Jessalynn Keller

My research explores how feminist politics have been mediated across digital cultures over the past twenty-five years -- including within both institutional journalistic publications and more informal online cultures. Through multiple projects informed by ethnographic methods and textual analyses I argue that digital cultures have been significant spaces for the development and circulation of feminist politics and organizing. Yet, the Internet is always in flux, and remains an ambivalent space for feminists who must navigate corporate, for-profit social media platforms where misogyny, white supremacy, and other oppressions proliferate. As such, my research showcases both the opportunities and limitations afforded by a changing Internet, yet maintains that an analysis of gendered power is always essential to understanding the Internet as a cultural formation and technological artifact. 

I am currently writing my second solo-authored monograph tentatively titled The Feminist Blogosphere: How Feminist Went Digital in the New Millennium. The book traces a cultural history of the American aughts feminist blogosphere through interviews with twenty-one feminist bloggers and analysis of over thirty feminist blogs from the first decade of the twenty-first century. Through six chapters I interrogate how blogging functioned as an accessible feminist practice, decentering the established feminist organizations that dominated mainstream American feminist politics for thirty years prior, and shifting feminist politics and organizing to self-produced digital spaces. This transformation was not just technological, but a cultural one too; indeed, the feminism of the aughts blogosphere was more grassroots, younger, increasingly diverse, and aligned with the values, and affects of a developing Internet culture. While amplifying longstanding feminist issues, such as reproductive rights, gendered violence, and racism, young feminist bloggers worked as networked communities to make feminist politics relevant and exciting to a new generation of girls and women at a cultural moment that had been deemed postfeminist. In doing so, Making the Internet Feminist asserts that the aughts feminist blogsphere effectively germinated an influential millennial digital feminist culture that proliferated into the 2010s and beyond, informing pivotal activist movements such as the Women’s March and #MeToo.  

The Feminist Blogosphere is the first book that explores the history of the feminist Internet and its influence; in doing so, it intervenes in the presentist approach to feminist digital activism that dominates current scholarship. It also serves to document the contributions of a diversity of feminist bloggers often made invisible in mainstream narratives about the aughts feminist blogosphere, including women of color, queer, trans, disabled, and working-class folks. Finally, by framing the early aughts as a moment of reorienting feminism in relation to new digital media technologies, the book proposes a new way to think about a decade that is often remembered as one marked by sexism, misogyny, and conservative politics.  

Please find my publication list below. My research has been highly influential in the field of media and communications studies; it has been cited 4526 times (Google Scholar, June 2026) by my peers and is taught regularly in undergraduate and graduate courses at prestigious universities, including McGill University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California. Outside of academia my research has been used as expert evidence in Steven Galloway v. A.B. et al, a well-publicized, “landmark” 2021 defamation case in British Columbia that addressed issues of Twitter activism as a form of public participation. I regularly speak to local, national, and international journalists on issues that include sexism online, #MeToo/digital feminist activism, and celebrity culture and I delivered a Tedx talk on girls’ digital activism in 2018. 

Publications:

Peer-reviewed Books 

Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller. 2019. Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keller, Jessalynn and Maureen E. Ryan. 2018. Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture. Routledge: New York. 

Keller, Jessalynn. 2015. Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. Routledge: New York.

Book Under Preparation

Keller, Jessalynn. The Feminist Blogosphere: How Feminism Went Digital in the New Millennium.  Proposal Under Review.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

Paulsen Mulvey, Alora and Jessalynn Keller. 2023. “Brooms and Ballots: #WitchTheVote, the Nostalgic Internet and Intersectional Feminist Politics on Instagram.” Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231205594

Keller, Jessalynn. 2020. “A Politics of Snap: Teen Vogue’s Public Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45 (4): 817-843.

Keller, Jessalynn. 2019. “’Oh, She’s a Tumblr Feminist:’ Exploring the Platform Vernacular of Girls’ Social Media Feminisms.” Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119867442

Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose. 2019. “Digitalized Narratives of Sexual Violence: Making Sexual Violence Felt and Known Through Digital Disclosures.” New Media & Society21 (6): 1290 – 1310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818820069.

Keller, Jessalynn, Kaitlynn Mendes and Jessica Ringrose. 2018. “Speaking ‘Unspeakable’ Things: Documenting Digital Responses to Rape Culture.” Journal of Gender Studies 27 (1): 22-36.

Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalynn Keller. 2016. “Why ‘intergenerational feminist media studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16 (4): 557-572. 

Keller, Jessalynn. 2015. “Girl Power’s Last Chance? Tavi Gevinson, Feminism, and Girls’ Media Culture.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 29 (2): 274-285.

Keller, Jessalynn. 2014. “Fiercely Real?: Tyra Banks and the Making of New Media Celebrity.” Feminist Media Studies 14 (1): 147-164.

Keller, Jessalynn. 2012. “Virtual Feminisms: Girls’ Blogging Communities, Feminist Activism, and Participatory Politics.” Information, Communication & Society 15 (3): 429-447.

Keller, Jessalynn. 2011. “Feminist Editors and the New Girl Glossies: Fashionable Feminism or Just Another Sexist Rag?” Women’s Studies International Forum 34 (1): 1-12.

Journal Article Under Preparation

Kaul, Shena, Aimee Koristka and Jessalynn Keller. “Taylor Swift and the Performative Ambiguity of The Life of a Showgirl.” Planned submission to Feminist Media Studies, spring 2026.

Edited Special Issue Journals

Keller, Jessalynn, Jo Littler, and Alison Winch. 2016. “An Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies: Conflicts and Connectivities.” Special issue of Feminist Media Studies. 16 (4). 

Book Chapters

Keller, Jessalynn. 2024. “The Internet of Feminist Girls: Re-reading Gendered Internet Histories.” Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies, edited by Sharon Mazzarella, pp. 281-292.

Keller, Jessalynn. 2022. “Beware the Dancing Communist: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Snap-lash and the Politics of Embodied Joy.” Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture, edited by Diane Negra and Michele White, pp. 158-175. New York: Routledge.

Keller, Jessalynn and Alison Harvey. 2018. “Kendall & Kylie: Girl Affects, Celebrity, and Digital Gaming in Millennial Girl Culture.” Appified: Mundane Software and the Rise of the Apps, edited by Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, 308 - 316. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 

Keller, Jessalynn. 2018. “Crop Tops and Solidarity Selfies: Understanding the Disruptive Politics of Girls’ Hashtag Feminism.” Mediated Girlhoods 2, Ed. Morgan Genevieve Blue and Mary Celeste Kearney, 157-173. New York: Peter Lang. 

Keller, Jessalynn. 2016. “Making Activism Accessible: Exploring Girls’ Blogs as Sites of Contemporary Feminist Activism.” The Politics of Place: Contemporary Paradigms for Research in Girlhood Studies, edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, 261-278. New York: Berghahn Books. 

Keller, Jessalynn. 2012. “‘It’s a Hard Job Being an Indian Feminist’: Mapping Feminist Identities and ‘Close Encounters’ on the Feminist Blogosphere.” Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks, and Cultural Citizenships, edited by Elke Zobl and Rosa Reitsamer, 136-145. Germany: Transcript. 

Journal Forum Articles

Keller, Jessalynn. 2021. “ ‘This Is Oil Country:’ Mediated Transnational Girlhood, Greta Thunberg, and Patriarchal Petrocultures.” Feminist Media Studies 21 (4): 682-686.

Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller. 2018. “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture Through Digital Feminist Activism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies25 (2): 236-246.

Keller, Jessalynn, Morgan Blue, Mary Celeste Kearney, Kirsten Pike, and Sarah Projansky. 2015. “Mapping New Methodological Approaches to Girls’ Media Studies: Reflections from the Field.” Journal of Children and Media, 9 (4): 528-535. 

Keller, Jessalynn and Jessica Ringrose. 2015. “‘But then feminism goes out the window!’ Exploring teenage girls’ critical response to celebrity feminism.” Celebrity Studies, 6 (1), 132-135.