Policing ‘what a feminist looks like’: Interrogating digital misogyny across the visual and discursive cultures of social media, podcasts and generative Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This article examines how the popular feminist slogan ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ has evolved over the past decade in response to increasingly misogynist and racist socio-political and technocultural conditions. By comparing the visual and discursive life of the phrase in 2014 with its presence in today's digital and algorithmic cultures, we trace how the slogan has shifted from a celebratory affirmation of feminist visibility to a contested and often weaponized expression. Drawing on three interconnected datasets (1) tweets featuring the phrase, (2) references within manosphere content and (3) Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated images prompted by the phrase, we analyse how different digital contexts shape the visual and rhetorical framing of feminism. Across these platforms, we find that the phrase operates in dual and opposing ways as both an assertion of feminist presence and a tool of misogynist disparagement. We conceptualize this latter form as ‘the disinformation of misogyny’, where digital content and visual representations seek to invalidate feminists as credible or even imaginable subjects of knowledge. This dynamic, we argue, exemplifies how gendered disinformation reifies white supremacy and broader hierarchies of power in online spaces. Reflecting on these transformations, we call for renewed feminist commitments to reflexivity, standpoint and situated knowledge in the study and teaching of digital media. In the context of big data and AI image generation, such approaches are essential for understanding how visual and algorithmic systems mediate who can be seen, heard and recognized as a feminist in the contemporary technocultural landscape.