Designing feminist reception studies in the new media environment: #MeToo, Tinder, and Feminist Culture Wars in the Post-Gender and Post-Reception Era

In this piece I treat a series of separate phenomena and events that have posed particular challenges to the terrain of feminist reception research as it seeks to grapple with these new elements of the media landscape: the #MeToo movement with its attendant publicity around the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault which were shaped by the "media-ready feminism" of mainstream media; reception of a popular media representation of work-life balance; gendered use of online dating apps, the associated ubiquity of "hookup culture", and what it means for feminist reception study when reception means active use but within a context of structured discrimination; and the movement critiquing the lack of representation of women and racial and other groups in the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Each has challenged previous notions of how to conduct feminist media reception research.