Truth and Discursive Activism: The Promise and Perils of Hashtag Feminism

I explore both the potential and the perils of Twitter as a space for constituting a Deweyan public aimed at transforming how "we" (here, I mean not only citizens of the United States but global citizens) affectively receive and thereby respond to and resist sexual violation. In the course of this brief exploration, I operate with a pragmatic notion of "truth," namely, as democratically formulating a hypothesis concerning the nature of a social problem that enables fruitful amelioration of the problem. I specifically focus on the viral #WhyIDidntReport Twitter campaign provoked by Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court hearing.