Jilly Boyce Kay

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of mediated women's anger in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It asks: what does it mean that the historic rise in the visibility of women's anger (at sexism, misogyny and gendered abuse) emerged at the same historical moment as the rise of reactionary forms of political anger (associated with authoritarian populism, ethnonationalisms, misogyny, racism and the ‘anti-gender’ movement)? By putting two very different ‘tales’ about anger in the 21st century in dialogue – two tales which are seldom analyzed or considered in relation to each other – I hope to contribute to the growing body of feminist scholarship which interrogates the complex politics of mediated anger, as well as the perplexing mutations of popular feminism in an era of what Pankaj Mishra calls the ‘age of anger’. In particular, the article argues that a media theory of anger is required to understand the ways that women's anger is shaped, fomented and directed through the highly specific communicative architectures of contemporary digital media. While scholars have extensively theorized and investigated the reactionary politics of the manopshere, I argue that we can also find similar logics of bio-essentialism, political fatalism and hatred of social justice in what I call the femosphere. This is a gender-flipped version, or ‘mirroring’ of the manosphere, which has its own communities, influencers and intellectual ‘gurus’. In this way I argue that popular feminism – or at least significant strands of it – has taken a reactionary turn, and that some of the affective energies associated with #MeToo have become shaped by, entangled with and fused with the aggression, nihilism and anti-equality logics of the ‘age of anger’.