Feminist Fabulation as "Fighting Back"

Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody^1*Marissa Grace Willcox²

• ¹Arts and Humanities Institute, Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies and Philosophy, Maynooth University, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
• ²University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Digital feminist fabulations can be a means of speaking back to patriarchal ideologies that determine algorithmic behaviour in online spaces. After Bergson (1932Bergson ( /1977) ) and Deleuze and Guattari (1994) we take up we take up Haraway's (2013Haraway's ( , 2016) ) concept of fabulation as radical creativity for collective transformation, to show how feminist and queer art in digital spaces provides a means of refusing patriarchal 1 practices of censorship via which some bodies are given visibility in public space and others are not. Drawing from a 4-year study following 10 feminist and queer artists on Instagram, we analyse a case study that contextualises how feminist fabulation in digital spaces can "fight back" against content moderation practices on social media platforms. We examine the work of Christine Yahya (@pink_bits) who is a bisexual, feminist artist and graphic designer living and working in Sydney, Australia. Christine is Armenian-Australian. She illustrates people and bodies "that we are told to hide" and in doing so, she expresses the daily realities of embodying diversity, including gender, sexuality, disability, masturbation, menstruation, mental illness, physical illness, fat activism, body positivity and race. Her practice of illustrating "bodies we are told to hide" occurs in contrast to the types of art, images and corporealities that are allowed in social media spaces. On Instagram, a largely visual platform, strict moderation guidelines around nudity, sex, genitals or anything which goes beyond standardised norms of "acceptability" can lead to the deletion or shadowbanning of work in a process of content removal, or, as Gillespie (2022) notes, "content reduction". For Christine, shadowbanning and content removal has led to a process of feminist fabulation, as they take content reduction as a call to create images that trouble regulatory boundaries. Christine's visual art presents diverse perspectives on the non-normative world and can be seen as a practice of feminist digital fabulation: a method for making new meanings.