#JusticeforLiz: Power and Privilege in Digital Transnational Women's Rights Activism

For those who have access to them, social and digital media provide unparalleled opportunities for crossing borders of all kinds, allowing advocates for women’s rights to organise around, through, and despite national and cultural divides. In Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s useful and insightful definition of transnational feminism, it is through these practices of border crossing—including interactions facilitated via digital and social media—that unequal power relations within and between feminisms are revealed (2000, 73). Indeed, in its discussions of these media, Feminist Media Studies has considered feminists’ continuing “struggle with issues of privilege and difference in online spaces” (Laura Portwood-Stacer and Susan Berridge 2014). In this essay I turn my attention to the specificities of this struggle in relation to campaigns addressing Violence Against Women, as illustrated by a recent Kenyan campaign called #JusticeforLiz.