The Guerrilla Feminist – Progressive.org

I have never craved danger, because I have lived too many lives of it. I’ve witnessed and experienced violence online and offline and been told repeatedly, “It’s not a big deal.” I’m chronically hypervigilant from various traumas, and the Internet does not assuage this. Being online is messy, beautiful, and loud with too many heartbeats. It won’t get us free, but it’s a helpful tool for many of us to continue to exist in a world that doesn’t care if we live or die. 

Social justice issues have received much more visibility through the use of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. For me, digital activism means using social media as a tool of respair. I learned of this fourteenth-century word from a 2017 article in The Economist. “Respair” means the “return of hope after a period of despair.” Perhaps the nineties and early aughts weren’t exactly a period of despair, but it may have felt like it to millennials in various marginalized communities. If it didn’t feel like despair to us then, it certainly does now as we try to navigate and survive a global pandemic, multiple genocides, and increased fascism. In the early aughts, we wanted more ways to collaborate and more efficient ways to discuss global injustices so we could do something about them. The immediacy of digital activism allows for instantaneous communication, visibility, and resistance. It allows for our voices to be heard—on our terms. Social media platforms—never static entities—continue to reinvent themselves in (often) not great ways. Thus, this book only captures what was happening at the time of my writing (between 2015 and 2024).

I have found belonging in online spaces more than I’ve found it offline. This grew exponentially when I created the “Guerrilla Feminism” Facebook page in 2011 and its Instagram account in 2013. I’m an elder millennial who had a childhood without the Internet. I was a teenager when I first got it. During my time online, I have witnessed courageous vulnerability in private Facebook groups for survivors of sexual violence. I have taken advice from people on Herpblr, the online hashtag associated with Tumblr’s herpes-positive community. I’ve swam through the Sensory Processing Disorder Reddit board, seeing myself in each post. I, too, have been rejected for who and what I am. I, too, wanted to create something where people felt like they belonged—even if just for a moment while they browsed my posts on social media.

These essays are about my history and present on social media and the broader Internet, as I search incessantly for belonging. The first essay discusses my childhood, upbringing, and the background of Guerrilla Feminism. The second is about how I’ve navigated my disabilities amidst feelings of unworthiness. The third focuses on herpes and finding belonging with other herpes-positive folks. The fourth is about my trash bag-size dating trauma. The fifth discusses the act of trauma storytelling online for clout and the concerns I have with seeing and participating in this. The sixth speaks to hypervigilance and what this can mean for our movements. The seventh focuses on beauty filters, artificial intelligence, and aging. The eighth is about my ambivalence around motherhood/parenting. The ninth is about friendship during a global pandemic and multiple genocides. The final essay discusses my current fears about using social media for activism and asking where we go from here. All of these essays have an ongoing thread of searching for, finding, and losing community in online spaces and off.

This is a love letter to all of us who have found (and still find) belonging in online spaces. For those of us who cozied up to medical Reddit threads that made us breathe a sigh of relief, felt believed when we joined a private Facebook group about feminism that acted as a digital consciousness-raising group, and settled into the unsettling stories of #MeToo on Instagram and Twitter because we saw ourselves in them. We are here online and off. We can find these spaces online and off. We belong to ourselves and each other. All I’ve ever wanted in my life were friends, co-conspirators, love. I have this in some ways, and in others I’m still searching, longing. I think of the Internet as my online playground. It can be messy, loud, and crowded. It can also feel like a peaceful cottage in the woods, depending on the spaces (and people) you find. I write about and hold both/and all of this. As a human with multiple marginalized identities, I have struggled to find and feel belonging because of disabilities, illnesses, trauma, and online abuse. This is a book about a life of ambivalence, hypervigilance, and a never-ending search for belonging and love.

People keep punching me in the face on the Internet. Everything I post is problematic. Everything I am is vexing. When I post about my personal experiences within my varied marginalized identities on my personal Instagram account, I’m told I’m taking up space. I am not the “right” kind of disabled. I am not the “right” kind of former sex worker. I am not the “right” kind of queer. I am not the “right” kind of feminist. I have spent years apologizing for who and what I am. I have spent years trying to erase myself. I wrote a tweet once that said: “Some of you have never had to change and grow in front of hundreds of thousands of people and it shows.” Even those who follow me expect me to be infallible. I’m in the panopticon and my followers are in the guard tower. I can’t live inside this pressure cooker. I have always tried to be open and honest when I have fucked up, and yet, that’s not good enough. In the online world, you are either good or bad—there is no nuance, no in-between, no shapeshifting. I want to disappear. I want to be a bog witch nestled somewhere off grid where no one knows me and those who do can’t find me. Baba Yaga was misunderstood.

At its core, social media is meant as a distraction. It doesn’t like nuance, and it’s set up to add to our already hypervigilant and fragmented selves. Author Aurora Levins Morales writes, “We are a society of people living in a state of post-traumatic shock: amnesiac, dissociated, continually distracting ourselves from the repetitive injuries of widespread collective violence.” I understand the protective reasoning for people to continuously distract themselves, but it doesn’t help any of us. For example, pretending we aren’t all witnessing the Palestinian genocide at the hands of Israel and the United States on Instagram doesn’t disappear this pain and trauma. We owe it to humanity to look, to watch, to cry. Using social media in this way is subverting its intended use of distraction. We are instead practicing hyperawareness and attention.

When I think of the Internet these days, I immediately feel paranoid and unsettled in my body. My stomach swirls, my jaw clenches, my fingers freeze. Opening up Instagram stokes my ever-present hypervigilance. I don’t feel like I belong in these spaces anymore. Maybe I never did. I don’t know if I want to belong in the current digital climate. With callouts, misinformation, and feminist infighting, I’m feeling more ambivalent about my presence in online worlds. But if I can’t find belonging where I once used to, what does that mean? What does that say about me?

Despite having a large following on social media, I am planning my exit, or at least planning to divest from Instagram. I’m at the point where I don’t want to build community online unless it’s private and small. I question how community can be built on social media when there is typically a “follower” and a “leader.” I gag at users with large followings who talk about what a great “community” they have. It’s not a community—it’s a performer with an audience. It’s a parasocial relationship. It’s not reciprocal on either end and there’s a clear hierarchy and power dynamic. We simply cannot use social media platforms as our only method of mobilizing and organizing. We can barely use it to disperse factual information, and these platforms are always changing. We can’t trust the algorithms. We can’t trust these systems that keep us in a holding pattern of staying on social media. The platforms will eventually die out. It’s far too dangerous to depend on Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter for our ideas and our communication. Many of us use these apps to knowingly or unknowingly engage in distractive callouts, “cancellation,” and disinformation.

The fragmentation that occurs online spreads like frost. There are still entire groups of people committed to callouts as their brand of “activism.” A callout is attention-grabbing, both for the person being called out and any witnesses. It’s meant to be this way. It needs to be. Callouts aren’t all negative, though they’re often talked about like they are. They can be quite helpful in curtailing and/or ending harm caused by an individual. Callouts, when sincere and respectful of all parties, can be beautiful messy moments of learning and growth in real time. The issue with callouts on social media, however, is that the entire experience becomes a spectacle. Any audience, even a “feminist” or “social justice” one, loves a good spectacle. Hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of people are watching. It’s free entertainment that never ends, because social media apps don’t have open and close hours. I’m concerned that the Internet has made us all so detached and desensitized, we forget, or choose not to see, someone’s humanity. 

Excerpted from the book The Guerrilla Feminist: A Search for Belonging Online and Offline by LaChrista Greco. From Iskra Books. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission.