What can feminist collectives teach media practitioners about building a more just, equal and inclusive future? Transnational feminist collectives typically work across national borders to fight for a better future, proposing new narratives while simultaneously appropriating mainstream media frameworks to achieve their goals. Can media practitioners adopt similar approaches to resist silencing tactics and build resilient, cross-border collaborations?
To answer these questions and many more, a feminist collective of doctoral students came together this Fall to bring Transnational Feminist Networks to the Annenberg School for Communication. They designed and curated a symposium and art exhibition dedicated to exploring how feminist solidarities across the globe are formed and how they resist oppressive structures. Through the event, panelists and invited artists reflected on the everyday work they collectively engage in (both offline and online) to fight gender-based discrimination and violence.
Over the past half-decade, the relationship between feminist movements and mainstream media has changed. From hashtag campaigns like #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos to mass mobilizations like the Women’s Strike and Abortion Rights Marches, feminist movements have “gone viral,” garnering global media coverage.. However, most media coverage only tells a partial story of these feminist movements. It often fails to capture the extent of their transnational collective organizing or the scope of their agenda for cultural change and social transformation. What is often obscured by the headlines is the organization of networks of solidarity, the efforts involved in challenging systemic injustices and the mobilization for a future that dismantles gender-based violence and inequity.
These practices of solidarity, which are often overlooked by the hegemonic structures of the Global North, aim to dismantle the conditions that perpetuate inequalities and marginalization. The activists who are part of these transnational feminist collectives pull from the tools created by these hegemonic powers to build grassroots solidarities that allow them to envision new futures and work to accomplish them in the present.
From the perspective of the current global context marked by polarized confrontations, crises and human rights violations, where media practitioners face silencing and co-optation when performing their jobs, the image of transnational feminist collectives offers a model for media practitioners to develop new forms of resistance and imagine alternative futures.
These collectives offer practical approaches to navigating censorship, building resilient global alliances and amplifying unheard voices to contribute to a future centered on inclusivity and justice. As we explored these practical approaches at our symposium and art exhibition, four themes came to light: Building community across platforms, adopting an intersectional analytic, decolonizing reporting norms and promoting collective care.
Build Community on Platforms
Many panelists at the Transnational Feminist Networks Symposium talked about the interconnection between digital media and socio-political activism. Addressing the case of South Korea, Jinsook Kim presented her overview of the 4B movement (Four Nos: no sex, no giving birth, no dating men and no marriage with men) on Twitter and Instagram, which is enabling activists to envision and discuss alternatives for a future reimagined without patriarchal constraints. As this example illustrates, feminist activists mobilize their resources to promote the creation of social ties that transcend national boundaries in pursuing a common agenda, such as reproductive rights or the end of gender-based discrimination and violence, creating awareness around it and promoting participation. In doing so, they reshape these media platforms into spaces that allow for the formation of new narratives based on the spirit of solidarity. By prioritizing collective actions over individual success while amplifying voices through commitment to the community, these efforts reinforce how community can be forged through shared purpose and mutual support.
What does this say to media practitioners? Like feminist collectives, media practitioners could use digital platforms to build community and sustain cross-border connections that share the same values and goals. Feminist collectivism offers a vision of media as a platform for solidarity rather than competition. By working as part of a collective, media practitioners—who do not readily identify community-building as a goal—could share resources, exchange information and promote and celebrate each other’s work. As such, media practitioners could work together to challenge dominant narratives, to amplify marginalized voices and counter global injustices.
Adopt an Intersectional Analytic
The work of these feminist collectives embodies an intersectional lens, addressing multiple systems of oppression, including gender, race, class and nationality. As panelist Inderpal Grewal noted, these dimensions of identity are deeply linked to histories of colonization, which continue to shape colonial and imperial spaces today. Yet, recognizing these connections also creates opportunities for solidarity. When covering conflicts that involve marginalized or oppressed groups, media practitioners can adopt a similar approach, crafting narratives that reflect the multidimensionality of those involved. By acknowledging the intersecting dimensions of oppression, media practitioners can achieve more accurate and just representations, portraying marginalized communities with the full complexity of their experiences and rejecting oversimplification or stereotypes.
Decolonize Reporting Norms
Another way of adopting part of transnational feminist network strategies is to rethink media practices from a decolonial perspective. What does that mean in the context of media? It means critically rethinking reporting norms to amplify voices and perspectives from unrepresented or underrepresented regions. These areas are often at the center of conflicts or crises, but their perspectives are unheard of or reduced by Western-centered narratives. As panelist Tamara Kharroub illustrated in the context of Gaza, women are creating alternative spaces for action that challenge the public-private distinction. By more fully incorporating local knowledges, media practitioners could help to counter biases and craft more balanced and multifaceted representations of global events. This shift would allow the media to avoid reinforcing single-sided stories and address the longstanding injustices that shape the realities of these regions.
Promote Collective Care
The final element at the heart of building solidarity networks is collective care, through which we can create spaces where members can support shared ideas and care for each other through mutual support. Some of the pieces at the exhibition accompanying the symposium reinforced this message. For example, in her short film I Take Care of You and (We) Survive, visual artist Okyoung Noh focused on showing the hands and ways of touching among care workers (e.g., masseuses), exploring how these gestures provide care. Her work highlighted a dual nature of care work, showing it as a source of healing and a site of contention. Like activism, media work involves an emotional weight that is difficult to sustain in isolation. Especially in the context of increased violence against media practitioners, it is essential to create spaces to share experiences, reflect together and learn from one another. In this sense, collective care becomes more than support; it is a way of seeing the world as part of something larger. Collective care could mitigate the risks media practitioners face when operating alone. This vision of collective care could create a media landscape rooted in community and committed to a future that resists oppressive structures.
There is much that mainstream media practitioners can gain from the orientation and approach of transnational feminist collectives, and there are many ways practitioners can embark on their own learning journey. For journalists, this may start with the production of nuanced coverage of the local feminist collectives in their regions, or choosing to cover feminist organizing outside their typical realm of reporting. For filmmakers and documentarians, this could involve collaborating with experts outside the Global North and ensuring their scripts reflect the intersectional reality of their characters’ lives. In all cases, it manifests on the ground by centering community, decolonizing daily practices and prioritizing mutual care. Media practitioners could engage in a distinctly feminist resistance that could transform the media environment.
Valentina Proust is a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and a member of the Center for Media at Risk Steering Committee. Her research focuses on how marginalized communities are represented in the media and how they create discourses of resistance against hegemonic narratives. With a particular emphasis on gender issues within the Global South, her work delves into the influence of cultural traumas on these communities, exploring how such traumas shape collective memory and identity formation while fostering solidarity, activism and social justice. Follow her here.