About — Hashtag Feminism

Hashtag Feminism is a digital platform that was born out of love for Internet culture and passion for social justice. I launched the website on December 20, 2013, seven days after Beyonce dropped her first digital album, Beyonce, and four days after I published an online case study about Renisha McBride. I was in my third year of graduate school drafting ideas for my dissertation. I had time and creative juices to spare. All of these factors, including the demand for ‘collecting receipts’ on Twitter influenced the form and function of Hashtag Feminism. Over the next several months, I worked with feminist writers who I met on Twitter, to build an online platform that reflected the culture and politics of the so-called hashtag activism era. In 2015, about a year into my dissertation, I realized I spent more money and time than I could afford trying to maintain the site while also paying writers. The website was being hacked around the time of GamerGate and targeted harassment of feminist media online. It was also around this time that I lost content on the site. A Columbia professor and his students hosted a #Feminism hack-a-thon to try to help retrieve some of the content, but ultimately, the Hashtag Feminism I started in 2013 was gone.

Fast forward five years. I’m now an Assistant Professor dedicated to continue the work of documenting Internet culture and social justice discourse; this includes archiving Hashtag Feminism. I spent several weeks scouring old emails, Google Docs, and The Internet Archives’ Way Back Machine to piece together the Hashtag Feminism Archive. I encourage you to check out the archive for some of Hashtag Feminism’s earlier blog posts that aren’t populated on this site. The archive is for anyone who, like me is fascinated by Internet culture and cares deeply about social justice issues. It’s especially for all of the contributing writers who dedicated their time to help grow Hashtag Feminism. The archive and this new website are also for Hashtag Feminism followers that stuck around even when the Twitter account laid dormant for months.

Before you dig in to the new Hashtag Feminism website, I recommend checking out the archive, and visiting How To Read the Hashtag Feminism Archive.

The new Hashtag Feminism website includes:

The Best of Hashtag Feminism: Most popular articles from Hashtag Feminism (2013-2015).
Press: News articles mentioning Hashtag Feminism.
Research: Compiled list of scholarly research about hashtag feminism and feminist digital cultures.

Stay tuned for more this year!

- Tara L. Conley @taralconley, Founding Publisher and Editor of Hashtag Feminism.

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