Tweet the “phallic teacher”: early career feminist education research, Altmetrics and alternative peer review

Feminist education research is disseminated today in a social media landscape dominated by anonymous commentators such as @real_peerreview. This chapter describes a case study taking a single example of a feminist article submitted to an Australian educational journal to contemplate how the editor and writer, an early career researcher, negotiated perceived personal and professional risks in relation to publication. These risks are a new feature of the postfeminist global mediascape, and demonstrate how patriarchal, misogynist and alt right discourses play out in this space. The study then considers the reception the article met on Twitter, which pushed its Altmetric attention score into the top 5% of all research outputs worldwide, and the impacts of this outcome for journal, editor and writer. This study highlights both affordances and dangers in the fluid distribution and commentary of volatile digital media ecologies, especially for early career researchers and those other than middle class, cisgendered, heterosexual, able bodied white males.