Digital intimate political geographies
The case of gender-based violence in the context of Kyrgyzstan on Instagram
Feminist political geographies have long emphasized the central role that digital technologies (e.g., smartphones, surveillance cameras, social media platforms, weapon technologies, etc.) play in the context of intimate geopolitics, affective nationalisms, embodied borders, and/or gender-based violence. Feminist political-geographical analyses focus on the ways in which digital technologies are interwoven with bodies and intimate everyday life in the (re)production of scalar and spatial power relations. Based on this understanding of digital intimate political geographies, my talk will examine the example of gender-based violence in the context of Kyrgyzstan. In Kyrgyzstan, a high prevalence of gender-based violence and the taboo of discussing gender and sexualities is pushing more and more people to turn to social media platforms such as Instagram to challenge entrenched societal norms and to fight gender-based violence. Drawing on a long-term Instagram ethnography and qualitative interviews in Kyrgyzstan, I show how Instagram users not only use the platform to disseminate information about the situation of those affected by gender-based violence thus shaping discourses on gender-based violence. Rather, I discuss how feminist social media activists strategize to advocate against gender-based violence. My analysis reveals how social media users build local, caring communities by centering, actively reproducing, and normalising embodied and emotional knowledge about gender-based violence on Instagram and taking it beyond the platform into mundane and often invisible acts of protest. While digital violence persists online, my findings indicate that social media provides possibilities for users to form new types of solidarity and advocacy.
Hörsaal 7, Neue Universität Heidelberg
14th July 2025, 11:15 – 12:45
Speaker
Ass. Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Militz
Universität Innsbruck
In her work, Elisabeth combines feminist cultural and political-geographical perspectives on bodies, affects, emotions, and digital technologies with empirical research on social media, body politics, nationalism, violence, and borders in the Global East. After completing her PhD at the University of Zurich on the topic of affective nationalism, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in various feminist geographic research labs at the Universities of St. Gallen, Bern, Texas at Austin, and Guelph to expand her research on the politics of emotions, marginalized sexualities, intimate technologies, and feminist social media research methodologies. Since 2022, she has been an assistant professor of social and digital geographies at the University of Innsbruck. Together with her working group “Bodies, Digitalisation and Space,” she currently explores what we can learn through focusing on the intimate scales of social media platforms and national borders.
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Tabea Bork-Hüffer
Heidelberg Universität
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