From Tweets to Tiktoks: Reimagining Religious Influence through Women’s Social Media Use

Submitted to Program Units
1: Contemporary Pagan Studies, Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit, Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Unit, Religion, Media, and Culture Unit, and Women and Religion Units
2: North American Religions Unit

This session examines women’s use of text, images, video, memes, and audio across various social media platforms and spanning four religious traditions in North America. By focusing on brujas on Instagram, Muslims on TikTok, evangelicals on Twitter, and Catholics on YouTube, the papers explore situated digital practices. How do women use media to contest dominant and hegemonic interpretations of religious texts and practices and put forth their own? How do they use humor, creativity, and referentiality to create digital content to assert authority and build community? What are some of the ways that the relationship between online and offline worlds are impacting religious experience? This papers’ session approaches these questions from a variety of perspectives to theorize some of the ways in which religious women’s use of diverse social network sites contribute to theorizing digital religion and digital archives and methods.

Papers

Kelsey Hanson Woodruff, Harvard University

"Why Is This Guy Preaching Again?": Rachel Held Evans and Feminist Counter-Messaging on Twitter

Abstract

In the 2010s, Twitter rose in popularity as a digital space for theological dialogue, debate, and grandstanding. For feminist Christians, Twitter activism was a vital form of activism with real-world consequences that was motivated by theological ideas about God’s ethical expectations. I argue that social media platforms were spaces in which evangelical women who were marginalized based on their gender and who grew up with an emphasis on evangelism could “inverse evangelize” conservative evangelicals with progressive theologies and progressive politics. By focusing on one well-known Twitter user, Rachel Held Evans, in her posts relating to two famous men, John Piper and Mark Driscoll, I examine the way that feminist women used Twitter posts to push against the logic of patriarchal theology. This paper shows how Evans, a woman who had less institutional power than either Piper or Driscoll, used Twitter to contradict their viewpoints in view of an evangelical and post-evangelical public.
Abtsam Saleh, Harvard University

“These are for girls only”: Experience, Authority, and the Practice of Naṣīḥa in Online Contexts

Abstract

When the “these are for girls only” meme went viral on TikTok in 2021, many Muslim women in North America used the meme to create content that comically addresses the commentary they receive about their Islamic practice and the boundaries they’ve established around it. This paper focuses on the concept of naṣīḥa, understood to be a discursive mode of communal regulation in accordance with constructed ideals, in digital contexts. It examines several TikTok videos in which Muslim women address their audience about who is or is not authorized to offer social commentary on their Islamic practice on the basis of shared experience. I explore these videos as sites of contestation surrounding authority, arguing that these women use their videos to counter hegemonic conceptions of who has the authority to determine proper practice. How might focusing on the concept of naṣīḥa, or social commentary, complicate scholarly understandings of top-down models of Islamic authority? This paper attempts to address this question.
Odalis Garcia Gorra, University of Texas

“Taking Spirit To Market”: Brujapreneurs Make Digital Sacred Space on Instagram

Abstract

Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in popular culture on the modern-day witch. To contest the erasure of Afro-Indigenous spiritual perspectives, this paper looks at how digital sacredness the Instagram accounts of self-identified brujas of Afro-Caribbean descent. By creating digital sacred spaces that become the basis for their activism, the bruja’s social media presence acts against larger hegemonic structures, such as white supremacy, colonialism/imperialism, racism, and homophobia. By enabling the divine via social media the brujas are able to have a voice in the world that would seek to silence them. Their social platforms allow their voices to be easily amplified (read: go viral) in ways that did not exist before. Ultimately, this paper seeks to begin conversations on how digital media has transformed newer generations to engage with the cosmologies of Afro-Indigenous religiosity.
Lauren Tassone, Harvard University

Do Nuns Just Want to Have Fun? #MediaNuns and the Millennial American Catholic Sister

Abstract

This paper examines the Roman Catholic sisters known as the Daughters of Saint Paul and their use of social media as part of their mission to use the media to evangelize. Through using modern forms, the Daughters of St. Paul emerge as leaders in Catholic media use. While their content challenges some stereotypes about Catholic nuns, their efforts seem primarily to serve recruitment goals, and their young millennial sisters are leading the efforts in making the nun life appear attractive to prospective future sisters that exist among their following. Through analyzing the Daughters of St. Paul’s use of Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube, this paper explores themes related to technology and religious traditions, technology and communal formation, virtual belonging, and politics and technology. Ultimately, while the Daughters of St. Paul are committed to using “new media,” they do so while preserving traditional aesthetics and messaging for the Catholic Church in America.
Leslie Polk, Union Theological Seminary

Conjuring Interiority: Womanist Reflections on Ancestor Veneration, Social Media, and a Philosophy of Aesthetics

Abstract

Philosophical approaches to Black aesthetics have included how Black human beings make meaning and see value in their everyday lives. The theorization of this cultural and social production has been essential to a philosophy of aesthetics, as shown through the work of Lewis R. Gordon and Paul C. Taylor. These philosophers have provided historical trajectories of Western philosophy and Black expressive culture to define blackness and racialization’s impact on how people show up in this world. Therefore, this paper seeks to come alongside Gordon and Taylor and explore the role of ancestor veneration in the project of Black value and meaning-making within technology. By drawing from womanist reflections on aesthetic interiority, I will examine the diasporic tradition of Southern Hoodoo on social media as a site for understanding how ancestors assist in the inner cultivation, transformation, and construction of individuals and communities.

Responding

Kristin Peterson, Boston College

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen

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Session Length

2 Hours

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Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Schedule Preference Other

Monday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Schedule Info

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Session Identifier

A23-211

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From Tweets to Tiktoks: Reimagining Religious Influence through Women’s Social Media Use

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