Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2025, 26 (1): 85-109 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2025.009
This article explores how feminist actors in Slovakia use Instagram to sustain po-litically engaged digital practices in a national context marked by institutional neglect and rising anti-gender discourse. While much scholarship on digital feminism has centred on An-glophone contexts and high-profile influencers, this study focuses on users operating outside mainstream visibility, who maintain a feminist presence not through spectacle but through careful negotiation with the platform’s emotional, aesthetic, and algorithmic demands. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the analysis shows how these users adapt to Instagram’s infrastructural pressures while striving to preserve critical integrity and ethical coherence. Their practices reveal a constant tension between the need for visibility and the risk of com-modification, between the desire to communicate structural critique and the constraints of platform legibility. In attending to these dilemmas, the article foregrounds feminist labour as a form of ethical endurance, enacted not through viral reach but through slow, situated, and relational modes of engagement.
Received: November 3, 2024; Revised: June 23, 2025; Accepted: July 1, 2025; Prepublished online: August 27, 2025; Published: August 31, 2025 Show citation
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