Alexandria Nuttal, under her DJ name Lilith, roams the airwaves on her feminist radio show Femme Fatale. [Photo © Gabriel Mayost]
By Gabriel Mayost
Two years ago, Carleton University student Alexandria Nuttal found herself in a radio booth for the first time.
She was there to discuss the stigma surrounding mental health as part of a class on activism she was taking. After half an hour of conversation on the air, her perception of radio as a strict and inflexible medium had completely changed.
“It was really great,” she says. “It was a really eye-opening aspect of radio, since I only thought you were allowed to do certain things and have on certain people, feminists not being among them.”
It didn’t take long for Nuttal to launch herself into the world of broadcast media. Under the alias Lilith, she now hosts her own feminist show called Femme Fatale on CKCU, an Ottawa community radio station.
As the feminist activist movement’s gravitation toward popular media and social media in particular as a platform to start conversations, Nuttal’s concern for a deeper engagement with the public is reflective of the movement’s concerns on the limitations of social media.
For Nuttal, the radio is a platform to have discussions and engage people differently on feminist topics than she would through social media.
“It takes two seconds to read a tweet, but to sit there and listen to a half-hour talk show, you’re engaging a whole lot more and are more able to teach people something,” she says.
“A lot of issues we talk about in our work are not being talked about. So where do people learn this stuff? They learn it from the media, good, bad, or otherwise.”
However, Nuttal’s show also has a strong online community which provides crucial feedback and commentary on the issues she presents, highlighting the now ubiquitous use of social media in feminist activism to reach out to the public.
“Social media is free advertising for the work that we’re doing, to advertise events or to get people talking about a cause, but I think it’s also a really great public education tool,” says women’s rights activist Julie Lalonde.
“A lot of issues we talk about in our work are not being talked about. So where do people learn this stuff? They learn it from the media, good, bad, or otherwise,” she says.
Media as education
“The role of media is extremely important,” says Yamikani Msosa, the Public Education Coordinator for the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa. “If we just look at the role of Twitter, look at the central hashtags that have come out of there, like #RapesAreNeverReported. Those discussions have become extremely important.”
Msosa, who gives talks to educate people about sexual violence, says she spends an enormous amount of time engaging on social media. Now that so many people have cellphones and have access to the internet, she says it empowers activists to put out their own information rather than leaving it to the mainstream media to get started.
“They don’t have to wait for CBC or CTV to pick up,” she says. “They can create their own stories. The media can help facilitate that, but it’s great that people can create their own news.”
“We need to not look at social media as this utopic space where everything can happen and everything is great,”
However, as social media activity becomes increasingly popular, it also becomes increasingly concentrated. Of all adults that spent time online in 2013, 71 per cent used Facebook, and 23 per cent used Twitter, according to the Pew Research Centre.
Rena Bivens, a doctoral fellow at Carleton University, argues that we need to better understand how social media is programmed in order to use it effectively as a tool for feminist activism.
“We need to not look at social media as this utopic space where everything can happen and everything is great and which you should spend all your time and resources on,” she says.
Bivens says that messages can be drowned out by the sheer multitude of other posts in people’s social media feeds. While organizations posting on Facebook might expect to have their online posts seen by every single one of their followers, research shows that only around one per cent of them will actually see it, according to Bivens.
She adds that the majority of mainstream social media platforms are designed to turn a profit rather than propagate activist messages. While these platforms can still be beneficial to feminist activism, Bivens says that it’s important to find ways to work around their limitations.
“Those are the kinds of questions that we have to ask,” she says. “What are the features of this particular platform? What is really possible here, and how can we do things differently?”
Msosa echoes the sentiment, saying that it is important to choose the appropriate platform for specific kinds of activism. For example, she says that Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters, may not be the best place to express a particularly nuanced idea.
Even a little can do a lot
However, Bivens notes that even short messages like tweets can have an impact. She says sexual violence activism often aims to reach out with quick messages to people in abusive relationships in order to intervene on their behalf.
“Sometimes just a little bit will get someone thinking,” she says.
Lalonde says that an increased engagement from feminists with traditional and social media has brought about a change in the narratives that surround feminist issues, which is why she considers it a crucial part of her activism.
“I don’t see as many straight up oppressive comments from the media,” she says. “I mean, it still happens, but they get fewer and fewer because there’s a legacy of people like myself who is talking to the media about the issues differently.”
“Unfortunately, there are very few consequences for what people say online.”
However, the internet is still plagued with users who, cloaked under the veil of anonymity, are enabled to post truly hateful comments. Bivens points to the heinous things posted about Amanda Todd on social media even after her death as an all-too-common example of this phenomenon.
Being such a public figure, Lalonde often finds herself the target of graphic threats and insults. She no longer reads anything written online about her, and goes to great pains to protect her privacy to avoid receiving hateful messages, electronic or otherwise.
“Unfortunately, there are very few consequences for what people say online. Which is garbage, but we also have to talk about that more,” she says.
Hands on enough?
In addition to hateful comments, Nuttal says that another issue concerning feminism is the tendency of some to criticize activism that takes place solely online, through actions like sharing posts or signing online petitions.
“Feminist activism takes place in so many different ways that it’s hard to place them in a hierarchy like that,” she says. “It’s problematic, since it limits people’s accessibility to feminist ideas.”
Lalonde recognizes both sides of the argument, although she maintains that front-line activism ultimately has a bigger impact.
“I get that for a lot of people, traditional activism is not as accessible to them, while being online is,” she says. “I think that both need each other, but I do think that it’s the traditional, boring, less glamorous stuff like volunteering and organizing events that actually leads to social change.”
For Nuttal, not all people need to fight the same battles.
“By connecting through media, people all around the world being exposed to feminist ideas, and not just western feminism. We actually can get voices from across the world,” she says.
“We’re reimagining ideas all the time, every day, and that’s totally cool.”
