Between Community and Commodity? An Ethnography of Subscription-Based Digital Feminist Communities

Increasing numbers of people including individuals, online communities, and influencers, are migrating from dominant social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter to smaller, less-public social media platforms such as Discord and Mighty Networks. Within this shift, feminist groups are notably visible - from private community platforms to private messaging groups. Often these groups are subscription-based: members pay a monthly subscription fee through platforms such as Patreon to access the community space, view content, chat with other members, and attend events. Usually these groups have much smaller memberships than popular social media platforms - around 100-300 members. While subscription-based feminist communities perhaps represent changing digital desires for smaller spaces, they are also part of the wider landscape of a turn to the subscription economy, of which feminist groups are again notably visible. This includes a variety of feminist subscription services: book clubs, podcasts, stationery, and exercise classes. The popularity of the subscription economy within digital feminism raises interesting questions for feminist scholars, who are increasingly interested in the relationship between contemporary feminism and the digital economy and namely, the ways in which the digital economy is shaping feminist activism, knowledge production and community-building.

In this project, building on scholarship which critically engages with the entanglement of feminism and the digital economy, I consider the emergence of subscription-based feminist communities through a digital ethnography of three UK-based feminist subscription services which offer private digital community spaces. I ask: how are the tensions of community and commodity negotiated and managed by both the creators building subscription-based communities and the members participating in them; what kinds of feminist subjectivities and feminist politics emerge in subscription-based feminist communities; and what can subscription-based feminist communities tell us about (i) the relationship between feminism, commercialisation and monetisation, and the digital economy, (ii) community-building in a time of economic strain, such as the ongoing cost of living crisis, retreat of government funding for arts, culture and media initiatives, and increase in self-funded, crowd-sourced groups, and (iii) the emergence and popularity of the subscription economy more broadly.

To answer these questions, this project employs a variety of ethnographic methods: (i) discourse analysis of a range of materials from subscription-based feminist communities, including social media content, mailing lists, and websites, (ii) participant observation of three subscription-based digital feminist communities, including participant observation of forum spaces and online and in-person events, (iii) zine-making focus groups with community members and community organisers, (iv) in-depth, semi-structures interviews with community members and organisers, and (v) visual map-making of subscription-based digital feminist communities forum spaces to explore patterns of interaction and less-readily visible elements of digital interactions including algorithms. I will thus examine the patterning of digital feminist subjectivities, the processes through which community is invoked, how communities are built online, the effects of monetisation, and how subscription-based digital feminist communities interact with, and are shaped by, various intersectional factors including gender, sexuality, class, race, age, and location. In understanding these questions and focusing on the ways in which the subscription economy is shaping digital feminist communities, I will explore the entangled relationship of feminism and the digital economy, and within this context, how feminists are trying to build and maintain more hopeful digital presents and futures.