The Women’s March and the Borders of Belonging Rethinking Collective Space Through Transnational Feminism

Abstract

On January 21, 2017, the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., produced a striking protest image: two women standing shoulder to shoulder, fists raised, holding signs that called for solidarity across race, ability, gender identity, and class. Echoing a 1971 portrait of Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem, the image gained significant traction online—celebrated, critiqued, and debated across social media platforms. This paper introduces the concept of a “collective space” to describe the emotionally charged digital arenas, such as comment sections, where feminist discourse unfolds in real time. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theory of emotional stickiness and the frameworks of transnational feminism, I analyze 168 social media comments responding to this image, coding them for emotional tone and thematic patterns. The analysis reveals solidarity, critique, and identity negotiation occurring simultaneously, as users wrestle with feminism’s historical exclusions and its evolving intersectional commitments. By tracing these interactions, I show how collective spaces both foster belonging and reproduce exclusion, mirroring the tensions embedded in the broader feminist movement. These digital arenas are not incidental noise but vital sites of feminist praxis—spaces where emotions, histories, and politics collide, shaping the possibilities and limits of solidarity in the twenty-first century.