Fearful or fearless? The impact of fear on feminist activism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fear is an emotion we generally try to avoid. It is associated with reflexes such as immobility, flight or, in the case of activism, demobilization. This article partially questions this received wisdom based on empirical research with feminists in Quebec (Canada) and Romandie (Switzerland). This article suggests that fear can also sometimes be a ‘drive to action’ for feminists and, at other times, rein in their activism. It first examines the varying effects of fear on feminist activism and links these to the different positioning of feminists within social relations of race, class and sexuality. Second, it suggests that the origin of the fear, its interactions with other emotions, and the emotional work performed by interviewees were other key factors shaping the impact of fear on their activism. In other words, we will discuss four main emotional sequences which take different directions depending on whether the fear stems from police violence, male violence, fear for one’s reputation or fear of exclusion. We will also look at the effects they give rise to: protective mechanisms, censorship, deepening knowledge and partial withdrawal from majority feminist circles. The article further addresses the fear of male violence which pushes many to become involved in the feminist movement. Combined with anger and emotional work to reduce its intensity, fear acts as a true driving force for action. Additionally, the article shows that factors which impede feminist activism are mostly related to a minority position in the movement and repeated anti-feminist threats.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it