Parasocial Feminism and Social Media Communities: Subjective Empowerment and its Ambivalences

Contemporary digital feminist activism is often embodied and represented through individual influencer accounts, which enable a form of parasocial feminism, likely being effective due to parasocial mechanisms and their significance for the social self. This study explores the influence and meaning of parasocial feminism for followers. To this end, 46 narratives by social media followers of an influencer who is a German artist and practices a distinct form of parasocial feminism known as #volanismus (“#volanism”), addressing misogyny, inequality and suppression through drawings and performance art in the form of online responses to hateful social media comments were analyzed. Applying a psychoanalytic paradigm, we investigate how content and parasocial community dynamics are subjectively experienced through explicit and latent layers of meaning. The findings reveal how parasocial feminism bears significant meaning on the subjective level for the self, but also in the form of practical relevance, shaping everyday life and social and relational dynamics (e.g., divorce, having another child, transforming sexual scripts). We discuss these findings in terms of resistance and group dynamics, with a particular focus on how social mechanisms are transformed under spreading parasociality, with social media communities becoming a key part of the social self and contemporary social organizing. We also highlight limitations, noting that online activism perpetuates an individualizing logic within contemporary liberal feminism and platform capitalism.