#WomenAgainstFeminism - Gender Knowledge and Anti-Feminist Meaning-Making by Women Anti-Feminist Influencers on TikTok and Instagram.

TradWives, Dating Couches, Christfluencer and Co. - various types of influencers spread anti-feminist ideas on social media platforms, aiming to mainstream their ideology. This dissertation project addresses the question of how women anti-feminist influencers engage in the formation of gender knowledge and anti-feminist meaning-making on visual social media platforms. Through digital ethnography and a complex mapping process grounded in theoretical sampling and close reading, the study uncovers different roles women anti-feminist influencers adopt to disseminate anti-feminism as an ideology on TikTok and Instagram. Furthermore, by employing a multimodal qualitative content analysis, this study considers the multimodality inherent to these platforms and focuses on the interaction between different modes of communication, such as audio, visual, and text, while identifying narratives and (narrative) practices used by the influencers to engage in anti-feminist meaning-making and to shape gender knowledge. Thus, the analysis reveals not only which narratives the influencers use but also which practices are employed to convey these anti-feminist narratives. Further, some of these practices carry narrative elements themselves. They are therefore referred to as narrative practices. For example, an influencer spread the narrative of “feminism” being a threat to “the family” through a TikTok or Instagram Reel while music from the 1950s is playing in the background. Thus, the influencer uses nostalgic elements as a practice to convey the narrative of “feminism” being a threat to “the family”, while through the practice itself, the idea of an idealized past is told. In addition to this qualitative approach, a quantitative content analysis enables the examination of the distribution of these narratives and (narrative) practices on Instagram and TikTok, as well as the distribution of narratives and (narrative) practices across different types of women anti-feminist influencers (e.g. Political Commentators, Tradwives etc.). The findings of this dissertation contribute to our understanding of contemporary (online) anti-feminism by revealing anti-feminist narratives and (narrative) practices used to convey these narratives while pointing to the unique role that women play as anti-feminist spokespersons. The findings show how women anti-feminist influencers mainstream their transphobic and binary understanding of gender and how various types of influencers express the same anti-feminist narratives but use different (narrative) practices to do so.