; 2015; 2016; 2017) and Gleeson

(2016; 2017; 2018) that have identified Destroy The Joint as a space for women to engage in

public resistance in a new way, such as discursive activism, and that social media provides a

platform which enables social change. From the point of view of the activists, only Gleeson

identifies the digital labour of activists as a form of emotional labour and ties that to

activist burnout.

This chapter argued that the wave metaphor as applied to feminism is ubiquitous but not

necessarily useful or accurate. It also makes the claim that feminism as a social movement

meets both Tilly’s (1998) requirements for a social movement of worthiness, unity, numbers

and commitment and those of Dahlerup’s trident: organisational continuity, shared identity

and core ideological purpose (Dahlerup, 2013). These overlapping characteristics incorporate

history, current circumstance and the multiple goals of multiple actors. It sets Destroy the

Joint in the context of a feminist social movement and surveys existing research about DTJ,

example of connective action. Yet the existing research does not sufficiently explore the

communicative aspects of DTJ which acts to both frame feminism and to create a public self.

Therefore, this thesis is aimed at investigating whether Destroy the Joint was able to bridge

the usual divide between current activist and feminist practice by generating a movement

operating at the grassroots level. In the next chapter, I will outline the methods and

methodologies used in this research.

46

In this chapter, I will outline the methods and methodologies I used in researching this thesis:

the thematic analysis of qualitative interviews from a single case study. At the conclusion of

this chapter, I provide a table listing the participants and some of their individual attributes

with an analysis of those attributes.

I had not planned on doing a PhD and was only just in the process of completing a masters by

research. However, if there was one thing I really wanted answers for, it was the question of

what constituted effective sustainable feminist organising in Australia. I’d been a feminist

since the age of 16 and seen some campaigns succeed and so many campaigns struggle. In

the middle of 2012, feminism in Australia looked to be in trouble. It couldn’t even mount a

good defence of the first woman Prime in Australia, Julia Gillard. Of course, that’s where

Destroy the Joint came in (and more of that in the next chapter).

Destroy The Joint was a case of Australian digital feminist activism, perfect for exploration.

It had successful actions in a particular time frame which I will explore later in this thesis. If

it worked, why and how did it work? As a cofounder and an active member of Destroy the

Joint, I had knowledge of the movement and insider knowledge of its actions.

My research questions were stated in the introduction but I will repeat them now.

Who builds digital feminist activist communities and how are they are built? What are

attributes of a sustainable feminist collective and how are those characteristics developed and

sustained over time? How is information about the key concerns of social

movements communicated? How do digital feminist activists get their messages, ideas and

concerns out there? In what ways do feminist online/digital activists contribute to and

transform the public sphere? And what is the experience of these feminist digital activists?

Are there ways to minimise burnout?

These questions informed my decision to use the case study methodology which provides me

with the ability to study an iteration of digital feminist activism in depth. In order to do that, I

would utilise qualitative interviews so I could explore the backstory of this particular instance

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of feminist activism, and how it operated. I was granted ethics approval for this

In addition, as a feminist, it was important to me that this research adhere to feminist

principles of research methods and approaches. I was particularly influenced by those

principles outlined by Acker, Barry and Esseveld (1983), which argue that the aim of

feminist research should be to contribute to women’s liberation; to use an approach which

would not be oppressive to women, and to end with research which critiques dominant

intellectual traditions. Approach matters, or, as Gayle Letherby puts it, what is important in

feminist research is “a sensitivity to the significance of gender within society and a critical

approach to the research process” (Letherby, 2011, p. 2).

At the end of my data collection and analysis, I can say I have both failed and succeeded in

trying to adhere to those principles. I do not know yet whether the work on activist resilience

will actually improve our lived experience as activists but that is my goal. I would also argue

there are no research methods which do not oppress women to some extent because if there is

any one fixed element in research, it is the time element. I do not know any women who have

much free time – and certainly far less than men (Sayer, 2005) - so any request for time is an

imposition, although none of the interviewees explicitly said so. As Mattingly and Blanchi

(2003, p.999) wrote of their findings at the beginning of this century on the gender

differences in the quantity and quality of free time, “[m]en and women do experience free

time very differently. Men tend to have more of it.”

Case studies are the perfect instrument for feminist research because they allow both a deep

dive and a diversity of voices. Berenice Carroll (1976, p. xi) writes of the importance of case

studies in feminist research: “Theory must remain at best hypothetical, at worst unreal

and barren” without the rich depth of case studies, without the experience of diverse groups

of women.

Destroy The Joint is a discrete example of feminist organising in Australia. From its

inception in 2012 to the end of 2018 it has had hundreds of thousands of interactions with

nearly 100,000 people who follow and/or like the page, some of whom have come and gone

and come again and gone again. Behind those interactions are the people who put the page

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together, who devise the campaigns, who post the posts, who moderate the posts. It faces the

outside world but has an internal life with those behind the scenes. It is multi-layered and

complex, the useful subject for case studies, which are a qualitative approach to investigating

a particular bounded system or example or in some cases, multiple bounded systems or

examples, over time, through in-depth research involving multiple data sources (Yin, 2006).

Its size and longevity make it a solid candidate as a case study to expand understanding

of feminist digital organising.

The case study method allows an intense study of social phenomena through intensive

analysis of a single case, while drawing on all aspects of the case (Gerring, 2006). Relevant

data are gathered and organised in terms of the case to provide a holistic view, including both

the outward-facing data and the behind-the-scenes data, in this instance, the use of

CrowdTangle. A case study may be conducted over any instance - individuals, groups,

processes, societies, episodes. In some respects, Destroy the Joint represents all of those

things. The characteristics of case studies are similar across instances: bounded systems, the

integrity of the selected case, studied over an identified period of time, observed in the

naturalistic setting and inclusive of the context; and multiple data sources, such as researcher

observation and interviews with participants (Feagin, Orum & Sjoberg, 1991; Mills, Durepos

& Wiebe, 2010; Yin, 2006).

However, the results of single case studies of single instances may not be generalisable.

There are three kinds of case study: intrinsic, where understanding is limited to a specific

case; instrumental, where insight can be developed into a single issue or theory; and

collective, where several cases are studied in order to understand a phenomenon and build

generalisability (Zainal, 2007). As with any methodology, there are strengths and

weaknesses. The strengths of a case study include the opportunity for both depth and insight.

Studying a phenomenon over time allows both flexibility and rigour. Weaknesses of the case

study include the risk that it will be time- consuming; that there is researcher bias and

interpretation; that there is a cost of maintaining any research over time; and, as mentioned

earlier, the lack of generalisability. In addition, there is a risk of poor case selection

(Baxter & Jack, 2008). However suitable I thought case studies would be to this research,

there was also a long research history with the use of case studies in feminist and activist

research (Ackerly & True, 2010; Ayers 2013). As for researcher bias and interpretation, at an

epistemological level, every single choice we make in our lives comes from a place of

49

subjectivity, so that is a risk not just in the use of case studies but in any research. Geertje

Boschma and her co-authors (2008, p. 100) summarise decades-long debates in the social

sciences as regarding “the subjective nature of interpretation and the influence the researcher

has on the construction of evidence in recorded interviews and participant observation”. What

I think matters is a direct result of who I am and what I am. As she writes, “We bring many

‘selves’ to the research” (Boschma et al., 2008, p. 100).

All research is more than just a list of facts, organised in paragraphs. The way that

information is arranged is a direct result of the frame of the research and the researcher.

Every choice I make, from the area I choose to research to the way in which the final thesis is

constructed, is a result of decisions I made over the course of this work. I attribute particular

meaning and elevate some themes over others (Brown, 1996; Mehra, 2002). Those decisions,

those choices, are all informed by who I am. I tried to reflect on my process as I went along,

to turn back on myself (Steier, 1991) as I did my interviews, to consider my deeply held

assumptions (Agger, 2006) about interviewing, about writing and about feminism. I

attempted to take a feminist approach to my research by reflecting on my own beliefs as a

feminist and to my own practice as a researcher. As Debbie Kralik (2005, p. 250) writes: “As

our lives present us with challenges, changes and experiences, our perspectives also shift.

Feminism is a dynamic and individual experience, as well as a social and political

movement”. This is particularly true when researching a case study of feminist digital

activism as an insider researcher.

Destroy The Joint is a relevant case study for feminist activism in Australia. It has remained

focused on feminist goals since its inception in 2012. It has won a number of significant

campaigns and continues to be involved in Australian political life. Its resources on fatal

violence against women are used regularly by mainstream Australian media and

administrators of Destroy The Joint are consulted as experts in this area. It still exists when

other similar online feminist activist groups have disappeared or become inactive. By some

measures, Destroy The Joint and its Counting Dead Women project provide an example of

successful activism and therefore findings on the research into this case can provide useful

guidance for other activism. In addition, it provided an opportunity for insider research, as I

have been involved with Destroy The Joint since its inception.

50

My involvement in Destroy The Joint provided an occasion to choose a case which allowed

an exploration of Australian feminist activism as it unfolded, an opportunity to research as I

participated. It is an online feminist action group based on Facebook and it fits the criteria of

loose, multi-issue: easy to opt in and out of which is a central characteristic of online activism

in the neoliberal age, where politics is both personalised and privatised (Bennett and

Segerberg, 2012; 2013; Baer, 2016; Salime, 2014), Further, exploring Destroy the

Joint’s position in the Bennett-Segerberg typology (2012; 2013) is a goal of this research.

The exploration of the typology also provides a framework to understand whether Destroy

The Joint was able to maintain its grassroots, connective action origin or whether it reframed

itself into what Bennett and Segerberg (2012; 2013) described as organisationally-brokered.

If so, what pressures brought such a change to bear. For example, a grassroots connective

action movement is more horizontal, with multiple leadership events, whereas pressures such

as those arising from what Stefania Milan (2009) calls a dictatorship of action can force

change in a movement.

Single case methodology works in particular when there is an event and where interviews can

provide multiple perspectives (Ackerly & True, 2010). I have tried to synthesize those

multiple perspectives to provide a thesis around the attributes of activists by reading the

transcripts of those interviews on many occasions before allowing multiple themes to emerge.

This thematic analysis will be explored later in this chapter.

After 35 years of using interviews as part of the repertoire of journalism, I considered I

understood how to undertake an interview. In the course of my work, I have interviewed a

wide range of subjects, from US presidents on airport tarmacs to children with measles. I am,

I thought, confident with the process. And, of course, the interview is a common data source

in the social sciences as a process of eliciting information from a respondent through asking

questions or seeking reflections on the meaning of their lived experience and practice (Berg,

2001; Seidman, 2006). It appeared to be a good match between the skills I already had and

the skills I would need to complete a doctorate.

There was, however, another reason to choose interviews. I am a feminist researching

feminist activism and, as Shulamit Reinharz and Lynn Davidman (1992, p. 19) put it:

51

Interviewing offers researchers access to people's ideas, thoughts, and memories . . .

particularly important for the study of women because in this way learning from

women is an antidote to centuries of ignoring women's ideas altogether or having men

speak for women.

Interviews also mean participants in the research use their own words (Reinharz &

Davidman, 1992, p. 19) which would provide a rich resource through the systematic analysis,

allowing difference to emerge despite the structure.

If there was a way to match the research method with the subject of study, interviewing

appeared to be the best approach for a feminist researching feminists and would, through

using quotes, capture the original voice in its own terms.

In the social sciences, there are three distinct types of interview: structured, semi-structured

and unstructured. I rejected structured interviews as more suited to a clinical setting where

questions are standardized, designed to ensure that the data will be able to be similarly

categorized (Essau & Petermann, 2013). In this instance, a totally structured interview would

not encourage or permit the interview subjects to answer to their fullest understanding. Semistructured

interviews, while in-depth, allow some categorizations across instances but also

give the opportunity for the subject/participant to range more widely in response (Halperin &

Heath, 2012; 2017; Galletta, 2013); and unstructured interviews allow the subject/participant

to shape the interview, often found in oral histories (Ruspini, 1999).

My own professional journalistic experience showed me that the best interview question was

nearly always the last one: is there anything else you would like to add, the perfect openended

question, one which will “elicit a full and meaningful response” (Adams & Lee-Potter,

2017 p.11). But as an academic researcher, it was important to have structure to yield results

which would be generalizable or at least comparable to one another - standard preparation for

each interaction would be both useful to provide a scaffold and to make it possible to group

answers. (Roulston, 2010), which was why I elected to use semi-structured and attempted to

keep the tenor and tempo of the interviews as consistent as possible. This meant that while I

could ask specific questions which answered the queries I had about Destroy The Joint and

the feminist activist experience in Australia, there was steadiness to the interviews in order to

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make it possible to compare across the responses. In addition, there were specific concepts

around feminist organising that could only be understood via interview.

As Reinharz and Davidman (1992) say, a style of more open-ended interviewing has a

prominent place in feminist research, relying as it does on the researcher immersing herself in

social settings. It also aims for what is described as intersubjective understanding (Buch &

Staller, 2007; Levesque-Lopman, 2000) between the interviewer and those interviewed, a

way of explaining the way that a good interview, much like a conversation, progresses the

understanding of all involved. Ann Oakley (1981) argued for a feminist style of interviewing

which aimed for intimacy and included self-disclosure. I tried to interview in the most natural

way possible although I was fighting off my tendency to interview like a journalist.

Journalists know what they want from their interview subjects however participants in

academic research cannot be led in that way. I had to let go of the control and allow people to

answer as freely as possible while still being prepared enough to enable the information

exchange to take place in an academic style. In some respects, my place as an insider worked

to support this as I usually understood the background or the context of those who responded

to the questions. In addition, there were a number of occasions in which the people

interviewed suggested themes or approaches. The subjects became the researchers. They

were “participants or collaborators” in the same project (Wilkinson, 1986, p.14).

Successful academic interviewers need to build rapport – that much it has in common with

journalism – and then ensure that each interviewer response is noncommittal and

nonjudgmental. Oakley (1981, p.231) describes an interview as an interaction:

“Interviewing is rather like marriage: everyone knows what it is, an awful lot of people do it,

and yet behind each closed front door there is a world of secrets.”

Yet this process is not seduction and betrayal, as explored by Janet Malcolm (1990), where a

journalist empathises in order to extract as many secrets as possible for the benefit of the

story. It is trying to provide the blank slate on which the interview subject can reveal as much

or as little as she wants.

The key elements of researcher conduct for an interview for research purposes are: listen,

probe, avoid comments, validate and review (Doody & Noonan, 2013). There is one key

element in common with this style of interview and a journalistic style of interview – before

completing the interview, it is also important to invite the participant to add any additional

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information which may not have been covered in the more structured parts of the interview.

The interview then concludes. Nonverbal cues must also be developed to instil confidence in

the participant, such as occasional eye contact and what a journalist might call a “noddy”. It

signifies you are listening and nodding in response to the answers (Beaman & Dawson,

2009). While I did use this technique for the interviews I did in person, there is a similar

technique I utilise for phone interviews, which includes making the noise “mmmmm” or

“yeah” when someone is speaking.

I also tried to be mindful of time when I interviewed, alert to sounds of impatience or anxiety

or of the sounds of need in the background, recognising that women’s time is colonised by

multiple competing priorities. I chose to do most of my interviews by phone for that very

reason. You have a much lighter footprint on someone’s life if you are not in their space. I

will explore other ways in which I tried to conduct feminist research later in this chapter.

I suspected that the structure of these interviews would be different depending on the

participant. That turned out not to be true – these interviews turned out to be very similar in

structure, although different in length. Some subjects had a lot to say, some interview

subjects had less to say. In general, however, the questions were delivered along this format:

a short introduction; simple closed questions; more complex open-ended questions (Teddlie

and Tashakkori, 2003); and a final question asking the participant to add additional

information. I used follow-up questions as a tool to seek further explanation by the

participant. The interviews all took place in Australia in person or by phone. The shortest

interview was 40 minutes and the longest was just short of two hours. All of the interviews

were recorded and the recordings were then transcribed in order to move to the next stage,

data analysis.

There are three groups of people involved in Destroy The Joint (DTJ). They are: a) the

administrators and b) moderators responsible for the page and c) the people who participate

on the page. Occasionally groups a and b intersect with group c. I mainly interviewed

administrators and moderators. The administrators are those who take responsibility for the

page’s policy, for its strategies, for its actions and for the majority of its content so the

participation of administrators over the period of DTJ’s existence in this research was crucial.

I interviewed all but two of those who were administrators over the course of DTJ’s

existence. The moderators of DTJ are the second set of eyes for any proposed post. While

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moderators were not and do not have responsibility for the page, they provide extraordinary

feedback, support and guidance for the page and they also take responsibility for enforcing

the tone of the page, using their own judgment and then using appropriate Facebook

tools. I also did a small survey of people who participated in the page, using direct Facebook

messaging, although this yielded few responses. To understand how Destroy The Joint works

as an organisation, the views of the administrators and moderators are crucial, therefore it

was vital to interview as many of the past and present moderators and administrators of

Destroy The Joint as would participate in interviews. I also interviewed Destroy The Joint’s

contact at Facebook Australia in order to gain some insight expressed on behalf of the

platform.

The sample size of those involved with Destroy The Joint is 30 interviews with

administrators and moderators conducted over six weeks in 2016. I conducted one interview

with Destroy The Joint’s contact at Facebook. I interviewed around two-thirds of the

available pool of people who have ever been involved in the founding, the administration or

the moderation of Destroy The Joint. Of the administrators – which came to be the key

group in terms of decision-making - I interviewed 84 per cent. I recruited the participants by

email, mostly interviewed over the phone, recorded all the interviews and then transcribed

them.

As a cofounder of the Destroy the Joint movement and the Facebook page which is its

organising mechanism, I am acutely aware of my connection with every single person

involved in this process and, as such, was able to easily contact them. I acknowledge the

contention around insider research and discuss that at length later in this chapter. However,

there is no-one who knows more about Destroy The Joint than me. I have been a part of the

page from inception to the present day. I have carefully considered those concerns, and

proceeded with the research. In addition, the majority of the participants made public their

involvement, including some who have listed their involvement on their public social media

accounts, including LinkedIn. Coercion is difficult to measure and made more difficult when

you know the subjects (Dugosh, Festinger, Croft & Marlowe, 2010). However, I do not and

did not wield structural power over any of the participants. All the activities of Destroy The

Joint are entirely voluntary, although Destroy The Joint uses a roster system for posts and

moderation and if a task is rostered, it loses some of its voluntary status.

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There are several elements to be considered around recruiting subjects known to the

researcher, in particular, a concern around any perceived coercion of recruits (McConnell-

Henry, James, Chapman & Francis 2010). It is true that recruits may participate because of a

desire to "help out"; or a feeling of obligation so I approached possible recruits at arm's

length, through emails or Facebook messages. For some participants, it also provided a forum

to critique both the page and my involvement in the page.

In addition, in no instance do or did I have a financial relationship with any of the possible

participants. I do not and did not employ them and am not employed by them. I am also not

employed alongside them in any workplace. I did not offer payment for participation and

those recruited to the study were able to withdraw from the study at any time.

I approached this thesis very mindful of my position as an insider researcher, with close

experience and understanding of the activists of Destroy the Joint as one of those

activists. Nancy Naples (2013) argues the dualities of insider researcher and outsider

researcher which she says mask power differentials and experiential differences between

researcher and researched. More importantly, she says, no position is fixed. The boundaries

are loose and shifting and the positions are experienced differently by those within the

research relationship, “constantly being negotiated and renegotiated” (Naples, 2013, p. 103)

in each and every interaction.

Whether I am insider or outsider or both at once, it is certainly true that my relationships with

my Destroy The Joint colleagues experienced some of those shifting boundaries especially

around their experiences as moderators (a distinct set of people within the Destroy The Joint

organisation). If I could sense that an interview subject was reluctant to critique the

administrators, I would try to use encouraging expressions to support any response. I would

also add that we could not improve as a group without critique. This usually was enough to

support moderators in their criticisms. Administrators did not seem to have the same feeling

of reluctance.

There are some advantages to being an insider, the obvious advantage of access is clear.

There are also a number of disadvantages, including that of perceived bias or subjectivity

(Greene, 2014). Yet I am an insider researcher and I cannot imagine being able to do this

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work without being an insider. How would you get the trust? How would people be happy to

speak to you? I know that when I have been interviewed about feminism or about Destroy

The Joint in particular for academic research, I am more guarded with strangers than I am

with people I know and very rarely permit my name to be used. As Colombina Schaeffer

role as an activist ...to ‘enter’ the field and have access to people and organisations . . . it is

difficult to separate previous experiences and knowledge from new ones.”

I also reflected constantly on my position. When I started working at a university in 2008, I

had no idea what it meant to be a reflective practitioner but I started doing a graduate

certificate in teaching where we were asked to read Schön (1983), to get us to think more

deeply about our roles as teaching academics. What I discovered was the usefulness of the

concept of reflexivity, forcing myself to think about my own practice and what shaped it; and

then changing and shaping my work as my understanding of my academic practice changed

and was shaped (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). I went back to Schön (1983) to remind

myself of some of his ideas as I set about doing this thesis, to remind myself that I had the

ability to go slowly, to think it through, to make complex judgments about Destroy The Joint

if I gave myself plenty of time. This was also a useful tool when I interviewed people with

whom I’d had conflict, that I had a lot to learn from those activists too. Emotions and

understanding are so highly connected (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 2013), which was true both

for me as I researched but also in my own experience of this activism.

There are many benefits to insider research but also many challenges. There was one other

major challenge for me as an insider researcher, which was how to negotiate friendships. It

can be difficult to hear criticism from people you consider both friends and allies. As Jodie

advantages, it also reshapes the researcher’s role in and experiences of her own culture and

those within it.”

Those criticisms also acted as a vaccine against treating Destroy the Joint and the results of

this research as a spectacle (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), as something from which I could

make myself distant. They also made me reflect on my practice across my activism and my

research, they challenged my presuppositions. (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, p.39).

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Aside from the interviews, part of my data collection included posts from the first post of

Destroy The Joint in 2012 (2012h) to the last post in December 2016 (2016a).

This data was secured using CrowdTangle, described on Google Patents as:

The CrowdTangle software analyses the attributes of content posted on Facebook. It does so

by:

comprising content, a content type, and a time stamp;

of time periods;

period selected from the predetermined set of time periods, the representative

engagement metric being based on the engagement metric of the post during the

particular time period;

platform;

selected post compared to the representative engagement metric

(U.S. Patent No. US20150169587A1, 2014).

This CrowdTangle data provided a bounded sample for my data analysis and I used it to

compare and contrast campaigns conducted by DTJ. I originally accessed this CrowdTangle

data through connections at CrowdTangle within Facebook but this data is now more openly

available. It provides a series of measures of underperforming and overperforming posts,

benchmarked against other posts on a given page. These are comprehensive analytics which

provide metrics for posts.

Data interpretation is a challenge in qualitative research based on lengthy interviews. I chose

thematic analysis, sifting through the data for similar ideas or concepts or themes emerged

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across each of the interviews. Thematic analysis is an accepted qualitative research method,

which Sofaer (1999, p. 1101) argues, provides:

[R]ich descriptions of complex phenomena; tracking unique or unexpected events;

illuminating the experience and interpretation of events by actors with widely

differing stakes and roles; [and] giving voice to those whose views are rarely heard.

Thematic analysis is also a way of managing thousands of words of data without losing the

context. It is an immersive experience yet allows for both summary and

organisation (Lapadat, 2010) within the vast immersion. As Richard Boyatzis (1998) puts it,

it is a way of both observing and quantifying. Themes are detected as patterns emerging

repeatedly in any set of data and this methodology is appropriate because it allows for

analysis and interpretation of how actors experienced online feminist activism. While

thematic analysis is descriptive, it is possible to present findings that are meaningful. I had to

organise the data in a way that was both thematic and interpretive but also told the feminist

story (Buch & Staller, 2007). Perhaps another researcher may not have found the themes I

found – or not found them to be as compelling. Qualitative researchers use thematic analysis

to develop insights and understandings from the repeated emergence of themes and patterns

which develop in the data but themes also emerge from what the researcher knows about

theory and existing research. In addition, how we feel about what we hear and read shapes

our analysis. Probably the most compelling connection for me was the link between the core

concept of emotional labour and the way in which the stories of emotions emerged from

every single interview undertaken.

I imagined well before I started my interviews and my coding that there would be multiple

narratives, that the observations and recollections of those involved in this particular feminist

activism in Australia would provide a huge range of perspectives. What truly surprised me

was the similarity – how often women mentioned how they felt, the range of their emotions,

the emotional labour of working as an activist - and I mention elsewhere that one of the very

first interviews I did, with the activist I call Constance, the use of the word “feel” as a stem

appears more than 20 times. There is an emerging field in activism research about feelings

and affect much of it negative (Kennelly, 2014; Papacharissi, 2013; Reger, 2004) yet there is

also room for further research on activism which deals with joy or pride. My research

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interrogates feelings and not all of those feelings are negative, not every activist experience is

about burnout.

There were some very useful instances of quantitative analysis, which provided facts and

figures (Cooper, Schindler & Sun, 2006) and the narratives or stories from this research were

then amplified through the use of qualitative approaches. As Sofaer (1999) argues, it can be

difficult to count or enumerate experience; the number of times an event occurs may not

necessarily be congruent with its impact.

In this case, qualitative analysis and interpretation is more likely to be able to provide an

understanding of how feminists experience online activism. The type of qualitative analysis I

have chosen for this research must be one where individual feminist voices are not lost in the

analysis and one where Shoshanna Sofaer’s (1999, p. 1011) “rich descriptions”, provided by

feminist activists and others, could be read, allowing each participant, each observer, each

actor, to be observed by their own experience, from their own experience. These will be the

actors’ voices.

A range of qualitative approaches could have been employed however the use of thematic

analysis was particularly appropriate because that style of research is largely descriptive,

“investigators are challenged to present findings that are both meaningful and useful” (Ayres,

2008). In my study, I used feminist thematic analysis to locate themes within the data which

the participants themselves raised, either directly (where respondents explicitly said “you

should write about this”) or indirectly (for example, much of the discussion about feelings

emerged as part of the chapter on emotional labour). Although there does not appear to be a

direct definition of feminist thematic analysis, I tried to emulate those researchers in nursing,

in particular, to “capture the values and meaning that these [participants] attributed to their

understanding of feminism and feminist identity” (McDougall, 2013).

As well, qualitative researchers can develop insights and understandings from the themes and

patterns which develop in the data. Ayres (2008, p. 868) describes the process well, partly

because she acknowledges one of the key areas for which thematic analysis is criticised that

the researcher has already developed a “view” about what will be found. She writes:

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In thematic coding, the analyst frequently begins with a list of themes known (or at

least anticipated) to be found in the data. When data for thematic analysis are

collected through semi-structured interviews, some themes will be anticipated in the

data set because those concepts were explicitly included in data collection not least

due to the questions that are asked. However, an inductive approach also matters.

In a detailed description of applied thematic analysis, Greg Guest, Kathleen MacQueen and

Emily Namey (2011) argue its strengths are well-documented: thematic analysis is suited to

large data sets, is suitable for group research, can sit alongside quantitative techniques and

can be used to study topics other than individual experience. They note that the only

limitation is that perhaps thematic analysis, subject as it is to picking main themes, may miss

some of the nuance within the data.

Of course it is difficult to approach the data without subjectivity particularly in insider

research. But what surprised me was the themes which emerged from what I considered to be

quite mechanistic questions: who, what, where, when, why. Even the “when” carried

responses about time and the feelings about time. Emotional labour was a major theme in this

data, and emotional labour contains both emotion and labour. And labour takes time.

I could have done fewer interviews to get the same themes – but I did not know that at the

time, before analysis had begun. I remember presenting a work-in progress, sometime in my

third year; and detailing my struggles with coding. How deep should I go with my themes,

how wide, how many nodes and subnodes? A former student, newly graduated, gave useful

advice: “I put together a Rolls Royce of coding – but I only needed the Mini Minor.” I took

this advice and built a model which was more like a Mini Minor with lovely detailing.

As David Firmin (2008, p. 149) argues in his essay on themes:

In qualitative research, data collection typically occurs to the point of saturation.

Essentially, this means that researchers continue interviews to the point where little

new information is shared by participants. In other words, people continue reporting

essentially the same ideas and the law of diminishing returns is at work in the

information-gathering procedure. Collecting more data, at that point, does not produce

novel results.

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Researchers may “gloss over” the methods used during thematic analysis (Howitt and

Cramer, 2007, p. 328). In an attempt to avoid “glossing over” I reread the interviews multiple

times, had arguments with myself over what really mattered, and kept going until I ran out of

interviews. I had 18 themes at the end of this process but even as I prepared to synthesize

what it all meant, I could see how some of the themes would work together. A good example

is the interconnectedness of the two themes of information activism and Feminism 101,

which brings feminism to the general public, and that discussion forms part of the chapter on

the capital and habitus of activists (chapter five). The major themes in this research do not

have one-word descriptions. Instead, I have put together for each theme a phrase or a

question which I believe encapsulates the extent of each data set but also keeps the highly

personal aspect of this research data set and which relate, through key concepts, to the

questions asked of participants.

iteration of my activism

online is different to online).

Themes one and two connect with each other and form the basis of the chapters on emotional

labour and the habitus and capitals of activism. I have also used a subtheme of time within

the chapter on habitus and capitals.

activist activities?

Dead Women?

general?

Other themes which emerged include emotional labour, daily activism, sustainability,

burnout, emotional responses to a range of campaigns, recruitment, differences between

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online and offline campaigning, time, feelings, labour, meanings of feminism, sustainability,

and the mechanics of Destroy The Joint.

In this research, there was a tension between the activist life experienced online and the

content of the interviews. Just as our personal boundaries have become looser, we are also

subject to the intensity and scrutiny of a life lived socially, yet contemporary research

practice has not yet developed a framework to respond. The messiness of “problematic

distinctions between categories such as private/public, personal/political, and

virtual/material” complicates every project (Morrow, Hawkins & Kern, 2014, p. 527) and

even interviewing participants about how they felt as digital feminist activists brought up

their own feelings of conflict and struggle.

At the outset of this research, I thought it may be appropriate to use the real names of the

participants and in 2015, I was granted permission to interview those involved in Destroy The

Joint as a moderator or as an administrator, the Facebook contact for DTJ and those who

participated on the page. I was also given permission to name the participants if they were

happy to be named. As my research continued, I made the decision to give the participants

pseudonyms. This was because once I had completed my interviews, I realised participants

were sharing very personal stories of what feminism meant to them. Sometimes, as they

shared, they were revealing parts of themselves that I considered may affect their jobs or their

role in any future feminist activism. I thought about naming them after mythological figures,

just as my supervisor did for her PhD, so I chose the mythological figures of the feminist

movement, the women who came before us. I decided to use the names of feminists listed on

the Wikipedia page (Wikipedia, 2019).

Of the 30 participants interviewed, 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, more than double

the percentage in the general population aged 20 to 64 of Australia (31.4 per cent according

to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). The remaining five completed year 12. Six of

the participants (20 per cent) are located in regional Australia, compared to one-third of the

general population (Services for Australian Rural and Remote Allied Health, 2018). Further,

21 (70 per cent) were members of unions at the time of the interviews, compared to 14 per

cent, which is union density among Australian employees as measured in 2016 (Gilfillan &

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McGann, 2018). Activism – that is, active participation in a civic or a political group - in

Australia, as measured by the ABS, is stable and low. Just 19 per cent of the general

Australian population, aged 18 years and over, were active participants in either a civic or

political group. The percentage has been steady over three consecutive surveys (ABS, 2015).

This contrasts starkly with the participants of Destroy The Joint where 80 per cent of

participants were directly involved in activism prior to DTJ’s inception. For 20 per cent,

DTJ was their first experience of activism and for a further three participants (10 per cent),

their first experience of feminist activism.

I did not ask questions about income nor did I ask questions about each individual’s own

perception of class but a forensic analysis of the role of class and income in Australian

feminist activism is certainly an opportunity for further study. Radicalism in the middle class

has a long history and is well-documented (Bonnett, 2013; Cleveland, 2003; Cotgrove &

Duff, 1980; Nicholls, 1985; Parkin, 1968; Quinn, 2017). It emerges when there is an upsurge

of cultural critique (Brand, 1990), and that is particularly relevant to feminist organisations in

the contentious interaction which is the attempt to disrupt the patriarchy, the prevalent

culture. In addition, the radicalisation of the middle class occurs when there is a break

between social integration on one hand and political regulation on the other, caused by the

“unintentional side effects of economic and social modernisation” (Brand, 1990, p. 41).

Bagguley (1992) argues that middle class women play a key role in contemporary feminism

in response to changing forms of patriarchy, in particular, around the shift from private

patriarchy (domestic setting) to public patriarchy (for example, employment).

Nickie Charles and Khursheed Wadia’s (2018) analysis of UK Feminista (established in

2010), an organisation of much younger feminists than DTJ, based on interviews with UK

Feminista activists, revealed a high proportion of middle class and well-educated feminists

with high levels of social and cultural capital. Gleeson (2018) in her third paper on DTJ

and again basing her arguments on interviews with four participants and an external activist,

argues that DTJ, along with other online feminist activism, needs to develop policies on

intersectionality. What would a policy on intersectionality look like? Is it possible to recruit

for ethnicity or race or for different abilities to a volunteer group? These are certainly

questions to be answered in further research.

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In this data set, three people of colour were interviewed. I can only make this claim based on

appearance, a risky way of assessing ethnicity or race, as I did not ask any questions about

ethnicity or race. The same is true of disability. I know from my personal conversations with

the activists of Destroy the Joint that a number of both past and present moderators and

admins have experienced mental health issues, and one has a significant physical

disability. However, others within the interview cohort may have experienced undisclosed

disability.

As I will explore more fully in the chapter on the habitus of activists, there were a significant

number of activists who had postgraduate qualifications and union membership compared to

the Australian population. Major details are laid out in the following table.

Figure 1: List of activists and attributes

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I've been a little bit bemused by those colleagues in the newspapers who have

admitted that I have suffered more pressure as a result of my gender than other prime

ministers in the past but then concluded that it had zero effect on my political position

or the political position of the Labor Party. It doesn't explain everything, it doesn't

explain nothing, it explains some things. (ABC News, 2013)

These were the final words of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in response to

her ousting by her parliamentary colleagues in 2013. Gillard was Prime Minister for just over

three years, and during the course of her leadership had been under constant attack, much of

which focused on her gender (Summers 2013).

As a number of writers and researchers have concluded (Sawer, 2013; Appleby,

2015), female leadership arouses misogyny and sexism. In the case of former Prime Minister

Julia Gillard’s ascension to power, her elevation unleashed “a media crusade of sexism and

misogyny previously unseen in Australian political history” (Appleby, 2015, p.283). In

addition, and as mentioned in the introduction, Gillard’s prime ministership had a gender

affinity effect (Sawer, 2012; Denemark, 2012) and the media became more interested in the

gender ‘card’ and ‘wars’ (Johnson, 2015; Trimble, 2016).

In that context, this chapter sets out the formation of Destroy the Joint and surveys the

structure and processes of DTJ. It will also explore how the activists came together as an

iteration of crowd-enabled connective action but transformed into organisationally-enabled

connection action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; 2013)

On Friday, August 31, 2012, on Alan Jones’s regular morning program, he interviewed the

then deputy leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce (the Liberal Party and the Nationals

always operate in coalition at a Federal level. At this time, both parties were in opposition and

not in government). The pair discussed the Prime Minister’s decision to fund education in

developing nations. Joyce said the funding was a waste of money. Jones responded by saying

women political leaders were wrecking Australia. He named Prime Minister Julia Gillard,

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Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and Christine Nixon, a former chief commissioner of

Victoria Police, as leading destroyers of the joint. Malcolm Farr reported on August 31, that

Jones told listeners $320 million would be spent by Australia promoting Pacific island

women in business and politics. He said that: “The Prime Minister] said that we know

societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating," he told

listeners. "Women are destroying the joint - Christine Nixon in Melbourne, Clover Moore

here. Honestly" (Farr, 2012).

On the evening of August 31, following those remarks, there was intense social media

activity on Twitter (Lupton, 2014), led by Canberra resident Anne Cahill

Lambert. Once Lambert tweeted what she had heard, Twitter trended with it. Writer Jane

Caro tweeted, "Got time on my hands tonight so thought I'd spend it coming up with new

ways of '’destroying the joint' being a woman & all. Ideas welcome.'' A few moments later,

Melbourne plastic surgeon Jill Tomlinson, later both an administrator of Destroy The Joint

and from 2012 ongoing, the sole operator of the @jointdestroyer Twitter account, started

using the #destroythejoint hashtag. As Jessica McLean and Sophia Maalsen (2016, p. 327)

observed:

Within one day, thousands had tweeted their own versions of acts and intentions to

quash sexism and misogyny and a new digital activism moment and movement had

begun.

The #destroythejoint hashtag trended on Twitter for four days (Tomlinson, 2012, blog in

Crikey). Late on the night of September 1, 2012, the then secretary of the NSW and ACT

branch of the Australian Services Union, Sally McManus, with more than 20 years

experience of organising and now secretary of the peak union body in Australia, the

Australian Council of Trade Unions, who created the Facebook page

(facebook.com/destroythejoint). About two hours later, according to posts on the page, 200

people had liked the page. Seven years later, Destroy the Joint is still engaged in activism

drawing attention to feminist issues and by 2019, the page had more than 98000 likes.

McLean, Maalsen and Grech (2016, p. 327) describe Destroy The Joint as “a broad-based and

effective unified but not uniform organisation that aims to shine a light on sexism and

misogyny”. It was true that thousands were tweeting about #destroythejoint, however, we

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did not know until many years later that this was a new “digital activism moment and

movement” because we had only created a series of ad hoc communicative acts around the

sites of sexism and misogyny.

Women on Twitter described ways in which they #destroythejoint or were

#destroyingthejoint (Bastow, 2012). Participants adopted the hashtag and used it to form a

community on Twitter. The community shared values, goals, targets and humour. It bound

the participants together while at the same time allowing individual personal expression.

That impetus led the creation of the Facebook page, as detailed earlier.

Figure 2: #destroyingthejoint tweet

Figure 3: #destroyingthejoint tweet

Through his ‘destroy the joint’ comments, Jones had placed himself in the sights of feminists,

which facilitated the mobilisation of the DTJ community in late September.

Occasionally I have trouble concentrating on feminism and that was particularly true on

Saturday, September 29, 2012 when my beloved Australian football team, the Sydney Swans,

were in the Grand Final. It is a game of four quarters and the third quarter was

tortuous. Their long-time football rivals, Hawthorn Football Club, called the Hawks, scored

five goals in a row. And even after the game finished, with a ten-point victory to the Swans, I

was still watching, all the replays, the interviews, singing the team song from the couch. I

usually watch everything with two screens, the television and the mobile phone, but I was

ignoring Twitter. At 7.42pm, there was a tweet I couldn’t ignore from

@BrendenWood (2012) who then worked as a news producer for Southern Cross Austereo,

an Australian commercial radio network. Every Saturday night, he would buy an early edition

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of the Sunday Telegraph, the local Sunday tabloid then owned by Murdoch’s News Limited,

and send out an image of the front page on Twitter. On this night, he tweeted the front page

of the newspaper which pointed to a story about Alan Jones (introduced above). The story

was about a speech Jones had made at a function held to raise money for the Young Liberals,

the youth arm of Australia’s conservative party. In that speech, made days earlier, Jones

claimed that the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s father had died of shame (Marshall,

2012). Unbeknownst to Jones, Marshall had recorded the event (Price, 2012).

Jones was quoted as saying:

Every person in the caucus of the Labor Party knows that Julia Gillard is a liar.

Everybody, I’ll come to that in a moment. The old man recently died a few weeks ago

of shame. To think they had a daughter who told lies every time she stood for

Parliament. (Marshall, 2012)

The reception of these remarks was negative and described as a loss of common decency in

the public domain, argues Megan-Jane Johnstone (2015) and the comments themselves

provided a key transformation point for DTJ, sparking the page’s first call to action, initiated

by the ‘died of shame' comments.

Those operating as administrators on the four-week-old Facebook page throughout that

evening began posting. The first post, less than an hour after the appearance of the

@brendenwood tweet, operated as a directionless call-to-arms. “Sisters and brothers, it is

time to #destroythejoint. Tomorrow, the Daily Telegraph will run this despicable story”

(Destroy The Joint, 2012a).

It used an image of the Wood tweet. It attracted 132 comments and was shared 98 times and

while all but a handful of comments were critical of Jones, there was no action asked and

none taken, although some of the commenters suggested petitions.

In the next two hours, a number of posts were made on the page, one drawing attention to

Virgin Mobile’s sponsorship of the 2GB website (Jones’s home radio station) (Destroy The

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Joint, 2012b), which was followed by another post (Destroy The Joint, 2012c) linking to the

complete Jonathan Marshall story (2012).

By 10pm that evening, Destroy the Joint admins posted the basic elements of an action,

“Want to destroy Alan's joint? Here's the emails for his sponsors - tell them what you think

about their decision to help keep [it] on air.” This was followed by a list of sponsors (Destroy

The Joint, 2012d). There was no visible strategy although the first post on September 30

suggested a rally two days later. It received little traction. Looking back on that post now, the

admins had yet to recognise that this kind of action, connective action, operated online

(Destroy The Joint, 2012e). The next post returned to foregrounding activism which could

take place online, requesting those on the page to assist with contact details for the board of

Macquarie Radio Network.

About midday on Sunday September 30, Alan Jones apologised for his remarks about

Gillard, at a press conference called by his employer, Macquarie Radio Network; and

broadcast live. He acknowledged that “all the criticism that has been levelled in this instance

is legitimate”. Towards the end of that press conference, Jones was asked by a reporter:

“What do you say to the advertisers today that are queuing up to pull their own

advertising?”

Jones replied:

The advertisers aren’t queuing up to pull their advertising. That’s a matter for the

station. I’m confident the station understands quite clearly what my position is on a

lot of issues and that the advertisers equally understand that and it will be business as

usual. (ABC News, 2012)

Even as this was broadcast, the campaign built momentum. In response to the calls to action

on the page, which included listing contact details for each company which advertised, those

advertisers were removing advertisements both from the Alan Jones program and also other

programs on the station and other artefacts of 2GB, such as the website.

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that DTJ was able to harness public anger through social media “into a unified

and extraordinarily powerful digital battering ram”. By October 8, there was no advertising

on the Alan Jones show, through a combination of the withdrawal of the majority

of advertisers and the decision by MRN management to remove any remaining advertisers.

As Macquarie Radio Network's then executive chairman, Russell Tate, told The Australian:

“The strategy promised to solve two problems in one: answering the advertisers' dilemma

over what they should do, while removing them as targets for the protesters' ire.” (Jackson,

2012, para. 28). Shares in Macquarie Radio Network fell from 64c to 54c during this

period (Jackson, 2012).

In some ways, this feminist campaign action used traditional and familiar strategies, for

example, participants challenged power through boycott, but the means of organising the

strategy was through another power, the power of connective action. This was an online

feminist campaign which “affected a corporation in a material sense” (McLean and Maalsen,

2015, p. 329).

In the intervening weeks between Jones’s remarks about women destroying the joint

and Jones’s comments, cited earlier, at the young Liberal function

in Sydney, feminists aggregated a community that had had enough, not just of Alan Jones, but

of the entire tone of the national conversation around women. Those who became involved

with Destroy The Joint as activists posted information to the page daily – but there were no

calls to action. On September 2, 2012, Rosa posted what could be characterised as the page’s

first attempt at agenda-setting (McCombs, 2009) or agenda resetting by posting a story by

Australian feminist Anne Summers:

A great article by Anne Summers written earlier this year recapping how women

political leaders have been treated in Australia - it has gotten far worse over the years

and it is a fever pitch at the moment. It will be up to us to put a stop to it. (Destroy the

Joint, 2012f)

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This became Destroy the Joint’s key political claim and reason for being. By September 4,

the number of likes had climbed to 4443. If agenda-setting in the sense meant by McCombs

(2009) is about highlighting issues and reframing salience on what is constituted as having a

news value, Destroy The Joint was, for Australian feminists, about forming a collaborative

consensus on contemporary Australian feminist issues, in particular and initially, the

treatment of Gillard. In addition, the continued climb of likes could be taken as evidence that

the ‘likers’ shared this view of what was relevant or had ‘news value’ to Australian feminism.

Jessica McLean and Sophia Maalsen argue (2013, p. 247) that the appeal of Destroy The

Joint is about the combination of accessibility of social media and the style of the

communication: “People joined, and continued to join, the campaign in part because of the

pleasure derived from aligning feminist thought with decisive action and lampooning the

naysayers.”

In this way, the page operated as a feminist news site for four weeks. It shared information,

on regular feminist events such as Reclaim The Night, the event seeking to make streets

secure for women; and the Ernies, an annual event held at NSW Parliament House to

‘honour’ the most sexist comments of the year. It celebrated the appointment of the first ever

female umpire to an AFL Grand Final, Chelsea Roffey. It also highlighted mainstream media

articles, such as those by veteran NSW Labor politician and former president of the

NSW Legislative Council Meredith Burgmann and feminist elder stateswoman Anne

Summers, on sexism in Australia.

I think within a day or so it had 5000 [likes] which seemed to be a lot. I was

expecting really just to post articles, post bits of rants and things like that, but

basically more of a sort of voice to keep on top of this [misogyny] and to fight

back. (Rosa, in interview)

At the time of the first campaign which began on September 29, 2012, DTJ had around

11,000 page likes on Facebook. At the same time its Twitter account @jointdestroyer,

operated nearly entirely by plastic surgeon Jill Tomlinson, had 4000 followers. In June 2019,

the Facebook page has more than 99,000 page likes and the Twitter account has over 22000

followers. The adjacent graph shows likes accumulated over time on the Destroy The Joint

Facebook page:

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Figure 4: Growth in the number of Facebook likes of Destroy the Joint over time

In December 2012, Destroy The Joint admins were asked to write about our activism for

Jane Caro’s new book (2013). Jill Tomlinson, the activist who had started the hashtag,

wrangled all our views into one coherent story, explaining the recruitment of over 40

volunteer moderators and some of the challenges.

As the Tomlinson et. al. (2013, “Birth of a Movement”, para.7) wrote:

The sheer number of engaged individuals required significant effort to keep a

semblance of order. We didn’t know each other – in fact, most of

the DtJ administrators had never met or heard of each other – but the crowdsourcing

approach worked.

Some of the tasks she listed as part of this activism included listening daily to 2GB breakfast

radio, procuring more than 110,000 signatures on an online petition to 2GB

advertisers; listening daily to 2GB Breakfast Radio daily to create a list of its advertisers;

asking people to call the advertisers and express their thoughts in a civil manner:

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We researched. We created a pledge. We created memes, montages and word clouds.

We created posting guidelines and a list of hundreds of profanities for a blocked word

list. We answered thousands of questions. (Tomlinson et al., 2013, para.7)

Specifically, in these initial days, Destroy The Joint pushed for companies to withdraw their

advertisements from the Alan Jones program and used various calls-to-action to enact that

campaign. By the end of the operation, Macquarie Radio Network revealed the loss of

advertising had cost it somewhere between $1 and $1.5 million, the withdrawal of more than

70 advertisers and a longer-term impact (Jackson, 2012).

The campaign became more targeted, more organised, using familiar organising techniques

over time. Rosa and others began discussions through Facebook messages with

others to recruit page administrators:

We sort of had our discussion there that everyone got on board about that strategy to

start on targeting the sponsors. Then it just became quite a big logistical exercise to do

everything it needed to make that happen, like all the organizing that had to happen.

People who were listening in. Doing a list in the morning. Doing the post. Using all

this technology [and] the momentum of the campaign. (Rosa, in interview)

Since that time, the group has conducted a number of campaigns across a number of issues

Australia, particularly in light of the “treatment of Australia’s first female Prime Minister”

(description from the Facebook page itself). At the time the page was created, the ‘About’

section of the Facebook read: “This page is for people who are sick of the sexism dished out

to women in Australia, whether they be our first female Prime Minister or any other

woman.” The posts on the page will be further explored in chapter seven.

These events took place at a time when Australia was experiencing, if not a backlash, then a

backslide in attitudes towards gender equality and equality “continued to be supported only

insofar as it [did] not alter gendered divisions of labour in the home” (Van Egmond, 2010, p.

165). The challenge for Australian feminists was to use social media to reset the agenda, in

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order to elevate equality, to “draw attention to the problems for which the old guards are held

accountable” (Popkin, 2007, p. 6). Destroy the Joint provided a platform to provide

information and news, to highlight key issues for women, to reshape the political argument

and to force a reshaping of the agenda.

Over this period, there was some also some media interrogation of the origins of Destroy the

Joint and whether it had organisational input. Was this really a grassroots movement

coalescing around the hashtag? Or was it a front for either unions or the Labor Party (Fife-

Yeomans, 2012)? According to conservative commentator, Andrew Bolt (2012), Destroy the

Joint was a front for organisational political actors, such as unions and the Labor Party. These

accusations conflated the actions of individuals with collective ties with formal organisational

actors; as if political participation must always be structured by those organisations.

These commentators were unable to separate the individual actor from those

individual actors’ other allegiances. This was a personally very difficult time for me. I

received a significant level of harassment and abuse both online and offline and dealt with it

in various ways (Jane, 2017). In addition, but also experienced personally, the university at

which I work was subject to campaigning around my employment (personal communication,

2012) as well as mentions of the University of Technology as my place of employment in a

move which I found intimidating (Henderson, 2012; Smith, 2012). There was no recognition

that the creation of the page emanated from the social and cultural capital of the

administrators and moderators, which made it possible for this campaign to function “as if” it

was the creation of an organisation. This is further explored in chapter five, the Habitus and

Capitals of Activists.

A number of media commentators doubted whether the Facebook page could continue for

any length of time and our efforts were belittled by almost everyone in mainstream media,

commentators in Fairfax and News. The then publisher of popular media news

acknowledged it had some impact (Price, 2012).

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Amid all the campaigning, those involved formulated some guidelines for those wanting to

interact with the Facebook page. The following two images provided those who interacted

with the page some idea about what the page stood for and guidelines for interacting on the

page. The posting guidelines provided some guidance for those moderating the page on any

given day. The first image: “Our Story” positions Destroy The Joint as standing for gender

equality and civil discourse and about providing a community. There have been slight

updates over time but the key points remain the same –equality, community, civility. The

second image asks those who participate on the page to keep in mind the community’s aims.

The Facebook page says in its "about” section (Destroy The Joint 2018a):

Destroy The Joint stands for gender equality and civil discourse in Australia. The

name "Destroy The Joint" came from the on-air comments of 2GB broadcaster Alan

Jones, who stated in an on-air discussion on Friday 31 August 31 2012, that "women

are destroying the joint". This misogynistic comment was transformed into a witty

Twitter hashtag that trended for 4 days. This Facebook page was set up independently

to what was occurring in the twitterverse on 2 September 2012 to provide a

community for those who are sick of sexism in Australia. The term "destroy the joint"

or "destroying the joint" has entered the Australian lexicon. It rejects the suggestion

that women are destroying the joint and represents a call to action for Australians who

reject sexism and seek a civil and decent society. We're not out to destroy the joint -

that was someone else's description. We're rebuilding it with good humour and

optimism.

Posting Guidelines for Destroy The Joint (2012g):

When posting or leaving comments please be respectful of others. We expect that

Facebook users interacting with our Facebook page will make sure that their conduct

is not:

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content without appropriate attribution; or

Destroy The Joint reviews posts and comments from time to time and can remove any

post, comment or user that it considers breaches the guidelines above.

While Destroy The Joint encourages open and robust conversation, the views of

Facebook users interacting with its page are not the views of the administrators of

Destroy The Joint.

The About section and the posting guidelines were about trying to develop an environment in

which non-violent conversation and discussion could occur.

Over nearly seven years, the posts are always focussed on sexism and misogyny, or the ways

they are manifest. However, not all campaigns used the method of pressuring advertisers as

described above. Some other successful strategies include pressuring telecommunications

provider Telstra on the provision of silent numbers to victims of family violence, highlighting

police procedure which resulted in the jailing of Indigenous women who withdrew charges of

domestic violence, as well as pressuring advertisers, providers, and venues. In some

cases, DTJ worked in concert with other campaigners such as unions or other nongovernment

advocacy groups. This included the DTJ campaign which began in July 2013, with partners

including Oxfam, Ethical Work, the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia

(TCFUA) and Australian Unions, to pressure Australian clothing companies to sign the

Bangladesh accord to protect clothing workers in Bangladesh. This campaign originated

because of the deaths of textile workers in Rana Plaza, when the building collapsed on April

24, 2013. Workers were ordered to come back to work in the building despite the fact that

cracks had appeared. The campaign lasted six months, with regular posts describing

which manufacturers had signed on to the Accord. Destroyers were asked to sign petitions

and to send emails. More than 80 companies signed on to the Accord after the joint

campaign. Eventually, Pacific Brands signed on; and Pacific Brands, Target, K-Mart and

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others agreed to publish the addresses of the Bangladesh factories in which they

manufactured (Destroy The Joint, 2013).

Another example of Destroy the Joint advocating in concert with others occurred in 2017.

DTJ began to pressure state and territory governments to introduce strangulation laws as the

presence of nonfatal strangulation in a relationship increases the risk of fatality. It put

pressure on men’s awareness group White Ribbon to move White Ribbon Day from the

International Day of Elimination of Violence Against Women to a different day. Other

campaigns had less success: a campaign demanding refugee removal from detention centres

attracted media attention but affected no policy change.

In 2019, Destroy the Joint remains a collective which is organised by a group of individuals.

It has a small administrative structure and a somewhat larger group who moderate the page. It

exists only on Facebook and Twitter as a findable entity. There is no web address other than

the Facebook Page, and no mailing or office address. The origin and original iteration of the

Destroy the Joint movement could most easily be categorised as crowd-enabled connective

action, fitting the taxonomy of Bennett and Segerberg’s model (2012, 2013), using both

Facebook and Twitter to gain momentum.

As the interviews with participants show, there was initially little formal organisational

coordination of action and no lead organisational actors, although it is clear from the

interviews that, the majority of administrators and moderators had significant experience as

activists. Of all those interviewed, six had no prior activist experience, although one of those

had been a member of the Liberal Party. The initial group of individuals mostly did not know

each other previously. These people, on average, had a vastly different activist experience to

the activist experience of Australians and this will be explored more fully in chapter five, the

following chapter, but it is useful to know that union membership and union roles in this

cohort of activists are vastly different to the average Australian experience.

From this group of disparate individuals, it is notable that an activist network with such

longevity and reach was created and the reasons for this will be explored further

in chapter five. The stimulus, the comments by Alan Jones, provoked a response from a wide

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group of (mainly) tweeters whose avatars/handles identified them as women and it could be

argued the hashtag #destroyingthejoint and later, for brevity’s sake, #destroythejoint, used at

the time of DTJ’s establishment, was one iteration of a personalised action frame (Bennett

& Segerberg 2012, 2013) which will be explored more fully in chapter seven.

In a very brief span of time, the activists with the most experience had developed strategies

and tactics. These activists did not, however, have organisations or protocols which could

deliver those strategies and tactics. As Bennett and Segerberg acknowledge (2012,

2013), face-to-face organising and offline discussion shapes activity even in crowd-enabled

connective action, but the theoretical emphasis on crowd-enablement ignores both the

internal momentum of collectives and the tyranny of structurelessness (Freeman 1972).

Those who had been in the union movement brought with them a habitus honed over that

time, and they brought that to bear in the organisation of Destroy the Joint. They functioned

as coaches for those with less organising experience. Most of the activists did not stick to

their original skill sets. Activists shared the skills they had, which provided learning

opportunities for those who didn’t have them.

using patterns within a group to develop the group’s goals, it was useful to acknowledge the

varied attributes and shortcomings of those within the group. DTJ developed from the skills

and attributes of all those within the group. The strategy emerged from the interdependence

and connectedness among the individuals. What Bourdieu describes as capital, the ‘usable

resources and powers’, were repeated across individuals in the group: the prior activist

experience; the prior specifically union experience at a senior level; the desire to act for

change; the willingness to adapt to new forms of organising and mobilising. In addition,

there was, for the most part, the openness to learning from each other. Only one moderator,

Aaron Darc (Razer, 2013), a brand strategist who claimed to have expertise in the area of

marketing feminism, left because admins and moderators would not do as he instructed.

His particular cultural capital did not resonate with the rest of the activists.

Capital forms status, and capital produces its specific effects in specific conditions (Bourdieu,

1990, p.122). Therefore, those who had the most organising experience (in a non-online

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setting) in DTJ were able to use that accumulated cultural capital to provide leadership in the

area of organising. As Rosa said:

I don't think there is a difference except that online campaigning happens faster. It

happens faster because time is compressed because you are spending more time

together talking about things than you could possibly do because of the issue of time

and space normally. In order ... If you think about it ... To organize a rally about equal

pay there would have to be meetings. You have to organise meetings to have

meetings. To have rallies, to do all of that, and social media just allows people to

There were complementary skills in this group of activists. Some were organisers, othes were

communicators, graphic designers, social scientists and others. In combination, these activists

applied to relevant skills to the process of DTJ. In terms of communicative acts, the activists

had a process which provided feedback on proposed posts, an opportunity to refine, not just

political messaging but also sentence construction, punctuation, punchiness. Those who

understood the logic of visual communication - because that was the cultural capital they

brought from their career - tried to teach others about what worked and what did not.

Emmeline, whose majority contribution is the visual look of DTJ, said of her experience in

visual design:

I had on-the-job training in my early years, with an advertising agency, which

basically teaches you how to sell. So, that's where these premises come from. Now,

even though Destroy the Joint isn't exactly selling a product, we are selling an idea,

and it's all part of marketing. So, anything that I've picked up over the years, and

anything that I've actually instigated myself, through experience and observation, is

put to use for Destroy the Joint. (Emmeline, in interview)

She taught others in the admin group some of the skills needed to make the images for the

page. Six years later, she still does almost all of the graphic work for the page because, no

matter how much she shares and teaches, 30 years of practice makes a difference.

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Destroy The Joint worked as a call to action - as process - using social technologies to

organise within what Brown (2017, p. 67) calls the “learning pains of organising for depth in

the age of social media”, and putting structures in place to coordinate actions. Decisions

around these structures were not hierarchical. Decision-making took place in private

Facebook groups rather than face-to-face or on the phone but there was agreement on

process. Those who participated in the campaigns were asked to undertake actions - to protest

by taking action of some kind. The call to action is motivational framing (Snow and

Bedford, 2000). It provides those who observe with reasons to engage, a framework for that

engagement of agency. Moreover, a well-developed call-to-action provides a gateway for

involvement and it is through this gate that the path to activist agency lies. Gamson’s (1995)

view on recruitment to causes is that activists must “bridge public discourse and people's

experiential knowledge, integrating them in a coherent frame that supports and

sustains collective action”. An effective call-to-action acts not just to get others to act

individually but to be part of something bigger, to be part of the action as a collective act.

McCaughey (2014, p. 2) says “creation and spread” of content has been transformed into a

standard tool for social movement organizers, not as a substitute for “real” action. It was this

‘creation and spread’ intersected with the interpersonal networks with digital networks on a

digital platform which enabled this iteration of connective action; or as Bennett

and Segerberg (2013, p. 35) put it:

When interpersonal networks are enabled by technology platforms of various designs

that coordinate and scale the networks, the resulting action can resemble collective

action, yet without the same role played by formal organisations.

Rosa and others leveraged their own personal networks through Facebook by gauging in

which ways she was connected to others seeking to become part of this action. Some of the

activists had lead roles in organisational settings, what they acknowledged in interview is that

what they brought to Destroy The Joint was the experience of activism, the dispositions and

traits brought from professional work to this work as a volunteer activist. For example, Jessie,

Rosa and Jocelynne brought with them techniques of protest, learned over many years in other

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social movements. This had shaped their habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), their dispositions and

traits, developed over time.

“There is a stock [of techniques] and it shapes protest activity. Protesting presupposes learned

activist know-how. It is rooted in habitus,” says Crossley (2003). While protesting may well

be rooted in the habitus, social media was not. This was a new ‘technique’ for everyone in the

admin group. Crossley adds: “We should never underestimate the potential of agents to

invent new techniques to add to the stock [of techniques].”

Yet when Alinsky (1971, p. 113) said, “Change comes from power, and power comes from

organization. In order to act, people must get together”, he was outlining the process of

community organising where it is ‘trained’ organisers in particular fields who organise. While

the majority of those involved with DTJ at its inception or now had previous political

engagement at various levels, only a small proportion came from community organising.

Some had organising experience from unions, some were involved parents at their children’s

schools, some had community organising experience in areas such as reproductive rights,

some had volunteered for the Labor Party or the Greens.

The activists engaged in a central feminist project with varying degrees of expertise in

organising. Two threads brought this group together, the political thread of opposition to

sexism and the communicative thread of social media. There was no top down organising,

except inasmuch as structurelessness (Freeman, 1972) breeds leaders, but no organisation

with a structure with decisions made by the few for the many. Destroy The Joint functions as

an exemplar of crowd-enabled connective action because of the absence of a lead

organisational actor (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; 2013) but has also morphed into something

more resembling organisationally-enabled connective action over its duration. What began

as classic connective action, a collection of ad hoc campaigns organised through Facebook

and Twitter (in particular the campaign against Alan Jones) altered substantially.

The Bangladesh Agreement campaign set DTJ on the path to becoming organisationallyenabled;

and that was embedded at the onset of the significant Counting Dead Women

campaign (which will be explored in detail in chapter seven). It turned DTJ into a more

professional organisation. DTJ still used connective action but it did so in a way which was

organisationally-enabled. It permitted DTJ to develop links with experts, become used as a

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source of expert information and facilitated professional relationships with other campaigners

in this area. It also provided a forum for fundraising. Two other significant campaigns

will also be analysed in chapter seven of this thesis. However Counting Dead

Women, the continuing campaign on fatal violence against women (Destroy The Joint

2019), is now the key issue for Destroy The Joint; and the other is the related campaign for

legislation around non-fatal strangulation. Activists within DTJ were able to leverage the

experience with the Counting Dead Women campaign for the strangulation campaign.

Despite the organisationally-enabled connective action undertaken by DTJ, it was and is a

community functioning as a discrete group. It was and is both structured by - and has

structured - the platform on which it operates at both a very intense and fast-moving

level. This intensity increased tension and put some pressures on the activists.

The formations of social movements are always a process in action, always becoming rather

than being. In the case of DTJ, there was also a friction between old ways of activism and

new ways of activism. These activists had become active, in the majority of instances through

traditional organisationally-enabled collective action. They had acquired their habitus in that

space and with the attendant social and cultural capital. Now they were activists on a social

platform at the outset of crowd-enabled grassroots connective action, where Facebook was

the organising platform. Although some were quick to acquire new dispositions, new traits,

the old and the new sometimes came into conflict. No matter how much some of the admins

loved the new form of organising, others were sceptical. Shifting loyalties caused some

anxieties and discontent among the activists. That first shift, from an outpouring of grassroots

fury and ad hoc and spontaneous campaigning to a more organisationally-enabled fury,

distanced some of the moderators.

In the Bennett and Segerberg typology of networks (2012, p.756; 2013), three models are

devised: the first, a connective action network which is self-organising, resists formal

coordination or organising; and could also be described as grassroots; the second, also

connective action but has ties to formal organisations; and third, the more traditional

collective action network, with strong organisation input. In each of these models, digital has

an important role. Destroy the Joint, by any measure, began as earlier described, an

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outpouring of grassroots fury; but shifted to a more organisational basis over time. The

engagement with other organisations over the Bangladesh Clothing Accord showed the

benefits of acting in concert. As described earlier, the change from crowd-enabled to

organisationally enabled became complete with the commencement of the Counting Dead

Women campaign, which provided a conduit for funding from the community and gave

Destroy the Joint a different status. It also provided the impetus for other organisations to

recognise DTJ as an entity, for example, Our Watch.

One of the moderators, Inez, was a woman who identified herself as a woman of colour and

someone who also had extensive experience in the union movement. Unions, in the Bennett-

Segerberg typology, are organisationally-brokered collective action. Inez did not find the

change from a grassroots movement to one more organisationally-enabled as sympathetic to

the values she wanted to align with as a volunteer rather than as an employee, where, as a

union employee, her working life was clearly structured.

I did Destroy the Joint for about two years and in that period of time it felt like it

changed quite significantly from when I first came on board. At the beginning, the

very very beginning, it had a less professional feel to it and a more activist sensibility

to it. Later on, it felt like it became a lot more professional therefore we had to be a lot

more careful, for its very own reasons which make sense but it lost its appeal for me.

(Inez, in interview)

The habitus, as ever, is deeply embedded and the quickly shifting and atypical dynamics of a

crowd-enabled connective action network unsettled a number of the activists, for multiple

reasons. While Inez very much wanted the grassroots aspect to continue, others struggled

with the tensions between grassroots and organisational. Constance, a moderator who became

an admin in the first few months, also struggled with the shifting structures:

Other times with this kind of structure that we have, that we're kind of trying to

navigate our way through, it's just created itself as much as anything.

She described the congregation around the hashtag as one which “just created itself”,

organized by the platform, around the shared value of #destroythejoint.

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Constance was also a union organiser with a background in community services and she was

used to traditional chains of command so felt some discomfort around the mobile internal

structure of this group.

Having lines of authority can be difficult. Like who actually gets the final say where there is

a disagreement? That's difficult to manage and that has led to me having problems with some

of the moderators, where, as an admin who is responsible for where the page is going, being

able to say, "Actually, no. You can't do that. Stop doing that. You are not doing what this

page is meant to do” (Constance, in interview).

This concept of responsibility in an activist group weighed heavily on this admin’s shoulders.

She has a great deal of campaigning experience in her work and she felt – and continues to

feel up to 2019 – that campaigns must be planned to be successful. She said that she resisted

being “in charge” because of a desire for flatter structures but also worried about who would

take responsibility for any necessary decisions or any negative short-term outcomes:

I try not to put any authority out there but I think that the administrators should have

that final word on what's going to impact the page. Where that's not respected, I've

found that difficult too. (Constance, in interview)

public DTJ page, that is, the interaction with the public page should prioritise the voices of

those not directly involved in the interaction. She argues it is key to keeping the discussion

and debate free-flowing:

Keeping the backend from over-interacting with the front end is probably one of the

biggest [challenges] I think keeping that to a minimum is a challenge. Moderators get

bored. They want to engage in the conversation which is understandable or they want

to engage with the issue and sometimes they can overlap that with their role as

moderator with Destroy the Joint, and so could admins. That's always going to be a

challenge I think, because when everything is calm and we haven't got any big flying

campaigns which will attract trolls, there's not a lot for moderators to do except for

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watch the conversations. It's challenging to keep them interested, but not personally

engaged. (Constance, in interview)

Other admins described the structure as one which differed according to what activity was

being undertaken. Helen said:

There is a top down, because we [admins] set the agenda from day to day, in terms of

what we think is to be talked about on any particular day, but the conversation itself

that is had among Destroyers is pretty free-flowing. We also take ideas that are put up

by Destroyers, and work them in the moderator and admin groups to see if they're

viable as posts. It's got a bit of both. I think it's possibly more directed, but where

there is a groundswell, I think we can recognize that and go with it, if it chimes with

our overall goals. (Helen, in interview)

One of the few men who worked on the page and who had extensive experience in the union

movement was clear in his view that DTJ had a non- structured approach to organising and

campaigning, in contrast to his own experience. Patrick said:

My experience, and it was for a limited time, is it was a group of similarly-minded

community activists that were willing to take grassroots action to make that change

occur. That's always special about it. (Patrick, in interview)

He embraced the social qualities of this particular form of activism, because of the capacity

for outreach and saw it as an opportunity for wider engagement and recruiting. “It can inspire

other people to join a group of Destroyers and say: ‘All right, we want to tackle something

like gender inequality,’ or whatever the issue is.”

Another moderator, Bell, described the way she saw the structure: “I don't think we're

grassroots, and I don't think we're like a normal company. […] I think we're sort of a

collective with a leadership”. Leadership mattered to some of the moderators. Some

embraced clear direction, others felt excluded and angry. One moderator, Gunilla, who left

after a disagreement on the support of sex work as work, said:

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I did get the impression that whilst it was important to have clear leadership, but also

there was an openness to being open to contributions from the others. It was fairly

democratic and open to involvement by all those involved. It depends on what kind of

leaders you got. I mean, I think that what there needs to be is ... I think you need

boundaries, and also, that's what leadership does, is provide boundaries for the

She also said that she thought DTJ was not a union and not a party: “I guess it's grassroots,

but more like GetUp, it kind of feeds from grassroots stuff”. Despite Gunilla’s disagreement

with the values of the group (she was the only activist to argue that sex workers and sex work

should not be supported), she maintained good relationships with DTJ after she left and had a

(mostly) positive view. Others actively preferred the flatter structures, seeing

this structurelessness as a true representation of the way in which feminist activism should

operate, prefiguring the feminist society as it should operate.

Another moderator, Emma, was recruited to the page in an entirely grassroots way. Although

she had some prior experience in unions, she was not recruited to the movement through

those networks but because her mother pointed it out to her. She said, “I would say it's a cross

[My mother] called me the day the page started and she said, "Oh, there's this page

starting up with a funny name." Like, "This is what happened. This is how

it started and you should join it.” I liked this page in the first couple hours that

it started and overnight it was up to a couple thousand and the next ... You know, tens

of thousands, so it's growing really, really, really quickly . . . people make that

happen. (Emma, in interview)

It was notable that those with experience of professional campaigning expressed a perception

that DTJ was more grassroots, while those who saw themselves as grassroots tended to see

DTJ as heavily professionalised. Those who had never engaged with activism of any kind

struggled to describe what they saw. One moderator who became an administrator briefly,

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Faith, had no prior activist training or knowledge. She described DTJ as “organised chaos . . .

Australia’s largest grassroots feminist organisation”. She was recruited through Twitter in the

first few days and had absolutely no activist experience of any kind. Her view was that DTJ

recruited as many bodies as it could and hoped “that it will work out . . .”:

It was a trapeze act. Just when you thought somebody was going to [fall and get]

smashed to the ground, somebody else would come swinging through and grab them.

Even if they needed to disembark from the trapeze, someone would somehow get

them safe. We do a platform, so that they could climb down. I don't think anybody

crashed to the ground amongst the mods and admins at the time, but it was ... a lot of

stress. (Faith, in interview)

That busy period of forming around the ideas of DTJ and running a campaign against Alan

Jones was probably not a good time to be recruiting people who had no idea what it took to

make digital activism work, as Faith herself acknowledged in interview. The combination of

episodic and sustained activity even surprised long-term activists. Seb, who was a mod for a

short time and is now an academic, said:

I see it much more in the grass roots and connective dimensions of activism. I think it

facilitates a number of conversations. It encourages people to pursue their own

thinking and then pursue their own actions in different ways. But at the same time

those grass roots because it's [also] mobilizing people not on the ground and it's made

up of people who are engaging in these various struggles on a daily basis themselves,

often leading to particular target of actions whether it's writing to an MP or protesting

a particular act. (Seb, in interview)

Those who were professional activists or who had been regular activists all their lives

brought the habitus of professionalised activism, in particular, the embodied habitus of

mobilisers and organisers, while those for whom activism was an occasional foray brought

the habitus from the field of their respective occupations to Destroy The Joint. Yet there was

one element which the majority of these activists had which made them a greater force

together than separately, and that was the combination of their cultural capital, whereby the

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vast majority of these activists brought with them an intense and personallyinvested

knowledge of feminist concerns. They could talk the talk of feminism.

For the most part, individuals were seen as having status acquired from their originating field.

And again, the majority brought with them strong communication skills of one kind or

another. While online communication was once considered the province of men, now

“women have not only adopted mediated technology such as social networking as a means to

maintain relationships, but have also increased the integration of text-based communication

more than previously thought” (Kimbrough, Guadagno, Muscanell, & Dill, 2013). The

combination of a number of factors: the desire for feminist expression; the

#destroythejoint hashtag, and the opportunity to discuss it on social media was a perfect

moment to form connections, to take connective action, to share values and to frame

solidarity. That conflation of various forms of expression as enabled by connective action

propelled the communicative turn.

From an organising point of view, it also meant that there had to be a great deal of internal

communication. It could be argued that the flatter structures in DTJ occurred because these

activists did not have close ties, were not all members of some other organising group, and

for the most part were not connected to each other. For these reasons, internal communication

was imperative. It is useful to say that aside from the Facebook page itself and the four

groups which work to structure the page and its campaign, the number of backchannel chats

were numerous, including competing individual and group Facebook chats, text messages,

Twitter DMs, and occasionally phone calls. It turns out that constantly writing/speaking your

feelings is one aspect of the communicative turn in this experience of feminist activism. This

can be good when it’s dealing with “the creating and sharing of plans for and implementation

to achieve disciplinary representation in leadership and other positions of power” (Heinert &

Phillips, 2017, p.132) and less good when people in those backchannels are all just

complaining about each other.

This chapter provided the historical context for the formation of DTJ. It offered a brief

exploration of the effect a woman Prime Minister had on women’s engagement with

politics; and the way in which that ‘gender effect’ provided the impetus for the recruitment

and mobilisation of Australian feminists engaged in digital activism. It gives a detailed

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account of the first campaign of DTJ and its impact, as an iteration of crowd-enabled

connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013) in an Australian feminist setting. In

addition, it portrays and analyses the workings of the group of administrators and moderators,

as they sought to develop a way forward for DTJ including the development of basic

strategies as the group continued. Through this process, this group shared skills and attributes

with each other to campaign against sexism and misogyny in Australia. It provided some

insight into the conflicts and challenges involved in connective action feminist activism in

Australia. It also introduced data from the interviews with activists. In summary,

this chapter described the evolution of digital feminist activism in Australia through the

example of DTJ and introduces the concepts of habitus and capital which will be more fully

explored in the following chapter.

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This chapter explores the becoming of Australian feminist activists, in particular, the feminist

activists of Destroy The Joint. I use two main concepts developed by Bourdieu to undertake

that exploration, habitus (1977) and capital (1986), and the concept of prefiguration

(Boggs, 1977). Prefiguration is what activists bring to bear on their activist experience and is

a specific choice to embody our political ideals, the embodiment of our politics. Within that

prefiguration, they bring their habitus and their varied capitals. To explain further, activists

bring their embedded values, skills, beliefs, experience and knowledge, the sum of their

habitus and various capitals, to activism and this prefigures their ideals. In the sharing of the

skills, knowledge and attributes which shape capital, capital both structures agents on the

field and the field itself. Bourdieu lists three forms of capital: economic (money, property

rights); cultural (education, skills, class, taste, preferences) and social (connections and

networks), although I will be discussing emotional capital in another chapter. This

chapter illustrates what these activists brought with them to the Australian online feminist

activist group, how their activism evolved during their involvement with Destroy the Joint,

and how what these activists brought to their activism shaped that activism. I will now set out

an explanation of the key concepts.

In the framework of prefigurative politics, activists try to be the change they want to see.

They believe their aims can only really be shaped or achieved by conducting themselves in a

particular way, enacting their politics in line with their values, ideologies and beliefs. Carol

Boggs (1977) who first conceptualised prefigurative politics, argued that prefiguration is ‘the

embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social

relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (1977,

p.100).

In other words, you must prefigure – or be - the change you want to see. Amid a revival of

prefigurative politics in social movement literature, Van de Sande’s (2013) recent work on

experimenting with those ideals; and, 3), as he puts it, “a reformulation of the means-ends

distinction”. He applies prefigurative politics to the occupation of Tahrir Square, where

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activists tried to create their ideal alternative society in the present. They experimented with

new ideas and forms, and where openness and consensus were:

reflected in their practical organisation the ends envisioned in the process. The

organization of Tahrir Square as a stronghold of resistance. In short, what took place,

what was done, was more than a means to an end. (Van de Sande, 2013, p. 236)

It was, he argues, “a sort of social laboratory in which a new political community began to

take shape”.

What would a social laboratory produce if it was trying to create a new, feminist, political

community? A prefigurative feminist community would have a particular shape. For

example, it would be shaped by women for women and resist patriarchal values. If one

believes that a feminist society would have a flattish structure, women-shaped and womenled,

with open organising and consensus decision- making, that’s what you would try to

exemplify in any activist activity if you were trying to prefigure your ideal feminist

community. If you thought feminism should be the antithesis of capitalism (because

capitalism embeds the patriarchy), you would resist any capitalist enterprise. Which makes it

hard if, for example, the entire platform of your feminist actions relies on the existence of a

capitalist enterprise, the Facebook corporation.

Cynthia Lin, Alisa Pykett, Constance Flanagan & Karma Chávez (2016, p. 302) reconfigured

a feminist prefiguration. Like Mathijs Van de Sande (2013) above, that too had three central

elements of what feminist activism should look like: “relationality, self-determination, and

intersectionality”. In practice, relationality describes how these activists related to each other,

in stressful times and in joyful times. They related to each other despite their differences

because of their similarities. They came together to organise because they had the same

concerns about central issues for feminism. Self-determination is best explained by the

expression “nothing about us, without us”, which describes centring power in the hands of

those who have experienced injustice. Finally, intersectionality recognises that we must

recognise multiple competing burdens or as Audre Lorde (1984, p. 183) wrote: “There is no

thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Be the change you

want to be and respect and honour those with whom you work to make that change.

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There was no reluctance to use platform capitalism to benefit the feminist project. What the

administrators of DTJ saw were the endless possibilities of the platforms. Nancy

Fraser (2013, p. 211) explains the contradictions well. She says that at its beginning, secondwave

feminism critiqued what she describes as “androcentric, state-organized capitalism”.

That generative critique of what she describes as state-organised capitalism had three

separate elements - economic, cultural, and political - when exploring gender injustice. But

she says that as time passed, those “three dimensions of injustice became separated, both

from one another and from the critique of capitalism. With the fragmentation of the feminist

critique came the selective incorporation and partial recuperation of some of its strands . . .

second-wave hopes were conscripted in the service of a project that was deeply at odds with

our larger, holistic vision of a just society” (Fraser, 2013, p. 211).

In other words, Facebook profited from our activism and, as you will see in the chapter on

campaigns, it also made a platform where more trivial concerns were rewarded. From the

CrowdTangle data, the case is clear. Those who interacted with the Destroy the Joint

Facebook page far preferred Buzzfeed videos to discussions of policy change, as will be

further explored in chapter seven, on Counting Dead Women. As Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne

Segal & Hilary Wainwright (1979) wrote, there is a need to push back against any form of

political participation which is structured by capitalism:

We need political forms which consciously help people to overcome the continual

mining of our capacity to resist . . .how can we struggle for prefigurative changes to

an organisation which reproduces the relationships of power dominant in capitalism?

(Rowbotham et al., 1979, p. 132)

That argument may have been sustained in 1981 - but in 2018 capitalism has colonised so

many forms of communication, some would argue all forms on online communication

(Dahlberg, 2014), that it is hard to avoid, both in the public and private spheres. Sheila

Rowbotham et al. (1979) could not foresee that a primary organising platform for resistance

would be also be a capitalist enterprise. As early as 2004, Lincoln Dahlberg identified the

way in which corporate control marginalised some voices online. As Srnicek (2017, p. 55)

argues platform capitalism tends towards gatekeeping, convergence and “enclosure of

ecosystems”, the structures of which may be incompatible with feminist aims to dismantle

patriarchy. In spite of the possibility of corporate control and marginalisation, Facebook was

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where these women (and a handful of men) from DTJ met to plot feminism and to attempt to

build a feminist movement because the audience for feminism was already there.

I will also link that form of political group-making, prefigurative politics, to the Bourdieusian

concepts of habitus (1977, p. 72 in the first instance) and capital (1986), as it is situated in

feminist digital activism. These activists had pre-existing social and cultural capital as

activists but it was the intersection of both social and cultural capitals with habitus which

predisposed these activists as prefigurative, or, as Leach puts it more specifically, working

towards a “decentralized, directly democratic, and often consensus-based authority structure”

(2013, p. 1). Prefiguration of feminist activists for feminist activism supports a more open

style of organising and mobilising, which is both structured by connective action and enabled

by connective action. In particular, I will look at the way in which these activists shared

knowledge, accumulated through their cultural capital, supported by their social capital, to

develop their core positions, or more precisely, to focus on what really mattered to them and

how those goals could be moved forward, both shaping and in line with their prefigurative

ideals.

The Australian feminist activists involved in Destroy the Joint brought thick ties, their social

and cultural capital which predisposed them to particular causes, in particular feminism,

bringing them to their respective activism as part of DTJ. In doing so, they connected their

accumulated experience of collective action to connective action through their habitus, the

dispositions and traits accumulated through both their previous jobs and their

previous activism. My analysis of interview data in this chapter will make clear the

importance of these concepts to making sense of DTJ. However, my analysis of the data will

also show that activists and actions are transmuted by the digital platform, because the digital

platform organises the field and, in some cases, mobilises the agents, in a way which is

different to previous experience. In this way, contemporary activism on digital platforms is

different to traditional collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013; Chadwick, 2007;

Couldry, 2015). While it may be true in the instances covered in the literature, in

particular, Bennett and Segerberg, that those who participated in connective action organised

entirely in that connective action setting (2012; 2013), those who participated in DTJ brought

with them their accumulated experiences, including their experiences of collective

action, which structured and shaped their interaction with connective action.

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As explained earlier, in a prefigurative framework, activists try to be the change they want to

see. Andrew Green and John Street say prefiguration (2018, p. 172) is about building “an

idealised present in the future” – for feminists, that can mean resisting what Jo Freeman

described as an overstructured society (1972), one where men dominate the discourse and the

organisations. For Freeman, this resistance led to chaos, to structurelessness, which in turn

made it impossible to make change. But somewhere between structurelessness and

authoritarian reporting lines was where the activists of DTJ wanted to sit, somewhere where

the power and leadership was more evenly distributed, where everyone had equal say over

the directions of the group.

There was, is, an opportunity for feminist communities to embrace democratic structuring

and be politically effective. Jo Freeman (1972) outlines the key elements: rights,

responsibilities, distribution of resources and information. For feminists, Freeman’s views are

the ideal instructional manual on how to create feminist communities and keep them feminist:

“They [tyrants, power seizers] will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their

power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the

power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.”

The search for authority and distributed leadership continues. While Carl Boggs’s (1977)

characterisation of prefiguration as a new form of social movement did not succeed in

shifting power relationships within social movements, it did leave a legacy for those social

movements. Wini Breines (1980) described that legacy as “a new politics of participation and

process” (p. 419) and, decades later, both David Graeber (2004) and Darcy Leach (2013)

acknowledged its developing presence in social movements, including feminism.

Contemporary examples include the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network

and We are BRAVE, a reproductive justice organizing project (both cited in Lin et al.

2016).

The disposition towards prefigurative politics of those involved with Destroy The Joint

shaped the group. Activists choose to be prefigurative. It is not possible to immediately intuit

what kind of politics you want to practise until you have had a range of experiences.

As Julia said, in interview, of the way in which her activism shaped her politics: “Political

activism can work in weird ways too because you saw what actually went on in the world.”

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Patrick too, had previous experiences which made him recognise the link between

experience, politics and political activism. He said, in interview:

My dad was made redundant from his job at Parks Victoria. They were getting rid of

rangers. We lost our home. My school got merged. A number of things happened at

once. I worked, trying to work out what this means in the world. Very quickly, it was

linked to politics. The Liberal government of Victoria had decided to do a number of

things. That meant my school got merged, and my old man lost his job, and the

charity that I was donating my time to got defunded. . . . Yeah, at that moment, the

political actions got fired me up. I decided, "All right, maybe I've got to do something

about this.

As these moderators explain, their lived experiences and their socialisation shaped

their dispositions. Their previous activist experience shaped their prefigurative inclination, in

the case of Julia, she saw what went on in the world and wanted to contribute to positive

change. In the case of Patrick, his experiences at school helped him recognise that he had to

“to do something about this”. He brought with him the lived experience of the effects of

governmental decision-making and that set him on the road to activism.

I argue that prefiguration, the embodiment of political ideals, has clear links to the concepts

of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) and social capital and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Habitus

is the embodiment of cultural capital, the way what we know shapes

our disposition. Prefiguration, as explained earlier, is a specific choice to embody our

political ideals, the embodiment of our politics. In addition, our social networks, our social

capital, feed into our cultural capital because those networks add to what we know. Social

capital is who you know and who they know, the entirety of an agent’s social networks. Diani

(1997) and Hanna-Mari Husu (2013) both argue social movement networks rely on previous

social capital and then generate new forms, so it could be argued that the confluence of

platformed social networks with social movement networks increases the capacity to

reproduce, to extend, social capital. In the case of those involved with Destroy The Joint, the

previous activist experience of participants meant extensive social networks, able to be

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mobilised quickly or brought to the group, either short- or long-term, when needed. Cultural

capital, in this case, is what activists knew and how they knew it.

The activists of Destroy The Joint have, collectively, accumulated hundreds of years of

experience in feminist activism. During interviews, each identified the issues they considered

key for feminists: violence against women, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, poverty,

equal pay, equal access, sexism, misogyny, bias against women. These are the responses of

activists whose identification of these issues resulted from their previous experience of

activism (including those whose entire experience of activism was DTJ itself). These key

issues informed the core positions of the activists of DTJ and a resulting word cloud

illustrating frequency of core concerns appears below.

What matters to individual activists is informed by their experience, their context and their

education, their social capital and their cultural capital. It also impacts on the key concerns of

the movement.

Figure 5: Word Cloud illustrating frequency of core concerns

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Those capitals shape habitus, which is both culturally and socially produced, by and through

those social and cultural capitals. What these activists brought to Destroy The Joint with their

lived experience shaped the movement, and DTJ would not have formed without those

activists and their experience. The formation of DTJ tapped into a mood for change, a

feminist tendency, and those activists formed part of a feminist generation (Olcese, Saunders

& Tzavidis, 2014, p. 541). To reframe Olcese et al.’s (2014) words, “Members of any

political generation are more likely to do direct action and be structurally available” could be

to argue the position that members of a feminist generation in the digital sphere are more

likely to take connective action and be structurally available. Online makes it possible to

always be structurally available, or as DeLuca, Lawson and Sun (2012, p. 501) put it, to be in

a cycle of “perpetual participation”. I will expand on this later in the chapter.

These activists are shaped by the social and cultural capital accumulated through activism,

and that capital is shaped by the habitus, the embedded dispositions and traits of activists.

However, those dispositions and traits have been altered by the experience of activism in the

age of connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; 2013), from traditional top down

organisationally-enabled collective action to crowd-enabled connective action. While Brian

Loader, Ariadne Vromen and Michael Xenos (2014, p. 149) remind us that “access to social

and cultural capital is often used to ensure unequal social distinctions between citizens,”

more specifically that could be applied to activists, there is something to be said about the

way in which activists have been structured by the structures they have previously

encountered in their activism. In some instances, these activists have resistance to the new

structures of connective action as, for most, the entirety of their activism has been structured

in collective action; and therefore their actions are structured by the structures, no matter how

freeing or liberating connective actions feels. That embodied habitus is difficult to resist.

Of the 30 complete interviews, 22 of those interviewed had current membership of a union

(73 per cent), and 9 were union representatives of one kind or another. This included being

delegates, organisers, or in the senior ranks of union hierarchy. This contrasts with the

broader Australian community, where membership is around 15 per cent. Unions build

activists with a particular habitus that includes “collective identities, repertoires of action,

power resources, representative capacity and the strategic capacity of the union

representatives” (Murray, Dufour, Hege & Lévesque, 2010, p. 314) and it is this habitus

which these 22 activists who had belonged to unions brought to Destroy The Joint. The

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activist profile of those who are admins and moderators of Destroy The Joint is homologous

in terms of political engagement – 24 had previous political experience of one kind or

another, including in the union movement, with a minimum of ten years of experience in

activism before joining DTJ.

Just under half of those 24 began their political engagement aged under 20, including joining

their parents at rallies, marching against government cuts to education, marching against the

monorail. Their acquisition of activist traits began when they were young. One moderator,

Sheila, who later became an admin, said she came from a ‘left-wing family’ with a father

who always encouraged her to join her union:

There was thinking in the family that you join a union and you look after other

people, that sort of thing.

That mindset – or habitus – shaped her. She joined her local community association, became

secretary after a couple of years and eventually became president.

That built my self-confidence to go on and do other things . . . I’m still very active in

the union movement. (Sheila, in interview)

This kind of pattern was repeated in the experience of other activists in DTJ: the young

schoolgirl who joined her teachers and other students at a rally protesting cuts to education,

the toddlers who attended rallies to protest the invasion of Iraq or cuts to childcare funding.

Not all of these experiences required an active participant - the toddler at the childcare rally

rode on the shoulders of a parent - but the process of participating even at that level shaped

participants’ values and beliefs and formed part of their narrative of previous activism. Jessie,

a long-time unionist who began as an admin, but left after the combination of a bout of illness

and also impatience and irritation with others in the group, said:

I come from a family that embedded in me a sense of the importance of thinking

about justice and fairness and equality and taking action and doing things when things

weren't right. That is part of my being and who I am. I don't really imagine being an

activist is a thing I do; it's what I am. (Jessie, in interview)

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She brought with her the union habitus: the dispositions and traits she brought with her from

union activism and union workplace habits which, as Jane McAlevey (2016) argues are

movements with progressive goals set for more than the workplace, for lives beyond work.

Jessie did not have a way to participate in her union which was different to the way she

participated in DTJ. She was McAlevey’s (2016) archetypal person in a union:

[T]he people in unions, who are called workers, and many of the same people after

they have punched the clock at the end of their shift and put on their SMO (or

“interest group”) volunteer hats—people who are then called individuals. (McAlevey,

2016, p. 2)

As Jessie said in her interview, “It’s what I am.” Jessie explains how she developed habitus,

shaped by the cultural capital and social capital her parents brought to parenting. As she puts

it:

I suppose throughout my life, I have been active about things big, small, and

otherwise, and known for speaking out and standing up for people. That manifested in

my teenage years, being a bit of a troublemaker. Into my working life, I worked in

social services and community services, and always looking for ways to make the

world more fair and make things more fair for people. I think the evolution of my

activism is when I found union.

The purpose and connectivity of activists are in flux, shaped by their social capital. After six

months in Destroy The Joint, my own activist network was absolutely dominated by people

who were active in the union movement and who, as a side activity, urged me to become a

delegate of one union or another (I belong to two, the MEAA for journalists and the NTEU

for higher education workers, but am not a delegate for either). The vast majority of those

who are or were involved as moderators or administrators in Destroy the Joint had experience

in the union movement, as a member, an official, or a position in the union hierarchy. While a

few had no experience of feminist activism, they had all experienced feminist activism in

some small way, such as attending rallies or flash mobs or signing petitions, an example of

feminism’s interconnecting networks and an illustration of its capacity to “generate new ties

and solidarities” (Diani, 1997, p. 142).

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Throughout the interviews, participants related their experiences of how their early activism

shaped their current activism. Rosa too had the experience of early immersion in activism.

She attended rallies because the state government had made cuts to education. It shaped her

later participation.

I remember at that time you were seeing the direct impact on your school. You just

see you've lost a teacher in the middle of year 11, not very good. The teachers having

discussions about it. Then going to the actual strike day. I remember that very clearly

where, you got on trains in suburban Sydney and there [were] streamers hanging out

of the trains. You were on the train with your teachers and with students from all over

the place. We went to the domain in Sydney and there was, I [with] 50,000 people

there. That very first feeling of being part of something big and powerful, which only

really gets replicated at big mass events . . . that had a large impact. (Rosa, in

interview)

Alice recalls her earliest political participation.

And I think my earliest memory is being at a protest as a very young child about

childcare, on my parent's shoulders. I think that's my earliest memory. I have

memories of going to rallies as a teenager and that sort of thing [but] I think I came to

it in a more very active sense a bit later, when [a friend] said to me that she was going

to have a feminist conference. I think getting involved in that was really, probably, a

big starting point for me, in terms of that sort of involvement. (Alice, in interview)

Of those interviewed, eight said DTJ was their first experience of active feminist political

engagement and of those eight, two were men who were very politically active in other areas

of interest. The majority eschewed engagement with political parties, however ten either were

currently members of political parties or had been members of one of three political parties:

the Australian Labor Party, the Australian Greens and the Liberal Party of Australia (two

women, who had been members of the Liberal Party in their early 20s because of its

alignment to small business). This is very high, in comparison to estimates in 2019 of less

than two per cent of Australians with political party membership (Price, 2019).

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On the whole, political parties were not viewed by these activists as a way to participate for

feminists. One moderator, Emma, explained why her membership of the ALP was brief:

“They are just part of the patriarchy.”

In the majority, these activists had consciously decided to structure their activism away from

traditional party politics to activism which clearly aligned with their values and beliefs and

which was accessible. Pippa Norris (2002), writing on environmental activism, highlights the

value of non-governmental protest politics including petitions, boycotts and rallies as forms

of protest politics which are not passing phenomena but “on the rise as a channel of political

expression and mobilization” (Norris, 2002, p. 11).

This is a cohort of people who were joiners yet were resistant to party membership. There

was not the same resistance to union membership by these activists and perhaps one

explanation for that disparity could be that the unions to which these people belonged were

largely female-dominated, such as service, education or health unions. These activists were

happy to join organisations where they could see a direct correlation between the organisation

and their political aims.

There was no clear pattern to previous involvement in feminist groups but they included a

range from Women’s Electoral Lobby to flash mobs for Reproductive Choice Australia to

organising a feminist conference in 2010 in Sydney at the Teachers’ Federation to

volunteering at a women’s refuge or shelter.

Diani (1997, p. 143) argues that social movement networks “rely crucially on previous social

capital and have to be able to generate new forms of it if they are to exert a lasting influence

over their social environment”. In some ways this goes towards explaining the ability of a

group of people to move beyond the fact that they, with few exceptions, did not know each

other (or at least did not know each other very well) to being able to form the new ties and

solidarities of which Diani writes. As Sheila, who was a mod and then became an admin, said

in her interview: “I don’t know a lot about the background of the other people on the page

except that they are feminists”. The solidarity with, and commitment to, feminism created

thick collective ties.

Diani’s argument also goes some way to explaining the way in which the social capital of

feminist activist networks was utilised both to connect and to enable what Husu (2013, p.

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275) says is a “specific understanding of social problems” and the cultural competence

needed to identify those problems. As she puts it, activists not only need to have expertise

and the ability to validate their positions, they must also “have legitimacy based on the

possession of capital and habitus that indicates their class position in the society” (Husu,

2013, p. 275).

What Husu (2013) means is that activists must ‘know’ what they are doing to make change.

As well, beyond knowing, as well as having the habitus of feminism, activists must have the

cultural capital - the knowledge - to back up the positions taken, particularly when trying to

resist patriarchy. It does not hurt to have the networks either, the social capital of knowing

other feminists or those aligned with the feminist position. In the case of Destroy the Joint,

these women brought with them accumulated knowledge and practice of feminism, both at a

practice level and at a theoretical level. That combined with the weight of organising

experience among the members of the group, including that gained from the field of unions,

made it possible for this group of women to have legitimacy.

I argue that a long-time dedication to feminist activism and to the specific causes around

feminist activism would bestow legitimacy based on the possession of capital in this area and

further embed the habitus which becomes embodied through that possession of capital. As

Stephanie Lawler writes, habitus carries the concept of history (2004, p. 111) - not just

personal but also social or collective history, and is generative rather than determining or

deadening. The feminist habitus of the DTJ activists is relational, in other words, it makes

sense in relation to the field on which it is situated and in the relationship of each activist to

each other. Habitus exists, “in relation to each other [and] is profoundly social” (Lawler,

2004, p. 112).

DTJ attracted those who had previous activist experience and who were, in the majority,

already activists. They had developed their own habitus of activism. Second, each of those

activists brought social and cultural capitals with them. Finally, all these forces shaped each

other on the field of online feminist activism in Australia in a particular time, as Julia

Gillard’s position as prime minister was under attack. The vast majority of activists involved

in DTJ had prior activist experience. They were sensitised to the repertoires of activism; and

in the context, where Gillard was under attack, looked for a way to fight back.

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Rosa, who had lengthy experience in the union movement, had a strong emotional response

to the treatment of Gillard:

I remember the months beforehand [Gillard] and just feeling this rising sense of guilt

over as there as a bystander. (Rosa, in interview)

Constance too was motivated by the treatment of Gillard:

I'd been following what was happening with Julia Gillard and that just really

resonated, so as soon as I saw the page I just thought, yes, this is [what] we need to

deal with. (Constance, in interview)

Jocelynne, in interview:

Well I was livid about the things that Alan Jones has said about Julia Gillard and

increasingly so. When those final comments came out about her father should have

died of shame I actually went looking online for something that would help me deal

with my anger about that and I found Destroy the Joint and I became involved fairly

early on in putting information together that would be used as the basis for calls for

action.

Of the 30 interviews, all but three actively mentioned the treatment of Gillard as a mobilising

force. The online platform made it possible to mobilise a feminist tendency which created

a feminist generation or fourth wave (as discussed in chapter two). The social media

networks and their content led to an increase in visible feminism (Duffy & Pruchniewska,

I think that feminism would have given a big high five when Destroy the Joint was

started. In the past there was no really collective national voice, people would have

responded as individuals, or as organizations they might have written their own

letters. There wasn't that collective outrage at some of those things.

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That collective outrage was mobilised in a particular way because of the capitals of the

activists involved in Destroy the Joint. More specifically, capital is the set of “actually usable

resources and powers – economic capital, cultural capital and also social capital”

(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 114) and it is capital which forms difference between agents, based on

overall accumulation. In this next section, I explore cultural capital and social capital and

how they apply to the feminists of Destroy The Joint. The feminists of DTJ, or as they could

also be described, the agents on the field of online feminism in Australia at a particular time,

are structured by their positions in social space, in this case, feminist activism and they are

formed by both their social and cultural capitals; and their shared values, formed by those

capitals (Svensson, 2014).

The exploration of the impact of social class, an extension of economic capital (money,

property rights), on digital activism has been outlined by Jen Schradie (2018) where she

argues that even in an online setting, class makes a difference because of time, income,

resources, power and abilities. As Schradie (2018, p. 71) says: “The digital activism gap may

make collective action more difficult for groups with fewer resources and more workingclass

members.” This could be further explored in an Australian context. In the DTJ context,

it is difficult to ascertain the social class of each of the activists, however, each had time at

their disposal; as well as work which was flexible. In addition, the vast majority of these

activists, 25 from 30, have, at the very least, a bachelor’s degree from a university. Only six

live outside Australia’s capital cities.

Bourdieu (1986) observes cultural capital as embodied (how agents express their dispositions

mentally and physically); as objectified (the objects which confer cultural capital); and as

institutionalised (whereby institutions confer that cultural capital). Those interviewed

mentioned their previous experience as a credential: a way of explaining their credibility,

their status and their position, a way of claiming their skin in the game, for example, over 70

per cent of those interviewed had previous – and long-term – investment in and experience of

feminist activism.

Those participants with previous experience were all women. In contrast, the three men I

interviewed talked about their lack of feminist organising as a gap in their own activist

experience. The capital they brought to Destroy The Joint was from the previous experience

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of organising in other spheres. One short term moderator, Patrick, who helped out during the

Alan Jones campaign said that in his workplace he was using his experience with Destroy

The Joint to build women’s capacity within his organisation. He said:

What we've done ... is we've decided to really heavily invest in our women's team and

organising through a feminist framework. We haven't done that previously in the past,

and that's meant that the type of work and action that we saw took place has given

hope that we can make broader change.

I look to Destroy the Joint as a little bit of a model . . . to get a lot more people to

come together to make change. I was massively impressed and very humbled to be

accepted at the time to help out. When that moment around Alan Jones had wrapped

up, or we'd got lots of victories, I was more than happy to step aside, too, and make

sure that there was space for women to do the work in that feminist agenda. There

were so many amazing women doing such amazing work. (Patrick, in interview)

He stepped aside from moderating after a few months:

I think that's the right thing to do. It is not the role of men to deliberately or

accidentally find themselves in the space of mansplaining or taking over or taking

away from others that type of work. I think you’ve got to be sophisticated about that.

(Patrick, in interview)

Patrick recognised that in feminist organising, he was missing embodied cultural capital, that

is, he was not a woman and had not previously been involved in any feminist organising,

although the values were congruent with his own.

Social capital is also acquirable, not necessarily through intent, through context such as time,

society and class. It is the networks that people move in, the ‘who you know’. Social capital

is most clearly explained as membership of a group, either constituted physically or

symbolically. Social capital increases when the group or groups are bigger; or when

individuals are members of many groups, which then expands the capacity of the networks.

(Bourdieu, 1986). In the example of DTJ, the agents on the field of feminist activism (despite

its many and varied internal differences) had a clear purpose expressed during interviews

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which was to work towards equality and to end sexism and misogyny. While they may not

have known each other explicitly before DTJ, they ‘knew’ each other in terms of recognising

familiar values. Activists explicitly said feminism was their number one allegiance in terms

of their activism, and for some, the employment they had aligned with feminist values. Those

whose main work was not in community services or health were employed in femaledominated

unions.

One of the activists, Bella, had worked in the field of family violence for a long time, in

community services. She said she became most engaged with Destroy The Joint when it

began the Counting Dead Women campaign. She said:

I have been involved with [work around] the deaths of women for a long time . . . it's

part of social activism that I've always been party to, so I found [involvement with

DTJ] quite a good experience. (Bella, in interview)

While capital is, as explained earlier, usable resources and powers, habitus is both culturally

and socially produced. It is how we operate in the world:

The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in

order for those products of collective history, the objective structures, (e.g. language,

economy, etc.) to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the

forms of durable dispositions. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 85)

Habitus is our reflexes, our embodiment. That develops through the exposure we have had, to

whom, what and when. These activists often speak of their specific dispositions and traits,

including the constancy of their attention to Destroy the Joint, all encompassing, “perpetual

participation” (DeLuca et al., 2012). They feel as if they are always on, all the time. Checking

the website hundreds of times a day, watching all the feminist networks, and following news

sites. These activists participated every single day. From their interviews, it is possible to

describe their activism as reflexive, so deeply embedded that it becomes embodied, even if it

was embodied not before their involvement. The notifications of social media trained these

activists to become deeply habituated to responding to those notifications, conditioned to

checking responses.

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Patrick, in interview, described his actions as being “constantly on. First thing in the

morning, last at night, always helping with the moderation job.”

The following three extracts from interviews give more depth to the feeling of being

“constantly on”. In Millicent’s case, she describes the quantity of output and attention, Joan

talks about time; and Faith describes DTJ as a “virus”.

Millicent:

In the early days of Destroy the Joint, it's possible I was checking Facebook for

notifications possibly even 10 or 20 times a day, depending on what was going on at

that time, but when there's not a big campaign on, and also when I'm distracted by

other things, because I've become busier at work over the 4 years, it may only be just

twice a day in terms of Facebook. I try and ensure that with Twitter I am at a

minimum tweeting once a day, but then there may also be days where I tweet in a big

campaign up to 50 times a day.

Joan:

I was having a look at a lot of, spending a lot of personal time, looking at various

pages and spending a lot of time and energy on that, as well, and emotions.

Faith, who looked at the page “multiple” times a day, described the evolution of the page as

like a “virus".

Ultimately beneficial virus, but it certainly grew like a virus at the beginning it just

went like, "Woah. What the fuck have we got here?" It was crazy. Viruses aren't all

bad. There are good viruses. It went viral, I supposed. There was an awful lot to do to

stay on top of it.

While this developed the activist habitus, it also had a strong emotional impact, which is

discussed in the following chapter. These activists were shaped by the social and cultural

capitals accumulated through activism past and present, and that capital is shaped by the

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habitus, the embedded dispositions and traits of activists, which also changes as activists

participate. While I might have thought about abortion law reform on a daily basis as a young

woman during my involvement with that campaign, there was no immediate action to take

from minute to minute. Social media notifications have changed that. There is always

something to do, or to attend to. It is perpetual activism and, more than ever before, we must

respond in-action (Schön, 1986).

All this practice, formed by the significant intersection of the habitus and capital of these

activists, is underpinned by what Misha Schubert (1996) in her work on young women and

feminism, described as daily activism. This refers to the opportunity to “use every

conversation, every social choice, every decision about how they interact with people and

live their lives to make political statements” (Schubert, 1996, p. 59). It is, she writes, a

conscious decision to “integrate activism into . . . daily lives” (Schubert, 1996, p. 59). A

number of scholars discuss daily activism in passing, as a habit of political agency (Braidotti,

2010), and undertaken by a variety of different actors in civil society. Dixon (2001, p. 8), for

example, describes it as a way to support social transformation and goes on to list those who

undertake that form of activism: “mothers, farmers, people of color, youth, sex workers,

immigrants, artists, queers, indigenous peoples, factory laborers, teachers, environmentalists,

service employees, poor folks, and all of the other overlapping, diverse sectors of our

society”. It was clear from interviews with the Destroy the Joint activists, how many of them

considered they conducted activism every single day.

Over half of those interviewed specifically mentioned that they committed activists acts

every single day, for a number of difference reasons, because they thought it was important

or because it was a habit borne of years of being activists. Julia (in interview) said:

Character is formed by habits, [you] get into the rhythm of doing something, that's

part of your life.

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Bell (in interview) also said:

I don't know how to do it any differently. I'm a really strong believer in the personal

being political. My whole life is activism. I am an activist. I am activism. I don't know

if that's a word, but do you know what I mean?

For these two activists, their activism consists of “multiple micro-political practices of daily

activism or interventions in and on the world we inhabit for ourselves and for future

generations” (Braidotti 2010), of a continuous, unceasing application of activism to daily life.

Some, such as Rosa and Constance, recognised the privilege of being able to be a daily

activist as part of paid work, others became daily activists when life circumstance changed,

such as Gunilla, who became retired during the course of this project, or when digital

activism enabled daily practice, which would previously have taken more time or not been

possible, as in the case of Elizabeth, for whom care of a child with a disability meant she had

limited time at her disposal.

Finally, Bella, who has practised daily activism for over 40 years, said it was not possible to

be an activist involved in the prevention of violence against women and confine it to one’s

job:

sometimes tragically consumes you but if you don't have that passion to bring it out

systemic change for women then you've got to get out of it.

These women exemplify the work of Judith Boice (1992, p. 195) who argued: “The first

lesson for the daily activist is to realize that any act is a political act.” While this could also

be construed as part of prefigurative politics, Boice clearly links those ideals to daily practice,

as a way of insistent deliberative politics. She goes on to write: “The great challenge is to

make the small, the daily, and the mundane acts of life into a statement of how you want the

world to be.” (Boice, 1992, p. 195).

This chapter explored the becoming of Australian digital feminist activists using the concept

of prefiguration to survey what values, ideologies and beliefs were brought to DTJ. Using the

lenses of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72) and capital (Bourdieu, 1986), this chapter analyses

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the habitus and capitals which activists brought to DTJ and how that shaped the

movement. These feminist activists were shaped by their previous experiences and activism

which also developed their understanding of how organisations of any kind work. In the case

of the feminist activists of DTJ, this accumulated understanding then formed new intentions,

prefigurative ideals, towards any new activism. As key issues for the activists as individuals,

they identified a range of issues, including violence against women and reproductive rights;

and 90 per cent of the participants in the research identified the treatment of former prime

minister Julia Gillard as a mobilising force. Crucially, the vast majority had prior activist

experience, specifically in the union movement. The values, knowledge and understanding

they brought with them to any new movement caused them to choose particular issues and

campaigns but their previous experiences impacted on the way they interacted with DTJ and

that previous activist engagement shaped their participation. In the case of DTJ, the desire to

organise and act according to feminist principles shaped the way DTJ began. Features

included no leaders, flatter organising structures and clear communication. Whatever

impingement these features might have had on an idealised feminist model of organising,

they also brought considerable advantages in terms of cultural and social capital. This chapter

also surveyed the way in which these activists shared knowledge, accumulated through their

cultural capital, supported by their social capital, to develop their core positions. In addition,

these activists also identified daily activism as key to their activist practice. The following

chapter surveys the way in which these activists utilised their social and cultural capitals in

the service of activism.

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Activists use their cultural and social capital for the purposes of supporting their activism, as

discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter surveys the way in which these activists

utilise their capitals, as outlined here, to form new internet publics, using the “communicative

turn” (Scannell, 2009, p. 210). It explores the use of this communicative turn in a feminist

setting which provides feminist networks with an opportunity to engage in low-stakes

participation, such as sharing on social media (Knappe & Lang, 2014). This is undertaken

with the intent to inform and to mobilise. This set of actions constitute information activism

(Halupka, 2014). This chapter outlines the way in which DTJ puts information activism in a

connective action setting into operation or use, and provides a detailed heuristic.

The hashtag is low-stakes participation and it is also a clear example of the communicative

turn of feminist activism, as a way of forming networks. Knappe and Lang (2014) identify

that as a new part of the repertoire for movements, using that communicative turn, that

hashtag, to recruit and to mobilise. Participants gather around a meme, a post, a hashtag. In

the case of the #destroythejoint hashtag, it proved both a mobilising point and a recruiting

tool for feminists which then developed into DTJ. As Knappe and Lang (2014) point out:

Generating internet-based issue publics can be relatively low cost and timely, yet can

produce effects far beyond the web. This communicative turn suggests that more

women’s organisations across Europe might be able to network and turn up the

volume from whisper to voice.

But does the creation of an internet-based public have a lasting impact? It depends what you

mean by lasting impact – but you would have to argue that shifts in public and political

discourse are a lasting impact, particularly when the shifts come after a long period of stasis

(Bennett 2012, Juris 2012). For example, Occupy Wall Street changed the way we discussed

inequality and, as Smucker (2014, p.75) puts it:

Indeed OWS’s initial success in the realm of contesting popular meanings was

remarkable. Practically overnight the nascent movement broke into the national news

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cycle and articulated a popular, albeit ambiguous, critique of the economic inequality

and a political system rigged to serve the ‘one per cent’.

The communicative turn builds internet publics, heterogeneous, episodic, occasional.

Feminist internet publics, for example, range from the humorous, such as the memes created

DTJ is, at the time of writing, seven years old, with multiple political wins to its name,

referenced in the mainstream and in academic journal articles (as discussed in chapter two)

DTJ is an iteration of discursive activism (Shaw, 2012), a form of political discourse among

feminist bloggers which builds investment in core values. In Frances Shaw’s newer work, she

aligns some aspects of digital behaviours with what her research participants called

microactivism (2013). Knappe and Lang (2014) and Shaw (2012; 2013), provide the direct

link between feminist activism and connective action; and, as Kavada explains, this

constructs the collective as “a process that is constituted in and through

communication” (Kavada, 2016, p. 9). These formations are modulated by the

communicative turn and provide feminist networks with an opportunity to engage in lowstakes

participation, such as sharing on social media, with an “intent to inform, mobilise and

activate their publics” (Knappe & Lang, 2014, p. 376). These actions in themselves are

information activism (Halupka, 2014).

While the sharing of information is often described as process work in activism, or as a

byproduct of ‘real’ activism, those interviewed for this thesis spoke explicitly about the

sharing of information as a political act.

Cultural capital is what we know and information activism is a function of activist cultural

capital. Those who live the life of activists communicate their activism broadly in this way,

with a purposeful dissemination of their key beliefs. Activists reveal their cultural capital in

many ways (as discussed earlier) as a form of cultural capital and they also show their

knowledge of the field (in this case feminism and feminist activism). I would also argue that

cultural capital could include what might be described as the ‘length of service’ in the field of

activism, meaning the length of time of their personal experience of activism.

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For activists, social movements are about recruiting and engaging (McAlevey 2016) so they

must share that cultural capital in order to recruit and engage. The knowledge, information,

understanding of key feminist issues is constituted by the cultural capital of the feminist

activists in DTJ. In the About section of the DTJ page, it explicitly states that the aims of the

page are about “gender equality” and, as I have mentioned earlier, what constitutes the areas

of gender equality are many and varied. But transferring that cultural capital and sharing that

cultural capital through information activism is how to make change. In a prefigurative

feminist group there is also the idea that actors need to share, to fully participate and to then

achieve consensus; but there is a larger picture at work. As Brandwein (1987, p.117) argues,

“The group is more than the additive ideas of each individual. Through the interactive

process new ideas are created and a better product is achieved than could result from an

individual effort.”

What DTJ and its major project Counting Dead Women both do is an example of information

activism, leveraging the cultural capital of the DTJ activists. As Halupka (2015) argues, it is

about the consumption, aggregation and distribution of information as a form of political

participation and should be acknowledged as a new and valid form of participation because

of the way it builds capacity around the feminist cause.

As Gerlach (2001, p. 298) points out, activists use a range of strategies and networks,

including multimedia technologies, “to share the information that enables them to act in

concert”. In other words, activists disseminate information for the purpose of education but

also for the purpose of creating solidarity using the concepts in the information. For example,

DTJ shares information about rates of family violence, and it shares information each week

about feminist events. It is, in this iteration of information sharing, Feminism 101; and as

Rosa argues later in this chapter, that information lays the groundwork for understanding.

The information activist’s capacity to stimulate commonality through decentralised and loose

networks, while allowing for solidarity building, demonstrates an approach to participation

which is at odds with the individualised perspective, pervasive in connective action (Bennett

& Segerberg, 2012, 2013).

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In this way, information activism at its most complex operates as curation across many

levels. It operates as:

• a gatekeeping activity which also becomes a mechanism for sharing

information/knowledge gleaned from gatekeeping.

• a gatewatching activity;

• a way to contribute to the development of the cultural capital of contemporary

feminist activism;

• through sharing, a mechanism to transfer cultural capital, from one individual to

another and therefore from one network to another.

What follows can be construed as a heuristic for information activism:

Gatekeepers have control over a process, they gather, they filter, they link and they send to

other people, as Lu (2007) explains. In the case of DTJ, gatekeeping happens through a

number of interacting processes and filters, in some cases, through two private Facebook

groups before it is posted to the public page; and through three private Facebook groups if it

is about the Counting Dead Women project.

Gatewatching is a term devised by Bruns (2003, p.34) to describe the transformation of

online news media from gatekeeping, where gatekeepers are no longer able to police the

news, to a process where “gatewatchers keep a constant watch at the gates, and point out

those gates to their readers that are most likely to open on to useful sources”. While Bruns’s

work is around journalism, gatewatching is also an activity of the actions of activist social

media platforms. DTJ’s gatewatching, for example, has included sources which debunk the

communications of men’s rights activists groups. It points to news and events of the day

through posts and comments. It ‘watches’ to see what is relevant and to alert those on the

page to those ‘useful sources’.

Shared cultural capital binds a group and also defines it. Currid-Halkett’s (2017, p.18) work

on cultural elites could equally be applied to activists: “They speak the same language, they

acquire similar bodies of knowledge, and share the same values, all of which embody their

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collective consciousness”. This concept of shared cultural capital is underscored by the DTJ

activists themselves, who talk about the important of developing understanding of basic

feminist concepts, which a number of DTJ activists described as Feminism 101.

I argue that among the activists of DTJ there was both knowledge-production of feminism

and knowledge-dissemination about feminism, both among the activists and then externally

on the Facebook page. That production and dissemination in this context is a cultural capital

of feminism, both as individual feminist activists and also as a group. Those who are

liberating that knowledge through acquisition, production and dissemination are, in some

ways, much like the “professionals of the work of explanation” as coined by Girling (2004, p.

44) - and their relationship with participants on the Facebook page is a mechanism for what

Girling describes as a transfer of cultural capital, which then acts to mobilises. That process

also underscores the argument that politics and power are now defined and owned by those

who can shape information flows, enabling their own influence and disabling the power of

others (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; 2013; Chadwick, 2007). The flow of information is

always political; and can be deliberatively activist. The term information activism was first

theorised by Molaro (2009) and repositioned by Halupka (2015) to describe the use of

information sharing as a form of political participation. Nowhere is it easier to share

information than on social media, from one to many, from many to one, any or many

networks; and in any or many directions, a simple copy, paste, click, share (Morozov, 2009;

Gladwell, 2010). While some would see acts of sharing or liking political posts as

clicktivism, purposeful posting and sharing constitutes information activism (Halupka, 2015).

This follows on from the reframing of clicktivism as a negative to a positive (Evans,

Halupka, & Stoker, 2014; Vromen, 2016; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013)

On DTJ, participants “Like” the page because of its explicitly-framed political content. One

respondent to a short, anonymous survey about participation in DTJ said he participates on

the page because of: “Anger, sadness, sense of injustice, desire to be a better man and better

human being.” For him, as for others, participation is not a mechanical act, it is motivated,

purposeful, with political intent, despite Stoker’s (2016) claim that such acts are politically

themed but not politically engaged. Stoker describes that form of engagement as ‘thin’ and

says that participants find it hard to remember (Stoker, 2016, p. 203) what and why they

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shared material - however, DTJ operates as a portal for one cause which could be an

argument which turns clicktivists into sustained activists, through their ongoing interaction

with the page. This participant’s response to the anonymous survey makes the case for

sustained interaction on the social platform offered by DTJ:

Long been a believer in gender equality, hater of sexism and misogyny. Didn't like the

way Julia Gillard was being treated. And DTJ is a great outlet for my left of centre

political views, and way to share those views with like-minded people who care about

making the world a better place. (survey response)

For this participant, DTJ is a place to share beliefs with others who hold the same or similar

views (van Dijck, 2013), a place to identify with others, a place to click, share and like, a

place to be shaped and to shape others, to share and share with those who are alike, a custombuilt

community.

Information activism is a further development and reframing of the concept of networked

publics, “the imagined collective that emerges because of the intersection of people,

technology and practice” (Boyd, 2010, p. 39) where practice is, or could be conceived of as,

the acts of information activism. Information activism is also acknowledged as a “form of

political participation that operates at the level of fluid and episodic associations of actors

with political causes” (Lunenborg & Raetzsch, 2017, p. 18). While the concept of projectbased

activism is maligned in social movement theory (Coşar & Yeğenoğlu, 2011), in its

favour, it may work to generate episodic solidarity, in a society which tolerates work

intensification to its current levels (Potter, 2019; Paškvan & Kubicek, 2017) and where

activists may have to take such an intensified approach in order to manage activism in a work

context. In addition, in the context of DTJ, with the exception of Gunilla who had retired

from full time work, every single moderator and administrator was in full-time work. Specific

tasks catered to those for whom activism is not a full-time pursuit. Information sharing of

political material is more than a reflex, more than a mechanical process. It is activism,

information activism, the purposeful flow of information as a form of political participation

whereby protesters use the internet “to be informed” as well as to spread information and

provide solidarity (Halupka 2015, p. 1493). His protesters overwhelmingly favoured

information-themed answers in their explanation of why they used the internet, which seems

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both too general and rather obvious. But it’s how they use it which matters: consumption

(reading, watching, listening), aggregation (all the material which matters comes into their

feed), and distribution. Halupka argues that “an individual drawing upon the consumption,

aggregation and distribution of information to ‘provide assistance to protestors’ will also be

looking to provide solidarity, to inform others and to be informed themselves”. The next key

factor in information activism is information production (Halupka, 2015, p. 1495).

I contend that situated somewhere between aggregation and distribution/re-distribution for

the online feminist activism of DTJ is information production, the concept that aggregated

information must be produced in a particular way in order to make that aggregated

information more distributable, more shareable. For those who produce posts for DTJ, the

concept of informing and educating is an integral part of what DTJ’s activism is about. It

promotes discussion and debate, and it builds solidarity by furthering understanding. It is

digital solidarity framing and in this instance, despite its connective action origins, it is not

personalised. As one short-term moderator, Patrick, who assisted during the intensity of the

Alan Jones campaign put it, to contextualise the inherently political nature of such

processes:

I think on some level there needs to be people out there who will hold people to

account and will help shift the goalposts about what's acceptable and what's not

acceptable. We need a group of dedicated activists to do that job. I don't know if

calling people out necessarily will lead to structural change, because I think

sometimes those campaigns take some extra fundamentals, but it could attract the type

of people to start that change. It can inspire other people to join a group of Destroyers

and say, ‘All right, we want to tackle something like gender inequality’, or whatever

the issue is. You need ways in which to get people on what in campaigning would be

a letter of engagement. Calling people out is a really good way of doing it. (Patrick, in

interview)

As Patrick points out, small actions matter and are cumulative. Sharing and liking

accumulates participation at any level. Certainly, for the admins and moderators, it

operationalised the connection between their ideas of what feminist action should look like,

their prefigurative ideals about what feminism is and how it should function, and how it

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actually operates in the 21st century, where activists can mobilise and organise whether

participants are known to each other or not.

These many interactions, big and small, provided an impetus to share information online

about ending sexism and misogyny and a reason to adopt this as a part of a bigger purpose, to

fulfil DTJ’s overt feminist actions towards ending sexism and misogyny. It also illustrates the

way in which knowledge gained through previous activism in other modes was able to be

transformed from a smaller group to a much larger group. Previous experience in collectives

was now able to be leveraged through connective action, and connective action provided its

own structures of this group.

One participant in the page, Helen, became a moderator and is now an admin. For her the

education of those who come to the page was central:

It's only by educating girls and women that you achieve good health outcomes for

without absolutely nailing our flag to the educational component. If by information

activism we mean the sort of thing that us boring old second-wave people used to call

consciousness raising, then yeah, I think we are. (Helen, in interview)

As explored in the introduction to this thesis, much of what DTJ has continued to do is to

highlight those issues relevant to sexism and misogyny, as an act of consciousness-raising.

I am a believer in consciousness raising as a form of activism. I think feminist

activism has really pioneered consciousness raising as a tool of recognizing that some

of the greatest political changes we can make are changes that we make in our

personal lives in terms of just how we think about the world, how we experience the

world, how we feel about the world. I am absolutely a proponent of information

activism. That doesn't mean that I think it ends at consciousness raising or that

consciousness raising is a simple a task or a task that will then inevitably lead to

results, but I do think that it is an important step and one that can help to facilitate

social change more broadly and actually we've seen that in a number of other social

movements over the last few decades. (Seb, in interview)

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Feminist activism has always sought to raise consciousness by, as Carole Zufferey (2018, p.

67) puts it:

publicly sharing personal and private reflections that aim to unite women in shared

recognition of their personal oppressions, to challenge self-blame, to work toward

fighting local and global gendered injustices and to contribute to social change.

She also acknowledges consciousness-raising’s early shortcomings because, as she argues, it

is not enough to make oppression visible: “In the context of a patriarchal society, men are

constructed as credible knowers, whilst women are frequently discredited”. Since those early

days of what was widely recognised as consciousness-raising, feminist activism has moved

through various permutations: individual effort, conferences, private meeting, rallies, flash

mobs, sit-ins, to, as in the case of DTJ, online feminist activism, which Carole

Zufferey (2018, p. 73) specifically describes as “a form of contemporary consciousnessraising—

it provides a collective feminist voice, social commentary on sexism and counts

how many women have died from domestic violence. DTJ (2017) has counted 21 deaths so

far in Australia this year in June 2017 and 73 deaths in 2016.”

Helen again:

We're using our access to information, whether it's as researchers or as people like

yourself and the others who have their fingers on the journalistic pulse that isn't

available to all women. I think we take out into the world a level of information that

isn't necessarily available to all women. We offer it to them, and we offer ways of

dealing with that. I think that's very much what we do.

Helen says DTJ takes into the world, or produces, a level of information that is not

necessarily available or easily accessible to all women. An example of information

production is the series of posts on Counting Dead Women. Counting Dead Women is the

principle campaign of DTJ. It works to highlight fatal violence against women. The

campaigning aspects of DTJ will be explored more fully in Chapter Seven. What follows is

an exploration of Counting Dead Women as information activism.

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Helen is the admin who leads the Counting Dead Women research and she is unambiguous

about her role in the group as a consumer of information. She says she is not a confident

writer but is very good at research, which she says is essential to CDW. Here she explains her

daily research routine, which includes checking police reports:

Every day, I wake up in the morning. I go straight to ABC News and News.com

Australia. I look and see if any woman has died that we know of, and then, if anyone

has, I do everything I can to find out the circumstances and to put together the register

notes and the update post for the page […] then it's basically touch base every hour or

so with the admin page and the moderator page to see what's going on. (Helen, in

interview)

While that will be the focus of another chapter, I will here briefly explain the process for a

Counting Dead Women post. The information within the organising groups of DTJ operates

this way. There are four Facebook groups responsible for the information which leads to the

posts shared on Destroy The Joint: admins, mods, renos and CDW. Admins consists of

administrators of the page; mods is moderators; renos is where individuals can put relevant

and useful links or content; CDW (Counting Dead Women) consists of news of deaths and

police reports. There are a number of ways for a post to be constructed and they include the

clear identification of the death of a woman through violence; a news topic identified by one

or more of those involved; a link to a resource which is interesting but not necessarily newsy

(most commonly comes through the Renos page); and a request from another group to share

their campaign.

There is no set method in how a post evolves unless that post is for CDW when Helen signs

off that the death fits the many specific criteria for Counting Dead Women. She may not have

seen the initial media report or police report but is notified because she sees a post in the

private Counting Dead Women Facebook group. It is also usual for others to post on the

deaths in Mods or in Admins. This process may or may not be straightforward depending on

whether the death meets the criteria: the dead woman must be over 18 (unless identified as

living independently) and, in most cases, there is some wait while police confirm that the

death is as a result of violence.

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The following Counting Dead Women post from a murder in NSW in August 2018 followed

an initial notification from one of the moderators that a woman had been killed in the suburb

of Penshurst, in Sydney, Australia. The moderator had seen a report from news.com.au on the

death on the morning of August 13. In that CDW private Facebook group, a number of

people updated information during the day. A decision was made to wait until a charge was

laid. The police reported that a charge had been laid through its email service just before

10pm that night. At least two of the moderators subscribe to that email service.

As web traffic drops off at that time of the evening on the DTJ Facebook page, a decision

was made to wait until the following morning to post to the page. It was posted at 8.04am on

Monday August 14 (see below). This particular production of a Counting Dead Women post,

the one posted on August 14, was not difficult. The information came through quite quickly.

The decision to wait for a charge came about because Helen believed this case followed the

pattern of cases where a charge would be laid early, thereby allowing the post to provide

more complete information which would circumvent speculation. However, in this instance,

there were instantly suggestions that this was a ‘mercy killing’. Helen deletes this kind of

speculation where it is possible to do so, quickly.

While the majority of these posts use similar wording, there are instances where this is

changed to suit the particular case. The news story which is linked is always one the

considered to have the most information. The news source varies. The image is new for each

death as the toll increases. There are instances where we post what is called an In Memoriam

post. For example, on August 18, 2018, a news story revealed that in the case of a death in

2017, there had been a conviction. This confirmed for the first time that the death of a woman

had been an act of violence and her partner was convicted. This then required a change to the

total toll for 2017. The Counting Dead Women team updates the tolls and only once has had

to revise a toll downwards.

One Counting Dead Women post can have six or seven admins and moderators researching

and reading and writing, in order to give the clearest and latest information about the post.

The production of posts is usually workshopped in the private group admin group where

discussion is free-flowing and critical. A proposed post goes into the moderators group for

feedback. Within the admin and moderator groups, participants acknowledge the expertise

brought to the groups by particular individuals: health workers, social workers, those with

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expertise in mental health, those working in domestic violence fields, union delegates and

organisers, and teachers. All contribute to the collection and production of material. The

information is then produced in a way in which the participants on the page recognise as a

Counting Dead Women post. Those who participate on the page recognise the symbols of a

CDW post. In the case posted on August 14, one of the responses was this:

Figure 6: Counting Dead Women tweet

This demonstrates the production of information as a crucial part of the chain of information

activism. All of the information producers bring their own skills and knowledge, their own

cultural capital, together to this process, to produce an artefact to be used for activism: in this

instance, the particular iteration of activism which is information activism and which then

must be distributed in order to be used for mobilisation.

In the case of Counting Dead Women, it is the impact of the production that expands

information activism. It is more than discussion and debate and therefore it is useful to ask

what the chain of distribution is. Halupka (2015) argues that distribution among activists is

the end point of this activism, a way of sharing information useful to the cause. Every time

Counting Dead Women is acknowledged in mainstream media or elsewhere, it broadens the

scope of, and investment in, this toll of dead women. Since its Australian inception, CDW

has made regular appearances on all mainstream news platforms, including News, Fairfax,

the Guardian, the ABC, SBS etc. It has been acknowledged in both the House of

Representatives and in the Senate and also in the NSW Legislative Assembly. The reach of

this kind of information activism moves beyond the sphere of activists themselves. This level

of activism could not occur without the cultural capital of the admins and moderators because

it requires detailed research, clear writing, shareable images and strong social networks.

Louisa, who works in the communication industry, identified what she believed was crucial

information distributed through the Counting Dead Women campaign.

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I know anecdotally, people who knew that there was a domestic violence issue in

Australia but didn't know how to counter the claims of certain people, that like, men

are victims just as much as women and all sorts of horrible claims about women

psychological abusers. I think that Counting Dead Women provided that [accurate]

information, which is power, other people could then dispel some of those myths. I

would say yeah, I think it's really powerful form of communication. Information and

knowledge is power. What I think has been really interesting in Counting Dead

Women is getting people who knew that there was an issue the information that they

need, to then take that out into their networks as well. (Louisa, in interview)

Rosa explains:

I mean, if you're adding to people’s knowledge or understanding or their education, of

course you're laying the groundwork for people to make decisions later on. They are

then better informed. There'd be a normal framework that we would see things in.

(Rosa, in interview)

She recalls thinking that DTJ would be a place where she could post articles, “post bits of

rants and things like that, but basically more of a sort of voice to keep on top of this and to

fight back” so in her view, having the voice was a way of fighting back. Rosa’s theory of

change (Weiss, 1998) was that relevant information activated political participation:

I think that social media means that we have more input, more thoughtful input.

You've got a whole lot of different ways to think about things, you are sort of forced

to unconsciously or by choosing to and it just means that better decisions I think, are

made actually . . .you've got to educate and then activate people. I would just see,

sharing of articles and that as part of that collective education . . . if it's changing

people's views or if you think that education is liberating, how can you say it's not a

form of activism. (Rosa, in interview)

A number of the administrators and moderators had strong views about the role of

information distribution as part of activism. Alice, in interview, argued that

“sharing information is an important part of activism”. Jocelynne, in interview, said it was

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“absolutely critical” although she acknowledged that not everyone would use the information

to take action.

Getting information out there and getting people to take action on it, that's, I mean

you can leave it, some people will take action, no question. Some people will think

about it and not do it. Some people will just [be] alone with their outrage that they

wouldn't even know where to begin. I think having a page that calls attention to

something and gives alternatives if there are alternatives but gives options, I reckon

that's fantastic. (Jocelynne, in interview)

Alice too argued for the relevance of information distribution in activism: “I think keeping

people ignorant stops people from doing anything about it.”

However, one risk among a group of feminists, was ensuring that the message was

understandable on social media, where concentration is both limited and declining (Carr,

2011, 2017). Within the administrators and moderators, there has been at times heated

discussion about whether the level of posts about feminism have been too basic or what

might be described as too undergraduate. However, the prevailing view has been that those

who come to DTJ’s Facebook page arrive with different levels of knowledge and there must

be some attempt to engage that spectrum - that it isn’t dumbing-down feminism to explain

reproductive rights at their most basic.

As one of the first moderators, Jocelynne, said in her interview:

I think there are times when Destroy The Joint is feminism 101, there's no question

about that. There are times when it steps up [so] I'm not sure that that's a reasonable

criticism. I think many, many people have come on board with Destroy the Joint and

have embraced feminism because they were pursuing campaigns they believed in and

the subsequent content has kind of, I think, enlarged people's understandings.

(Jocelynne, in interview)

Or as Helen (in interview) said: “If you don't do feminism 101 every new day, then you don't

get to [do] feminism 102 or 201.”

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The decision to keep it simple ended up being the consensus position because admins and

moderators saw that Feminism 101 could be used as a useful tool to explain key concepts.

The more people could use those key concepts to challenge patriarchal views, the more likely

it could be for anyone participating on the page to challenge the orthodoxy of the patriarchy.

The activists themselves see the relationship between online discussions and actions,

where doxa (Bourdieu, 1977), the held views, can be contested in the public space of the DTJ

page, among the posts on the page, the comments by participants who share DTJ values and

the challengers to those views (in particular, men who post on the page) particularly when

they come with different kinds of capital from outside the field (Swartz, 2013).

One of the more experienced activists, Rosa, said she felt strongly that education needed to

be a big part of DTJ:

If you're adding to people’s knowledge or understanding or their education, of course

you're laying the groundwork for people to make decisions later on. (Rosa, in

interview)

And another, Faith, said she witnessed posts where people would change their minds about

an issue: “I mean, the number of times it would be a comment [like], they are saying, ‘Yeah,

I didn't get this, but now I do’” (Faith, in interview).

In addition, Bella, whose long-time work in domestic violence services helped shape

Counting Dead Women, said: “I think you can't lobby until there's an awareness and

education of what you're lobbying for. People won't embrace change or campaign for change

until it's galvanized into action.”

There are two forms of information activism at play here: the process of information

production, and the connective action of those who follow, comment, like, and share. This

is far more than clicktivism - they consciously follow a page where they will see information

that may extend, align and/or reinforce those beliefs. They are more than audience because

they are on the page in the first place because they believe in the cause but they hold their

actions to digital following. They can be the end point, the recipients, of information

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activism; or they can extend their views and the reach of information activism by interacting

with the page, by liking, reacting, sharing and commenting.

Another admin, Millicent, who also operates the @JointDestroyer Twitter account,

researches other areas of interest for production on the Facebook page, and shares that

information in the private Facebook groups. She consumes information to bring back to the

organising groups:

On Twitter, I will search for certain words or hashtags. I might search for feminism,

feminist, sexist, sexism. I might search for women and the hashtag #auspol, which

will tend to bring up most things that people are tweeting politically about. (Millicent,

in interview)

One moderator, Anita, whose job is in non-university social science research, says she

follows Facebook pages which intersect with her interests.

I contribute fairly regularly to the Reno Clouds which is where we post ideas, so

whenever I’m going through my newsfeed and I find something that might make a

good post, I’ll put that into that separate group so that people who are the admins who

write the posts can decide whether or not that’s a good thing to post on. I’ll often

write a little bit of a draft post for it, if I think it’s particularly timely or a really good

thing to post on, because if there’s a little bit of material already there, it makes it

easier for the admins to pick up and they already have something to work with.

(Anita, in interview)

In addition - but briefly - the initial campaign to remove advertising from the Alan Jones

program on Macquarie Radio Network’s 2GB required an enormous amount of research and

dissemination. Boycotts have always operated using the tool of information activism but

digital platforms increase exponentially the power of information activism.

What activists bring to their activism matters: their habitus, their cultural capital, their social

capital. Most importantly, it is how they employ and leverage their habitus and capitals.

These activists identified what was to them the central concerns of feminism and were thus

able to use their social and cultural capital to activate, educate and organise, particularly

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through the use of information activism enacted to build common ground and therefore

solidarity. This chapter also provided a heuristic - a method and process for information

activism which begins through its sifting or gatekeeping of information, processes that

information into a product, then distributes that information as an activist act. That

distribution is key as a mechanism to transfer cultural capital, from one individual to another

and therefore from one network to another. The next chapter interrogates three examples of

information activism.

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This chapter examines both the campaigns within Destroy the Joint (DTJ) and the

multiplicity of strategic repertoires used by the DTJ organisers in their hybrid

campaigning. It will explore how the admins and moderators of DTJ each personally felt

about the campaigns of the page and what the admins and moderators considered to be

effective and ineffective. In particular, it will investigate the Counting Dead Women

campaign, which keeps track of - and disseminates - a toll of fatal violence against women in

Australia. It will document how it was devised and then implemented. It will also examine

what, if any, impact that campaign has had on the mainstream media coverage of fatal

violence against women. It will also look at the artefacts of the Counting Dead Women

campaign including the imagery of the campaign, how those artefacts were shared, and the

way this campaign performed on Facebook. This analysis underscores the concept of a frame,

which, as Charlotte Ryan and William Gamson say (2006, p. 13), organises thoughts,

highlights “certain events and facts as important” and renders others as invisible but must

also involve “a strategic dialogue intended to shape a particular group into a coherent

movement”. Using that imagery and the way it is shared, I will illustrate the shift from the

concept of the personal action frame (Bennett & Segerberg 2012; 2013) as a form of political

participation to a transnational digital solidarity frame, where those who participate online

through the sharing of images do so to state their position in solidarity with others. I argue

that this too is a form of connective action, enabled by the internet, which, unlike the personal

action frame, emphasises shared values rather than individual interpretation and adaptation. I

will also examine, briefly, my own journalistic practice as it relates to these campaigns.

DTJ, as has been mentioned earlier in this thesis, began without much consideration of any

long-term campaigns, a Facebook page created without a clear purpose except to share

outrage or, as Castells (2012, p. 7) puts it:

Individuals formed networks, regardless of their personal views or organizational

attachments. They came together. And their togetherness helped them to overcome

fear, this paralysing emotion on which the powers that be rely in order to prosper and

reproduce, by intimidation or discouragement, and when necessary by sheer violence,

be it naked or institutionally enforced.

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Castells was not using those words to describe how women felt in Australia in 2012 but they

could be applied to the experience of women in Australia at that time. The gender pay gap

was not shrinking. As the report from the Australian Senate’s Education, Employment and

Workplace Relations Legislation Committee into the Equal Opportunity for Women in the

Workplace Amendment Bill 2012 put it, inequality continued to be a feature of Australian

workplaces: “In 2011 it was estimated that women in full-time paid employment earn 17.8

per cent less than men in similar conditions” (Parliament of Australia, 2012). In addition,

crime victimisation data reveals a dramatic increase in the rate of non-face-to-face threats of

violence against women, perhaps a precursor of what women experience online today (ABS,

2014).

DTJ’s formation was a response to an extrinsic motivation, using a platform which, prior to

this episode, was only in limited use in political campaigning in Australia (Burgess & Bruns,

2012; Chen & Gorski, 2010). Castells (2012, p. 233) describes the impact of Internet use as

one of empowerment, especially for women, in an age of networked social movements. What

women felt they could not do alone, or in small feminist collectives, they could do together

when they found others with similar values, particularly in the “hybrid world of real

common purpose and their common values, moving from one platform to another,

converging the distinct organisational repertoires (Chadwick, 2007) they had acquired in their

previous activism and using mobilising techniques from those organisational repertoires,

from emails to the sharing of images (Vromen, 2016). As outlined in chapter three, these

activists first congregated around the #destroythejoint hashtag on Twitter. That convergence

of people and values then provided the impetus for a Facebook page. The initial posts on the

page, as outlined below, tried to explain the purpose of the page in the simplest way possible

while also providing a muted call to action.

The purpose of DTJ was and is to signal that achieving gender equality was and is important

to society and that governments should take approaches to achieve gender equality; and to

undertake what Ken Kollman (1998) describes as conflict expansion - an attempt to both

broaden public support for a key issue and to mobilise those who might otherwise not have

been mobilised. As an advocacy group, DTJ focusses on outside lobbying and mainly uses

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public appeal, although one of the campaigns explored later in this chapter used direct

lobbying (without face-to-face contact as explored by Dexter in 1969) and then a

combination of indirect lobbying and public opinion appeal (Nonon & Clamen, 1991).

It took four more weeks for the admins of the page to develop a more coherent strategy - and

when it did, it was specific and targeted - although it did not address the entirety of sexism let

alone of misogyny. The campaign to ask advertisers to remove advertising from Alan Jones’s

program, as described in the history chapter, was really a series of small, symbolic actions

without an organised attempt to address the structural underpinnings of inequality.

But as Rosa, one of the admins, said:

I remember back then, even in the beginning, the thing about Facebook is that it did

provide safety in that you were anonymous and that no one knew who you were

behind it and everyone was scared of Alan Jones, even more than they are now. He

seemed to be all powerful. The fact that a whole lot of people could gather and

organize without necessarily ... If they could fight back without being subjected to

bullying, so we thought, was a new thing.

An early analysis of DTJ’s campaigns and outcomes (McLean &

Maalsen, 2015) examines small targets and big, from events which promote sexism (easily

cancelled) to rape culture, much more intransigent. Where there was an identifiable target, for

example, David Koch or John Laws, these involved calls to action.

From 2012 to 2018, DTJ has posted 98 separate posts with the phrase “call to action”. They

range from Counting Dead Women campaigning to asking distributors and business owners

to change particular practices or social media posts. They range from the small and targeted,

such as the removal of the word slut from baby jumpsuits, to those which target

violence against women. Each of these campaigns resonated to a greater or lesser extent with

those who were involved at an organisational level. In the interviews I conducted with

administrators and moderators, three of those campaigns were mentioned most frequently

during those interviews and I will now describe those campaigns in full: Telstra silent

numbers; Indigenous women and their treatment by police in NSW regarding withdrawal of

charges of family violence; and Counting Dead Women.

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During the life of DTJ, there have been 12 administrators and two of those are also the

designated administrators who are responsible for the Counting Dead Women research and

the posts for each of the Counting Dead Women posts. I interviewed nine of those

administrators and I am one myself. Each of those admins, who are responsible for the

campaigns and direction of those campaigns, talked about the impact of CDW, even those

who had left before this campaign began. Of all the campaigns, only CDW was mentioned by

each and every single admin and, indeed moderator, I interviewed. Even the Alan Jones

campaign which was foundational to DTJ (and which gave the group its name) was not

mentioned by all the interview subjects, except in passing to acknowledge the way in which

this movement began. The first Counting Dead Women campaign post, on May 20,

2014, explored the link between the federal government’s decision to slash funding to

community legal centres and violence against women.

There were two other campaigns which appeared most frequently in the interviews - the

‘silent’ campaign to provide free access to private numbers, which first appeared on Feb 23,

2013, and the campaign to change the way in which Indigenous women who withdrew

accusations of violence were treated, which first appeared on May 11, 2013. I will first

compare the sentiment of these campaigns based on a social media analysis tool and my own

comment analysis and then describe the operation and impact of both of those campaigns

briefly here and then summarise their impact, if any, on the targets of the campaign.

According to Cassandra Star and Paige Fletcher (2018) in their review of

available academic literature on the influence of feminist organisations on public policy

responses to domestic violence and violence against women, feminist activism is

“overwhelmingly” (p. 59) successful in influencing policy. The three campaigns outlined in

this chapter, albeit limited in either size or scope, were successful. This section addresses, in

a limited way, Star and Fletcher’s identified gaps in knowledge (2018) about effective types

of activism and provides an exploration of three campaigns which were identified as wins,

even if only for limited numbers of women. One of these campaigns impacted corporate

policy on domestic violence survivors (Telstra); both ‘public mischief’ and community legal

centres changed government policy and practice.

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Figure 7: Sentiment score on campaign posts (CrowdTangle)

This comparison table uses CrowdTangle to look at sentiment on these campaign posts.

Earlier in this thesis (p.31) I described CrowdTangle. To recap, CrowdTangle:

post comprising content, a content type, and a time stamp;

predetermined set of time periods;

time period selected from the predetermined set of time periods, the

representative engagement metric being based on the engagement metric of

the post during the particular time period;

platform;

the selected post compared to the representative engagement metric (Google

Patents, 2019)

CrowdTangle is used by publishers to measure how a post is travelling and this tool is used as

a way to discuss the comparison table above. The interactions on the Facebook page inform

the CrowdTangle score. For example, CrowdTangle uses the total number of interactions,

including reactions, shares, likes and comments, on each post to give each post a score. That

score is devised by calculating averages for the previous 100 posts on the page which then

provides a benchmark against which later posts are measured (Silverman, 2019).

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DTJ’s campaign is described in more detail below. The post on Telstra’s decision not

to apply private number charges to ‘Rebecca’ appeared on Feb 26, 2013. It had a link

but no image. It attracted 436 likes, 29 shares and 45 comments. This win was also

well-publicised on mainstream media.

It had a negative CT (CrowdTangle) score. -1.575757576 because it met benchmark

likes (349 at the time) but fell well short with the number of comments (52 was the

benchmark at the time) or shares (52, the benchmark at the time). I analysed the

sentiment of the comments myself and found that 37/45 comments were positive, and

eight critical of Telstra for charging for this service at all.

were treated when withdrawing charges of family violence. The post about public

mischief published on May 11, 2013, contained no links or images. It had 640 likes,

91 shares and 48 comments; and on the following days, the win was well publicised

on mainstream media. It had a positive CrowdTangle score 2.272727273 because it

met benchmark likes (130 at the time) even though it did not meet benchmark

comments (47) or shares (32). I analysed the sentiment of the comments myself and

found that of the 48 comments, 28 were positive. The others were neutral with some

discussing the issue of domestic violence in general.

legal centres. This post celebrated the decision by the federal government to restore

funding to community legal centres and was set in the context of Counting Dead

Women was posted on April 24, 2017. It had both a link and an image, 491 likes, 37

shares, 25 comments. The backflip was well publicised on mainstream media but not

attributed to DTJ campaigning. It had a small positive CrowdTangle score of

1.74269005847953 and the sentiment of comments was 6/25 comments positive and

the remainder critical of government.

In early 2013, in the DtJ Facebook private messages, a woman wrote to DtJ seeking help. She

had escaped from years of domestic violence and now had an apprehended violence order

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against her former partner. She was in financial difficulty after the separation because of the

costs of relocation. She had asked Telstra for a silent number (neither listed in the White

Pages nor available on caller identification) but a call centre operator for Telstra had told her

that there would be a charge. The amount of $36 (the cost of that service in 2013) for

that correspondent of DTJ, seemed like an insurmountable sum of money. One of the longtime

admins describes the impact of this cost as a financial hardship for the person seeking

this service - a struggle between needing the safety mechanism and not being able to afford

the payment.

As Millicent, the long-time admin, puts it:

The purpose of that campaign was to have the fee that was being charged women to

have a silent number waived, because the fee that was being charged was a financial

hardship on women who were leaving their partners. It was also necessary for those

women to have a silent number in order to protect themselves against further

harassment from the usual male partner that they were leaving.

Millicent recalled this campaign as being quite different to other campaigns. This was not

outside lobbying and nor was it the kind of campaign which relied in any way on garnering

supportive public opinion:

There was quite a bit more behind the scenes liaising with the organisations than had

happened with some other campaigns, because I thought it was somewhat different in

that we were trying to get somebody onboard with something rather than somebody to

detach from something. I am pretty sure that [you were] the one who was liaising with

people at Telstra. . .I think there was quite a bit more behind the scenes negotiation

happening.

There was quite a bit of discussion among the members of admins as to how the campaign

would work. The “behind the scenes negotiation” as Millicent described it was a different

strategy to any employed by DTJ until that time. As Griffin and Thurber describe it, “direct

lobbying potentially touches or at least contemplates each of the players . . . whose specific

behaviour could have an immediate impact on the outcome of the Campaign” (2015, p. 8).

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The strategy of direct lobbying was selected partly because the prospect of success in a

campaign to encourage people to boycott Telstra in order to pressure the telecommunications

giant while exhilarating, was unlikely to work because of a near-universal dependence on

phones (Winnick, 2016) and Telstra, in 2013, had over 40 per cent of the

mobile market (Marketing Mag, 2014). It was also hard to imagine how such a boycott could

operate and DTJ needed another strategy to try to cut through as companies always think

activists will criticise them. Saul Alinsky (1971) provided three rules which were useful:

power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have; whenever possible go

outside the expertise of the enemy; and the price of a successful attack is a constructive

alternative. DTJ activists believed they had each of these rules covered, although there was

not universal agreement on the use of direct lobbying. No-one ever mentioned Saul Alinsky’s

name but the rules were discussed.

This campaign was devised by the admins alone and in heated correspondence with one

another via Facebook messages and telephone calls. DTJ’s mode of operation until that time

had to make public demands of the target of the campaign and to put pressure on the target of

the campaign. However we agreed that this process would not work, as described above.

There was conflict about this approach. Should the approach be to target Telstra in the way

DTJ had approached Alan Jones and other smaller campaigns? Or should another approach

be undertaken? The success of the Jones campaign was emboldening but at least one other

admin felt it would not be possible to ask people to boycott Telstra because of the necessity

of communicating with family and friends. That admin dug her heels in. Rosa and Jocelynne

acted as mediators and negotiators within the group to develop a strategy but managing the

diversity of approaches, strategy and experience was difficult:

[She was] also a particular personality to ... I don't mean it this way, but I'm going to

just say it bluntly, a lot to manage. I hadn't really dealt with someone like [her] before

either in my day-to-day work and as you know there were those early divisions in the

group and people feeling as though ... ‘Oh, were people pulling their weight?’ or

‘were people's skills and experience valued in different ways?’. There was also a lot

of super behind-the-scenes work, basically keeping [it] together. I think I had a bit of

capital with people so I could use that, which I did. (Rosa, in interview)

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Finally, direct lobbying was selected as the best initial approach. The text of the following

email was agreed, sent on Thursday January 17, 2013 at 9.00am, to the then managing

director of Telstra, David Thodey:

Dear Mr Thodey,

I am a member of the administrative team of DTJ on Facebook - a women's

advocacy group which has 23000 members. We campaign against sexism and

misogyny and we also highlight issues that are particularly relevant to women. I write

today on behalf of the admin group in response to an email from one of our

members.

This email was sent to us in confidence. Our member has experienced domestic

violence and has an apprehended violence order against her former partner. She rang

Telstra seeking a silent/private number but was told it would cost her $36 a year. She

was told that the charge would not be waived "under any circumstance".

That is when she wrote to us, explaining that leaving domestic violence had left her in

a very difficult financial situation. Being told that this charge would not be waived

was very upsetting. As you can imagine keeping in touch with friends, family and

support is vitally important. She feels like she is being charged for being safe and

connected.

She said: "It was a humiliating experience to need to spell out the justification for

why domestic violence requires a silent number... and then to have it rejected."

Telstra is a leading sponsor of White Ribbon so we are sure you understand what the

effects are on women who have suffered domestic violence - and a private or silent

number would help many of those women feel safe.

Members of DTJ did some further research about these charges which confirmed

the experience of the woman who wrote to us.

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Our member was told that waiving such a charge would create an

"unwanted precedent".

We are writing to you to make a commitment to women escaping violence. Please set

the precedent - to waive fees for silent and private numbers for women escaping

violence.

Please let us know your response as soon as possible - we hope to hear from you by

the end of the week. We imagine our members would be keen to begin a public

campaign about this but, in the first instance, we seek your early cooperation on this

matter.

Kind regards,

To summarise, DTJ wrote to Telstra’s CEO David Thodey to explain and support Rebecca’s

case. This was direct insider lobbying, as posited by Thurber and Griffin (2015). We were

lobbying for an outcome for one person but we also made the point that we wanted those

rules to change for all victims of domestic violence with apprehended violence orders. It took

six weeks of regular polite phone calls to the CEO and those to whom he had delegated

authority - but on Valentine’s Day 2013, Telstra agreed it would fix the issue for “Rebecca”,

the woman who had come to the page.

The initial posts about “Rebecca” did not seek a boycott, nor did those posts ask people who

participated on the page to take action, other than a positive action. However, a threat may

have been perceived by Telstra executives based on DTJ’s prior actions, which had

previously consisted of outside lobbying, in particular to contact or pressure decision makers

(Kollman, 1998, p. 3) and to develop a public view of this case. In addition, this campaign

built upon an existing campaign by ACCAN which had used outsider lobbying but had not

been successful, except to provide what Vromen describes as “diffusion . . . an active process

of sharing repertoires and framing among trusted allies, within a formal or informal network

of actors” (Vromen, 2016, p. 192). ACCAN’s then CEO Teresa Corbin publicly

acknowledged DTJ’s reframing of the issue after the announcement of Telstra’s new policy.

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She said: ''Suddenly the issue became very public … The fact that you had a real case, a

person explaining exactly how it had affected them” (Swan, 2013).

Figure 8: Destroy the Joint post after Telstra campaign

A couple of weeks later, Telstra issued a statement confirming that it would take a new

approach to those seeking silent numbers:

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We understand that some Australians require a silent line because their personal

safety is at risk so we will be waiving the silent line fee for customers in these

circumstances [and for] anyone who has a valid protection order recognising a

security threat or is a client of a community organisation providing services to people

who are facing a security threat. (Motherpedia, 2013)

Both the Sydney Morning Herald (Swan, 2013) and the Daily Telegraph (Dudley-Nicholson,

2013a; 2013b) credited DTJ for the success of the campaign.

For Helen (in interview), now an admin, it is one of the campaigns which had long term

impact: “It's kept going, and has I think possibly ramifications for other service providers in

the way they deal.” Telstra provides over 10,000 silent numbers to those with AVOs against

their partners (phone conversation with Telstra spokesperson).

Figure 9: Destroy the Joint post after Telstra campaign

This campaign was successful. It used direct lobbying at first over a six-week period. It then

praised Telstra on the DTJ Facebook page and used positive reinforcement for the

telecommunication giant’s response to “Rebecca” in its outside lobbying to provide

affirmation to the company.

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mischief” where they had withdrawn complaints of domestic violence. There were more than

20 cases where these women had been charged by local police prosecutors for criminal

offences of “false testimony” as well as “public mischief”, with no police investigation, but

instead using the women’s own testimony to convict them. The report in the Weekend

Australian provided DTJ with the ‘makings’ of a call to action and some sources who could

provide guidance on what was needed for such a call to action.

For five weeks, DTJ campaigned publicly to stop these survivors of domestic violence being

jailed and charged for withdrawing their statements. The May 11, 2013, call to action asked

Destroyers to email the office of the then NSW Attorney-General Greg Smith demanding a

policy change to ensure that such cases were referred upwards to the Office of the Director of

Public Prosecutions for consideration of prosecution. Three of the minister’s email addresses

were provided: ministerial, office and electorate office.

The post itself was not highly shared or commented upon, compared to other calls to actions:

33 shares, 146 likes and 46 comments (see table). There was no direct correspondence from

DTJ as an entity to the minister. The post on the page served only as a call to action.

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Figure 10: Destroy the Joint campaign post

reported that the NSW Attorney General had moved from his original position of “no plans to

act” to the Police Minister now issuing this edict:

The NSW Police Force has advised that it will only prosecute someone for making

false representations where it can be established that the original allegation was

untrue. We are advised that the NSW Police Force provides guidance to its officers to

not solely rely on admissions made by a victim when deciding to proceed with such

charges.

She acknowledged the work of the DTJ activists:

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Feminist lobby group DTJ campaigned on the issue, decrying the prosecutions as ‘a

reminder of the harsh way our criminal justice can treat the state's most defenceless

citizens, particularly in remote areas.

It urged its supporters to bombard the office of Attorney-General Greg Smith with

letters demanding a policy change to ensure that such cases were referred upwards to

the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for consideration of prosecution.

Ordinarily, false accusation charges are dealt with by local police prosecutors.

(Robinson, 2013)

Figure 11: Destroy the Joint post during domestic violence campaign

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These two campaigns operated quite differently. In the case of silent numbers, the preparation

of the campaign was conducted privately, first within the admin group alone and then through

emails and phone calls to those with authority to act, on behalf of ‘Rebecca’ using

direct lobbying. At no stage, in public, did Telstra acknowledge DTJ’s role although it was

acknowledged in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. One post had no

public call to action other than to thank Telstra for its support of ‘Rebecca’, the other was

direct, specific calls to action, using connective action and tactics which Postmes and

Brunsting (2002) describe as persuasive rather than confrontational.

One aspect of DTJ’s activism is that its remit is very broad: shining a light on sexism and

misogyny. That broadness allows a lot of scope but it also tends to structurelessness, a term

coined by US feminist scholar Jo Freeman (1972), as discussed in chapter six. As one of the

admins Jocelynne said (in interview):

One of [Freeman’s] theses was that when you've got no formal structure there's an

informal structure that arises by force of personality or whatever, centrepiece, or

whatever and that one of the difficulties about that is that it can never be discussed

because in reality it doesn't exist or in inverted commas, reality, it doesn't exist.

These two campaigns provided a stark contrast to each other in terms of organisational

response. The Telstra campaign is an example of an action taken by 'sheer force of

personality’. There was no formal structure to deal with conflict but the person with the

loudest voice made the decisions, even though there were others with competing, valid

arguments. On the other hand, the public mischief campaign was truly consensus-based, with

distributed leadership in terms of decision-making. Yet neither of these campaigns emanated

from stated DTJ policy. Stated DTJ policy, if it can be given that grand title, is standing for

against gender inequality and incivility and protest. As Verta Taylor and Nella Van

(2004, p. 263) in order to persuade or coerce. A policy cannot flourish without a strategy and

strategies aren’t rolled out without actions and tactics.

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However, DTJ policy was without specifics and without those specifics, some campaigns

could not be fully developed. DTJ’s activists believed they knew what the focus of

contemporary feminism should be and, by extension, the focus of the campaigns of DTJ.

adequate funding for domestic violence services, appropriate sentencing, and ensuring that all

against women but in society in general, “there is still a lot of work to be

rights, domestic violence or violence against women, homeless women's rights,

the workplace is essential.

Constance, for example, could identify her concerns and was also able to identify and critique

areas where the operations of DTJ could be improved:

We could do a bit better with workplace issues . . . we do a lot of workplace issues

about whether or not women are getting pressured to wear high heels in the

workplace, which is fine and important. They're all important questions. Getting

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women onto boards, all those sorts of criticisms that we have around workplace

equality.

I think we could get a bit better on that. We could probably tweak it to get it a little

less white bread.

The key themes here included the end of violence against women, equal pay, equal

opportunity, reproductive rights, but there was no clear path or process on how DTJ might

operationalise those aims.

As Jocelynne observed of the group’s organisational model:

‘Yes, we'll be a consensus model’," but we had never actually worked out how

decisions would be made.

As Berry (2015) argues, policy decisions in public interest organisations and groups are not

divorced from decisions around strategy and tactics, so everything happens at once because

of limited access to money and people. Groups search for what will be effective and efficient

but are limited because of time and money. In the case of DTJ, with the exception of a shortterm

paid administrative position in 2014, everyone else has volunteer status and all but two

people had or have full-time employment, which may explain why DTJ’s actions and

campaigns range from ones with a broad scope which aim to address inequality to ones which

are smaller and less ambitious. Without well-developed policies, strategies and actions, the

campaigns depend on what ‘feels’ urgent and are also congruent with values of the

administrators. This meant that much of what DTJ did was broadly on an initial ad hoc basis,

although benefitting from the cultural and social capital which administrators and moderators

brought to the group (see previous chapter). It was also an excellent example of how a

consensus model may be subject to three pressures: Freeman’s tyranny of structurelessness

(1972), Polletta’s tyranny of emotions (2002) and Milan’s dictatorship of action (2009) while

still developing deliberative democratic decision-making, in an attempt to “press other

participants to recognise the legitimacy of other people’s decision-making” (Polletta, 2002, p.

26).

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I will now explore Counting Dead Women, which is the longest running campaign DTJ has

conducted. In 2014, DTJ began a campaign to highlight fatal violence against women,

following on from the British campaign with the same name. I was very keen to use this as a

model for an Australian campaign but members of the administrators group were

divided. There were concerns around whether such a campaign would be useful, the

emotional labour of the work to run the campaign, and whether it would have an impact.

While the concept of enumerating fatal violence against women was largely considered to be

a good idea - in much the same way that having a national road toll demonstrates the extent

of the road toll - there was also some argument about the difficulties of trying to build

something new from the ground up. There was also the very real concern of how a campaign

about fatal violence against women might be derailed if posted on Facebook, for example, by

men’s rights activists. However, the British model provided a strong example of a successful

campaign. One of the administrators phoned the founder, Karen Ingala Smith, to ask her how

she felt about Australians appropriating her work. She was very keen and “said having

international partners in the project made change more likely – a ‘united we stand’ kind of

approach” (Price, 2014).

Helen, first a moderator, later an admin and the key researcher of Counting Dead Women,

said:

My very first inkling that it was a possibility for us was when [one of the

admins] rang me. I was aware of the work that Ingala Smith had been doing in

England, but it didn't actually occur to me that we could do that. Once [she] had

called and we talked about it a bit, and I looked more in depth at what [she] was

doing, yes, it suddenly became clear, ‘Yeah, we can do that, and we should do that.’

However, there was some conflict within the group about both the approach and the name.

Constance, a long-time admin, said (in interview):

The idea was pretty well received although there were some doubts about it from one

admin [who is] no longer with us, but I also think I had my doubts . . . I was happy to

defer, but to be perfectly honest, I had my doubts about it, the whole Counting Dead

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Women concept and name, and everything about it sounded quite confronting. I now

see that's the point, and I think I was really ... how can you say your gut is wrong, but

I can now see that I was wrong.

Emmeline, another long-time admin, was very conflicted about whether all fatal violence

against women should be counted or whether it should only be fatal violence perpetrated by

men:

We discussed it behind the scenes and thought it would be a great thing to do but to

do it our way . . . I had problems with the idea of making it all violence against

women because people keep asking us how many men, how many men, how many

partners, etcetera. But the fact that we count all women in the tally just points to the

vast majority being male violence [against women] by partners or ex-partners.

The very first Counting Dead Women post combined the general and broad campaign to stop

violence against women by consciousness-raising (more fully explored in chapter six, in the

section on information activism) and using information activism. That post contained two

actions or campaigns: the first launched Counting Dead Women Australia, the second

mounted an attack on the federal government for its cuts to community legal centres. This

post linked to a story I wrote for the Canberra Times which was published on all its

metropolitan Fairfax websites where I made a connection between the cuts to community

legal centres and a higher risk of fatal family violence. The Counting Dead Women posts

began using the strategy of storytelling (Davis, 2002; Polletta 2009; 2016; Vromen, 2013),

defining the narrative of these cuts to community legal centres with a key villain, the federal

government (Price, 2014)

The post announced our intentions for the Counting Dead Women campaign at the time,

which included the establishment of a separate internet entity, a destroythejoint.org page.

Repeated hacks of the separate page meant DTJ was forced to rely on Facebook to host

Counting Dead Women. The launch on May 20, 2014, marked the beginning of our recording

of this national toll of fatal violence against women, and (as stated earlier) also appealed to

the federal government to reinstate funding to community legal centres.

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Figure 12: Destroy the Joint post on the Counting Dead Women campaign

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There was also some criticism of the approach taken because the campaign, using outside

lobbying techniques including eliciting a feeling of solidarity among those who clicked like

on the page, sought a response and action from the federal government. The initial post for

this campaign included the call to the federal government to reinstate funding for community

legal centres. Some feminists argue that feminist activism should be highly theorised and

should be about changing the structures, or as Valentine and Breckenridge (2016, pp. 31-2)

argue:

Whereas earlier feminist approaches called for broad social reforms to disrupt male

power and built alternatives to state institutions via networks of women’s services,

this current framing of [domestic and family violence] necessarily calls on the

assistance of state institutions. As such, it represents a significant departure from the

theorised, political accounts of gender and violence that have mobilised scholarship

and advocacy for decades.

Meanwhile, Marilyn Lake (1999) in her history of Australian feminism, reminds us that

Australian feminists have always “looked to the state” for physical and economic security

and protection, which has meant that when governments have a purely fiscal approach, that

can have a direct impact on policies and programs. As Carol Johnson (2019, p. 208)

ongoing implications for areas such as domestic violence policy” during

domestic violence programs was a key issue therefore the issue of funding for community

legal centres continued to be a theme for DTJ posts. We posted on a number of occasions,

usually including links to stories I had written. Finally, on March 26, 2015, the federal

government relented and restored the funding which had been initially cut. In April 2015, the

Executive Officer of the Federation of Community Legal Centres (Vic) Inc. wrote to the Vice

Chancellor of the University of Technology, Sydney [where I work] acknowledging the role

the work of Destroy the Joint had played but there was still some distance to go before the

government funded the centres to their full need.

There are many people who “like” the DTJ page, at time of writing, 98,000. That does not

mean that those people who “like” the page will see any given post. There are a number of

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decisions that a Facebook user must make in order to regularly see posts, including ticking

the option of seeing posts from a particular page first. While social media is often touted as a

way of disseminating ideas for free, for purposeful and intentional distribution of a post with

a specific audience, posts must be boosted (also called sponsored), which is a way to ensure

that a particular post will appear in a number of feeds. Boosts are paid posts which ensure

that more people will see the post. These boosted Facebook posts, in effect, are

advertisements, in order to get the best possible reach to a range of Facebook newsfeeds

beyond those who like or follow the page. Therefore, the DTJ admins made a decision to pay

Facebook to promote the Counting Dead Women posts, and a few other selected campaigns,

such as strangulation which began in 2018, where and when financially possible, in order to

maximise reach. For Counting Dead Women posts, we boost our posts to the specific

audience of “People who like your page and their friends”. Kelsey (2017) outlines the process

- “pay Facebook to get a better chance of being noticed”.

Each post is sponsored for somewhere from $50 upwards (and more if we have to have a post

where the post commemorates two women). This paid content sends the post into the feeds of

those who fit certain criteria, including being over 18 and have indicated on Facebook

settings that they live in Australia. It is difficult to make comparisons between the reach of

Counting Dead Women posts because there are so many factors which affect reach, including

time of day and whether the post is sponsored or not. Below is a graph which shows

the difference in reach over the course of a day, with peak reach at 4pm and another lower

peak at 7pm. Days of the week do not show much variation.

Figure 13: Graph showing temporal dynamics of Destroy the Joint posts

In the period between the inception of DTJ and the end of 2016, CrowdTangle data showed

that Counting Dead Women posts had scores at the very top of a range that CrowdTangle

describes as ‘overperforming’. They occupied 11 of the top overperforming posts in that

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period of time. An overperforming score is one which, when compared against benchmarks

generated by CrowdTangle, performs better than the average of the previous 100 posts of a

particular page. CrowdTangle calculates the average number of interactions each post type

(link, image etc) has at a particular time in its ‘life’, say after 15 minutes or an hour or a day

and then weights each of these measures.

Figure 14: Table of posts by CrowdTangle sentiment score

From the table above, it is clear Counting Dead Women posts are ranked highly in terms of

CrowdTangle sentiment, even when the posts are not sponsored. Of the 22 posts in that table,

16 deal specifically with violence against women, which is a key information message of

DTJ but the vast majority of these most shared posts include the striking image of the

funerary statues.

Figure 15: Example of Counting Dead Women post

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The outcome of boosting the Counting Dead Women posts is variable.

Figure 15: Impact of boosting Counting Dead Women posts

As is visible in this image, it is not possible to expect any particular numbers of engagements

from boosted posts. As well, it is more difficult to reach a male audience through this

method, as the DTJ ‘membership’ is, at September 2018, 82 per cent women and 15 per cent

men, with three per cent not identifying a gender. The cost to DTJ per click is around four or

five cents for men but three or four cents for women. Far fewer men click on the posts, no

matter what time of day the boost is approved, nor what variable is chosen, such as friends of

the page or friends of friends of the page (these are all variables which can be chosen when

deciding how to tailor and target the sponsored posts). Later sponsored posts ran two

sponsorship of posts at the same time, one directed only at men and one directed only at

women. These reached around the same number of people for each sponsored post.

In Figure 16, the words reach and engagement are used. Facebook reach is described by the

Facebook help site as “the number of people who had any content from your Page or about

your Page enter their screen” (Facebook, 2019, para. 2). Facebook engagement is the number

of people who have interacted with the post, such as liked, shared or commented on the post.

As can be seen in these figures, the cause of trying to prevent violence against women is a

hard one to ‘sell’ or ‘promote’, particularly to the group which needs to engage most with

the issue. It is political but also confronting and it is difficult to get people to align

themselves with the cause. There has been increased reporting on domestic violence. A

Factiva search using the term “domestic violence” and restricted to the Australia/Oceania

region revealed only four stories published in 1988, compared to 15314 stories in 2018.

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Similarly, using the search term “violence against women”, there was a marked increase from

1988 (two appearances) to 2018 (2923 appearances). The phrase “family violence” was not

recorded in 1988 but appeared 7713 times in 2018. On average, over the course of the

Counting Dead Women deaths about 75 per cent of the deaths are as a result of partner,

former partner, or family member violence.

Newsrooms may be reluctant to cover these issues and, as Jenny Morgan and Margaret

Simons (2018) argue, much coverage is about individual cases and it is the work of particular

journalists in newsrooms which can make a difference. In particular, when it comes to

reporting on fatal violence against women, journalism’s focus on daily events rather than

larger/longer contexts leads to journalistic narratives only concentrating on individual events

of fatal violence against women (Greer, 2003). Jane Monckton-Smith (2010, p. 15) argues

individualisation is used to “rationalise and explain the murder and/or rape of women” rather

than challenging societal frameworks in which that violence exists. Lane Kirkland Gillespie

and her co-authors (2013, p. 240) argue media miss opportunities to influence the portrayal of

“femicide as an issue deserving of public outrage and intensified policy development”.

Camelia Bouzerdan and Jenifer Whitten-Woodring (2018) explain violence against women is

rarely covered as a hate crime or as a violation of human rights, so these deaths remain as

individual events, untheorised, with no conceptualisation of deep structural and cultural

problems that cause violence against women (Hudson & Den Boer, 2012), and with little

policy response. They “propose that media failure to cover violence against women—

especially non-intimate femicides—as hate crimes is part of the reason why there are not

better policies in place to prevent femicide” (Bouzerdan & Whitten-Woodring, 2018, p.

226).

In my experience, it has been difficult to engage editors on the topic of family violence. This

difficulty to engage editors in violence against women, except in unusual and

sensational cases, makes it difficult to present this issue in a way which engages the wider

community. The DTJ activists wanted to include the women who had been killed, to make

them more than a number, in a way which did not sensationalise their deaths. The next

Counting Dead Women post appeared on June 4, 2014. By that time, the CDW team had

compiled a list of women who had been killed but the processes to collect this information

were still developing. The Counting Dead Women campaign got underway but the failed

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website caused some delay. The image we used on June 4, 2014, was a collage of those who

had sent images to DTJ for an early community building post and it was similar to ones

which had also appeared with other posts.

Any campaign to stop violence against women, which is often marginalised as being about

the personal or the domestic, is also very aligned to the key beliefs of feminism, a political

group which has also experienced backlash (Faludi, 2006; Scharff, 2016; Yeung, Kay &

Peach, 2013). As Bennett and Segerberg (2012; 2013) argue, in the place of political group

membership is a series of individual alignments and orientations which “result in engagement

with politics as an expression of personal hopes, lifestyles, and grievances” (2012, p. 743).

Those individual engagements are operationalised through digital communication

technologies such as social media platforms where “the ideas and mechanisms for organizing

action become more personalized than in cases where action is organized on the basis of

social group identity, membership, or ideology” (Bennett and Segerberg, 2015, p. 174).

Counting Dead Women centralises the campaign to stop fatal violence against women by

giving it a personal expression but not a personalised expression because it allows people to

share the CDW posts as utterances, as ways to demonstrate solidarity, without having to

personalise it to themselves as individuals. This will be explored more fully later in this chapter.

More importantly, Counting Dead Women overcomes a key challenge for disseminating

violence against women which is frequently portrayed by news media as singular (Genovese,

1997). This is not just reporting on one dead woman at a time, it is Counting Dead Women, a

never-ending narrative.

I have been writing about family violence since 1979 when, as a mature age student, I wrote a

story about the case of Violet and Bruce Roberts. It became that social issues journalism, and

reporting on family violence in particular, needed a three-fold approach to its coverage of

social issues: accurate news reporting, analysis and opinion. As Pallavi Guha (2015) puts it,

hashtagging becomes effective when it is combined with mainstream news media. I have

always been an advocate journalist in some respects because I have tried to concentrate on

the social issues which affect women but this work allowed me to be an advocate journalist at

a time that the field of advocacy journalism was developing. Advocacy journalism was first

articulated by Deitch (1969) and then expanded by Janowitz (1975) who posited that

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journalists who operated as advocates became active interpreters and could therefore “speak

on behalf” of powerless groups. For me that seemed a clear and useful way to approach

journalism. The concept of advocacy journalism was most recently modernised by Waisbord

(2009) who recognised that despite the challenges of advocacy journalism, particularly in the

global context, there is what he calls a “growing homogeneity” about newsworthiness which

include using a common set of “source strategies” including the reliance on advocacy groups

such as Greenpeace for the purposes of persuasion. DTJ did not have the same reputation or

advocacy tradition such as Greenpeace or GetUp. However it was able to use the work of

journalists working in the field and leveraged those through social media, in much the same

way as Pallavi Guha (2015) described. These pieces went beyond the usual parameters of

commentary by seeking the views of key players in, for instance, the debate on community

legal centres. The vast majority of these stories were written to pressure governments to make

change, particularly on the issue of the funding of community legal centres.

Yet there was so much more to this campaign than the stories which were linked in the posts.

Emmeline, for example, had more experience than anyone else on the team when it came to

working within Facebook guidelines and brought that to bear on the posts and how they were

designed, keeping in her mind that consumers of Facebook sought short posts with visibility.

She said that “[t]hey might not read detail, they just want to get an instant impression of

what's being said”. To that end, she decided to make the imagery simple and select colours

her experience told her would have impact:

People have even less time to absorb the message that you're trying to give them. So,

there's a premise in art direction and graphic design, that if you don't hold

someone's interest with visual communications within about four seconds, you've

possible lost them.

So, within that four seconds, you really need to get the idea of your message across,

and get people interested enough to keep reading. I had on-the-job training in my

early years, with an advertising agency, which basically teaches you how to sell.

(Emmeline, in interview)

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To underscore the themes of the earlier chapter on habitus and capital, these comments from

Emmeline illustrate the way in which individuals assisted with the work of DTJ because of

the cultural capital they brought with them:

So, that's where these premises come from. Now, even though DTJ isn't exactly

selling a product, we are selling an idea, and it's all part of marketing. So, anything

that I've picked up over the years, and anything that I've actually instigated myself,

through experience and observation, is put to use for DTJ, yes. (Emmeline, in interview)

Emmeline’s experience of activism was limited to donating to climate change charities before

her involvement with DTJ. She describes herself as “leaning to the left” but says she had no

involvement with any other political causes. This makes her unusual among the

administrators and moderators of DTJ, the vast majority of whom were activists across a

range of causes (feminism, refugees, environment, unions etc). In her work as a visual

communications and marketing consultant, her clients were always commercial.

Her reason for her commitment to DTJ was that she felt that gender equality was within

reach. She also recognised that she could make a unique contribution to the group because of

her ability to create images of a professional standard. She set herself the task of

manufacturing an image which would be easily identified. The first iteration of the image was

not successful, in terms of sharing. The image (multiple small images) was too reminiscent of

earlier images which DTJ had used to signify its growth. The change to use the powerful

images of funerary statues occurred in February 2015.

As Avigail McClelland-Cohen (2016) argues, “production style contributed significantly to

higher popularity, with formally produced videos being far more popular than

entrepreneurially produced videos”. The Counting Dead Women memes were produced

formally by a professional graphic designer, the only member of the admin team with both

qualifications and professional experience in this area.

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Emmeline sought an image which had an unbreakable connection with memorialising death

but which would not cause Facebook users to switch off immediately from images of

violence. In addition, Emmeline had to ensure that the image was not one which would cause

users to report the image or Facebook’s moderators to ban, limit or otherwise inhibit the use

of the image, a frequent trap for those unused to Facebook’s arbitrary rules.

Emmeline said:

I wanted to find an image that immediately conjured up a feeling of sadness and was

evocative for anyone who looked at it to really think about what the image was

meaning. I came up with the idea of funerary sculpture, specifically of women.

She fixed upon the idea and then sought ways to give the image the most impact, which in

turn would make it more shareable, using the purple, teal and white she had originally chosen

as the colour of DTJ.

They’re quite tightly cropped to make sure that it’s all about the emotions that are

conjured by the sculptures rather than just the landscape setting . . . I stagger them so

they’re not using the same images too frequently. So there's several dozen that I

choose from and I just alternate between instances.

She looked for an image which would have an immediate impact.

So the basic principle is to keep it simple and to have a reaction basically in the first

few seconds that someone looks at something ... there's a little bit of a rule of thumb

where in any kind of visual communications if the viewer or reader doesn't get some

sort of an idea of the image you're trying to communicate within about four seconds,

you've kind of lost them. They will just flip the page or look elsewhere.

Emmeline considered herself to be very familiar with the requirements for sharing on the

Facebook platform. She also became familiar with the rules and regulations around Facebook

sponsored posts, which includes not permitting more than 20 per cent text.

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Facebook uses some sort of a bot, which casts its steely eye over every ad and

advertised comments that we do for Counting Dead Women . . . so I've learned

how to work the system so [Facebook doesn’t] reject the ad, and we won't be able to

sponsor it.

Towards the end of 2014, we had tried various approaches and the reach of Counting Dead

Women Australia surprised most of the moderators and administrators of DTJ. Almost

immediately the toll we used - the number of women who had been killed violently - began to

be quoted in all kinds of media: mainstream, niche, blogs, social. It includes mentions on all

the major television networks and some radio mentions. In 2015, the campaign won the Our

Watch Award, for best use of social media in reporting domestic violence. It has been cited in

federal parliament, in New South Wales parliament, has made its way into curricula at

universities, been quoted in myriad reports (Australia’s National Research Organisation for

Women’s Safety, 2018; Central Australia Women’s Legal Service, 2015; Victorian

Multicultural Commission, 2016), been part of many submissions on violence against

women. It has appeared in academic texts as an example of social media campaigning

(Pilcher & Whelehan, 2017), cited in the Australian Women’s History Network (Simic, 2016)

as leading to an “unprecedented public awareness about the prevalence of domestic violence

in Australia, particularly against women, thanks to the activism of those involved”, cited by

the outgoing Sex Discrimination Commissioner (Broderick, 2015).

The early campaign developed good traction but Emmeline, the admin with a long-term

experience in design, had strong views about the image we were using. She sought an image

which would illustrate the humanity of the woman who had been killed but without using a

photo of the deceased. She sourced some images online which had no copyright attached and

took some photos herself and then set about refining the image to be used for the campaign.

Her primary directive was not just to make what she described as a “pretty picture”. She said:

The basic principle is to keep it simple and to have a reaction basically in the first few

seconds that someone looks at something ... there's a little bit of a rule of thumb

where in any kind of visual communications if the viewer or reader doesn't get some

sort of an idea of the image you're trying to communicate within about four seconds,

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you've kind of lost them. They will just flip the page or look elsewhere (Emmeline, in interview).

Emmeline chose purple, white and green for DTJ early on because of their relationship with

historical feminism. For these images, she also used red to provide contrast and highlight. It

has a distinctive image attached, in shades of purple and green, which are the colours

associated with feminism since the emergence of the suffragettes (Caine, 2001).

Every time a woman is killed, the Facebook cover image of the DTJ Facebook page is

changed. That cover image uses funeral statues, cites the number of women killed to that date

in any year and also cites the number of women killed in the preceding year. The Counting

Dead Women image which accompanies the Facebook post is not the image of the woman

killed. It also shows an image of the statues commonly found in cemeteries, also called

funerary statuary and cites the number of women killed in the year to date. The image of the

statue changes as does the number of women killed in the year, increasing over the time period.

The key part of this image is the rising number of deaths. It makes this image shareable and

quotable, and the number is quoted widely because, as Porter (1996, p. 49) puts it,

“[q]uantification is a social technology”. He argues that public numbers are anything but

neutral. They have weight and impact and are often contested. He uses, as an example, the

struggle to count those in the United States who are homeless, and explains that the number

can only be “made objective by specifying in detail what efforts will be made to locate and

tally people”. This was precisely the challenge presented by attempting to calculate the

number of women who had been killed violently in order to present a public number.

As Porter argues, statistics have a “creative power” and each category provides a “potential to

become a new thing” (1996, p. 37). For Counting Dead Women, the ‘new thing’ was a

reliable, current tally of women who were the victim of fatal violence. Where before the only

possible number to be used was the information provided by the Australian Institute of

Criminology (Crime Statistics Australia, n.d.) at least a year later after official murder and

manslaughter figures were published, now these ever-mounting figures were in more or less

real time and could be used to quantify an epidemic or, as Porter (1996, p. 46) puts it,

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“[s]ickness, in short, could not be reliably quantified until it was mapped out and subdivided .

. . it reflected, rather, the weakness of institutions promoting public knowledge”.

The Counting Dead Women tally provided both a clear quantification of the scale of the

problem in Australia and a degree of rigour. The numbers speak both for themselves and

for the dead women – and they appear to be fair and accurate which then provided media

outlets with an opportunity to quote those numbers because of the alignment with

contemporary news values. Helen Caple and Monica Bednarek’s news values (2017, p. 53)

are: “Negativity (and conflict), Impact (consequence, significance, relevance),

Superlativeness (size, scale, scope), Proximity (geographical, cultural nearness), Timeliness

(recency, currency), Eliteness (prominence, elite status), Personalization, Consonance

(expectedness, typicality), Unexpectedness (and unusuality), and Aesthetics (visuals

only)”. Counting Dead Women aligns with nearly every news value on this list; and on some

occasions, with every news value except aesthetics and either consonance or

unexpectedness. The alignment with a number of these news values works to support the

continued usage of Counting Dead Women in news media.

These numbers – the rising number of women – have become shareable information and are

widely used in media and in calls to action. At any time, the current number is used on the

front page of a newspaper or the home page of a news site across all ownership entities such

as Nine and News Corporation, in current affairs programs, in parliaments, both state and

national, in cartoons, in calls to action, in vigils to commemorate particular dead women,

during International Women’s Day or Reclaim the Night marches. It is broad and deep

which recognised that what counts is what matters.

Porter (1996) also explores the idea that such a public number of any contested group may

exclude minorities. This has occasionally been a criticism of the Counting Dead Women

count tally which has been contested with claims of deliberate exclusion of minority groups

women such as women of colour, women with a disability or trans women, because an

example of such a person was not on the list. Porter is explicit about the need for strict rules

for numbers to be “made valid” but even with those rules, numbers are contested. For

example, when Counting Dead Women chose not to count Courtney Topic, the accusation

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was made that Counting Dead Women did not count women with a disability. The guidelines

against women”. Courtney Topic, who had autism, was killed by police when she lunged at

them with a knife. After lengthy internal discussion, the decision was made that Topic would

not be included because a man lunging at police with a knife would be similarly shot and

killed.

In addition, women on the list are not labelled unless a relevant police or news report

provides such information, which means their minority status is not made visible. Complaints

about the information provided for the women on the list are directed towards the researchers

of Counting Dead Women. As Porter writes: “Official statistical categories occupy contested

terrain. The numbers they contain are threatened by misunderstanding as well as self-interest”

(1996, p. 41).

The Facebook post accompanying the image varies only in that it names a different person

and links to the most up-to-date news article published. There are usually one or two

sentences which describe the manner of the death and in each case, the post links to the

page’s own notes, so those reading can link with a separate site which lists the manner and

date of each death. If someone has been arrested in relation to the charge and the police are

able to confirm the relationship of that person to the deceased, the post will also include those

details.

There are set guidelines developed by the administrators and the research team before the

decision to post. These are different to the model developed by Karen Ingala Smith (n.d.) in

that this list includes any woman who has been identified as having died as a result of

violence, even if a woman has been arrested as the alleged perpetrator.

From February 2015, the approach was the same. Each time we posted, we had a process.

First, the cover photo for the Facebook page was changed to include the updated toll and then

the Notes with links to each case were also updated. Then these posts are hidden from the

timeline. The post itself memorialises each reported death of a woman as a result of violence.

Each post has very similar text, which includes a link to the report of the death, usually from

a news source; and a link to the notes, where the entire list for the year resides.

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Between May 1 2014 and December 31 2016, Counting Dead Women was cited 99 times,

according to information available on the news data base Factiva. Only 12 of those

were duplicates. The stories appeared in Australian Associated Press on 14 occasions but do

not appear to have been reproduced in those exact forms elsewhere. Other major news

producers to cite the count include the Canberra Times (8), the Sydney Morning Herald (7),

the ABC, The Guardian, the Daily Mail (five each) and the Conversation (3). The top 30

results from Factiva also showed a breadth of location: from Western Australia to Launceston

in Tasmania to Cairns in north Queensland. These mentions do not indicate the sharing of

this content across commercially-connected sites online. Instead, these stories were entirely

original to those publications, including Australian independent news sites Crikey and The

Conversation. The publications were also across different ownerships, namely Fairfax Media

(as it was then known), News Ltd, The Conversation Media Group Limited, McPherson

Media Group, West Australian Newspapers Limited.

Figure 17: Results of Google search for "Counting Dead Women" and SBS

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This screenshot shows the results for search for the phrase “Counting Dead Women” and

SBS in Google, using the ‘verbatim’ search limiting tool.

Figure 18: Search on Saturday Paper and Counting Dead Women

The same process undertaken using “Saturday Paper”.

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Beyond media mention, Counting Dead Women made its way into the annals of government,

both by citing relevant news articles but also mentioned by politicians during the course of

parliament.

The results from a search of the Parliament of Australia website shows 11 results in the

Senate for the search for the phrase Counting Dead Women, 3 for the House of

Representatives and 1 for Committees (Parliament of Australia, n.d.). It also includes 34

media mentions and 4 results for the library. A similar search of the NSW Parliament website

shows hundreds of results most of which are in publications but eight mentions in the

Legislative Assembly and four mentions in the Legislative Council (Parliament of New South

Wales, n.d.).

The process of negotiating campaigns is long and arduous. On February 15, 2016, the

administrators of DTJ embarked upon a campaign to make non-fatal strangulation an offence

in states and territories across Australia. It built upon the work of the Red Rose Foundation

which is situated in Queensland. This took the form of posts which explained why non-fatal

strangulation acted as a red flag –"the odds of becoming a homicide victim as a result of

further domestic violence were increased by 800 per cent for women who had previously

experienced strangulation by their partners" (Destroy the Joint, 2016b)

On April 20, 2016, the Queensland government passed the anti-strangulation laws. While it

would be naive to imagine that this happened because of DTJ’s campaign alone, the

campaign post encouraged a national overview and explained why it was important in the

context of domestic violence. Once again, it also served to put the term on the national media

agenda. In the three years before DTJ launched its campaign, Factiva found 760 mentions of

strangulation in Australian publications. In the three years since the launch of the campaign,

1436 mentions were found. Again, this is not direct causation. In 2018, from April to August,

DTJ engaged in direct lobbying of the NSW Opposition on the issue of strangulation (Price,

2018). It published a post on August 13, explaining the campaign. Four weeks after the

publication of the campaign, linked to the story (Price, 2018) on why strangulation was an

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offence, the NSW Government announced it would introduce a new strangulation offence to

bolster NSW domestic violence laws (Visentin, 2018).

These campaigning posts were all accompanied by an image of a hand squeezing a bunch of

roses. They were all identified with the line, Eight times, in order to represent the increase of

the risk of fatal violence for those who experienced non-fatal strangulation. This campaign

was supported by the existence of the Counting Dead Women campaign.

Bennett and Segerberg (2012; 2013) identified two elements of personalised political

communication important to connective action which I will connect to DtJ. Firstly, that

political content is expressed in easily personalised ideas such as those used by Put People

First and Occupy Wall Street, and that personal communication technologies then facilitate

the sharing of those artefacts or it becomes a meme (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 745): “a

symbolic packet that travels easily across large and diverse populations because it is easy to

imitate, adapt personally, and share broadly with others.”

Counting Dead Women might, in some respects, be categorised as an example of a personal

action frame (Bennett & Segerberg 2013, p. 37) because an image, shared many times is like

a meme. Bennett and Segerberg argue that “[t]hese frames require little in the way of

persuasion, reason, or reframing to bridge differences in others’ feelings about a common

problem”. The personal action frame represents an action - or a representation of an action -

taken on a platform and that platform operates as the organising agent. Those who share it

may or may not align themselves with DTJ or with feminism but instead, align themselves

with the specific concept of Counting Dead Women. As Bennett and Segerberg (2012, p.

744) explain:

People may still join actions in large numbers, but the identity reference is more

derived through inclusive and diverse large-scale personal expression rather than

through common group or ideological identification.

However, the concept of personalised action frames more properly operates in the way the

meme “We are the 99%” operated during and after the US Occupy protests on Tumblr,

Twitter and Facebook (Bennett, 2012). Those posting on social media used the phrase “We

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are the 99%” but inserted themselves as an image or a handwritten story into the frame.

Nurses, farmers, teachers, those with a disability, shared their stories and joined with others

as part of the 99 per cent.

As Tetyana Lokot (2018) has analysed the #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt campaign, a hashtag used

by Ukrainian and Russian women on tweets disclosing sexual abuse, workplace sexual

harassment and street harassment. Lokot demonstrated that the Facebook posts from that

impromptu campaign were activist work which functioned as “personalised political acts of

feminist resistance as they create a mediated feeling of solidarity” (p. 804) and afforded a

“networked public space for impactful everyday political speech and a platform for pushing

less popular narratives into the limelight” (p. 804). In this case, the hashtag worked to build

solidarity around the public discussion of acts of gendered violence. The tweets really placed

women ‘shoulder to shoulder’ or tweet-to-tweet in order to make a coherent voice

from many.

But these utterances, as with many other such actions, offered participants a way to

personalise these artefacts. Counting Dead Women and its artefacts did not do that. DTJ did

indeed begin as a grassroots campaign, both mobilising and organising on social media and

could therefore be associated with the personal action frame. The personal action frame is

particular to connective action and always includes both the framing of a political particular

situation that those who share believe should be changed and a personal response or reason to

show the need for change (Bennett, 2012). Personal action frames are used across a number

of grassroots, technologically-enabled connective action groups, such as Occupy Wall Street,

los indignados, Send Your Own Message to the G20, #sistabriefen and #metoo (Andersson,

2018). In addition, personal action frames are transmitted through modelling - one person

who shares the post shows others how to personalise and then share the post.

Instead, the Counting Dead Women image operates as a digital solidarity frame which is

different to the personal action frame because in most instances, sharers cannot personalise

this frame - and if it relied upon personalisation, it would limit those who share it to those

who have experienced fatal violence among their connections. Personal action frames and

digital solidarity frames have in common a recognition that an aspect of society must change

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but are different because, in the case of the digital solidarity frame, there is not always the

ability to personalise.

Solidarity framing, in the case of Counting Dead Women, demonstrates support for the

recognition of fatal violence against women as a continuing narrative. The contents of the

Counting Dead Women posts on DTJ are nearly identical. In September 2018, the 47th death

for the year is marked with a cinerary image, the words Counting Dead Women and the

familiar words of the post which nearly always begin the same way:

Destroyers, too soon we bring you again the news of a woman’s violent death. With

great sadness we add another victim of violence against women to our ever-growing

register for 2018. (Destroy the Joint, 2018)

That post was shared 540 times, which means that quite aside from the boost, it appeared on

the timelines of [at least] 540 other Facebook profiles and pages. Facebook privacy rules

mean not even an admin of the page from which that post comes can see where the shares are

occurring. But in the case of this post from September 18, 2018, I can see only about 130 of

the shares because of privacy settings. Of those, not one puts themselves in the frame. At the

very most, shares might add a comment such as “too soon” or “Akal Julie, may your soul find

me, none who shared the post put themselves in the frame. Instead, they expressed their

solidarity through a) sharing the post and b) emphasising through an extra comment or an

emoji of some kind.

These interactions reveal an engagement with the Counting Dead Women images which is

different to engagement with the personal action frame. There are, of course, a multitude of

frames from which to choose. Lindenberg (2003), describes three: hedonic, gain and

solidarity. The solidarity frame has, for this research, the key characteristic of displaying

alignment with another’s concerns without self- interest. The solidarity frame, where the user

acts appropriately and shows non-instrumental concerns, is the case for those sharing the

Counting Dead Women posts. People are identifying the Counting Dead Women posts as

something worthy of sharing but do not want to claim it or personalise it. They are showing

solidarity for the twin causes of supporting the victims and highlighting violence against

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women as a form of consciousness-raising. In addition, Jill Hopke (2015) argues that in the

case of Global Frackdown, tweeters engage “in framing practices of: movement convergence

and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging [...integrating]

personal action frames with collective action frames” (p. 29) engaging with hybrid framing

jumping as being episodic and loosely coordinated and she uses transnational to distinguish

the Global Frackdown as a movement which emphasises “communication processes that

transcend nation-states” (p. 1) but are not in every region. Just as in the example of the

Global Frackdown, Counting Dead Women transcends nation-states (see below).

Both the planning and dissemination of the Counting Dead Women campaign is highly

controlled (as opposed to loosely coordinated) by a small group of people: the Counting Dead

Women researchers, in particular Helen, Sheila (also both administrators) and Anne (

moderator) and it is not episodic but a continuing narrative. However, Counting Dead

Women emerged as a by-product of a grassroots movement which existed only briefly

through crowd-enablement and soon used hybrid tactics to achieve its goals. It is consistent,

non-personalised, tightly-controlled in its production yet highly-shared.

There have been more than 300 posts over the course of the campaign and each post,

accompanied by a discrete image which Facebook categorises as a photo, was shared on

average 400 times. I argue that while the frame itself is not personalisable in the way that the

“we are the 99 per cent” frame is personalisable - and is not personalised to the individual

sharer, nevertheless individuals sharing the memorialised post of the dead woman do so as a

way of contributing to a “mutually valued project in order to produce a public good”.

(Bennett & Segerberg, 2013, p. 34). While some of those sharers may be survivors of family

violence, there are rarely instances where sharers express their own experience. In this way, it

is not a personal action frame exactly in the way described by Bennett and Segerberg but the

goal of the sharers is the same, to be seen to be contributing to change. The sharers are

showing solidarity with Counting Dead Women.

transferable and customizable memes or action frames in which the message is sufficiently

open to interpretation that a wide group of people can support it, albeit often for very

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different reasons”, the message of Counting Dead Women is not open to interpretation. It is

distinctly a memorial to women who have died violently. The sharing of these Counting Dead

Women images illustrates both the sharers’ commitment to the cause of stopping violence

against women and to signalling their commitment to that cause - the sharing binds the sharer

to the performed political stance and to others with that same stance, in a form of group

identification with those seeking to stop violence against women (Gerbaudo, 2015).

While Paolo Gerbaudo (2015, p. 1) argues for the memetic significance of avatars as “durable

foundational elements of contemporary social movements” because of their “vagueness and

inclusivity”, this underestimates those with serious political commitment to a cause or

purpose for whom sharing an image may be the only available form of participation. An

image, meme, avatar or ‘personal action frame’ doesn’t diminish the significance of the

shareable or viral artefact, nor should virality be seen as a disqualification of the potency of

its politics despite Morozov’s (2011) rejection of the internet as a platform for increased

participation and César Rendueles and Heather Cleary’s (2013) trivialisation of actions on

social media as an example of cyberfetishism. César Rendueles and Heather Cleary argue

that “Facebook users unite . . . in being Facebook users” (p.73) rather than participating in

anything approaching social change. That trivialisation ignores social media’s role in sharing

information through information activism (as discussed in an earlier chapter). Actively

disseminating information about a shared commitment to a reduction in fatal violence against

women is no less potent because it’s represented by an image. Instead, it is building a

collective identity borne of connective action but without using the vectors of personalised

action frames.

These threads come together: the inability to personalise the shared artefact, the recognition

that fatal violence against women is a longstanding narrative; and the sharing, the solidarity

against fatal violence. These elements make Counting Dead Women posts digital solidarity

frames, however, more specifically, they are transnational digital solidarity frames as they are

affiliated with the original Counting Dead Women in the United Kingdom. The frame is

transnational because Counting Dead Women began in the UK, then in Australia. It now has

groups across a dozen countries, some of which began because their representatives asked

DTJ if they could start their own group. We put them in touch with Karen Ingala Smith. The

use of the phrase Counting Dead Women frames solidarity with its originator, Counting Dead

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Women and, using Westby’s (2002) alignments, Counting Dead Women in Australia has also

been able to access Ingala Smith as a consultant who was able to share information about the

processes and guidelines she applies in Counting Dead Women. The Counting Dead Women

posts express a solidarity with meaning and intent but are not personalisable in the way in

which campaigns such as “We are the 99 percent” are able to be personalised. The work of

Stier, Schünemann & Steiger (2017, p. 1923) shows that advocacy groups (of which DTJ is

an example) are much more likely to use connective action frames and framing in order to

influence agendas and that, in contrast, “traditional political actors mostly refer to established

actors, institutions and processes of policy making, followed suit by traditional media and

online media”. A move away from a personalisable action frame framed a steady message to

draw attention to fatal violence against women, more aligned with messages from traditional

political actors and was able to influence traditional political actors.

This digital solidarity frame - and clearly digital because of its organising platform -

focussing on fatal violence against women, works to engage the viewer in thinking about an

issue which is notoriously hard to attract attention. It is, as Lisa Miller (2013, p. 285) argues,

difficult to turn fatal violence against women into a first-order problem because it is

continual, unrelenting or, as Howe puts it, “its very constancy renders it commonplace”

(Howe, 2014, p. 277). In Howe’s analysis of Karen Ingala Smith’s work, he describes it as

relentless with a “shock value destined to have an impact far greater than that of the endless

recitation of the two-women-a week statistic” (p. 288). He also argues that she has challenged

“academic feminist definitions of femicide that failed to name men as the perpetrators”

(Howe, 2014, p. 288)., which, as earlier described by Kylie Valentine and Jan Breckenridge

(2016), tends to focus on disruption of male power. The ambition to disrupt male power and

control is laudable but, in the meantime, a symbolic approach, such as the symbolism of

Counting Dead Women, may provide an alternative short-term route to change.

This chapter has outlined what administrators and moderators agree are the key campaigns of

DTJ through an exploration of individual campaigns, attributing specific campaigning

techniques to each campaign. It expands on the construction of the key image in the Counting

Dead Women campaign, including both the pictorial and numeric elements, and it argues for

a new category of image artefact in connective action: a transnational digital solidarity frame,

which resists personalisation. This is a tool of connective action which includes elements of

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connective action, withstands individualisation and promotes a feminist collective

identity while standing opposed to violence against women.

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This chapter explores emotional labour and emotional capital and how those concepts sit in

the broader study of the politics of emotion and the results of this study. I analyse what

Social scientists have for some time recognised the importance of emotions in the social and

the impact of emotions on the practice of activism (Aminzade & McAdam, 2002; Gould,

2002; Kim, 2002; Taylor & Rupp, 2002; Stets & Turner, 2006). One early focus was that of

the role of managing emotion in the workplace. I demonstrate that working as a feminist

activist in this Australian setting requires emotional labour, the emotional work of being an

activist, the need to manage emotions in order to continue to be activist. The emotion work of

being an activist can lead to burnout and this is therefore construed as negative (Chen &

Gorski, 2015; Gorski, 2015). I also outline what my participants said about what can be

construed as emotional labour and emotional capital (Nowotny, 1981; Reay, 2004). I argue

that these activists acquire emotional capital through participation in DTJ and Counting Dead

Women, and may also acquire it through the attendant emotional labour they expend while

being activists. Emotional capital, a form of social capital (Nowotny, 1981), was once

identified as being acquired solely in the private sphere but as women have inhabited the

public sphere, they bring with them emotional capital and its benefits which they have

acquired in the private sphere. Those benefits include “knowledge, contacts and relations as

well as access to emotionally valued skills and assets which hold within any social network

characterised at least partly by affective ties.” (Nowotny, 1981, p. 148). Emotional labour

was always identified as being in the public sphere.

Emotional labour, as argued by Arlie Hochschild (1983), is the management of emotions for

the benefit of paid employment, where managing those emotions is the labour of managing

feelings in order to be commodifiable for the benefit of the employer. Hochschild (1979)

identified emotion as both a quantifiable and commodifiable resource and explored what it

meant to manage emotion. She argued that emotion worked privately, that is, in the private

sphere, to sustain relationships; and she used the phrase ‘emotion work’ for what is

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performed in a domestic setting, recognising that women developed their capacity for warmth

and empathy in that private or domestic setting. In some ways, this bears some similarity to

the origins of emotional capital (Nowotny, 1981).

However, activists also must both experience and manage emotions in the spaces where they

volunteer. Just as paid employment is in the public sphere, volunteer work as an activist is in

the public sphere. However, I contend that because of personal commitment to a cause,

activism is a site for emotional labour comparable to paid employment.

The activists I interviewed consistently revealed their reactions to their involvement and the

way in which those reactions impacted their experience of activism. Eileen, in interview, said

her experience led her to step away from feminist activism.

I suppose, to a smaller extent, I started to get a little bit gun-shy on certain issues that

I had to deal with. I suppose eventually all the things that triggered me and upset me

had a little bit of a cumulative effect. I got to the point sometimes where I'd go, "Oh,

no, I've got to do a [moderating session]. What's going to happen? What am I going to

have to deal with?" As I said, all of those things added together led to me stepping

down.

Faith (in interview) acknowledged both the difficulty of the experience and the way in which

she had to manage her emotions:

Sometimes I think that when things have been very trying, when we've had a full pileon

of whatever sort, it's very hard not to take that pile-on personally . . . [she was]

playing me these voice mail messages that people had left basically threatening to kill

her and then rape her and then kill her a few more times.

Faith’s story is one of emotional labour, the story of the management of feelings. It tends not

to be recognised (Hochschild, 1979; 2003) or is undervalued (Green, 2018). Likewise, on

DTJ, emotional labour is not recognised or is undervalued because, as Green (2018, p. 98)

argues, “it is hard to measure; it does not yield to the format of a spreadsheet . . . and it is

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something that women are perceived to ‘do naturally’.” However, I contend it is identified

and recognised as a form of exchange within the volunteer digital activist workplace.

While I have already discussed the ‘dailiness’ of the tasks required for activism, that constant

doing is also accompanied by constant feeling. As Bessie said, in interview: “I was

just exhausted from trying to throw all those balls up in the air.” Emma, also in interview,

said she felt very “tired and downtrodden”. Despite the juggling and the exhaustion, they

both managed those feelings and kept up their activism.

Constance, in interview, provided a specific example:

Obviously the biggest problems, since I've been there, was a certain admin who was

always . . . spending a lot of time and emotional labour ‘fixing’ the problems that kept

happening in the moderators and at time to time in the administrators. That was all

quite exhausting, and, of course, when that admin went, the problems went too. That

was one person I had quite a big issue with, because when she wanted to come back

she wasn't welcome. That obviously caused a bit of nastiness.

Hochschild (1983) repeatedly talks about managing feelings in order to continue to work,

about the requirement to ‘carry on’. When Jocelynne (in interview) described her feelings

after conflict with another DTJ admin, she said:

Well, I mean this is obviously a very biased perspective but I think that I was

exceedingly generous and it's my inclination always to seek reconciliation I suppose

and we had a job to do I just let it slide. She apologized, I let it slide but I can't say I

ever trusted her again.

“We had a job to do.” These feelings that my interviewees expressed about their activist

experience align with my own. It has a strong hold over me and impacts other parts of my

life. As Hochschild says, it’s about applying “a sense of ‘should’ to the situated feelings that

emerge in the course of a week” (1979, p.572), it’s about having a job to do and putting aside

the hurt sense of self.

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Emotions are part of activism – activists are propelled by urgency, purpose and passion and,

as Gould (2002) puts it, “Movement participants, animated by a tangled mixture of feelings

and calculations, are much more than rational actors.”

Much of what women do at home and in the workplace requires the performance of positive

emotion in order to make the machinery of family operate smoothly. However, Arlie

Hochschild (1983) wished to separate the domestic space from the workplace, the private

sphere from the public sphere. As she put it:

publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and

It was purely in a commercial setting, the public sphere, where emotion functioned as a

commodity, where it could be bought and sold as a function of labour power, argued

Hochschild (1983). She gave the example of flight attendants who must not only do the

physical toil of their work - pushing trolleys, cleaning and serving - they must also be

charming and forever smiling. Hochschild defined this as a labour which required one “to

induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the

proper state of mind in others” (1983, p. 7). By others, she means the consumers of the

product and in the case of flight attendants, the passengers who are comforted by the

ceaseless cheer of the flight attendant. As she points out in her work, those industries where

emotional labour can be identified are likely to be female-dominated industries. For the

workers, feelings are managed while doing paid work, in order to do that paid work to meet

the expectations of employers or as Hochschild (2003, p.5) puts it, “the emotional style of

offering the service is part of the service itself”.

The list of jobs and industries which require emotional labour for success is documented by a

number of researchers: television (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2008); tour guiding (Van Dijk,

Smith & Cooper, 2011); hospitality (Seymour, 2000); and call centre operations (Mulholland,

2002). Or, as Hochschild puts it: “funeral parlour director, the doctor, the complaints clerk,

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the day-care worker all apply a sense of "should" to the situated feelings that emerge in the

course of a week” (1979, p.572). Therefore, emotional labour is that labour of managing

feelings in the course of one’s work for the benefit of one’s work.

Specifically, I argue that as activists work on campaigns, they also work with other activists

and come face-to-face with the perpetually participatory nature of online activism. In other

words, they emotionally labour. It is a requirement to manage the feelings in this setting in

much the same way as it is a requirement in paid work – activists must manage their own

feelings, their feelings about each other, and about the impact of both campaigning and

campaigns in order to achieve their end goals. Activism is outward-facing, in the public

sphere, and the emotion work of families is in the private sphere, inward-facing. Both of

these are unpaid work but it is important to note that in activism, there is the outward-facing

emotional labour in response to both the way in which the activism is communicated or in

response to the subject of the activism, and the inward facing emotional labour which deals

with the way activists deal with each other and their own feelings about both the focus of the

activism and each other.

Emotional labour in activism is well theorised however but it is mainly seen as a volunteer

act and its work as ‘pleasure’ (Jarrett, 2015, p. 2), as an act of discretion. Instead, these

activists consider this to be ‘work’ and manage their emotions and behaviour.

They behave in a particular way for the cause, because they believe in the cause; and they

also produce for the cause, or as Bruns (2008) argues, they are produsers for their particular

cause and produce artefacts for that cause, as well as of course, being both the audience and

cheerleader/advocates for that cause. Although they are unpaid, neither selling their work nor

having their work sold for them, what they produce has a use-value for a campaign. Fuchs

(2014, p.303) argues digital labour creates value but “digital labour power is not a

commodity. It is unpaid and not sold as a commodity”. Yet making communication is the

result of work, and activist digital labour creates, delivers and executes. Its actors mobilise

and organise, in order to achieve a goal. The emotional labour of activists is conducted in

order to achieve change. This intersection of what Lazzarato (1996) calls immaterial labour

and production is, I would argue, at a higher level of intensity than it is in paid work. As

Lazzarato (1996, p.137) posits:

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The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential

use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in

the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges,

transforms, and creates the "ideological" and cultural environment of the consumer.

This is precisely the impact that feminist activists work towards. In addition, this ‘work’

place, like much volunteer work, is more similar to paid work than it is similar to a domestic

setting. Activists work with a range of people – while they may work along people with

whom they had a prior relationship, it is unlikely that covers everyone. Activists must

accommodate those who are strangers, a more challenging process than accommodating

those with whom we are familiar.

In the case of DTJ, only a couple of people knew each other to any extent before the page

began and this digital activism provided an opportunity for strangers to work together for a

common cause, for strangers to become sisters.

In the interviews, there were specific mentions of the structures in place in DTJ: the

Facebook page itself, group private messages on Facebook, a number of groups which had

different sets of people in them who were undertaking different tasks. These were used to

organise the work of this iteration of activism. Helen, for example, said: “This particular

[online] way of going about things was so new to me that I was constantly learning new ways

of interacting”. While Helen was not a person who expressed much discomfort or

disagreement with other participants, Julia was up front about feelings of conflict:

I think the group dynamics can be interesting, sometimes they can be a little edgy, I

think and I think that's because it's a group of people, mainly women, who are going

to have lots of different opinions. I've had my arguments with people. (Julia, in

interview)

She said that while everyone had a core belief of feminism, there were:

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[A] whole lot of different belief structures as well. They're not necessarily then people

who would be your close friends in real life either . . . women who you don't know for

real, I guess within there, there's a few people who might know each other in real life

but lots of people wouldn't, I don't. That's quite interesting and I think it's quite

interesting negotiating your way through relationships which are online in that kind of

way. (Julia, in interview)

When Hochschild, as quoted earlier, says workers “apply a sense of ‘should’ to the situated

feelings that emerge in the course of a week” (1979, p. 572) feminist activists must also do

this. They feel they should work to produce a harmonious activist environment in order to

create and deliver a successful campaign, to mobilise and to organise, to make meaning and

to sustain meaning, to produce change. Part of the production of change is emotionally

labouring, as explored by Mackay (2015), in her research on the British Women’s Liberation

Movement from the Second Wave. She reveals the expenditure required by activists involved

in feminist activism. She lists both financial and physical outlays but also highlights the

emotional labour. In addition, she details some of what that emotional labour entails,

including the experience of being “ridiculed and stereotyped” (Mackay, 2015b, p. 33).

Mackay gives as an example such abuse as extremist or man-hating, very familiar to any

activist involved in online feminist activism. She quotes one of her interview participants,

Lucy, 24, a white, heterosexual feminist, as saying: “There are horrible stereotypes, about

feminists, you know; hairy, man-hating lesbians. Yeah, just that sort of thing is really

frustrating, the associations of feminism.”

Yet in order to continue to function as an activist, these emotionally difficult experiences

must be managed and overcome. It is how these experiences are managed and overcome that

become, in summary, emotional labour, in order to continue activism. There is extensive

research around the responses to feminists online and feminist activism online (Beard, 2017;

Jane, 2016, 2017; Poland, 2016; Lewis, Rowe, & Wiper 2016; 2018) – but emotional labour

entails more than enduring the ridicule and stereotyping which comes with public feminist

activism. As explored earlier, Hochschild says it is the management of feelings for the

purpose of paid work. Mulholland (2002, p. 285), also exploring the commercial aspects of

emotional labour, says the “product of emotional labour is the state of mind and the feelings

of the customer”. She makes the observation that the employee, the producer of emotional

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labour, must persuade the customer of the virtue of the product. Most importantly for the case

of DTJ, Mulholland, (2002, p. 285) identifies:

[Another] aspect of emotional labour [which] entails the management of employees’

own feelings as defined by enterprise needs, when they become the business

ambassadors of their companies, magnifying the importance of performance during

the employee/customer interaction.

Mulholland’s work examined emotional labour in the commercial setting of a call centre

dealing with inquiries about a broadcast organisation. She explored the conflict between

knowledge-sharing and productivity which is also a tension in non-commercial settings (such

as activism), where the ‘cost’ is disposable time. In particular, she reveals the inner workings

of the night shift in the call centre, where call-centre operators have more time to share

knowledge with each other but, in this research, also extend their emotional labour, as is

demonstrated by the activists of DTJ. Mulholland (2002, p. 296) writes that the call centre

operators were sometimes “required to demonstrate empathy and sensitivity with callers”.

The way in which the activists dealt with family violence and other key feminist concerns on

a daily basis had daily impacts on the activists themselves. During the interviews, a number

of activists talked about the struggle to maintain composure when dealing with confronting

posts on the page or conversations with each other.

Inez, a moderator, was exhausted both by the content of the page and by the constant

trolling:

I was a single mother at the time and it was emotionally draining. Theoretically we

were just moderating the page and getting rid of comments but you can't help but be

affected by the stories that have been posted that day or being impacted by the kind of

negative comments that were being made. They were really either homophobic, or

extremely sexist or extremely racist and it takes its toll. Also, when you're doing that

kind of work, you're putting your heart and soul into the process and so therefore that

takes a lot of commitment and a lot of emotional commitment as well. (Inez, in

interview)

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Mulholland’s interview with Agent Eva is particularly appropriate for DTJ where the

discussion of fatal violence against women is a daily event. “It was very upsetting for me

listening to her. I felt like crying. But you have to listen and be sympathetic. You let them

talk and say you understand” (Agent Eva, 1999 in Mulholland 2002, p. 296).

This instance is replicated behind the scenes of DTJ as admins and moderators deal with each

other about these incidents but also deal with those who post on the page and those who send

private messages about their grief. I too found dealing with disclosures about family violence

exhausting. However, it was particularly difficult for admins and moderators who had

themselves experienced family violence. As the page began to develop a focus on violence

against women, some admins and moderators found themselves needing to step away.

Faith, a moderator who was an admin briefly, said:

I think that one consequence of that is that the people who are in there doing it they

get, a), very emotionally invested, and b), very upset. We had people like [one admin]

who had to dial out [leave], because she was so triggered by it all. (Faith, in

interview)

This replicates Mulholland’s description of what happens to those who have to ‘listen’, that it

is an emotional load which is hard to manage.

Helen, in interview, also took the trolling to heart:

Sometimes I think that when things have been very trying, when we've had a full pileon

of whatever sort, it's very hard not to take that pile-on personally.

Or as Eileen, another moderator, said, in interview:

There were other nights when modding was absolutely difficult because you were

dealing with either some really hard issues that you had to read through, and I get

really triggered by the violence and the sexual assault and, like I said, the transgender

stuff. I'm a really over-sensitive person, so that was really hard for me sometimes. I

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really just wanted to walk away from modding sessions some nights, because it was

just really psychologically terrible, but I knew that I had a job to do, so I just,

as Shakespeare said, ‘screwed my courage to the sticking place’ and just stayed where

I was.

That ‘screwing the courage to the sticking place’ to which Eileen refers explains what Bolton

(2000a) means when she provides a typology of four categories of emotional labour or what

she calls “emotion management”, the forced labour of constraining emotions in paid

employment. The first is “presentational”, by which she means managing emotions by

accepted social rules. This could include celebrating birthdays of those with whom we work,

cake at morning tea. This presentational aspect is one which occurred in the operational pages

of DTJ, virtual cakes appear every time it is someone’s birthday.

The second category in Bolton’s typology is “philanthropic” emotion management, which

she represents as giving the gift of caring in the process of work - and that is something

which occurred regularly in quite a performative way, the added love emojis or heart emojis

at the end of messages among and between administrators and moderators were a sign of

caring either in private messages to one another or in the groups where organisation of the

page took place. In addition, there was and is a sense of playfulness and support. Eva, a

moderator, described (in interview) the characteristics of those involved in the page:

Sense of humour, look, you have to be fairly resilient, I guess. You have to have a

fairly strong sense of who you are, flexible, patient sometimes, bloody minded

possibly, sensible and a good team player. You know really, puns are good. If there's

a difficult situation going, a good pun can really dissipate all that anger and hostility.

Bolton’s typology provides two more categories: “prescriptive” emotion management and

“pecuniary” emotion management. “Prescriptive” emotion management includes abiding by a

code of conduct. In the case of DTJ, there are moderating guidelines for administrators and

moderators and the Facebook page itself has Commenting Guidelines for those who comment

on the page. Both these sets of guidelines are an attempt to make sure that the Facebook page

(Destroy The Joint 2012g) remains a secure space for discussion of feminist issues.

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Finally, Bolton explores “pecuniary” management of emotions, related most directly to

commercial outcomes. While there is no overt commercial outcome for DTJ, it utilises the

emotional investment in feminism by administrators, moderators and those who post on the

page to raise funds for the promotion of Facebook posts.

Of all Bolton’s categories, it is important to acknowledge the work of some of the long-time

moderators and admins in trying to make this kind of activism more sustainable, using

“philanthropic” emotion management category (Bolton, 2000a). These activists created posts

which would encourage personal reflection and discussions about how we were all going,

who was experiencing stress outside DTJ, how our lives were in general. I recognised that

was useful although I was less comfortable disclosing my own personal circumstances. The

usefulness of those reflective spaces to ensure activism stays sustainable is clear in the

literature (Brown & Pickerell, 2009, p.11), but they also express a clear challenge, at least for

someone like me: “How do we create spaces for these difficult emotional responses to be

expressed freely, opened up, discussed, and then processed, challenged and potentially reformed?

How do we include those who are resistan[t] to such processes?”

I did not seek permission to share from the private Facebook groups but I will make a generic

comment about them. The majority of admins and moderators were happy to share their

feelings and experiences on these threads, even if it was just the day-to-day events of our

lives. One of the moderators said of these kinds of conversations: “It's quite interesting

negotiating your way through relationships which are online in that kind of way.” As Rosa

said, in interview:

I think the people, yes, because you're not seeing people and you don't see their, all

their non-verbal clues. People can be harsher and make ... It's easier to misinterpret

people. Also when people are online they could be drunk or affected by drugs and you

wouldn't know.

Jocelynne too found decoding purely online communication a challenge:

Always difficult. We were established along the lines of a consensus decision making

model and that's always hard work, always hard work. Particularly online when you

are missing a lot of the non-verbal, well you're missing all of the non-verbal

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cues which make up probably more than 60 per cent of communication face to face.

(Jocelynne, in interview)

These responses show how we developed various ways of dealing with others, both negative

(as described by Rosa above) and positive.

I was personally resistant to sharing my emotions with a broad group of colleague activists,

in the same way I would not consider sharing my feelings in my paid job, except as they

relate to my conditions of employment, there was no way I wanted to be part of disclosing

my private emotions with people I did not know well. I wanted to stay ‘professional’. That

was part of my emotional labour - trying to keep some personal distance from all these

people who I suddenly found myself dealing with on a daily basis.

Those emotions and their performance – the manufacture of niceness, politeness and empathy

- are the actual emotions performed as emotional labour (Taylor and Tyler, 2000). Other

iterations include enthusiasm, positivity and suppressing negative emotions (Cossette &

Hess, 2015). However, some of the emotional labour in activism is also the labour of dealing

with anger and grief (Gould, 2002). Taylor and Tyler (2000), in their work on the emotional

labour of flight attendants, outlined “building rapport” or “empathising” (Taylor & Tyler,

2000, p. 86). As one of their subjects said: “You can’t let yourself be impolite with a

customer or be angry with them”. Cossette (2015) also explored the use of emotional labour

in customer service agents, where enthusiasm and positivity are used in order to suppress

negativity. Agents were instructed to deliver service with a smile. This instruction is

interpreted as external motivation by employers and in Cossette’s study, was linked to

suppression of negative emotions.

Jocelynne, in interview, described some of the internal workings in DTJ and makes the need

to ‘carry on’ explicit:

When you're dealing with people who are squabbling, when people are making

unhelpful contributions. When people are just being frankly, barking mad and you've

got to deal with them and be sensible as you're dealing with them . . . and try and put

your own baggage aside, that's hard work.

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Gould (2002), for example, illustrates the way in which AIDS activists marshalled their grief

into anger which in turn fed what she describes as militant activism. She argues that AIDS

activists in ACT UP were able to do emotion work which transformed grief into action. She

gives the example of the display of the Names Project Quilt, a quilt which had the names of

those who had died of AIDS-related complications, exhibited in Washington and was a

central focus for grief. However ACT UP activists went to the exhibition and handed out

pamphlets which on one side said: “SHOW YOUR ANGER TO THE PEOPLE WHO

HELPED MAKE THE QUILT POSSIBLE: OUR GOVERNMENT”.

The reverse side of the pamphlet said:

The Quilt helps us remember our lovers, relatives, and friends who have died during

the past eight years. These people have died from a virus. But they have been killed

by our government’s neglect and inaction . . . More than 40,000 people have died

from AIDS . . . Before this Quilt grows any larger, turn your grief into anger. Turn

anger into action. TURN THE POWER OF THE QUILT INTO ACTION. (ACT

UP/NY 1988, capital letter emphasis theirs). (Gould, 2002, p. 7))

In summary, emotional labour is the expression of socially desired emotions during service

interactions (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993) and includes the management of a whole range of

emotions for many purposes (Mulholland 2002; Mackay, 2011a, 2011b; Bolton, 2000a,

2000b). I argue that activism is a form of service interaction both within the activist group

and with external participants in the activism of DTJ, service interactions in service to the

cause. There is also emotional labour within activist groups to keep those groups together, to

build solidarity within the group. Emotions build commitment, argues Edward Lawler,

Jeongkoo Yoon and Shane Thye (Lawler & Yoon, 1998; Lawler, Thye, &Yoon, 2000) or as

Kim (2002, p. 161) puts it, “Emotions provide effective motivational forces”.

Activism includes labour and effort - physical, financial, intellectual - and all this is

documented. However, it also includes emotional labour which is often construed as

negative, as if the expenditure of emotion, or the use of emotion in work, is just another way

for women to be exploited (Hochschild, 1983). However, as women are generally constructed

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as more emotional, even though they may not in reality be more emotional (Barrett, Feldman,

Petromonaco, & Eyssell, 1998), I claim that for women and, in particular for feminist

activists, emotional labour which then accrues as emotional capital, is positive. Emotions and

feelings practised as part of emotional labour are accrued as emotional capital through the

practice of activism. These ongoing emotions which are experienced during the labour of

doing activism build emotional capital and they manifest as an activist’s habitus, the durable

dispositions of activism. Social movements tap into shared emotions (Jasper, 1998; Bosco,

2007; Collins, 2001) and Bosco (2007, p. 558) says emotional bonds “permit the generation

and sustainability of collective action under difficult conditions”. I believe the experience of

those emotions builds solidarity with each other, commitment to the cause and capability

through embedded responses. This, in some way, goes towards answering Bosco’s questions

of “how the emergence, continuity and/or dissolution of various geographies of resistance can

be explained in part by analysing the multiple relations between the emotional underpinnings

of activism and the diverse organisational forms of social movements” (Bosco, 2007, p. 559).

To put it more plainly, feminist activism is underpinned by more than ideology. It is also

underpinned by the collective identity of the feminist activists and by their relationship to

each other. The ideology, the collective identity and the relationships of activists to each

other exist in context and that context shifts, thereby applying pressures on social

movements.

One of the mods, Anne, who also is integral to the Counting Dead Women project, talks

about what she sees as the ‘emotional underpinnings of activism’, ‘the diverse organisational

forms’. When asked whether this form of activism can be sustainable, she said:

I can't see why not. I see it a bit like the Dread Pirate Roberts [the famed character

is the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn't have to be the same all the time. I think it's

perfectly possible. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, DtJ isn't going to fall in a heap.

Possibly if all of us got hit by a bus, it might, but I feel certain that there would be

friends of friends or people who knew people or whatever who would be willingly

dragged in to do exactly the same things, possibly in different ways. It may evolve

and change according to the personalities who are involved in it at any time, but I

think it's a bit like that. That's one of the good things about us having D numbers and

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things [D numbers are used in place of names as a way to keep the identities of

moderators and administrators reasonably private on the site]. Even though initially

there was a bit of a media [attention, some of it very critical], and I know you get

copped with it because your name is known, and other people who were initially

involved and whose name is known probably still have to wear it a bit, but because

the majority of us are completely anonymous, there isn't an overt personality. Yeah, I

don't see any reason why it wouldn't be sustainable in the long term. (Anne, in

interview)

As Anne points out, the construct of sustainability is more than the existence of one activist.

She argues that DTJ is a community where people work together to build a bigger identity

than any one individual activist. Yet, there is a need to think about what sustains activists,

since activists are at the very foundation of movements. The emotional connection both with

the cause and among the activists who support the cause make a movement sustainable.

Interviews with the activists involved in DTJ highlighted the profound emotional labour of

working as an activist. Each interview revealed an activist who described feelings and

emotions attached to the various activities of DtJ. This section will explore the emotions

experienced and managed by activists during the ongoing campaigning, organising and

mobilising required to maintain an online feminist presence on social media, emotions

experienced and managed in order to continue working on DTJ.

These emotions described by the subjects are many and varied. Hochschild (1979, p.551)

summarises emotion as a bodily response linked to an “image, a thought, a memory” and she

uses the terms emotions and feelings interchangeably although she concedes that emotion

conveys a “state of being overcome that ‘feeling’ does not”. It is the management of these

emotions within and among the admins and moderators of DTJ, and bounding the experience

of those emotions as central to participation in DTJ which equates to emotional labour. It is

also the management of feelings about the central concerns of the page as well as those

experiences of the page being under attack.

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The activists speak about the emotions involved with dealing with campaigns and posts on

the public Facebook page, the subjects of which are often about harms to women, such as

fatal violence, and the way these activists manage those emotions, including taking time out

from the page, leaving the page altogether or sharing with other activists in the group. They

also talk about the emotions of dealing with other activists in the group. It is the entirety

of the management of these emotions, as well as the experience of these emotions, which

amounts to emotional labour. In some cases, it is also about dealing with the emotions

surrounding conflict resolution, so it is both emotional and relational, the emotions activists

themselves experienced and the emotional labour required to resolve those conflicts.

Helen, a psychiatric nurse and academic researcher with strong organisational skills, was

recruited to DtJ through a private Facebook message. She, along with two others, is mainly

responsible for the management of the Counting Dead Women campaign. Around half of

those interviewed explicitly discussed conflict within the group. Helen discusses the cycle of

emotions around conflict and its resolution, the emotional labour of resolving disagreements,

and her comments highlight how activists experience their own emotions around this:

Really, I'm amazed at how well it works, quite honestly. After all my years of

running wards and especially wards in mental institutions, I'm just amazed at how

able people are to open up, to be angry without being destructive at times, to ask for

help when they need help, and to get support from the group, and to discuss things

that we may want to address in different ways. We finally come to an agreement. It

doesn't always please everybody, but that's the nature of a group, isn't it? We're able

to do that without falling out. (Helen, in interview)

Feminist solidarity, as Dean (1997) points out, is often constructed in opposition to those who

seek to deny women equal rights - but the us/them duality in some respects, forces the ‘us’ to

be more homogenous and more exclusionary. As she argues, once we move away from that,

differences among members . . . recognising another as a member despite her difference

means that we must remain attuned to the possibility of omission” (Dean, 1997, p. 32).

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Helen’s experience of DTJ is one where she says, in interview, that the activists involved are

able to express their feelings but without destruction of what exists - without “burning

everything down”. Her view is that the internal structures encourage the emotional labour of

emotion sharing which allows activists to get the support they need and gives an indication of

this being a process of repetition. As she puts it: “We finally come to an agreement. It doesn't

always please everybody, but that's the nature of a group, isn't it? We're able to do that

without falling out.”

However, others had experiences that showed this was not always true. There was quite a bit

of “falling out” as has been described in Gunilla’s response to DTJ’s sex work policy. That

disagreement was about serious policy issues. Gunilla was very upset about the issue of sex

work and felt there had not been enough or appropriate consultation about the decision to

support the agency of sex workers, despite this decision being formed from the consensus of

the whole group.

But there was also a lot of infighting that had more to do with personalities than with political

priorities. One moderator, Bell (in interview), described this as the big challenge for the

sustainability of any feminist group: “The personalities not getting in the way of each other,

being able to resolve that conflict in a way that's productive.”

Bell makes it clear that the continued existence of the group relies on administrators and

moderators being able to “resolve that conflict” in order to keep working towards the goal of

highlighting and eradicating sexism and misogyny but at no point does she talk about how

she would resolve her feelings about those conflicts herself, in contrast to Jocelynne, who

was with DTJ as an admin for about two years. Jocelynne spoke very openly about intraadmin

conflicts. As she says, DtJ was originally established with a “consensus decision

making model” (again fitting with the prefigurative politics of the people involved), a style of

open organising which requires constant communication, emotional labour in itself; and she

speaks about the workload of dealing with the process of open organising in an online

setting:

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That's always hard work, always hard work. Particularly online when you are missing

a lot of the non-verbal, well you're missing all of the non-verbal cues which make up

probably more than 60% of communication face to face. (Jocelynne, in interview)

Jocelynne addressed one of the difficulties of online organising – the challenge of

understanding someone else without either seeing that person’s response face-to-face or

hearing the tone of voice. This is the “hard work” and I argue that this part of the emotional

labour of online organising is under-recognised. Misunderstanding among and between

activists is a real challenge for those of us working as activists online – there is no ‘tone-ofvoice’,

no expression to be detected either visually or aurally. Time pressures also mean you

can’t just phone someone up to check that you understand what they mean.

Riordan (2017, p.85) argues: “Emojis serve to reduce ambiguity in messages, a role that is

especially important considering the communication context”. However, emojis are often

used to be ironic, sarcastic, misleading, aggressive, some or all of those things at once or not

used at all. One of our administrators decided to make sure people understood her real

feelings by writing “irony font” or “sarcasm font” on every post which she felt might be

misunderstood by others.

Jocelynne spoke about the stresses of dealing with conflicts within the admin team. DTJ has

always had two groups which run the page, the admin group (the people who were

administrators of the page but also had financial and governance responsibilities) and the

moderators’ group. The size of each group has varied over time. The admin group has varied

in size from four to seven. The moderators’ group has varied in size from 15 to 40 (at the

peak of the Alan Jones campaign).

There has always been intense discussion within the moderators’ group about the direction of

DTJ. The admin group is normally quite close-knit with similar values and approaches,

however, there has been one notable issue in the period under review:

We [the admins] had our own space, our own Facebook space and it was a bit of a

refuge sometimes. When that became conflictual it was incredibly difficult to do the

role . . . another admin […] wrote a letter to the admin team and put it out on the

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Facebook page [a Facebook private group] that we occupied accusing me of being

dictatorial and, I can't remember now actually what the criticism was but it was pretty

damning stuff that she'd said. It was completely untrue . . . she said I'd failed to

respond to communication from her, which was untrue . . . We didn't have any

policies around behaviour [among] the group. (Jocelynne, in interview)

Jocelynne went on to explain the emotional burden that placed on her, and that this conflict

affected the admin group for about two weeks. Jocelynne left not long after this. The admin

who had accused Jocelynne eventually left of her own accord but wanted to return. This

incident prompted the remaining admins to exclude her from returning to DTJ. The

emotional labour, the management of emotions during the organising of activism, was a

constant task and quite draining. As Jessie said, in interview: “It could be a rough ride

sometimes, and it can be hard work.”

Both Jocelynne and others spoke of the way this incident occupied the consciousness of those

involved - the burden of trying to negotiate how decisions were made and how conflict

should be resolved. Beyond what happens in the admins group, the disagreements

participants experienced were many and varied. Based on the interview data, they include the

trivial and the serious, from the timing and length of Facebook posts to the page to whether a

woman counted in Counting Dead Women should be counted as a fatality as a result of

because she approached them with a knife. Was this death the result of violence against

women? Or was her death similar to other deaths of those who threatened police? (Zhou,

2018)

There have been a number of internal arguments about whether women murdered by other

women should be counted or whether DtJ should write posts in support of sex workers and

their own bodily autonomy. One former moderator explicitly said she left moderation of the

Facebook page because the policy of the administrators is to support sex workers and sex

workers’ agency to choose sex work as work. In addition to these explicitly negative

emotions and conflict, there are also the concerns of time pressure and of stress, around the

demands of internet activism. Online activists labour in the field of activism for long periods

at a time. Separately, eight of the people I interviewed, spoke of the constancy of the

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notifications: Patrick said his tabs were “open all the time, notifications rolling in”; Rosa

described it as “getting notifications the whole time”; Millicent said “I was checking

Facebook for notifications possibly even 10 or 20 times a day, depending on what was going

on at that time”.

Though this emotional labour, they build emotional capital. They perform constant digital

work and connect through that work. Terranova (2012) has written extensively over the

intensification of digital labour as a form of further exploitation of workers and of the way

in which audiences are generated in the digital sphere. I argue that these two ideas work in

concert in online feminist activism - digital activists are on all the time and that is partly in an

attempt to produce an ‘audience’ of the like-minded. Terranova says, “Only some companies

are picked up by corporate distribution chains in the case of fashion and music; only a few

sites are invested in by venture capital” (2012, p. 41). In some respects, it’s the same for

activism - only some causes are picked up, only some succeed in sharing a message. It’s the

collective - and in the case of activists, unpaid - labour that makes this possible, makes this

necessary. Digital work for the purposes of social change (Jarrett, 2015; Dean, 2012) requires

the same intense efforts as that required by digital work for the purposes of capital as outlined

by Terranova (2012, p. 47):

[C]ontinuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labour-intensive. It is not enough

to produce a good website; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in

it and fight off obsolescence.

In the case of DTJ, traffic slows the fewer times we post each day; traffic grows when we

post on the topical. But keeping it relevant and engaging is a huge amount of work. This

work is continuous and must be constantly updated. One male moderator, Patrick, who

volunteered during the Alan Jones campaign said it was just open tabs with notifications

rolling in all the time:

Constantly on. First thing in the morning, last at night, always helping with the

moderation job. I thought we were doing super significant, interesting stuff. (Patrick,

in interview)

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During the interviews, every administrator and moderator said they looked at the page and/or

at the private Facebook groups which support the page every day. This is, as I have

explained, daily activism. There are costs and benefits to this daily activism. The time

allocated to this varied widely - from moderators who said that the time they spent on the

page or its support mechanisms totalled about four hours a week to those who said they felt

as if it was a constant presence in daily life. For example, I always have a tab open on my

laptop to see how the page is going, always have the Facebook Page app open on my phone.

One moderator who has subsequently left because of work pressures said that even while she

was at work, she would look at the page once an hour to check in to see if those posting

on the page were adhering to the posting guidelines, in other words to moderate the page in

order for conversation to be civil.

Despite the expenditure of emotional capital, we are at work on the project of dismantling

patriarchy and throughout this load, borne by hundreds of thousands of feminists the world

over, we have the companionship of working together and chatting together. Richardson

(2016) in her feminist analysis of digital work says digital technologies both “extend and

intensify” work. It makes it hard to switch off. As Jessie (in interview) said when I asked her

how much time she spent looking at the page when she was an administrator and a

moderator, “probably at least hundreds of times a day”. Rosa said she felt as if she had a

double life, her full-time job during the day and her social media obligations straight after

work:

I think I basically just lived two lives. What was happening during the day at work.

Then I'd go home and all I would do was the page. Living by yourself and not having

all of those other obligations made that easier but it meant I pretty much had no social

life for a long period of time because that's what I was doing. (Rosa, in interview)

For me, I too had all the tabs open all the time, checking and re-checking. During our

interview for this research, I asked Jocelynne, who was also an admin and a moderator at the

beginning of DTJ. She too estimated that she checked the Facebook page 100 times a day.

This was a really different experience to offline organising and mobilising – when I first

started going to rallies to support the right-to-choose and becoming involved with feminism

as a young woman, the pro-choice leaflets couldn’t follow me home. They remained in my

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consciousness but required no action until the next time an action was planned. Digital

organising, on the other hand, is always on and so are the activists.

Rosa, a long-time campaigner, had good insights about the difference between online and

offline activism:

When you think about it ... lots of people will talk about this, like various feminists

organisations over a long period of time . . .[but] I think that in social media, it's more

of a hothouse and it's happening quicker. You're all in there all the time. It's not like

you're having one meeting as a collective and it goes for an hour. [in DTJ at

the beginning] I was hardly getting any sleep. I'm sure you weren't either. (Rosa,

in interview)

Fotopoulou (2014) argues that Web 2.0 platforms still complement existing activist practices

and that this means there is no extant ‘digital sisterhood’, that the current practice of digital

activism must sit alongside existing activist practice. Even since Fotopoulou’s (201) research,

we see that some digital practices, including hashtags such as #metoo, have wrought change

without a single rally, leaflet or committee meeting.

People feel highly connected as administrators and moderators in this group. My immediately

prior experience of a feminist collective was in 2010 as a member of the F collective which

ran Sydney’s first feminist conference in 20 years (Sydney is Australia’s largest capital city).

We used Facebook but not in an instrumental way. It was still fun and casual, without

purpose. We had regular face-to-face meetings in the run up to the conference and used email

and phone to organise. Even with the impending F conference, we were not highly socially

mediated and not having a relationship with everyone at once. We still had those very linear

relationships - in terms of time spent, I was more likely to have conversations with

individuals and spent more time having conversations with individuals than in groups. The

only real time spent in a group setting was during collective meetings. In the case of DTJ, the

mechanism for its operation also includes four separate Facebook groups: one for the

administrators, one for the administrators and the moderators; one for those who assist with

the Counting Dead Women project; and one for putting ideas in, interesting links, material

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which could do with more research, possible material for posts. In almost every instance of

relating to others, it is in a group setting. Even on the odd occasion where we have Facebook

messages, it is likely to be also with a bigger number than just one-to-one. This provides a

structured framework for moderation which, according to the moderators, allows connections

among moderators.

Sheila (in interview) discussed the support from the network of moderators:

Because it is a voluntary thing anyone can say I can’t manage this today and I can’t

think of any time someone hasn’t said I can’t manage this and someone else hasn’t

said I’ll do it for you, so it is very supportive in that way.

Another moderator, Phyllis (in interview), described the community of the group as:

[F]abulous. Lots of humour, which is really important, very supportive of each other .

. . it's a really, really lovely group to be part of and, yes, it's good fun, even though it’s

at times very sad topics that you’re dealing with.

Eileen (in interview), who volunteered for three years on one particular day and for one

particular shift, said:

I think the crew that I worked with was so supportive and just really backed us all up.

That was the good part, and that's the thing that made the task easy, was the fact that

there's already a good crew.

These activists were brought together by a collective commitment to feminist activism and to

feminist ideals. They were not necessarily friends in the traditional sense of the word but

were collegial and supportive of each other, brought together by an instrumental purpose not

through friendship. I would also suggest that adding the layer of friendship across the group

would add more of a time burden to the work of activism and these women are already short

of time. As Julia (in interview) put it, “[t]hey're not necessarily people who would be your

close friends in real life either but I think that's a really good thing”.

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The emotional labour required to ensure harmony among the group is mentioned by a number

of the interview subjects. Emma (in interview), the youngest of all the moderators, brought

up the sustainability of DTJ. She described the effort as ‘constant’ and ‘wearing’. Another,

Gunilla, the moderator who decided to leave the group after the rejection of her views on sex

work, resented the leadership group:

There needs to be change within leadership because I think when you have three or

four women who start something and are seen as leaders . . . sometimes they need to

move on (Gunilla, in interview)

She said that she:

perceived prostitution as being a form of violence against women . . . I know that

there were people in Destroy the Joint who didn't feel that way . . . my view would be

that prostitution [is] a form of violence against women, and the community is not

empowering at all, and it's not about choice. (Gunilla, in interview)

When Gunilla left the DTJ community, she said the time commitment (four hours a week)

was the significant factor, but in her interview for this thesis a year after her departure, she

said she could not reconcile her views on sex work with the decision by the community to

support sex workers.

This theme of conflict and resolution emerged in interviews with other moderators and it is

therefore useful to draw upon what Freeman (1972) calls the “tyranny of structurelessness”

which she identified as a challenge to the style of open organising to which DTJ admin and

moderators aspired at its inception. The concept of the tyranny of structurelessness is that

when there is no structure, those with the loudest voices impose structure. As Trott (2017)

highlights, the connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) of digital organising, where

the platform is the organiser, should be immune to the tyranny of structurelessness, because

the organising platform provides the structure. Yet my data shows that individuals involved

in DTJ imposed a structure of their own.

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The tension around the aspirations of open organising, as explored in the discussion around

Jocelynne’s interview, and the reality of daily campaigning caused conflict. From the point of

view of the administrators, some of the conflict was also about some moderators wanting to

have more say but not more responsibility. Joan was very unhappy with the delineation:

A lot of the control of that information and that process was held with the

administrators . . . there was a very high segregation between administrators and

moderators. I found it quite difficult when the segregation between the administrators

and the moderators was very, very clear and very separate. Moderators shouldn't

challenge and shouldn't question and shouldn't, necessarily, take action to hide or ban

someone without an administrator giving it the go ahead. (Joan, in interview)

Every single moderator who is not an administrator acknowledged the admin group as having

separate responsibilities, including financial responsibilities, while a number of those

moderators felt they were excluded from key decision making, while not wishing to have any

of the bigger responsibilities.

The process of how decisions were made looked different to everyone involved. The aim of

keeping it open and consensus-based struggled at times of high external engagement, i.e.

when a lot of people came to like, share, or post. There was no question then that there was a

small group, the admins, who were in charge.

One moderator described the structure this way:

Well, if I'm going to draw it, it's going to look like a doughnut on the bottom level

where all the moderators sit. Then on top of that, there's a smaller doughnut where the

admin group sits. It's kind of like ... The admins make all the big decisions and write

the posts and talk about the big picture stuff, and you tell the moderators what's going

on and ask us to comment and be part of the final decision making, but really you've

already decided (Bell, in interview).

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That structure also led to some conflict which could be divided into these areas: conflict

around beliefs, such as Gunilla’s beliefs on sex work, as has been explored elsewhere and

conflicts around process, such as decision-making and structures.

Joan grew increasingly hostile to the way in which decisions were made:

Yeah. Yeah, there's been questions. That, again, comes back to, and with, particularly

at the time where it was much more structured, there were partly personality clashes,

but also clashes in perception of the role. It's quite difficult when, I found it quite

difficult when the segregation between the administrators and the moderators was

very, very clear and very separate. Moderators shouldn't challenge and shouldn't

question and shouldn't, necessarily, take action to hide or ban someone without an

administrator giving it the go ahead. There was, previously, lots of interactions I

had that weren't particularly pleasant, but they were resolved. I think it's because it

can be a highly emotive group because of what we do and the topics that we cover,

that clashes are expected to happen, because people are passionate about it. (Joan, in

interview)

Gunilla too found the structures restrictive:

The type of leadership is that I think you need is ones who are not going to dictate to

the group, that you have that open communication between people and the ability to

take on criticisms and critiques of how an organization is being run. (Gunilla, in

interview)

Both Gunilla and Joan were moderators and keenly felt a lack of distributed leadership.

Millicent, one of the longest serving admins, was concerned about the recruitment process in

general. She was concerned that the way in which people were recruited (a Facebook 'friends

of friends' process, which later evolved to asking potential recruits to send a description of

other activism with which they had been involved) exposed DTJ to a series of risks:

You really can’t recruit people [who] nobody knows who they are. On the Internet,

somebody can be anybody, and there could be a lot of damage done to the

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organisation by recruiting people who are disruptive within it or who are not able to

fit within the frameworks that are necessary for an online [group]. (Millicent, in

interview)

There was also some reluctance - not conflict exactly but perhaps resistance - when the

decision was made to ask for time commitment, in order to be able to provide coverage

through a roster system. Gunilla said she found a regular commitment too much to ask from a

volunteer:

In terms of a regular, half-a-day commitment per week, I found a bit . . . it was a bit

too much for me. The other is, my guess would be, that there, I guess, are

broader issues that I wanted to focus on for myself, rather the issues that Destroy the

Joint's were focussing on. (Gunilla, in interview)

Gunilla again found the clash in process between her previous offline activism, where she

knew everyone involved, to online activism, where she knew no-one, very difficult.

I didn't know who these people were, what their backgrounds were, or what their

history was. I couldn't get a good sense of who they were as people,” she said. She

could not align herself to the decision-making process. (Gunilla, in interview)

Despite the perceived aim of open organising, in DTJ, the decision-making group formed

fairly early. This delivers leadership into the hands of the most invested – but the leadership

group may appear to have no transparent process or accountability. The aspirations of

leaderlessness succumbed to a phenomenon already observed by feminist scholars. Polletta

(2002) detailed the tyranny of emotions where activists with the most investment in the cause

of action’ by which the urgency of taking action may result in decision-making cliques”.

There is a clear conflict between taking action in a timely fashion and having consensus.

The interviews with admins and moderators showed a clear pattern - from quite early, this

was a large project and a few people took charge. It is one thing to mobilise and get everyone

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informed, excited and agitated about a project - it’s another to organise effective campaigns

which deliver change. Decision-making processes derived this way deliver “miniconsensus”

(Milan, 2018, p. 334), where small powerful groups deliver decisions because there are no

clear lines of communication within the group or where time demands outrun the aspiration

of getting the consensus. Even time demands - deadlines - eat away at consensus. Small

groups within the groups form and reform, formed and reformed, depending on the issue. As

Gastil (1993) argued, talking outside meetings is the most common way for a miniconsensus

to emerge but may also be a way in which consensus is disrupted and no consensus of any

kind can ever emerge. Alliances come and go - and this is speeded up in an online setting,

where it’s possible to have a (more-or-less) public meeting and within minutes also have a

back-channel chat, for example, using Facebook chat, as a disruption mechanism. This is

particularly frequent in groups where people share more than just activism and these backchannel

chats can also be used as a disruption mechanism, shoring up alliances, beginning

new ones, disrupting transparency.

The examination of feeling and emotion in feminist activism is key in order to reclaim

emotional labour as a feminist act. Emotional labour can be seen in an entirely negative light,

as draining, but surviving that negativity may also propel activism, it unites us. The

emotional work undertaken as part of activism is how we express solidarity with each other

and therefore build our feminist organisations more sustainably. All activism needs an

activist workforce and the biggest risk to that activism workforce is burnout. However, the

negative experiences of emotional labour also propel solidarity.

As Seb said, in interview, of the experience of DTJ being attacked by trolls:

It’s about turning something that was stigmatizing and shameful into an act of power

and solidarity.

Salovaara (2014) argues: “Concurrently, the humanities have witnessed a surge of interest in

questions of affect, leading to efforts to address the psychosocial dimensions surrounding

activism in urban and digital spaces.” However, the study of affect may be broadened to

include the effect of those embodied feelings or emotions and the labour, the emotional

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labour, required to undertake activism. There has already been considerable work in this field

(Kennelly, 2014; Gleeson, 2016), but there is further scope for this investigation.

Bosanquet in Thwaites and Pressland’s (2017) significant work on what it means to be a early

career feminist academic applies the lens of emotional labour only to that conducted within a

family while Gleeson (2017) mainly focusses on the burnout of dealing with feminist

activism, an entirely negative take on the emotions experienced in activism. What we feel

and the impact that has on us - our internal contexts, the politics of emotion - are also

important. It is not exactly an exploration of the private/public divide because of the use of

social media to share emotions. Social media organises us to share our emotions, as argued

by Salovaara (2014), so research should also recognise the importance of emotion and

feeling, which is why this research explores the feelings of the activists involved in DTJ and

the way in which it impacts their activism.

Eileen, a DTJ moderator nearly from the page’s inception, identified her experience of

community-building as a page moderator:

Every modding session had lots of challenges . . . I think the crew that I worked with

was so supportive and just really backed us all up. That was the good part, and that's

the thing that made the task easy, was the fact that there's already a good crew.

(Eileen, in interview)

Her response explained why she was able to continue for a long period of time as a regular

moderator, despite recognising that each session of moderation could involve both positive

and negative aspects of the interaction on the page. It was the network of the other

moderators which made the task easy, the connectedness of the team - in the face of the

challenges of moderation.

Dora (in interview) also made a point of talking about the moderating community. She said

she found moderating boring unless there was a very active post but “it's worth it to be

involved in the rest of the group”, once again underscoring the value of the network.

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In particular, as Fuchs argues, “Facebook is also a community, which means that repeated

communication between users results in or maintains friendships and personal relations that

involve feelings of belonging together”.

Anita (in interview):

I’ve actually got from Destroy the Joint I feel a lot safer and more comfortable online.

Within the Destroy the Joint in the background moderating the admins page. It just

feels like your lounge room. It feels like you’re just hanging out, having a chat with

people. Yeah, I’d say I’m heavily emotionally invested. When I had to leave Destroy

the Joint for a few days because my work place demanded it of me. I was distraught,

just distraught.

Elizabeth, the moderator who decided to provide admin support for the group through

keeping a roster of when people were available to write posts or to actively moderate, lives in

rural Victoria and says that it was hard for her to develop friendships in that area. Her work

had mainly been temporary admin work. DTJ provided an opportunity for her to be

connected to other women in her first activist experience and to engage with activist

work that she felt mattered. She also used the connections she made through DTJ as

references when she began to apply for permanent jobs. She said her experiences

volunteering at DTJ made her more confident, as she explains here:

I feel an amount of pride in the work that I do. I am happy to be involved in

something that is important and impactful as well. (Elizabeth, in interview)

This was the feeling expressed by Emmeline, who at first was disinclined to make public her

involvement with DTJ:

Now I guess that sort of proprietorial feeling has been constant the whole time and I

am proud to be associated with it. I went through a stage where I didn’t want it to be

known that I was associated with the page mostly because I was aware I may have

had some clients who may have been a little less progressive but that is not the case

anymore. I do tell appropriate (in inverted commas) people and I use that as a

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platform to try and gather names of prospective mods for the page. (Emmeline, in

interview)

And the experience of involvement in DTJ also supported a sustained commitment to

feminism, according to Helen:

I feel that it has renewed me as a feminist. There was a point where I was just

toddling along doing not an awful lot of anything in terms of real activism. I think this

has brought new life into my feminism, and it certainly ... It's great to be part of a

small online company and a larger online community that's made up of women of all

ages, backgrounds, opinions, insights. For the most part, we are able to discuss all that

and support each other and do all the rest of it without falling out and with the end

game in view. That's been wonderful for me. It does feel like a surrogate family at

times. (Helen, in interview)

Bell, a single parent caring for two teenagers, said that the online activism of DTJ was the

only kind of activism she could do while caring for her children and working full-time:

I've been an activist my whole life. The way that things are for me at the moment, the

only activism that I can do is Destroy the Joint. It fills a really big hole in me. I have

this need to change the world, and so being involved with Destroy the Joint makes me

really happy. Whenever I talk about it to anyone, or rant as I usually do, I feel really

happy and really proud of being involved with such a great group of people and the

stuff that we do. Yeah, I feel happy and proud. (Bell, in interview)

For Bessie, working, because it is working, on DTJ gave her both the cultural capital (the

knowledge) and the emotional capital (the confidence), to take her newfound skills into other

feminist activities. Her labour became her capital. She was in her seventies and did not feel at

all confident about social media or the internet:

It made me feel quite confident that I could do things like that, it gave me more

internet savvy. [It] probably has helped me participate more in online forums where I

stick my neck out sometimes and …. personal strength and the skills. I haven’t done

anything else exactly like that but I now administer two little online forums. I know

what I’m doing because DTJ came first. (Bessie, in interview)

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Affect is complex and contested, but Margaret Wetherell (2012, p. 2) deftly explains why it

has become important, despite the variation in conceptualisation. She argues it is a way of

expanding what is studied in the social sciences:

It leads to a focus on embodiment, to attempts to understand how people are moved,

and what attracts them, to an emphasis on repetitions, pains and pleasures, feelings

and memories . . . the advantage of affect is that it brings the dramatic and the

everyday back into social analysis.

As the participants in my research say, what they do feels like work (and the word work itself

either on its own or as a root appears more than 600 times in the interviews). Like workers in

paid employment, they must collaborate and cooperate and do it without losing their tempers.

They manage their feelings for the greater good, if the “greater good” is what feminist

organising and campaigning can be called. These are the emotions of building solidarity,

which I argue is emotional capital.

One of the younger moderators, Alice, who became an activist in her early 20s, made it clear

that she valued that feeling of working together:

I think activism often requires taking a lot of time out of your free time, so balancing

up to criticism and that ... that requires solidarity amongst people, because you have

to decide how to deal with that criticism and cop that criticism, or not cop it, or you

know. That can be quite difficult, as well. (Alice, in interview)

Another moderator, Bessie, says she appreciates the camaraderie: “I guess I enjoy being a

part of that, the solidarity that comes along with that . . . there is such a diverse membership

This chapter has argued that emotional labour and emotional capital are connected, in

particular in the field of feminist online activism. Emotional labour is the hard work of

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making online feminist organising work, the hard work of organising despite the conflicts

and the contested ideas - but it builds solidarity and that is a direct benefit. As knowledge

builds cultural capital, so do the feelings around emotional labour build emotional capital,

particularly the emotional capital of resilience.

Bourdieu touched on emotional capital when he outlined the work which falls mainly to

women within a family. He described the family as an institution built on “countless acts of

reaffirmation and reinforcement” and outlined the “constant maintenance work” on feelings,

the “practical and symbolic work” of training those in the family to have what he describes as

“loving dispositions” in order to maintain relationships (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 22). Nowotny

(1981) was the first to identify emotional capital as an addition to the capitals for

which Bourdieu is best known: social, cultural and economic. She argued then that women

could demonstrate power in a domestic setting, or private sphere, but not in the public sphere;

and that the work in the private sphere propped up the public sphere. Nowotny (1981) further

developed emotional capital as a gendered variant of social capital. She argued men had

access to social capital in a way that women did not because, at the time of her writing,

women were still unlikely to be in positions of public power. Social capital was “the sum of

the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing

a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and

recognition” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p.119). In other words, social capital is contacts,

access, social skills, or what helps us connect with others. It refers to the ‘who we know’

rather than the ‘what we know’. Nowotny postulated social capital as “a necessary ingredient

in the continuous struggle for success, rewards, recognition, and power that categorises a

field” and categorised as structurally male (1981, p. 148); and emotional capital as

structurally gendered female, situated in social networks, with a power of its own, wielded by

women and characteristic of the private sphere, of family and friends, and accumulated in

adverse circumstances, or as Reay (2004, p. 60) puts it “affective relationships of family and

friends and encompasses the emotional resources you hand on to those you care about”. In

this context, Zembylas’s (2007) argument for a deeper conceptualisation of emotional capital

and its conversion to other forms of capital shows the need to scrutinise the ways in which

emotional capital builds social capital. In the case of feminist activists, emotional labour

around that activism builds emotional capital. Emotional labour is what we experience and

emotional capital is what we accrue. It extends our social capital.

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Online, emotional capital is valuable as a way of building relationships or as Rodriguez-

Hidalgo, Tan and Verlegh (2015) says “cooperation, support and community building”, the

prosocial factor where “online social sharing can contribute to individuals’ overall well-being

and life satisfaction by promoting emotion regulation and/or capitalization through social

sharing in online social networks”. I contend emotional labour contributes to the accrual of

emotional capital through what research participants identified as a process of building

community and solidarity.

Online feminist activists do not undertake their work in a vacuum - no activist does; and the

consideration of activist context regularly examines the social, the economic, the

political, contexts of activism (Altbach, 1990). However, I argue that the personal, the

emotional, the feelings, also provide context. Emotions and the emotional labour of activists

can be characterised as individual. This may be because emotions are individual to the

subject, rather than to the collective group. This individualism may make it more difficult to

analyse and generalise but I argue that there is some emotional labour which is collective, or

experienced in a collective way or experienced by many in a collective.

Emotions and emotional work have not been valued in comparison to reason and logic; and

this argument has been built along gender lines (Goodwin, Jasper & Polletta 2009). The

experience of the activists of DTJ show that working as a feminist activist in this Australian

setting requires a great deal of labour, in particular, the emotion work of being an activist.

This is often construed as negative and often is negative; is a part of the emotional labour of

being an activist and is emotional labour because the management of these negative feelings

is required to continue to campaign. Participants discussed issues of burnout and, for activists

working in the family violence space, the issue of being triggered.

Yet some of what these online activists do is positive, joyful and provides impetus in other

areas of their lives. It provides the confidence and the capital to continue with activism.

While victories in campaigns are always energising, the nurturing within activist

communities and the support while doing stressful work, provide participants with emotional

capital. For some women, it also gives them skills to allow them to do further activist work.

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Activist feminists know there are no waves (Stevenson, Everingham & Robinson, 2011).

They know this because in between those hypothetical waves (Nicholson, 2010;

Munro, 2013; Taylor, 1989; Dahlerup, 2013; Donovan, 2012), activists keep working. What

appear as the gaps between waves and generations to scholars are just tiny lacunae for

activists, where the activism still exists yet is less visible. Crossley (2017) says feminism has

myriad currents, some stronger than others. The strength varies but not the presence.

One example is in the battle for reproductive rights. After what is termed the second wave

(Thornham, 2004), women continued to struggle for bodily autonomy. They still struggled

after the third wave (Walker, 2001) and now, at the fourth wave (Cochrane, 2013; Darmon,

2014; Munro, 2013; Martin &Valenti, 2012), are still struggling. In Australia in June 2019

online advertisements for abortion clinics mysteriously disappeared from the results of

Google searches. The number of appointments at abortion clinics halved (Davis, 2019) yet no

useful explanation from Google was forthcoming. There is, however, no evidence to show

women worked any less hard for reproductive rights in between waves, which is why the

scholarly fascination with the wave metaphor may not be all that useful to anyone wanting to

understand successful feminist activism.

DTJ is an example of successful digital feminist activism in Australia using connective action

(Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013). There is no similar group in Australia with such

longevity. While there have been many instances of successful episodic connective activism

(Trott, 2019), DTJ has sustained its work over seven years and has remained a volunteer

organisation, unlike other digital groups such as as GetUp and Fair Agenda. Those

organisations quickly transformed into organisations with paid staff. In the case of GetUp, it

has also expanded from its original digital roots to offline organising and has an annual

budget of around $10 million. Both these organisations have boards, managers and traditional

operating structures. In the case of Fair Agenda, it fits in with the Australian feminist

movement neatly, which is largely both institutional and institutionally-focussed. The major

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feminist organisations in Australia, the National Foundation for Australian Women, the

Women’s Electoral Lobby and, increasingly, the Country Women’s Association, are also

traditional organisations with registered premises, bank balances; and a strong focus on

building relationships with governments and other non-government organisations. However,

DTJ is recognised as part of feminist activism in Australia (McLean, Maalsen, & Grech;

Gleeson, 2016, 2017; Trott, 2019) and operates within feminism as a social movement, with

its organisational continuity, shared identity and core ideological purpose (Dahlerup, 2013),

despite its basis in connective action which more usually relies on personalised sharing across

networks, floating populations of activists and contributors, with opt-in loyalties in the

moment.

Connective action protest movements tend to be short-term. There have been many examples

of connective action in Australia, including #ShutDownRSD, #takedownJulienBlanc,

#EndViolenceAgainstWomen (Trott, 2019); but each of these has, in typical connective

action form, been episodic. They included the creation of hashtags and of petitions, they

sparked rallies and protests. In terms of feminist actions, #ShutDownRSD,

#takedownJulienBlanc and #EndViolenceAgainstWomen were more about treating the

symptoms of inequality rather than the cause. These actions existed within feminism but in

those forms have not continued their activism.

To a great extent, DTJ has resisted both the episodic nature of connective action and the

more institutionalised form of feminism as a social movement. It exists online. Its fundraising

is sporadic and small in scope. It remains an iteration of connective action in its approach. By

way of contrast, there are a number of examples of contemporary Australian digital activism

which do not operate connectively; in particular, in the environmental movement. Lock the

Gate, for example, has a strong digital presence but operates in a more traditional collective

action framework; as do Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. In other words, they are more

likely to be identified as having organisational continuity, shared identity and core

ideological purpose. In addition, they are also identified, as is much environmental action in

Australia, with more radical activism, including protest events such as activists chaining

themselves to trees and obstruction of logging roads. They enter, obstruct and occupy

(O’Brien, 2019). Connective action enters the digital space, obstructs inboxes and occupies

consciousness. It’s a different way of protesting.

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Yet the distinctive features of connective action, including its flexibility, lack of

organisational structures, lack of financial costs, speed of mobilisation and range of reach,

make it an important subject of research (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013). An analysis of

the sustained success of DTJ over seven years as an example of sustained connective action

utilising both the crowd-enabled and the organisationally-brokered models in Bennett and

Segerberg’s typology is crucial to understanding contemporary social movements in the

digital environment. A systematic social science analysis reveals the complexity of DTJ’s

achievements.

I was fortunate to be part of DTJ at its spontaneous and angry inception but far luckier to

have worked with these activists since 2012. It made it possible for me to write my thesis as

an insider. While there are some disadvantages to being an insider (which I refer to in chapter

three), the benefits are many and include the accessibility of the activists and the familiarity

with the processes. There were only two former administrators I did not approach because of

extremely difficult relationships either with myself or with other administrators. There was,

however, no shortage of critique on the operations of DTJ among those I did interview.

There is still some reluctance to accept that connective action works; that anything built on a

hashtag lasts, that anything resembling clicktivism has an impact (Morozov, 2009; Gladwell,

2010). But these movements are not just built on hashtags, they emerge because of context.

The #destroythejoint hashtag aggregated a movement because of Julia Gillard and the way

she was treated. The context, the highly visible and relentless bullying of a woman politician,

attracted increased interest by media (Johnson, 2015; Trimble, 2016) and women felt more

politically engaged (Sawer, 2012; Denemark, Ward and Bean (2012). They wanted to do

something about it, a direct effect of the symbolic power of women in elected office on

women’s engagement (Karp & Banducci, 2008).

This research examined the social and cultural capitals (Bourdieu, 1986) of those who came

to DTJ as administrators and moderators, what impact that had on the nature of DTJ and the

way in which those capitals impacted both the activists and the activism. Of the activists

interviewed for this project, 80 per cent had some kind of experience which they counted as

activism – way beyond the normal population. They had developed stickability (and how

they developed that over time is something worth studying in the future). In particular, the

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previous activist experience for the majority was activism in the union movement These were

the women who built this digital feminist community. And the tiny handful of those who had

no prior activist experience learned as they went along. Prior activism of any kind was a key

attribute of these activists. This group was also highly educated compared to the population –

which isn’t surprising since the radicalism of the middle-class is well-documented (Bonnett,

2013; Cleveland, 2003; Cotgrove & Duff, 1980; Nicholls, 1985; Parkin, 1968; Quinn, 2017);

they mostly lived in cities rather than regional, rural or remote areas of Australia and were in

paid full-time employment.

The original #destroythejoint tweet capitalised both on women’s readiness to engage

politically in that environment and in response to the backlash. In what is now understood as

an iteration of crowd-enabled connective action, DTJ built a community from a hashtag and

has turned into that community into one which shows up every day on Facebook. In 2019. it

has more than 99,000 ‘likes’ and daily, its administrators post on the page, usually twice. On

International Women’s Day each year, there are always 16 posts, one every hour until

bedtime, which together have a page reach of one million. It is hard to tell whether “reach”

measures success but it does measure who is seeing consistent information such as this; and

one million reach for a volunteer group with an anti-misogyny mission is significant.

These activists who started the group wanted it to be leaderless and structureless and

embraced connective action as a form but the experience they brought with them from other

campaigns prefigured their behaviours in, and to, this new political entity. The introduction

of Counting Dead Women Australia to the campaign repertoire initiated a change to DTJ, a

move from crowd-organised to organisationally-enabled (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013);

and with it more structure and connections to other groups working to end violence against

women.

To analyse feminist digital activism, it was important to use feminist research methods,

particularly feminist interviewing methods (Reinharz & Davidman, 1992; Ackerly & True,

2010). Those methods encouraged real and intensive listening to those who give up their

time. A number of the women interviewed for this thesis either already had postgraduate

qualifications or were embarking on them. They were just as interested in how I was

conducting the research (what questions? What themes? Have you thought of this?) as they

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were in the subject of feminism and feminist activism. The number of times Jo Freeman’s

(1972) name came up, out of the blue, was quite funny. Through these conversations, the

themes finally emerged, some prompted specifically by the participants themselves.

This new understanding of the way social movements operate in the digital environment not

only includes the way these movements are formed connectively, that is, through connective

action (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; 2013). In addition, this new understanding of

connective action also highlights the difference in actions: what works well on social media

and what works less well. It’s crucial to recognise that DTJ operated beyond connective

action in a number of its campaigns. It used connective action in concert with direct lobbying,

indirect lobbying, outside lobbying, conflict expansion and public opinion appeal in order to

make change across a number of campaigns.

Furthermore, there were other new aspects highlighted by this research. First, that the digital

environment which brings with it “perpetual participation” (DeLuca, Lawson & Sun, 2012)

encourages daily activism (Schubert 1996); and second that dealing with violence against

women on a daily basis requires emotional labour, different from the emotional labour first

defined by Arlie Hochschild (1983). This is management of emotions not for commercial

purposes but for public benefit. The work of this community can be very intense and the

focus on family violence can be exhausting. But behind the relentless, perpetual participation

are women who support each other in little groups. They share memes and goat jokes, share

skills, take breaks. They keep going.

Emotions and emotional work are rarely seen as more valuable than reason and logic, an

extension of what the patriarchy considers important. However, feminist activism in general

and more particularly, the experience of the activists of DTJ illustrates that working as a

feminist activist in this Australian setting requires a great deal of labour, in particular, the

emotion work of being an activist. Emotional work is largely construed as negative (and it

can be both negative and draining). However it forms part of the emotional labour of being an

activist because it requires management of feelings, such as those sparked by constantly

dealing with violence against women, exhaustion, burnout, in order to continue campaigning.

Yet there was also positive and joyful space, sometimes gleaned from success in campaigns,

sometimes from emotional support in the groups, and that provided momentum in other areas

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of these feminist lives; leading to a development in confidence and the emotional capital to

continue with activism.

It’s emotional labour, just as Hochschild explains it. Yet through this experience of emotional

labour, through the management of the dark and disturbing, through the need to keep going,

the positive emerges, affirming, something to share with other activism or tasks now or in the

future. It accrues as emotional capital. Emotional labour plays a significant role in the

formation and retention of social movements because of its capacity to reinforce ties beyond

political ties.

The activists of DTJ brought their habitus and various capitals to bear on this connective

action project. Their embedded values, skills, beliefs, experience and knowledge, the sum of

their habitus and various capitals, prefigured their ideals, their aims, their goals and their

ways of working. As a connective, they shared their skills, knowledge and attributes, always

in the context of their habitus, the dispositions and traits shaped by their experiences of

accumulated habitus, which in turn, structured and shaped their interaction with connective

action. It is also important to acknowledge Jen Schradie’s (2018, p. 71) reservations about

connective action, which she argues may impact the collective action of those with fewer

resources, or, as Bourdieu would put it, economic capital. There is urgent need for research

around such challenges around time, income, resources, power.

Connective action also organises the sharing of cultural capital, which both binds and defines

groups. The concept of shared cultural capital is underscored by the DTJ activists themselves

in interview. A basic and shared understanding of feminism mattered, particularly as it fed

both the knowledge-production and the knowledge-dissemination of DTJ activists. As Rosa

said in interview (and quoted earlier in this thesis), “If you're adding to people’s knowledge

or understanding or their education, of course you're laying the groundwork for people to

make decisions later on.” The shared cultural capital supercharged the activism. It laid the

“groundwork for people to make decisions”.

It’s also important to recognise the role of emotional labour in activism and its contribution to

the acquisition of emotional capital. Elsewhere in this thesis, I have argued that it is identical

to the emotional labour performed in paid work because it is a requirement as activists work

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on campaigns. Activists work together and must manage their own feelings, their feelings

about each other, and about the impact of both campaigning and campaigns in order to

achieve their end goals as activists. In DTJ, there were some long-time admins and

moderators who worked to make this activism more sustainable by using what Bolton

(2000a) called “philanthropic” emotion management. They created posts to encourage

personal reflection, to encourage the sharing of feelings, both negative and positive.

Emotional labour is always considered negative but I argue, in what I hope is a novel

contribution, that emotional labour can also be positive and produces what Helga Nowotny

called emotional capital in a way which parallels the way in which intellectual labour

produces cultural capital. Though emotional labour, the activists build and accumulate

emotional capital. The labour required for digital activism is constant and builds on intense

connectivity, the “perpetual participation” required among the activists in a group. Despite

the efforts, it also provides rewards, the companionship of working together and chatting

together to continue the activism. Yes, there is emotional labour in feminist activism and it

can be exhausting and draining but it is also how we express solidarity with each other and

build our feminist organisations more sustainably. As I discuss earlier, there was and is much

positive experience of such emotion work, both in developing hard skills and in feelings. The

feelings required for emotional labour build emotional capital, particularly the emotional

capital of resilience. Emotional labour, experienced through building community and

solidarity, is what we experience and emotional capital is what we accrue. In addition,

emotional capital extends our social capital.

This thesis argues that campaigns to stop violence against women and to raise consciousness

about its existence are the product of information activism (Halupka, 2014), itself a byproduct

of the cultural capital brought by activists to DTJ. These activists communicate their

key concerns, an outcome of their core ideological purpose, through a complex process, the

goal of which is to use the communicative turn in a feminist setting, to encourage low-stakes

participation, such as sharing on social media with the intent to inform and to mobilise. It is

that set of actions which constitutes information activism (Halupka, 2014) in connective

action in an Australian digital feminist activist setting.

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This thesis also expands on the use of images in the Counting Dead Women campaign and

argues for a new category of image artefact in connective action, a transnational digital

solidarity frame, which resists the motivation to personalise all aspects of campaigning. It is

an example of a campaign which pushes back against the neoliberal aspects of the personal

action frame (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013, p. 6), and signifies a return to solidarity framing in

its place while still using social sharing technologies. Counting Dead Women has both

contributed to and transformed the public sphere. It became highly shareable on social

technologies and remains highly shareable. It has become a national toll able to be used by

national publishers. It has imitators. Finally, this iteration of feminist activism has

manifestations which resist the personalisation of politics. The personal action frame, as

theorised by Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012, 2013), identifies a tendency for

activists to fracture the collective experience towards the individual. Not only is activism

episodic but the episodes are limited to the individual. DTJ acted collectively in its organising

groups. The exploration of what administrators and moderators agreed are the key campaigns

of DTJ through an examination of individual campaigns, attributes specific campaigning

techniques to each campaign, including direct lobbying, indirect lobby and public pressure.

This thesis found that the intersection of this social movement with the communicative turn

afforded by social media and journalism, combined with the characteristics and attributes of

this particular activist campaign force, provided a supercharged form of activism, well-suited

to digital information activism. From a personal perspective, this activism influenced my own

work as a journalist. I would argue that I’ve always been an advocate journalist in my column

writing but there is a higher level of change possible when you combine hashtags with

journalism (Guha, 2015) and more agency when you can create the journalism to leverage

social media.

This experience of activism has been largely positive and, in some aspects, joyful. The group

of activists has, in the majority, stayed together for seven years but it could be argued that

there are some disadvantages from the stability, which became more marked after the

introduction of Counting Dead Women. In some ways, it has become more exclusive,

particularly among the administrators, and somewhat distanced from its connective roots. It is

difficult to imagine recruiting someone now just because you all retweeted the same tweet or

shared the same Facebook post. It would be unthinkable to recruit someone now without

having knowledge of their prior activist background. It would be useful to research other

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iterations of connective action to explore whether this shift in the practice of DTJ is a unique

example of the lived experience of connective action and whether it reflects, across iterations,

the evolution of connective action of this kind and whether it is sustainable as connective

action.

As mentioned earlier, this kind of activism is largely middle-class and largely white

(although, in the case of DTJ, not exclusively so). It is a challenge for DTJ to be more

inclusive and it is also a challenge for activism more generally. Can it only ever be a largely

middle-class pursuit because the middle-class is more likely to have discretionary time?

It is interesting to note that most of the administrators of DTJ are in jobs where there is some

discretionary time. No-one works on an assembly line and any shift work by either

administrators or moderators is in the health sector. It would be difficult for working-class

feminists in jobs with little autonomy to be part of the decision-making or process,

particularly in the moment. There is also a lack of young women. Holding on to young

women in this iteration of feminist activism is difficult. There are lots of choices on how to

spend discretionary activist time in feminist groups and moderating Facebook pages may not

seem like the most rewarding feminist task ever. While there is some literature which

addresses the involvement of young women in digital feminist activism (Jouet, 2018;

Mendes, Ringrose & Keller, 2019), future research could examine ways in which to engage

young feminists over time.

There are many limitations in this thesis. This has been an inquiry into which activists

operate DTJ but the other side of the activist process are people recruited as participants,

those who like the page, comment on the page, share Counting Dead Women posts. I don’t

know who they are. I tried to get some small input from those people by private messaging

them – I ended up with only three responses. Knowing who those people are and the impact

DTJ has on them would be a useful area for further research because we need to know what

makes people act, share, change their minds.

What we do know is this, based on Facebook insights (based entirely on what Facebook users

say about themselves). Nearly all of our fans are women – 83 per cent to 14 per cent; and 70

per cent fall between the ages of 25 and 54. Mostly they are Australian, with more users in

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Melbourne than in Sydney. Their language of choice is English (either UK or US). We know

nothing about class, race or differing abilities (even for the analysis in this thesis, the

administrators and moderators rarely disclosed race, ethnicity or differing abilities). However

the most important answer missing from this thesis is how to stop violence against women;

and in related areas, how to achieve equality. It’s one thing to operate as activists, to be

sharing information in the community, it’s quite another to change process and practice

effectively to make sure Australian women achieve equality, respect and safety.

The social movement is on a continuum, connecting old and new modes (or

styles/performances/repertoires of activism) with old and new nodes, including all those

impacts of how we relate to each other online and the concurrent impact of doing it all the

time, non-stop. Longstanding effective change requires longstanding and effective activism,

some of which entails crushingly dull and repetitive work. This thesis found a social

movement where activists were happy to do that dull, repetitive, continuous and continual;

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