“We Go Online to Call Them to the Street”: Multidirectional Flows in Hybrid Digital Feminism

Although contemporary feminist practices tend to be imagined as “digital by default,” these engagements are often hybrid in nature, combining online and offline settings and actions. Using the 2023 International Women’s Day march in Portugal as both case study and methodological entry point, this article explores how hybrid feminist practices are engaged and negotiated within this context and how this is shaped by affective experiences and emotional investment in activism. The article adopts a multi-methodological and multi-situated approach, combining online observations of feminist practices on Instagram, offline ethnographic observations of Lisbon’s International Women’s Day march, and twenty-two in-depth interviews with people engaged with feminisms in the Portuguese context. Our findings illustrate the deep entanglement between online and offline feminist practices, showing how digital and social media permeates all stages of mobilization, participation, and documentation of the International Women’s Day march. We explore the ambivalent feelings of feminist participants, interrogating how they negotiate the perceived potentials and drawbacks of digital platforms. In this context, everyday practices of dis/connection and a revalorization of offline practices can emerge as a way to manage these tensions.