Social media has emerged as a significant, though uneven, tool of empowerment for women‘s activism in South Africa. It has enabled women, particularly Black women, to mobilise across geographic and institutional boundaries, to voice experiences of gender based violence, and to produce alternative narratives that challenge dominant media representations (Baer 2016; Maluleke and Moyer 2020). However, access to this digital terrain is shaped by race, class, education and language, resulting in differentiated experiences of participation, visibility and political influence (Daniels 2016; Lewis and Orderson 2022). While younger and digitally fluent women have leveraged social media to organise and campaign, many working class Black women remain marginalised within these spaces due to infrastructural, linguistic and economic barriers (Jackson 2018; Guillard 2016). This study therefore approaches social media not as a neutral or democratising platform but as a contested space where power is negotiated and Black women‘s activism is both enabled and constrained.
The study examines how social media reshapes the terrain of Black women‘s activism in South Africa by foregrounding the role of race, class, gender and space in structuring political agency. Drawing on an in depth qualitative study of the Black Womxn Caucus and its affiliates, Bereka Mosadi and Black Girls in Caucus, the research explores how digital platforms simultaneously reproduce inequality and create possibilities for resistance. The Black Womxn Caucus functions as an umbrella organisation with a core membership based at the University of the Witwatersrand. These members are largely university educated, professionally employed and active in civil society. In contrast, Bereka Mosadi and Black Girls in Caucus include young women, domestic workers and unemployed women living in informal settlements and low income households. University educated members tend to have greater access to digital resources, discursive power and social capital, while lower income members face structural exclusion from digital activism and are constrained by everyday struggles of material survival. These asymmetries reproduce exclusionary dynamics within a movement committed to challenging inequality, even as a shared political struggle continues to hold the organisations together.
- Women’s social movements in the digital age : exploring the socio-cultural and political impact of social media activism on black women’s political agency
- Mabona Elizabeth Machaba
- Luke Sinwell
- University of Johannesburg; Doctor of Philosophy (PHD)
- Doctor of Philosophy (PHD), University of Johannesburg
- 9963504807691
- University of Johannesburg
- University of Johannesburg; Department of Sociology; Faculty of Humanities
- English
- Dissertation