Quiet Publics and Lowercase Feminism

This chapter explores the online-offline grounding spaces and rhythms helping young feminists to endure, both emotionally and intellectually. It highlights “quiet publics”: spatiotemporalities outside of formal protests, organizing, and activism that sustained the participants. These were spaces where the “noise” of constant, immediate reaction and the fast flow of news could be muffled. Such spaces felt slightly removed from the feminist pulse, not squarely within or on it; more feminist-adjacent than directly oppositional. Traversing online and offline, these were bounded spaces of limited duration that allowed a diffuse sense of attention to experience, and social recognition, without scrutiny.