Feminism in the troll space: Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl, social media, and the networked book

Abstract

Clementine Ford’s memoir/manifesto hybrid, Fight Like a Girl, was hailed as a significant contribution to feminist debate in Australia when it was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016. The book is one stage in Ford’s considerable media career, developed across traditional journalism, public speaking, and social media. It can be situated in the context of a recent Anglophone publishing trend of similar hybrids between feminist manifesto and memoir, as well as—as evidenced by its cover quote from Anne Summers—being part of a much longer history of Australian feminist publishing. This article positions Fight Like a Girl as a networked text, exploring its close and constitutive relationship to Ford’s social media presence and its online reception. Both book and reception tap into online feminist conversations and mainstream public debates about feminism in the wake of identity politics, trolling and shaming, and the gendered nature of contemporary online spaces. Analysing conversations on Facebook and Twitter and reviews across Goodreads and more traditional media outlets, this article explores the extent to which the book reconfigures, intensifies or enters into existing conversations as it moves through the networked space of post-digital Australian literature. Show more