‘These Men Are Disgusting Losers’: Theorizing the Affective Economies of Digital Justice and Activism

Abstract Instagram and other social media have played a significant role in feminist activism. For phenomena such as street harassment—a form of sexual violence with ‘invisible’ harms—digital activism is one of the only ways survivors can advocate for social change. Although criminological scholarship has begun to draw connections between social media activism and justice for street harassment, there is a gap in this research in exploring the affordances of Instagram as a site that meets victim-survivors’ justice needs, as well as the role of interaction and commenting on content as a mode of justice-seeking. Utilizing content analysis, this paper examines the ways that two street harassment activist accounts have the potential to meet survivors’ justice needs. Further, we examine the affective qualities of digital justice, with a focus on the circulation of disgust and disapproval, arguing that digital justice is a felt experience.