Calling out or calling in? Feminist CCIs negotiate BLM, cancel culture, and activist selves online

This article examines the cultural impact of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests on Feminist CCIs (feminist creative and cultural organisations). Through contextualising these responses within pandemic precarity in London, this paper shows how the heightened digital character of BLM generated new pressures for Feminist CCIs to show they were responding to the global events, and in the right ways. By foregrounding a conjunctural analysis of how feminist organisations responded to these digital and branded landscapes, this paper brings scholarly research on digital feminist activism, intersectionality, and practices of monetisation into conversation with debates around woke-washing, BLM performativity, and corporate activism. The paper shows how the wider cultural conditions of “cancel culture” intensified the digital practices of Feminist CCIs, and how incentives to present “good” intersectional feminist politics, as well as fears of “getting it wrong,” governed these online activities. Further, this analysis homes in on the commercial pressures for Feminist CCIs to monetise their work during the wake of BLM and pandemic precarity. The article shows how Feminist CCIs simultaneously critique but also engage with— and indeed economically benefit from—corporations and brands in relation to anti-racism and social justice.