Activist Literacies: Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics 1643363425, 9781643363424

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Activist Literacies

MOVEMENT RHETORIC/RHETORIC’S MOVEMENTS

Victoria J. Gallagher A. Freya Thimsen, The Democratic Ethos: Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy

ACTIVIST LITERACIES Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics

JENNIFER NISH

© 2022 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.uscpress.com Manufactured in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found athttp://catalog.loc.gov/. isbn: 978-1-64336-342-4 (hardcover) isbn: 978-1-64336-343-1 (paperback) isbn: 978-1-64336-344-8 (ebook) Front cover design: Ben Kamprath, benkamprath.com

For activists everywhere who seek to dismantle oppression: I hope you find ways to challenge injustice despite all that is working against you, and I hope you experience community along the way.

CONTE NTS Series Editor’s Preface : ix Preface: Situating My Own Feminist Work : xi Acknowledgments : xix Introduction : 1

ONE Literacies of Positionality: Networked Activism, Embodied Genres, and Performances of Dis/Identification : 32

TWO Differences That Matter: Orientation as a Transnational Feminist Literacy Practice : 75

THREE Activist Genre Knowledge: Sticky Uptakes, Counteruptakes, and Circulation Literacies : 114 Conclusion : 151 Notes : 159 Works Cited : 175 Index : 191

SE R I E S E DI TOR’ S P R E FACE The University of South Carolina series “Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric’s Movements” builds on the Press’s longstanding reputation in the field of rhetoric and communication and its cross-disciplinary commitment to studies of civil rights and civil justice. Books in the series address two central questions: In historical and contemporary eras characterized by political, social, and economic movements enacted through rhetorical means, how— and with what consequences—are individuals, collectives, and institutions changed and transformed? How and to what extent can analyses of rhetoric’s movements in relation to circulation and uptake help point the way to a more equal and equitable world? This timely and well-written book is an outstanding project for the series. Author Jennifer Nish defines and illuminates activist literacies as a set of practices that people can use to understand and engage with local, national, and transnational efforts to contribute to social change. Although other projects may focus on activism, feminist activisms, digital activisms, or digital feminisms, Nish’s book expands that scope to include an examination of transnational feminisms in the digital sphere. This book is thus original and particularly useful for classroom teaching: the activist literacies outlined will enable readers to better understand and take up the relational work of transnational and social media activisms.

P R E FACE

Situating My Own Feminist Work Movements are situated. Movements are networked. Movements are critical. Movements are supportive. Movements resist power. Movements harness power. Movements emerge from existing communities. Movements generate new relationships and communities. Movements build on traditions and histories. Movements imagine new ways of being and doing. Movements channel anger, sadness, and frustration. Movements cultivate joy, curiosity, and love. Movements hold contradiction, tension, and possibility. Movements challenge our world. Movements remake our world. Movements educate. Movements liberate. Movements heal. Movements transform. Movements are rhetorical. Rhetoric is part of how movements move us. The rhetoric that moves us is itself moving, circulating, and transforming as it moves through the relationships that connect us to one another and to the ideas and structures that shape our world. We move with rhetoric. We move rhetoric. Rhetoric moves us. Narratives about movements often highlight the ways that relationships and actions move and transform the people who engage with them as they work to move and transform communities and worlds. This preface isn’t a narrative about movements per se, but a narrative about how my engagements with feminism and activism are shaped by a web of interconnected relationships, activities, and ideas. My relationships to people and politics have moved as I have moved, chronologically, emotionally, intellectually, and geographically. This book draws on transnational feminist theory to think about the complexity of networked rhetorical activity. However, the ideas in this book have also been shaped by my own history and experiences. My perspective on transnational movement and relationships began as a theoretical interest, but the ideas that I learned from transnational feminisms continued to move me as I have moved through the world. A particularly influential period of my life that has shaped this book is the time I spent living and working in Beirut during my first academic job after completing my Ph.D. : xi :

xii : Preface

My experiences during this time transformed my relationships to feminism, activism, and research (among other things). During my time in Beirut, I walked everywhere, in part because I had the privilege of living close to my place of employment and in part because I sometimes found it stressful to negotiate fares for shared taxis. I also really liked many aspects of walking in Beirut: there’s always something interesting to observe and I enjoyed saying hello to shop owners and employees that I passed on my regular routes. However, as I moved through public spaces, I stuck out. As is common for women in most large cities, I experienced some sexual harassment as I walked around in public. Depending on the neighborhood and time of day, I also experienced plenty of stares and attention that were presumably not sexual but certainly made me self-conscious. I am also neurodivergent and disabled. My chronic illness and my neurodivergence contribute to experiences of overwhelm and exacerbated stress response, so these experiences were difficult for me to manage. I also struggled with how to respond, both because of my position as a white, US-American woman and because of language and cultural differences. Although I understood and spoke some Arabic, I didn’t always know what people said if they spoke to me in Arabic and therefore didn’t always feel absolutely sure that I knew exactly what was happening. Although tone and body language can say a lot, tone, volume, and gestures can all vary across cultures, and I had observed some differences between my interpretation of tone and that of others around me. Furthermore, if I were to respond, that response might also be a site of misinterpretation. If I wanted to respond to these experiences, what aspects of cross-cultural communication, power analysis, and positionality should inform my response? Without a satisfactory answer to this question, I often felt frustrated by this situation. I also felt a sense of isolation when many of my colleagues didn’t seem to understand this experience or how overwhelming it was. Some of this was clearly due to differences in positionality such as age and gender, but some may also have been related to my experiences of disability and my concerns about responding appropriately. One day, I saw a post shared in a university-related feminist group on Facebook calling folks who wanted to discuss harassment to meet at a local restaurant. I was excited at the idea of finding a space to discuss this. I was also nervous: would it be weird for me to attend if I was a faculty member and other participants were (I assumed) students? Would I be welcome as a US American in this space? I recall talking my concerns over with a trusted friend who encouraged me to attend the meeting. I am generally shy, insecure, and socially anxious, and these things were surely shaping my hesitance. However, I was also nervous about issues of power and positionality. As I

Preface : xiii

had suspected, some of the folks at the meetings were students at my university (undergraduate and graduate), which meant that as a faculty member, I was in a position of relative power even if the students weren’t in my classes. Most of the participants were Lebanese and I was not. I didn’t want to cause harm by inserting myself into a space where I wasn’t wanted, claiming knowledge I didn’t have, or perpetuating the harm that many (mostly white) feminists have caused in cross-cultural and transnational settings by engaging with arrogance rather than accountability. These were issues that I knew about from reading and studying transnational feminism but also from observing interactions at talks and in public spaces in Beirut. Both my scholarly background and my experiences in Beirut shaped the cautious attitude with which I entered this space. I approached the group, then, with intention of being mindful of my position, listening and learning before speaking, and trying to prioritize the voices and opinions of other participants rather than my own. I did my best to show up in consistent ways and looked for opportunities to contribute to the group’s work that would take advantage of my skills and position to support the work of the group. For example, one of the first “individual” contributions I remember making involved students at my university who had spoken out about a student-created video that essentially encouraged sexual harassment. These students experienced harassment and retaliation for speaking out against the video and were not receiving support from university administration. We offered support to the students as a group, but I also realized that I could use my position as a faculty member, since many folks at the university respond differently to faculty members than they do to students. I wrote a letter to the dean of students asking him to take action in support of the students. Doing something that took advantage of my specific position helped me feel like I had something to contribute to the group, and I think this helped me continue to participate despite all of my insecurities. However, I continued to be preoccupied with my position and all of the ways I differed from other folks in the group. I was often very quiet and worried that I wasn’t a valuable contributor to the group. I recall being in a meeting many months later in which we were talking about our experiences of the group and what direction we’d like to see it go in. I was quiet, as I often was. I don’t remember the specific contours of the conversation, but I remember somehow indicating my reluctance to contribute. Several members of the group pushed back on this, telling me explicitly that they wanted me to share my thoughts because I was part of the group. This was one of several experiences that led me to challenge myself to complicate my understanding of what it meant to “stay in my lane.” Sure, I shouldn’t barge

xiv : Preface

in and assume everyone wants to hear from me, but also what’s the point of showing up if I’m not going to contribute? In reflecting on this situation, I have realized that I was treating my participation and identity in a narrow or overdetermined way that constrained my ability to form relationships and contribute. I was learning in practice about the limits of what Linda Alcoff, in “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” describes as a “retreat response”: my concern about reproducing patterns of oppression within feminism led me to be wary of speaking at all and to attempt to speak only in certain very specific conditions about my own experiences.1 Alcoff explains that the retreat response is something of a double-edged sword. It can be an appropriate move in some circumstances in which speaking for others can be a form of discursive imperialism or violence. However, the impulse to retreat and speak only for oneself can also obscure the ways that people and their actions are inextricably bound up with other people, their experiences, and their practices. It is not possible, Alcoff writes, to make claims from a discrete location that is separated from others and does not affect them: there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one’s words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a boundary between one’s location and all others. Even a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to reinforce their dominance . . . the declaration that I “speak only for myself ” has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot literally erase those effects.2 In short, I was engaging in the retreat response in an attempt to avoid making mistakes, but this was an untenable position. Political participation involves affecting and being affected by others. My caution and attentiveness to positionality were important, but they also needed to be balanced with the expectation that being in political relationship with others means that we all have the capacity to affect one another. I could not avoid mistakes altogether, no matter how carefully I tried to manage my contributions. I share this story because it exemplifies how political and activist engagement are about more than public action; activism also involves building relationships. These relationships are part of how movements transform people and transform worlds. The relational components of activism are vital to sustaining activist groups and the activist commitments of those who participate in activist groups. I have shared this story in detail to make the following point: I was looking for ways to be a perfect individual contributor.

Preface : xv

Alcoff describes this process, in which one attempts to avoid criticism, as a move that privileges personal mastery of the situation over collective goals. Due to both my position and my individual insecurities, I was placing too much emphasis on me. Do I fit in? Am I contributing enough? These are not irrelevant questions. Self-reflection and attention to positionality are important, but they are important because of their impact on relationships. For many months, I showed up consistently and tried to be supportive of the group, but I struggled to truly feel like I belonged. I recall several moments where I specifically noticed that I was not as open as I should be to building relationships with others in the group by sharing my own experiences. Thankfully, other members of the group still wanted me to participate, welcomed me at meetings, and encouraged me as I eased out of my shell. Once I opened up more, I developed deeper relationships with others that helped me experience the group as supportive and sustaining. My weakness within the group, which took me a while to discover, was that my reticence and over-attention to my difference was making it hard for me to develop strong connections. Those connections are vital, radical work. I did not see this group as a site for research and did not anticipate it becoming part of this book. It was, however, an important space of personal and political growth for me, and I share some of that experience here because it shaped the perspective on activism that I share in this book. One of the things I learned is the way that collective engagement facilitates action because of accountability. I don’t mean accountability in the sense of someone calling me in (or out) when I did something wrong, although that is an important element of accountability. Instead, I mean accountability as an understanding of myself and my engagement with activism as relational processes that are connected to broader patterns of activity, social structures, and power relations. Accountability is a way of understanding ourselves as “social actors and not lone individuals”3 and thinking and acting with a sense of commitment and responsibility to others. Through groups or networks of accountability, people share ideas, sites of action, and support. It was through this group that I found ways to engage consistently in feminist activism in Beirut. The relationships I developed in this group helped sustain me and motivate me politically. Through the group, I felt supported as an activist and as a human being. This support helped me see myself as a political agent and ground my thoughts and actions in relation to others. When I attended marches, talks, or other events in Beirut, I didn’t have to participate alone. I had others to talk through ideas with, to listen to and learn from. By focusing so much on how this experience shaped me as an individual, I do not mean to suggest that the benefits of activist relationships are

xvi : Preface

important only in this way. Rather, I want to suggest that I understand my individual position and experiences best through an understanding of relationships and interactions that have had reverberating effects. To understand myself politically, I have to understand how I have affected and been affected by others. As Aimee Carrillo Rowe writes, “the meaning of the self is never individual, but forged across a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of.”4 The relationships I’ve described here transformed me; therefore, they shaped the thoughts and idea in this book. My connections with these collaborators, as activists and friends, still shape my thinking and my behavior. While these relationships and their effects have changed over time—my memories of these experiences are not the same as ongoing conversation and interaction—the way that these relationships and interactions have shaped me and continue to motivate me are part of what is important about activist relationships. Communities exist in many forms and serve many purposes. Groups dedicated specifically to political work aren’t the only collectives that can support activism, though I think they are an especially effective site for this work. For example, since I moved to Lubbock, Texas, I’ve felt an absence in my life that is the absence of this group. In 2019 and 2020, I attended several small demonstrations in Lubbock (related to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camps, climate change, and the police murder of George Floyd), but I longed for the sense of community I’d experienced in Beirut. I showed up and participated, but it felt different to participate in an event without connecting to organizers or engaging in an ongoing way. I had several friends who would circulate materials on social media about topics I was interested in, which made me feel a bit less alone, but I didn’t feel the same sense of accountability or belonging that I had when I was engaged with a group specifically dedicated to activism. My work in this book is also, of course, shaped by other aspects of my positionality and life experiences. My ways of thinking, researching, writing, and doing have been shaped by my position in the world and my relationships to people around me. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, surrounded predominantly by people who were white, middle-class, and Catholic. Most of the political ideas I encountered while growing up were conservative. Much of my knowledge about feminism and other forms of resistance to oppression developed gradually in my teenage and adult years, and especially as I formed relationships with people whose experiences and background differed from my own. Aside from these gradual processes of growth and change, I also see two strands of experience as particularly transformative of my politics and worldview. The first is my experience of disability. My entire adult life has been heavily shaped by my experience of disability, though I

Preface : xvii

did not always have disability as a lens to name and understand these experiences. My experiences of disability helped me recognize how privilege has shaped my life, including my experience of illness and my access to care. For example, during experiences with hospitalization and group therapy in my early twenties, I noticed contrasts between my own experiences and those of some other patients, including how I was seen by other patients, by the people facilitating our care, and by my family and friends. I did not have this language at the time, but I was becoming aware of the ways that class and race shaped people’s expectations about the severity of my situation, my chances of recovering, and the kind of care I should receive in ways that contrasted with their expectations of other patients. In this way, disability helped me identify examples of intersectionality and privilege before I had the words to name these phenomena. The second thread that shaped my perspective on activism was my engagement with feminist theory during a particularly transformative period of my life. The reading I did during this time helped me to name and make sense of my own experiences and my desire to think and live a different life than the one I had been living. Feminist theory helped me recognize my experiences of sexist oppression, but also to recognize how those experiences had been shaped by various privileges. Some of the scholars who most profoundly affected my political development were Black women whose writing I read in undergraduate coursework at the time, such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Patricia Williams, and June Jordan. For example, in Feminism Is for Everybody, bell hooks writes that a woman “cannot be anti-abortion and an advocate of feminism.”5 This was a controversial statement for a group of Nebraskan students, even in the relatively progressive context of a Women’s Studies class. However, hooks’s writing helped me identify that although I thought of myself as “pro-life,” I could not reconcile that abstract belief with the ways I responded when I encountered actual people who experienced unwanted pregnancy. Hooks’s explanation helped me realize that I was holding onto a term that did not actually describe my position. Her words were especially impactful because during the previous year, I had listened to women in my inpatient recovery program describe experiences of sexual assault and rape, some of which had resulted in unwanted pregnancy. Although I didn’t have this language to describe it at the time, I had begun to realize that bodily autonomy and reproductive choice were shaped by intersecting forms of oppression—abortion was not an issue of morality and individual choice as I’d been taught. By developing awareness of the ways that people experience differential access to abortion, medical care, and effects of unwanted pregnancy, I also began to see that some of my previous thinking came from my position of privilege.

xviii : Preface

Conversations about feminism and activism often involve examining the ways that experiences and socially constructed identities shape the perspective people bring to their work. However, as many scholars and activists have pointed out, position and privilege are not discrete; they are relational.6 When I reflect on my experiences, I understand my position through not just an explanation of who I am as an individual, but also through reflection on my relationships with people around me, including other people engaged in feminist and activist work. Through my background, experiences, and relationships with others, my politics and practices have evolved and shifted. The ideas in this book are shaped by these personal and professional experiences in which my position, location, and relationships have profoundly affected what I know, how I know it, and with whom I develop and share experience and knowledge. My work in this book comes from a deep commitment to feminist politics and resistance to oppression. The questions I consider and the analyses I develop in the following pages have been shaped by my experiences and relationships as well as my scholarly training. I am indebted to the scholars, writers, activists, and friends who have made space for me to grow and have educated me about oppressions I do not experience. I am not a model feminist, activist, scholar, or human being, and any mistakes that follow are mine alone. I share these current ideas with the knowledge that they will likely continue to grow and change. From this imperfect, situated, shifting location, I am, to borrow a phrase from scholars in disability rhetorics, “finding ways to move.”7

ACKNOW LE DGME NTS Thank you to Mary Jo Reiff, Amy Devitt, Marta Vicente, Alesha Doan, Ayu Saraswati, Jay Childers, Germaine Halegoua, Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Kenton Rambsy, and Kara Kynion for your support in (and beyond) Lawrence. Thank you to Beirut colleagues and friends for support during my first academic job and the early stages of this project: Mounawar Abbouchi, Altayib Ahmed, Ira Allen, Lisa Arnold, Doyle Avant, Nora Bakhsh, Greg Burris, Caesar Chan, David Currell, Lucy Currell, Hanine El Mir, Alli Finn, Dorota Fleszar, Zeina Ghanem, Talah Hassan, Jim Hodapp, Syrine Hout, Rima Iskandarani, Nagham Jaber, Malakeh Khoury, Alison Lo, Laure Makarem, Mira Mawla, Tarek Mehmood Ali, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Sara Mourad, Laura Noll, John Pill, Rima Rantisi, Elsa Saade, Zane Sinno, Samhita Sunya, Michael Vermy, Adam Waterman, Amy Zenger. I am also grateful for the support of the TTU Women Faculty Writing Program and Lubbock friends and colleagues Mike Borshuk, Aaron Braver, Cassie Christopher, Nesrine Chahine, Jess Gross, Steve Holmes, Matt Hunter, Callie Kostelich, Marta Kvande, Beau Pihlaja, Elizabeth Sharp, Jess Smith, Brian Still, Jason Tham, Bill Wenthe, Allison Whitney, Greg Wilson, and Elissa Zellinger. Thanks to the Texas Tech Humanities Center for financial support. Thanks to many nonhuman companions: Moose, Murphy, Max, Polly, Squeak, Patches, Opal, Oatmeal, Moon, Bob Sr., Freckle, Bob Jr., Billie, Dusty, Penny, Nickels, and the mockingbirds of Lubbock, Texas, who made my pandemic writing life immeasurably better by singing their little hearts out beside my window. Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback or help at various stages: Amy Sherman, Michael Faris, Kendall Gerdes, Tanya Golash-Boza, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Lisa Lewis, Nancy Small, Lisa Phillips, Robin Stevens, Abir Ward, Scott Weedon, Becky Rickly’s research methods class, the Feminist Reading Group at the American University of Beirut, and the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript. Thanks also to Aurora Bell, Vicki Gallagher, and the University of South Carolina Press. Kathryn Maude, I’m especially grateful for your generous and generative feedback on several chapters. I am also grateful to Rebecca Dingo and Rachel Riedner for supporting my work and fostering spaces of collaboration and mentorship within the field of transnational feminist rhetorics.

xx : Acknowledgments

Thank you to my students: you have taught me so much. To my Mom and Dad, who may not agree with everything that’s in this book: thank you for your love and support. Ben, I am so grateful for all the ways you enrich my life. Thank you for moving with me, first to Beirut and then to Lubbock. Thank you for talking me through rejections, sharing my joy and excitement, and for your persistent confidence in me.

Activist Literacies

FIGURE 1. Print by Ricardo Levins Morales

Introduction Like so many webs criss-crossing the globe, feminist alliances are also power lines that connect us to one another and to circuits of power. We build alliances to link our lives together, to transmit power, and potentially for the purpose of transforming power. Through their mindful construction, these alliances function as sites where “power over” may be remade as “power with” and “power to” (Albrecht and Brewer 1990). What is required for such mindfulness is the recognition that the lines of intimacy, trust, and collaboration that we build with others are embedded in power. . . . These lines that connect us to others are not neutral; they are neither natural nor innocent. —AIMEE CARRILLO ROWE, POWER LINES: ON THE SUBJECT OF FEMINIST ALLIANCES

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

O

—ABORIGINAL ACTIVISTS’ GROUP, QUEENSLAND, 1970S

n January 21, 2017, in response to the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, millions of people participated in Women’s March events in cities across the United States, as well as in other countries and continents. The Women’s March events and platform focused on speaking out against Trump’s politics, including his unapologetically racist and misogynist statements and beliefs. The march is an excellent example of the complex ways that digital and social media are entwined with contemporary activism. The march also illustrates the complexity of contemporary feminist politics and activism, including the use of technology for activist projects. Initial plans for the march began on Facebook, and digital and social media were important venues for planning and publicizing the march. The energy and attention generated by the Women’s March : 1 :

2 : Introduction

sparked many conversations about the importance of feminism and activism and what feminism and activism should look like. Many such conversations took place and were circulated through social media. During and after the march events, social media were used extensively to participate in and discuss the march, including support and critiques of organizing and participation. Critiques and transformation of the march took place in late 2016 and early 2017, as attention to the Women’s March intensified in the months and weeks leading to January 21. For example, the event was initially planned as a march in Washington, DC, under the title “Million Woman March.” However, many people, especially Black women, criticized this title as an appropriation of the title used in a previous march led by and for Black women in Philadelphia in 1997.1 This appropriation was especially problematic because the initial organizers of what became the Women’s March were white women. Within feminist activism and rhetoric, there is a long and persistent history of privileged women (especially white, middle-class, heterosexual women) representing their experiences as shared by all women and failing to listen to and learn from the perspectives of women who don’t share their background. Black feminists and other women of color have continuously drawn attention to racism, appropriation, and erasure within feminist theory and movements and have called on feminists to listen to and center the perspectives of those who are most marginalized.2 In response to critiques of this event’s appropriation and leadership, the title of the march was changed to the Women’s March on Washington and three women of color (Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour) became co-chairs of the March.3 In the two months leading up to the Women’s March, these leaders worked to address public critiques as they organized the DC event, coordinated satellite events, crafted a platform, and publicized the March. For some, these changes showed that organizers were willing to listen and respond to critiques.4 Yet there were still critics of the march who publicly announced their intention not to participate.5 Critique is a key element of feminist thought and activism. Feminist thought and activity is usually imperfect, and like all knowledge, it is necessarily partial and situated. When feminists collectively voice and listen to one another’s critiques in order to build feminist practices that respond to multiple forms of oppression, they improve feminism. In order to do this, though, feminists need to be able to distinguish among critical perspectives: connecting critiques to collective histories and power relationships is one way to distinguish between critiques that uphold oppressive power relations and critiques that push feminist movements to engage more fully with the varied forms and locations of sexist oppression. The latter kind of critique allows feminist work to survive across changing social and political contexts.

Introduction : 3

Iris Marion Young characterizes feminist theory and politics as pragmatic, and therefore shifting with the shifts that occur in social relations and practices.6 The heterogeneous people and ideas that contribute to feminist work such as the Women’s March allow for the kinds of productive revisions that the march made. They also follow a rich tradition of using feminist reflection, critique, and revision to facilitate inclusive knowledge and practice. In the words of Angela Davis, “Feminism enables us to inhabit contradictions: with it, we can understand what it means to be critical and supportive at the same time.”7 In this way, critique can be a site for building feminist knowledge and relationships. Feminists also need strategies for reflexive critique through which we examine our own work. One of my own such critiques arose from participating in a Women’s March event outside the United States. Terms such as “global” and “worldwide” were used frequently to describe the 2017 marches.8 The organization dedicated to events outside of the United States was called Women’s March Global. Global and worldwide also appeared in Women’s March statements about their mission and values and in many media narratives about the events that took place on January 21. However, many of those narratives treated the “global” events as evidence of diversity, with little attention to the complexity of these various events and their relationships to one another and the United States. The Women’s March Global did not make the same kinds of moves toward inclusive representation and listening as did the organizers in the United States, nor did many narratives about the Women’s March Global engage with the various ways that events were distinct—from the US march and from one another—in resources, participants, and goals. Many narratives about the march circulated on digital and social media, referencing the 2017 events through numbers or counts: “over 600 marches,” marches “in 200 cities,” in “80 countries,” “on all seven continents.”9 Reports and stories about the event often showed pictures from various locations or listed a sample of the locations in which marches were held. I became especially uncomfortable with these representations when a photo that I shared on Twitter from an event in Beirut, Lebanon was republished in an online magazine under the headline, “Females in the Middle East Show Solidarity with the Women’s March.”10 Because I am not Lebanese, I do not think my words or actions should be used to show what “females in the Middle East” or Beirut are doing. Were there Lebanese participants at the event? Yes. Am I qualified to represent them because we attended the same event? Absolutely not. In addition, many of the attendees I interacted with were from or had lived in the United States. My experience of discomfort raised questions for me: were other examples of the “global” events organized for similar

4 : Introduction

reasons—because folks connected to the United States but living elsewhere wanted to take up this energy and do something in their own contexts? As I read through the descriptions of international events, many of the other “global” events also seemed to be organized and attended by US citizens living in other countries. This situation makes sense: the Women’s March was framed and organized in relation to US politics. This framing shapes participation, even in locations outside the United States. For me, this experience raised important questions about the use of “global” in relation to these events. Who and what do we imagine when an activist project is described as “global”? What does this description imply about similarities and differences among participants situated in different geographic and political contexts? Like the Women’s March in the United States, Women’s March Global participation also changed over time. After the initial burst of activities in many cities and countries in January 2017, the organization and participants had to shift from coordinating initial activities into building an organization and set of priorities that could support continued engagement from participants in the 2017 Women’s March. In Fall 2017, the list of “local chapters” on the Women’s March Global website looked quite different than the list of places connected to the January 2017 Women’s March events: chapters were located in Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland. The work of Women’s March Global continues to change, as does the list of chapters. Paying attention to how movements change and why is one avenue for building more nuanced interpretations of their work. Rhetoric about global and transnational feminist activity involves complex relationships. Reports and descriptions that offer numbers or brief snapshots to represent global participation fail to capture some elements of the activity that are essential to our understanding of the Women’s March as well as feminist efforts to think about (and with) it. The January 2017 Women’s March certainly showed the mobility of US citizens and perhaps it also shows the “reach” of US politics. Claims about solidarity or the international reach of the Women’s March should be considered critically, though. While it might be a worthwhile desire to connect feminist movements in various locations to one another, histories of privilege and silencing mean that feminists must be critical of the ways that we think, discuss, and engage in efforts at feminist connection across different cultural and political contexts. Just as feminist scholarship and activity in the United States has often represented the concerns of white, cis, nondisabled, heterosexual, middle-class women as those of all women, feminist work under the label of “global” also has a history of eliding differences, assuming common priorities and experiences based on the perspective of women in the United States or the Global

Introduction : 5

North.11 Examining how activist groups form, who they include, how they engage participants, and how they change is one important avenue for understanding contemporary activism. In addition, contemporary activist genres and campaigns emerge and circulate in complex rhetorical environments. Activist ideas and genres circulate quickly and widely through social media, which can facilitate the process of critique. Digital and social media were an important venue for circulating critiques of the Women’s March during and after the events took place. For example, many people interpreted a widely circulated photo from the DC marches of activist Angela Peoples as a representation of the need for intersectional critique and practice among feminists. Peoples, a Black woman, is pictured in a hat that reads “stop killing black people.” She has a lollipop in her mouth and is looking off to the side while she holds a sign reading “Don’t forget: white women voted for Trump.” The composition of the photo places her in contrast with three white, blond women who stand in the background wearing knitted pink pussy hats12 and looking at their phones or taking selfies. As Elliot Tetreault notes, this imagery illustrates tensions surrounding the Women’s March—tensions that represent historical and ongoing issues in feminist discourse and practice. The circulation and uptake of this photo are connected to histories and relationships that exceed the photo itself.13 These examples of the Women’s March and Women’s March Global show the complex connectivities that shape contemporary activism. Communication and political practices, including activist practices, have transformed significantly over the past two decades as the ubiquity of digital media and visibility of globalization have become pervasive elements of everyday rhetorical interactions. In some ways, social media make it easier for activist rhetoric to spread quickly and widely. However, the relationships between social media, social and geographic locations, and social movements are complex. The argument of this book is that people need literacy practices with which to carefully interpret and engage with contemporary activist rhetorics. As I make this argument in the following chapters, I outline a set of activist literacies: concepts and frameworks intended to facilitate nuanced engagement with activist rhetorics. The activist literacies I propose in this book build on recent scholarship in rhetorical studies that emphasizes rhetoric’s connectivity. Among the arguments associated with rhetorical connectivity are the ideas that rhetorics circulate and travel;14 rhetorical situations are in flux;15 rhetorical practices are connected to specific histories and cultures;16 rhetoric shapes and is shaped by the movements of people and things across borders;17 and rhetorical agency is connective and not located solely within the individual.18 In

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addition to these theoretical shifts toward connection, technological shifts have drawn attention to connectivity as digital and social media affect the way people connect to one another and to texts, ideas, and things. A great deal of everyday rhetorical practice has become visible, searchable, and traceable through social media. These changes provide rich contexts for exploring and participating in public and activist conversations. However, scholars of new media have drawn attention to the ways that many formerly distinct practices are now merged together through concepts such as “context collapse”: the collapse of previously distinguishable contexts, such as personal and professional, when one is connected to people from both contexts on social media.19 Activist rhetoric circulates alongside everyday social conversations, and engagement with activist genres can range from a simple tap or click to more extended forms of creativity and conversation. In fact, activists’ circulation of material that fits into the sometimes-banal interactions on social media has raised concern over the appropriate ways to engage in activism. Rhetoric and activism are also increasingly connected across geographic and cultural contexts. This process is not new, but it is facilitated by technology, necessitated by globalization, and increasingly visible across a range of everyday rhetorical interactions. The nature and type of transnational connectivities enabled by digital media and globalization have been a central concern of transnational feminist theory, as have the uneven distributions of power that emerge from specific historical and material relationships. When activists wish to engage in feminist work that crosses borders, a central concern should be about the kinds of connections being created rather than simply their existence or number (as in the example of the Women’s March Global). When people encounter circulating rhetorics with many purposes and audiences on the same platform, interpreting those rhetorics requires examining the connectivities that shape their creation and circulation. The literacies I outline in this book are avenues for doing this kind of work. Activist texts and ideas circulate within these connectivities, between networked publics, counterpublics, enclaves, and semipublic or private settings. While some savvy communicators negotiate these contexts expertly, many people are still developing literacies with which to understand and engage these shifting connectivities. An understanding of rhetoric that takes this connectivity into account allows us to better understand how “rhetorical situations bleed”20 and to recognize the ways that communicative acts are inextricably linked to systems of power. In the following chapters, I use social media’s affordances to research and map activist rhetorics and their connectivities. Although this approach does not capture the full picture of activist rhetoric or activist engagement (if one believes such a thing to be possible),

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the frameworks and examples provide insight into the complexity of feminist and activist participation and the ways that activist work responds to (or neglects) systems of power and oppression. In this book, I attend to the nature and effects of connections and to questions about how the connections work for people who are connected but positioned in different ways by those connections. Through concepts and frameworks that highlight these connectivities, this book draws on insights from transnational feminism and digital rhetoric to analyze activist rhetorics. In short, rhetorical and activist practices have shifted along with processes of technological change and contemporary globalization, but interpretive practices haven’t necessarily kept up. The literacies outlined in the following chapters provide tools that can help students, researchers, and publics explore what activism does and how it does it. Together, the chapters in this book intertwine multiple areas of focus (activism, transnational feminism, and digital rhetoric) and draw on a wide variety of theories and examples to develop a set of activist literacies that students, scholars, and publics can use to investigate and analyze contemporary activist rhetorics. I analyze a variety of feminist activity that (a) engages transnational issues and audiences and (b) circulates via social media. Both of these contexts are often oversimplified or misrepresented in public discourse. Each chapter of the book provides a set of conceptual and methodological tools for exploring the nuanced connectivities that shape the creation, circulation, and transformation of feminist and activist rhetorics. Conceptual Background

My approach to developing activist literacies builds on conversations in literacy studies and transnational feminist rhetoric about the ways that rhetorical practices are shaped by complex, shifting rhetorical and political relationships. These activist literacies also respond to gaps in public conversations about digital activism.

Transnational Feminist Literacies My use of “literacy” in this book draws on literacy scholars’ attention to the multiple, situated, social elements of literacy. Jacqueline Jones Royster defines literacy as a “sociocognitive ability” through which people access and use information for diverse purposes, including voicing experiences and solving problems.21 Literacy, for Royster, involves “ways of knowing and believing . . . and also ways of doing.”22 Royster’s definition aligns with the emphasis of New Literacy Studies on understanding and studying literacy as a complex, socially situated practice. The ability to understand and communicate cannot be neatly separated from the social contexts in which that

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communication occurs, nor can particular modes, such as reading and writing, be neatly divided from other modes such as speaking and listening. Royster emphasizes the importance of examining and connecting both microlevel and macrolevel elements of literacy.23 Soon after Royster’s book was published, Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton published a call for literacy scholars to move beyond the social practice perspective’s emphasis on local contexts and attend to literacy’s “ability to travel, integrate, and endure.”24 Brandt and Clinton argue for more emphasis on literacy’s “transcontextual” elements, through which macrolevel social relationships and material conditions affect microlevel literacy events and practices. This sociomaterial and ecological approach to literacies, of which Royster’s work is an early example, attends to both “localizing” and “globalizing” aspects of literacy practices. More recently, Eric Darnell Pritchard defines literacies as practices that people use to “make sense of, negotiate, and contribute to their social, political, and cultural world.”25 My focus in this book is on activist literacies: practices that scholars and students of rhetoric can use to understand and engage with efforts toward social change. By outlining specific frameworks and concepts that readers can use to examine activist rhetorics on social media, this book provides tools that identify and trace the transcontextual elements of activist “literacies-inaction.”26 These tools contribute to transnational feminist rhetoricians’ efforts to trace the connectivities that shape rhetorical activity. Transnational feminist theory engages with feminist projects and issues that cross cultural, national, and geographic boundaries. Many projects have taken up “global” or international feminist work without attending to important cultural, political, and economic differences that influence experiences of oppression and responses to that oppression in different places. Transnational feminists call for attention to the specific histories and material conditions that affect feminist work in various places and among differently positioned groups of people. Transnational feminists also stress the importance of examining the relationships between feminists in different contexts, attending to the ways that power differences affect these relationships. An increasing body of rhetorical scholarship uses transnational feminist theory and analysis to explore how uneven power relationships complicate the creation and circulation of rhetoric, things, and people.27 Transnational feminists call for attention to the systems of geopolitical and economic power that shape experiences of oppression and connect differently positioned people to one another.28 For example, Rebecca Dingo argues for a transnational feminist literacy and pedagogy of “networking arguments,” linking microlevel rhetorical practices to macrolevel histories, economic systems, and geopolitical relationships that shape those practices:

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“Networking arguments might be seen as a literacy practice and then, ultimately, as a composing process that makes connections between entities, places, practices, and histories that might at first appear to not relate to each other. Linking the micro to the macro is not just an analytic but also a material practice that offers a new sort of productive agency that asks readers to address scales of oppression that include how they themselves may be complicit with transglobal power relationships.”29 Similarly, Sharon Yam’s work on deliberative empathy highlights the political importance of linking the experiences of differently positioned people to material and political conditions that connect those people to one another and provide grounds for coalition.30 These scholars and others31 use frameworks of relationality and connectivity to articulate the political value of literacy practices that connect people, structures, things, and ideas to one another while also emphasizing the differential experiences and conditions that shape those connections. The concepts, frameworks, and examples in this book contribute to transnational feminist rhetoricians’ efforts to foreground the complex connectivities that shape transnational relationships and rhetorical activities.

Digital Activism The narratives about global and worldwide participation in the Women’s March and Women’s March Global illustrate the need for literacies with which to better understand activisms that engage transnational issues and audiences. Another example of the need for the literacies outlined in this book is in the persistence of inadequate frameworks for evaluating activism that circulates via social media. These inadequate frameworks often evaluate activism through effort and short-term effectiveness. Concerns about effort are perhaps best exemplified by persistent engagement with the concept of “slacktivism,” though many similar critiques circulate without using this word. Discourses about slacktivism persist because of anxieties about effective forms of connection and engagement; these anxieties are connected to the changing contexts and tactics of activist work. Evgeny Morozov coined the term “slacktivism” in 2009, which he described as “feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact.”32 Slacktivism and related terms such as “clicktivism” or “armchair activism” have been used derogatorily to critique digital engagement with politics and activism in popular writing, academic conversations, and activist circles. These critiques stem from concerns that social media will lead people to engage in ineffective tactics that masquerade as activism and substitute for more effective political engagement. Morozov focuses especially on the idea that digital projects (a) offer “too many easy ways out” and (b) overemphasize fundraising, which is ineffective for many problems. He also suggests that slacktivist campaigns

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focus too much on gaining attention and raising awareness, which is of limited effect for global issues.33 Slacktivism has been a debated concept from the start, and many scholars have critiqued the term. In 2012, Zeynep Tufekci argued that the term “slacktivism” is misleading because people engaging in “slacktivist” efforts aren’t “slacking activists”; they’re “non-activists taking symbolic action.”34 For Tufekci, concerns about slacktivism are really responses to ways our political engagement has changed because of digital technology and social media. Political engagement is a part of everyday, mundane activity in a way that differs from the past. Digital media have opened up more spaces for people who aren’t professionals to engage with political issues, while also increasing the potential visibility or reach of that engagement. Yet accusations of slacktivism and criticisms of tactics seen as “easy” persist. As my discussion of feminist critique suggests, I support conversations about the uses and limits of different activist techniques. However, the concept of slacktivism has circulated so widely that it is often taken up in ways that oversimplify the relationship between social media and activist work. Social media have the ability to raise awareness quickly, but awareness doesn’t necessarily solve most problems (or so the logic goes). However, social media campaigns can also spark national and international conversations about important issues and encourage people to march, boycott, or engage in other forms of protest. Social media posts can also be a powerful site for pedagogy and community education. In addition, social media can facilitate access for people who are disabled or for whom in-person protest carries risks of violence, arrest, or deportation. In short, using effort to determine the value of activist work is both reductive and ableist. In order to understand the uses and limits of activist rhetoric that occurs and circulates on social media, rhetoricians and publics need strategies for moving beyond a one-size-fits-all assessment of “effort.” Articulating the nuanced outcomes of activist work is not a simple task due to the complexity of activist assemblages and their effects. Not all effects are visible or measurable. Many effects are not immediate but emerge over time. In addition, activist projects can aim for and achieve a wide range of effects, from raising awareness to changing minds to changing policy to changing material conditions. Broad social change requires multiple types of activity; one of the problems with critiques of slacktivism is the devaluing of the discursive, relational, and everyday elements of activism. For example, everyday rhetorics can contribute to narratives that shape people’s perspectives and preferences, which are often integral to other forms of change. Furthermore, “easy” forms of participation might serve as an entry point for other forms of action or make activism accessible to people whose social location affects their ability

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to engage in direct action or other public activities. Charges of slacktivism often suggest that effort, engagement, and effectiveness require everyone to engage in public actions and elide forms of effort or engagement that aren’t publicly visible. Some work that is labeled slacktivist should be subject to critique. For example, slacktivism has been used to critique neoliberal forms of participation, such as donations and socially conscious consumerism. It has also been used to deride specific projects such as #Kony2012 and #BringBackOurGirls (viral hashtag campaigns that drew global attention to violence in Uganda and Nigeria, respectively).35 Both #Kony2012 and the transnational circulation of #BringBackOurGirls were problematic. However, the problems with these projects can be better understood through measures other than effort involved. Imperialism and neoliberalism offer more useful frames of analysis for the shortcomings of these campaigns and their circulation. For example, Teju Cole’s critique of Kony2012 illustrates how this kind of campaign generates affective responses that elide analyses of power and privilege. Cole characterizes #Kony2012 as part of the “White Savior Industrial Complex.”36 He argues that campaigns like this one focus on generating affective responses that make privileged white Americans feel good without engaging the voices of those affected by the problems they discuss. Furthermore, such campaigns fail to engage with local contexts and global power relations, including the ways that US foreign policy contributes to the oppression of people in other countries. Understanding the problems that digital campaigns face requires other terms, as well as methods that examine more than effort. A hashtag, social media post, or digital campaign is often only one part of a much more complex process. While Morozov’s definition of slacktivism hints at some of these ideas, his term has been taken up more broadly in ways that miss this nuance. Because the term taps into collective anxieties about changing forms of participation and connection, it persists. Like Tufekci, then, I don’t believe that charges of slacktivism necessarily mean that activists are using lazy or ineffective strategies. Rather, concerns about slacktivism highlight an issue with digital literacies. Many audiences encounter only part of an activist movement or campaign. A casual observer may not see how the post in their social media feed is connected to other texts or activities, or they may not have a useful framework for evaluating these connections. The activist texts and campaigns that I have encountered in my research (as well as my own political engagement) are typically partial and connected. Activist work involves complex relationships and orientations that are important for understanding how people create, view, listen to, spread, imitate, and appropriate digital media for activist purposes. There are important differences

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between activist projects, and these differences should be used to consider whether and how to engage. Concepts such as slacktivism tend to shift attention away from the nuances that can help people with this process. The literacy-based approach that I develop in this book focuses on strategies with which activists and publics can understand and engage with digital activist rhetorics in more nuanced and complex ways. Defining Activism

Activism is a process of working toward social change. An “activist” is often seen as someone who dedicates a significant amount of time and energy to this work. However, one does not have to identify as an activist to engage in activism. Activism is a spectrum of activity into which people can enter and engage in multiple ways, with varying levels of interest and commitment. Activism has multiple entry points and engages a broad range of people. I see activism as a useful framework in part because it does not necessarily specify activity of a particular scale (e.g., social movements) or type (e.g., direct action). Nor, ideally, does engaging in activism require people to see themselves as belonging to a group or achieving a specific standard of recognition or effectiveness. This ambiguity initially frustrated me as a researcher, but I grew to consider this ambiguity part of what makes the term interesting. While I am interested in activities that are widely understood as activism, I have also been persistently curious about how this work connects to actions that are less clearly activist. A broad sense of what counts as activism allows activists and researchers to explore the connections between a variety of people and activities. Capaciously understood, activism can be inclusive, making space for many people and activities to be part of an activist project in ways that are precluded by narrow understandings of activism. However, there are limits to this process; if everything and everyone is included, does the term mean anything at all? In this book, I engage this concern by identifying features of activism that can help researchers and audiences distinguish among different activities that fall under the rubric of “activism.” In the following sections, I will provide some context for my own understanding of activism. I then outline three variables that have emerged from the examples in this book: situation, direction, and collectivity. These variables provide ways to distinguish between different kinds of activist engagement without engaging in activist gatekeeping. It is not easy to find a definition of “activism” in scholarly literature. Although it is used fairly often—both in rhetoric and composition scholarship and more broadly—most scholars who use the term do not define it. When scholars do define activism, they often focus on a specific type of activism,

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such as “hashtag activism” or “environmental activism.” While some scholars acknowledge the complexity of the term, others discuss activism without explaining what the term means, instead defining other, related terms, such as “social movement” or “politics.” The definitions I explore in this section come from varied disciplines including feminist studies, social movement studies, cultural studies, and sociology. I have also included definitions written for public audiences. Historically, activism is a relatively recent concept. Examples in the Oxford English Dictionary Online that correspond to its definition as “the use of vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change” date back to the early twentieth century.37 Examples included in that dictionary entry associate the terms activism and activist with political or social causes that would typically be considered either liberal or leftist in the United States today, including socialism, eco-activism, labor unions, animal rights, and women’s rights.38 This makes sense: many broad definitions of activism refer to it as an activity that involves creating social or cultural change. Conservative efforts to preserve the status quo would thus be less likely to be seen as activist. However, many definitions of activism and uses of the term make room for its applicability to a variety of people and political perspectives. Some scholars understand reactionary or power-consolidating activity as activism.39 For example, in her discussion of the rise of neoliberalism in The Twilight of Equality? Lisa Duggan refers to pro-business and “conservative” activism as a countermovement that began in the early 1970s to shift downward redistribution of power and resources into upward redistribution of power and resources.40 Some scholars associate activism with “change” in general, while others specifically emphasize resistance and/ or power analysis.41 Many people associate activism with specific types of activity, such as direct action.42 Scholarly theories and analyses of activism include varied targets, activities, and directions for activist work.43 Valentine Moghadam’s overview of transnational feminist activism includes various forms of organizing among and on behalf of women, including participation in formalized institutions and political processes, relationship-building, and grassroots movement-building. Definitions of activism for public audiences are similarly varied. The online “Activist Handbook” defines activism as “collective efforts to create change from the grassroots.”44 “Permanent Culture Now,” a project focused on environmental sustainability and social justice, defines activism as “taking action to effect social change.”45 In Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards advocate an expanded definition of activism as “everyday acts of defiance.”46 In Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown defines activism as “efforts to promote, impede, or

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direct social, political, economic, or environmental reform or stasis with the desire to make improvements in society.”47 These definitions imply a range of perspectives on the issues, practices, and people involved in activism. My knowledge about activism comes primarily from people who see their work as resistance to one or more forms of oppression. My analysis in this book is therefore influenced especially by the idea that activism and social movements involve identifying power relations and resisting oppression. I am also influenced by activists’ emphasis on community and collectivity.48 Common to most definitions of activism I’ve found is the idea of change; because the change is situated at the level of the social, it is implicitly collective in nature, though these definitions vary in the emphasis they place on collectivity. Furthermore, despite this implicit collectivity, a significant body of scholarship also focuses on activist identities and individualized action as a way to understand participation or incorporate various forms of participation into contemporary activism.49 This work is part of a broader project of mapping the shifting contexts and tactics of contemporary activism in order to more fully account for (a) the range of people who participate in activism and (b) the range of activities that can be connected to activist movements and goals. For example, Charlotte Cooper examines “micro fat activism”: small, everyday actions such as responding to problematic conversations, doing research, exercising, learning, and playing with one’s identity that involve “imagining other possibilities and acting on them.”50 These actions can be embedded in communities or collective goals, even though they take place within small-scale interactions. For Cooper, these are thoughtful and intentional ways to draw attention to—and resist—the ways that oppressions saturate people’s daily lives. I agree with the need for expansive definitions of activism and I find it useful to understand how individuals see their relationship to social movements because this can help activists and academics understand how movements form and grow. However, I also believe that liberatory social change requires relationships and collective commitments. In her explanation of the Black queer feminist lens she advocates, Charlene Carruthers writes: Activists who have entered movement work in the second decade of the new millennium may have missed a few things as a result of hyper-reactionary tendencies after police killings and the plethora of injustices enacted upon Black people. Far too many people have come in thinking that activism is solely about what the individual wants to do, who the individual is and what the individual believes should be done. Our movement would benefit if each person took a moment to reflect. The work is only as strong as the people with whom we work.

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Lone wolves in movement work can move fast, but can only advance transformative change as far as they are connected with people. Paris Hatcher, Black feminist leader, blames the neoliberal identity politics in today’s movement on white queers’ presence in movement spaces, self-absorbed people who promote individualism over collective struggle. Organizing by using the Black queer feminist lens calls for us to be individuals and to work collectively, with neither being at the expense of the other. What we believe to be true matters for our movements. What we believe impacts how we move in the world, what we imagine is possible, what we choose to fight for, and what we fight against. But believing in something is never enough. We must turn our beliefs into collective action.51 Drawing on Carruthers and other activists, this book emphasizes the collective, relational nature of activism and social movement work.52 This emphasis is not meant to devalue the individual elements of activist participation, but to emphasize the value of linking that individual participation to collective goals and activities. As I discussed in the preface, collective work is not only a way for activists to gain power and leverage; it is also a site for facilitating and sustaining political work. Furthermore, collective engagement is important for identifying what needs to be changed and imagining alternatives through conversations about shared and divergent conditions and experiences. Collective memories and power relations shape both public stereotypes about what activism should look like as well as the practices of contemporary activists. These processes shape how people view their actions and identities, how activist groups or spaces include or exclude people with diverse identities and social positions, and how scholars conduct research and write about activism. For example, narratives about activism and resistance often draw on comparisons between contemporary movements and those of previous eras. In the United States, the stereotypes and ideals associated with activism often position it within a lineage that draws heavily on the activism of the 1960s.53 Much of the literature I reviewed that defined the general term “activism” reported on research conducted in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.54 This may be due to factors such as the power dynamics that affect the production and circulation of scholarship and the translatability of “activism” in different locations and contexts.55 Other historical examples that might shape ideas about activism come from social movements, revolutions, and anticolonial liberation struggles such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the first Palestinian intifada, the Sandanista-led revolution in Nicaragua, the 1979 overthrow of Shah

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Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran, and the 1952 revolution in Egypt.56 These movements involve specific nationalisms and anticolonial struggles as well as broader political solidarities that linked different movements regionally and transnationally, such as through Arab nationalisms, Afro-Asian solidarity, socialist and communist ideologies, and opposition to colonialism and imperialism. Different movements and groups of activists will have different local, regional, and global reference points due to the positionality of participants and the historical, political, and material circumstances that have shaped the activity and discourses around them. Even within the same movement, positionality may affect the ways that participants situate their participation in activist work. For example, the online comic book Where to, Marie? illustrates this through a series of narratives that situate contemporary experiences of Lebanese feminist activists in relation to historical circumstances, ideologies, and resistance efforts (colonization; the Palestinian Nakba; Arab nationalism; the Lebanese civil war; labor, women’s rights, and student movements; international law and NGO structures; the Arab Spring; and queer and LGBT activisms).57 The work that activists do to connect movements across contexts is an important form of political meaning-making and relational literacy. In addition to shaping public narratives about what activism looks like, histories and collective memories also shape the ideas and processes that activists foreground in their work. For example, historian and activist Barbara Ransby connects practices and principles within the Movement for Black Lives to the influence of activist Ella Baker. These practices include centering marginalized people and resistance to designating a leader, despite our contemporary celebrity-driven culture.58 While tracing activist lineages is a valuable project, quick or superficial connections can perpetuate exclusionary stereotypes about activism. The stereotype of the “ideal” activist privileges certain kinds of participation. Several scholars have shown how people who engage in activism take up these stereotypes by drawing boundaries around the kinds of people who count as activists and the kinds of work that is labeled activist.59 However, these privileged forms of participation aren’t accessible to all movement participants, nor are they the only kind of work that matters. While public actions and prominent leaders are often lionized in popular narratives about activism, these activities and people are supported by processes of relationshipbuilding and private or semi-public activity that may be less publicly visible but are certainly no less vital to sustained activist work. In this way, the idea that activist participation involves completely committing one’s life to the cause or engaging primarily in direct action can contribute to the devaluation of people and work needed to sustain contemporary movements.

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Stereotypes about activism can also reinforce power relations in activist spaces because the traditional or ideal version of activism is often less accessible to marginalized people: the ability to engage in the “right” activist work can correlate with privilege. For example, Emma Craddock studied the perceptions of activist identity among anti-austerity activists in the United Kingdom and found that activism is associated with an “ideal” identity and type of activity, both of which are gendered. As Craddock explains, “women are more likely to experience not only barriers and exclusions to doing activism and being an activist in the first place, but negative emotional impacts from not fulfilling the criteria to be deemed an ‘ideal activist.’”60 This can result in activist spaces reinforcing gendered power relations when the most valued performances of activism are more accessible to men. In their work with environmental activism in Canada, O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy explore the possible causes of research showing that women have lower rates of participation in environmental activism despite demonstrating higher levels of concern. The authors argue that activism is typically defined by sociologists as a public sphere activity, which results in incomplete accounts of activism. Other scholars have made similar points about overlooked activity, such as Jin Haritaworn’s discussion of the importance of the “queer of colour kitchen table” as a space for community building, knowledge production, and other forms of movement work.61 Catherine Squires explores varying relationships to publicness in her typology of Black publics in the United States, distinguishing among enclave, counterpublic, and satellite publics. In particular, Squires’s description of enclave publics explains that factors such as repression, violence, and a lack of resources can necessitate activity that is hidden from dominant publics or institutions in order to survive, support members’ autonomy and agency, and cultivate resistance.62 These scholars’ work shows that discourses and processes of resistance may take various forms due to factors such as oppression, resources, and goals. Relational work is essential for sustainable movements and affects the strength of a movement or community. Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker and her many, varied contributions to the civil rights and Black liberation movements offers an excellent example of the ways that sustained relational work contributes to activism and social movements.63 Baker’s work was integral to the civil rights movement and organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker held some official leadership positions and did occasionally speak publicly, but her work more often involved roles that were community based or behind the scenes, and thus less visible to some audiences.64 Many activists have used digital genres and platforms to challenge “traditional” understandings of politics and activism, including the ways these

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definitions are shaped by privileged social positions and exclude participants for whom traditional activism or politics may be inaccessible. Maher, Johnstonbaugh, and Earl argue that broad definitions of activism can lead to more inclusive participation.65 Disabled activists have made similar arguments on social media as people circulate various forms of participation and evaluate different strategies or tactics. People who are marginalized because of class, race, gender identity, disability, and citizenship or residency status may not be able to engage in direct action, may face radically different consequences for their participation, or may have different strategies for activist participation that go unrecognized by traditional definitions. Scholars and activists working on feminist, queer, disability, and antiracist activisms have countered stereotypes about ideal activism in academic publications and public contexts. However, the ongoing conversations about slacktivism illustrate that the work of (re)defining activism is a continuous, ongoing project. Devaluation of certain types of work crops up even among experienced activists. Some scholars have argued for a redefinition of activism or for a framework that accounts for the multiple kinds of people and activity involved in contemporary activism. Martin, Hanson, and Fontaine argue for an understanding of activism in relation to geographic scale and social relationships, defining activism as “everyday actions by individuals that foster new social networks or power dynamics.”66 O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy propose the concept of “relational activism,” which they describe as the “acts behind activism.”67 The authors focus on embeddedness to argue for the importance of connecting everyday lived contexts to political activity. I agree with these scholars’ moves to consider a broader range of activity as activist and to describe that work in relational terms, rather than excluding or devaluing work that isn’t public or is less visible. However, some of these authors still implicitly or explicitly position the everyday, relational, or nonpublic in ways that may lead to devaluation of this work. For example, Martin, Hanson, and Fontaine argue for recognizing the importance of everyday actions to activism, but position these actions as precursors to “political action that transforms a community.”68 Likewise, O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy’s phrase “acts behind activism” still foregrounds public sphere activity as activism and positions the activity they study in a supporting role. Although they position their argument as one that leads to a more inclusive definition of activism, their description suggests that relational work is not the same as activism, but supports actual activism work of a particular type, scale, or effect. They emphasize the importance of activity that leads to direct political change or transforms a community; positioning everyday activity as a precursor that enables these processes still means that everyday activity

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falls outside of these boundaries. As Craddock notes, though, participants experience different barriers and exclusions to certain kinds of work.69 If the most important work can only be done by participants with class, race, or gender privilege, this leads to exclusions in activist movements and devaluation of important contributions. A more radical approach to reframing definitions of activism is outlined in an online manifesto titled “This Tweet Called My Back.”70 The authors, who identify themselves as “an online collective of Black, AfroIndigenous, and NDN71 women,” call attention to the ways their digital activism is devalued despite its significant impact and consequences. They argue that when definitions of activism exclude or devalue digital work, they reproduce oppressive power relations by valuing the spaces and contributions accessible to those with privilege. Furthermore, these behaviors are harmful to movement sustainability because they are used to exploit, devalue, and exclude the integral contributions of marginalized women to social movements. The authors argue for different ways of understanding and participating in activism: Currently, much of the defining dialogue on activism excludes the very women who have made it possible via sustainable conversations on anti-violence on social media and across a variety of informal platforms. The idea of “real activism” also ignores the fact that most marginalized women support their own mini communities and are at the core of providing care and resources for those around them. It is radical activism when an unemployed elder or younger woman provides free or reduced childcare for working women in her family and her community. It is radical activism when an abuela makes hundreds of tamales to feed a community during holidays or cooks extra, just in case visitors drop by. It is radical activism when women create informal economies to support themselves and their family. Whether you are selling tamales out of your truck, letting a cousin who was sexually assaulted stay with you until she can survive, or hosting a community teach in with your computer YOU ARE A RADiCAL ACTiVisT.72 The authors emphasize the range of forms that movement participation can take and the importance of recognizing the ecologies of support and community that sustain activist projects. Contemporary activist literacies involve identifying and foregrounding the histories and genealogies that shape ongoing movements while also accounting for processes that have changed the communicative and social landscape in which activists work. Two such processes that I foreground in this book are technological change and globalization. Zeynep Tufekci writes that the networked

20 : Introduction

communication enabled by digital technologies has altered “the architecture of connectivity” across society; these changes affect a wide range of rhetorical and social processes, including political and activist engagement.73 Tufecki highlights three important capacities of social movements: “to set the narrative, to affect electoral or institutional change, and to disrupt the status quo.”74 Digital media have changed the trajectory of movements; although they can bypass some of the processes involved in “traditional” organizing, the results may not be sustainable unless the movement develops the ability to adapt and change. In addition, Tufekci’s analysis highlights the importance of multiple kinds of work involved in traditional organizing processes; her analysis shows that highly visible, public actions aren’t the only activity that matters. Before social media, gaining supporters happened more slowly but the process also accomplished multiple things: it involved building relationships and working through issues, processes that shaped movements’ success and sustainability. Analyzing movements and their capacities is a complex task, one that requires attention to the ways that social media have changed how movements demonstrate these capacities. Instead of subjugating relational work as a precursor or background element of activism, scholars and activists need to understand activism as networked and connected, so that these activities aren’t necessarily less important, as “behind” or “before” might imply, but rather serve different purposes within activist assemblages. This different position doesn’t make these actions less valuable—it just makes them differently visible and leads to different effects. Social movements involve various kinds of rhetorical and relational work: ordinary people connecting with political discourse, activists connecting with one another, people and activists refining their ideas, and activists shaping public discourse about important issues. Social media make some aspects of connectivity visible in ways that can also shape organizing in positive ways: the everyday, interpersonal, and individual work of activism is visible, shared, and circulated. I regularly see folks model activism through the content they share on social media, and it shapes my understanding of what activism looks like, who it includes, and how it works. Just as spaces and rhetorical interactions are porous and dynamic, so too are activist movements and campaigns. Different kinds of activity are differently accessible. For many people, engaging on social media is a way of participating in an event such as a demonstration or march if they aren’t able to be there. Alice Wong, a disability activist, explains that “living in a world that is physically and socially inaccessible (e.g., microaggressions, lack of transportation, lack of accessible buildings and venues), and living with a body that has significant energy and assistance needs, makes it difficult for

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me to ‘show up’ the way most activists imagine what ‘showing up’ means.”75 In order to better recognize and value accessible movements, publics need frameworks for understanding activism that allow for multiple entry points and forms of participation. Instead of focusing on the boundaries of activism, contemporary frameworks for understanding activism need to incorporate various types of activity and provide mechanisms for distinguishing among those activities. Charlotte Cooper’s typology of engagement in Fat Activism is one useful example. Cooper draws on archives, interviews with activists, and her own activist experience. From this research, she distinguishes among public engagement, community building, and cultural work to describe fat activism as a “meta social movement” that is widespread, diverse, and accessible to a range of people.76 Cooper’s typology acknowledges that these different types of activism do different things, but together they provide a view of (fat) activism that is accessible, inclusive, expansive, and dynamic. I agree with Cooper’s emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity, as well as her attention to the blurred boundaries and mutability of activist work across contexts and among different groups of people. Instead of narrowly defining activism, then, I focus in this book on frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneous and interconnected elements of contemporary activist movements. The frameworks I propose emphasize three relational features of activism: situatedness, directedness, and collectivity. First, activism is situated: rhetorical and transnational feminist theory are especially useful frameworks for analyzing activist work because each body of theory draws attention to the importance of reading this work at multiple scales. Rhetoricians attend not only to rhetorical activity but also to situations, genres, and ecologies that shape that activity and its effects. Transnational feminists typically attend to phenomena at various scales and the relationships between different levels of analysis. For example, a transnational feminist analysis might situate feminist activity in relation to both local political and historical contexts and transnational power dynamics; or it might examine how and why a similar text or activity is interpreted or enacted differently in different places. Examining the ways that strategies, movements, and discourses are situated in relation to people, histories, and ideologies is one way to understand activist work. The cost and effect of the same activity can be quite different from one person or context to the next. Positionality and intention can be part of what makes something activist. By emphasizing situatedness, I do not mean that situations can be isolated: activist work is relational and connected, not discrete. Activism often involves connections between public, semipublic, and private spaces and activities. Analyses of activism’s situatedness involves tracing the situational elements

22 : Introduction

that shape that work and the connections between different activities or scales of analysis. Second, activism is directed. Perhaps the most obvious element of this feature is that activist work is directed toward a particular goal. Scholars describe this aspect of activism in various ways, such as “contributing to longterm cultural change”;77 “a vision of a better future for a group of people”;78 and “actions . . . that foster new social networks or power dynamics.”79 Activist work may involve multiple goals, and one way to interpret activist direction relationally is to identify those goals, their relationship to one another, their relationship to various participants or audiences, and their relationship to a particular activity (such as a genre, campaign, or event). One element of directedness in particular that I focus on in this book involves the ways that activist projects engage with power. Many activists see power analysis as a foundational element of their work; transnational feminists, too, typically engage with the ways that power infuses transnational connections between people, things, structures, and ideas. The case studies I examine in this book all engage in activity that was directed in some way by gender; however, the extent to which that direction involves a view of sexism as a systemic form of oppression varies quite widely across all three chapters, as does the extent to which the case studies engage with the connectedness of oppressions. Analyzing the directedness of activist work involves activists’ self-identified goals as well as the ways that those goals address power. Finally, activism is collective. Activist projects are typically connected to social groups and collective goals. However, these connections can vary substantially in scale and quality. I see room in this expansive vision of collectivity for individualized activity to be directed in ways that connect it to a social group or collective goal, but this version of collectivity is quite different from the community organizing and accountability emphasized by many activists.80 I don’t think contemporary activism can be restricted to organized groups, but collective organizing and activity serve particularly important functions for social movements: organizing gives activists more power to push for change. It is also a site of political and relational work that can help folks develop and refine their politics and goals. Analysis of how activist work involves collective engagement yields important insights about that work. An analysis of activism’s collectivity involves identifying how an activity is connected to collectives (e.g., social groups, specific community/ ies, or activist groups) and how those connections shape the activity. The ideas about activism that I discuss in this book are shaped by various social movements and trajectories of activism, but my project is more narrowly focused on contemporary women’s and feminist activism. The case studies in this book all engage with gender, and my perspective is shaped

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heavily by feminist theory and activism. Contemporary feminist activisms are shaped by histories of activism, including women’s participation in political movements generally (not just those focused on feminist, women’s, or gender-based issues) as well as groups and figures from previous eras of women’s and feminist activism (such as campaigns for women’s suffrage). “Feminist” is used to refer to a broad range of people, activities, and ideological positions. For example, a list of famous feminists might include writers and activists such as Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Sara Ahmed, Emi Koyama, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nawal El Saadawi as well as popular figures whose feminist texts have circulated widely, such as Beyoncé, Emma Watson, and Malala Yousafzai. This multiplicity is part of why critique and support are useful—for feminism to do its job, we have to constantly attend to what this term means, who it represents or excludes, and how it works. I view these considerations as fundamentally rhetorical: they are negotiated through feminists’ and activists’ use of communicative tools to affect others. Thinking about feminist activism from a rhetorical perspective allows scholars and activists to explore the uses and limits of activist tactics by connecting these tactics to ideologies and effects. To do this, though, it helps to have some common ground about the meaning of words such as “feminism” and “feminist.” In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks defines feminism as “a struggle to end sexist oppression.”81 This is the definition that I use in this book. Like many other feminists, I see this struggle against sexist oppression as inextricably linked to other forms of oppression, such as racist, antiLGBTQIA, capitalist, colonial, imperialist, and ableist oppressions. The unifying element of the work discussed in this book is its engagement with sexist oppression; however, I also draw attention to the ways that this engagement connects with other systems of domination. In addition, not all of the rhetorical activity in this book is explicitly labeled “feminist.” Each case study connects to the term in some way, but those connections differ. Some rhetors in this book might be described as “profeminist,” a term that Joy James uses to describe people who advocate for gender liberation but do not self-identify as feminists.82 When the identification of a person or group with the term “feminist” is unclear, I have tried to use “feminist” as a label for activity rather than people and to explain when and how this label is used. Drawing from the feminist principles that drew me into activist engagement, I view feminist and activist work as ongoing, recursive, and interactive. I also view activists as skilled rhetoricians and intellectuals from whom researchers and students of rhetoric can learn a great deal. However, I also believe that academic work has something to offer to activist thinking and practice. In making these connections, I do not mean to suggest that

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activists and rhetoricians are mutually exclusive groups; I know well that they are not. Many scholars of feminism and rhetoric also engage in activism.83 And my personal and academic experiences have taught me that most activists are very savvy rhetoricians who understand the importance of making purposeful communicative choices in their work. Activists have taught me a great deal about effective rhetorical practices, even if their work isn’t framed in those terms. Activists’ work is often pedagogical and theoretical in ways that have much to offer rhetorical studies.84 To highlight these connections, I follow the example of feminist and queer scholars who emphasize the importance of understanding their discipline’s engagement with, and grounding in, politics and practices of communities that stretch beyond academia. My goal is to strengthen awareness of this interconnectedness rather than to reify the notion that academia and activism are separate spheres. In this book, I explore activist processes with attention to the connectivities between groups of people, locations, resources, and rhetorical activities, drawing attention to the fact that just as rhetoric and rhetorical situations cannot be isolated, neither can activist projects. In her overview of transnational feminist activism, Valentine Moghadam connects technological changes to globalization and the networking strategies of transnational feminist activists. Contemporary globalization, which involves transnational “mobility of capital, peoples, discourses, products, and organizations” has led more activist movements to make connections across borders, though most organizations work at multiple levels.85 Processes of globalization, visible models of transnational organizing, and awareness of the linkages between diverse people and places have led to increases in transnational activism.86 While the case studies in the following chapters do not explicitly name globalization as their target, they are shaped by the processes of globalization (and resistance to it) that have led to increases in transnational organizing and activism. This connectedness calls for a dynamic and multilayered approach to understanding and engaging with activist rhetoric. I use the concept of “assemblage” to frame the complex connectivities I highlight in this book as I analyze digital activist work from a transnational feminist perspective. Activist Assemblages

A social movement might be made up of rhetorical genres, people, structures, events, material resources, ideas. These things interact with one another to form the properties of the movement. However, the relationship between these things is one of interaction, not addition. Like other scholars, I use “assemblage” to characterize contemporary activist work because of its usefulness for thinking about the relationships between heterogeneous parts of a complex whole—including both material and immaterial elements—as

Introduction : 25

well as its focus on circulation, movement, and interaction.87 In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write about assemblages along with rhizomes, grids, strata, and plateaus; their emphasis is on ways of thinking, writing, and existing nonhierarchically.88 Assemblage offers a framework for thinking about complex relationships and interactions. A “whole” (i.e., an assemblage) develops through the interaction of a number of different components with one another. The Women’s March is an assemblage: it is a complex multiplicity composed of living beings, things, and ideas interacting with one another. These components and their interactions shape the whole, but they can move in and out of the assemblage; the assemblage itself can stabilize, transform, or break up on the basis of these interactions. Through the lens of assemblage, the Women’s March might include (but isn’t limited to) the following parts: • • •

•

• • • •

•

• • •

organizers of the Women’s March in Washington, DC organizers of “sister” events the Women’s March website (including some of its tools, such as the online network of sister marches, the statement of values, and the mission statement) protest signs (individually made signs, full-page newspaper advertisements by Shepard Fairey, signs distributed by National Organization for Women and other organizations) chants or slogans people who participated by attending, marching, speaking, and engaging through social media clothing items (such as t-shirts with political messages or “pussy hats”) digital texts created by people other than the national Women’s March organizers (e.g., social media event pages, posts about march logistics and safety, commentary on the march and reasons for participating or not participating, photos of the events and participants) material and infrastructure that enabled the sharing of those digital texts (e.g., smartphones, laptops, desktops, servers, Wi-Fi networks, social media platforms) geographic locations (streets, plazas, parks, rooms) vehicles (cars, buses, airplanes, and trains that transported participants to the events) groups and organizations (political, activist, and social groups that endorsed the events or that participated together)

These various components are related in time and space and worked together to produce the Women’s March as a whole as well as the various connected local marches. However, just adding the different elements together wouldn’t

26 : Introduction

capture the “whole” of the Women’s March. An assemblage is greater than the sum of its parts because it emerges from and depends on relationships and interactions between the different parts. In assemblages, the relationships between components are relations of exteriority, in contrast to relations of interiority. Manuel DeLanda, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, compares relations of exteriority to symbiotic relationships between animals and plants in nature, whereas relations of interiority are like the relationships between organs in the human body.89 Relations of exteriority mean two things. First, the parts of an assemblage are somewhat autonomous in relation to the whole. They can be detached from it and connected to another assemblage. The components of an assemblage do not necessarily need the relationships or the other components in the assemblage in order to exist or function; they might make use of those relationships within the assemblage, but they could also be part of a different assemblage and develop different relationships. If a person or object were separated from the assemblage and placed in a different kind of assemblage, it would likely function differently but it would not cease to work. For example, my participation in a Women’s March satellite event linked me to the activist assemblage of the Women’s March. In other contexts—working, grocery shopping, socializing, or attending other protests in Beirut—I did not operate the same way that I did in connection to that particular assemblage. Additionally, assemblages’ relational nature means that the whole can’t be explained by the properties of the different parts that make it up. The parts each have both properties and capacities. Properties are attributes, and capacities are potentialities (capacities to affect or be affected). To take an example used by DeLanda, consider a sharp knife. Its sharpness is a property. The knife might have the capacity to cut, but the exercise of this capacity can only occur in relation to something else (such as bread, but not a rock).90 In the example of the Women’s March, the trains heading toward gathering points in various cities may have been filled with marchers on the morning of January 21, 2017. While the trains had the capacity to move protesters toward their meeting point, they needed specific kinds of passengers in order to do so. Filled with a different set of passengers, the trains would not have exercised their capacity to bring protesters to the march. The capacities of components may or may not be exercised in a given assemblage, and the exercise of capacities can’t be predicted based on the properties of the part because they depend on other components of the assemblage.91 Understanding how a part functions within an activist assemblage is a relational task. This means that we don’t know how a component might work within an assemblage based on looking at that component on its own;

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we need to see it within the context of the assemblage and its relation to other parts. To take another example, a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt worn by a march participant has the capacity to relate to ideas and people in different ways, while maintaining the same properties. This capacity can be explored in ways that parallel rhetoricians’ interest in how context affects rhetoric. The relations that develop depend on the person wearing it, the location (from a type of building, room, or outdoor space to rural, city, state, country, border, or contested space), the people who see it, and its temporal proximity to events and rhetorical activity (such as the murders of Black people in the United States and/or protests for racial justice and accountability). Note that these elements aren’t fixed: the person moves through space and time, as does the shirt and as do the ideas it relates to. At the Women’s March, where some participants presumably needed reminders about the importance of racial justice to feminist activism, the shirt and its wearer might be interacting with participants and observers as a reminder of the importance of intersectionality in feminist movements. It could be worn at a Black Lives Matter protest to show others that the wearer supports the protest’s opposition to anti-Black violence and the systematic targeting and killing of Black people by police. Or one might wear the shirt while going about one’s daily life (e.g., working, if one’s job allows casual or nonuniformed attire, running errands, socializing) to affirm the value of Black lives and express one’s political commitments. The shirt might function slightly differently in each of those contexts. While the shirt and the person wearing it are common to all of them, the assemblage relies on more—intensities, interactions, and relationships. I have proposed situatedness, direction, and collectivity as three principles that can help examine these interactions and relationships in order to understand the links between an assemblage’s parts and the assemblage as a whole. Another important feature of assemblages is the processes that stabilize and destabilize them. Reterritorialization is the process of stabilizing an assemblage and holding its parts together—through this process, the “territory” of the assemblage is established (hence, “territorialization”). Deterritorialization destabilizes, dissolves, or transforms an assemblage. The emergence of outcry in response to Trump and his misogyny and the circulation of discourses responding to that misogyny were a part of the process of reterritorialization for the Women’s March. Early critiques of the march offer an example of deterritorialization, because they led to a transformation. The pussy hats could be read as a reterritorializing object in the assemblage: in collective memory, the hats serve as a visual link to the march, which holds certain elements of the assemblage together. However, to the extent that the hats were also critiqued as racist and transantagonistic, they also

28 : Introduction

may have served to deterritorialize the march. My concern with the language of deterritorialization is that it might inappropriately suggest that critique ruins something good. However, I see critique as an important form of activist dialogue as well as a means for transformation. Through this process, critiques can help people transform what was previously only good for some participants into something more just and inclusive. Theoretical concepts such as Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy or Susan Jarratt and Johnathan Alexander’s theorization of “unruly” rhetorics link processes of disruption and resistance to political struggles toward justice.92 In this spirit, I think of critique and deterritorialization as part of the process of maintaining activist work’s vitality. In a similar way to languages that are “alive,” and therefore change and adapt as they are spoken, activist assemblages must be alive and responsive to people, things, and relationships. The Women’s March is a rich example of how people, things, and ideas come together as activist assemblages: fluctuating collections of connected, heterogeneous elements that resist power and oppression. Assemblages aren’t linear, so it isn’t quite logical to define a beginning or end point. Deleuze and Guattari’s project of writing or thinking through an assemblage involves mapping, a process that doesn’t specify a particular path through the material but allows for multiple entry points and “lines of flight.” Furthermore, maps “must be produced, constructed . . . always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable.” 93 Maps not only can be revised, they must be revised. This attention to process and revision resonates with both feminist and rhetorical ways of knowing and doing. Feminist thinkers, rhetors, and activists emphasize processes of critique, reflection, and continuous development as central to feminist politics and theory. For rhetors, the process of composing texts is often filled with feedback and revision, one in which we sometimes don’t necessarily “finish” but rather stop modifying in order to circulate our material (to trusted writing partners, reviewers, publics). Even after such a stopping point, the text may still be revised, or our ideas may continue to be revised as others circulate, respond to, and otherwise take up our texts. Process and revision are also visible in many activist communities. For example, the activist practice of “calling in” is used by some feminist, queer, and antiracism activists to respond to problematic behavior by friends, fellow activists, family, or acquaintances in a manner oriented toward helping them learn from their mistakes and revise their thinking and practices.94 This phrase is a revision of “calling out,” a term with a longer history that also involves responding to harmful behavior. Historically, call outs have often been a public communication tactic directed at groups or people in positions of power. As adrienne maree brown writes, “Call outs have a long history as a brilliant strategy for marginalized people to stand up to those

Introduction : 29

with power. Call outs have been a way to bring collective pressure to bear on corporations, institutions, and abusers on behalf of individuals or oppressed peoples who cannot stop the injustice and get accountability on their own.”95 In contrast to calling out, calling in is a strategy for responding to problematic behavior by communicating directly (publicly or privately) with a person or group who has caused harm. Calling in typically happens within a community or between people who have previous interaction with one another, whereas call outs often rely on accumulation of support through public circulation. Both calling out and calling in are oriented toward stopping harm, but they involve different assessments of the relationship between those involved.96 Calling in is one of a number of tactics that draws attention to feminist and activist ideas and work, as well as those who engage with them, as in-process, and therefore subject to critique, reflection, and revision. Process and revision are also visible in feminist projects that focus on accessible language and education. For example, some popular magazines and blogs, such as Bitch Media and Everyday Feminism, have used a “Feminism 101” section or tag for content that introduces key ideas and concepts. On social media, “social justice slideshows” can be used to provide a brief introduction or background on a topic that is circulating in the news or through social media networks.97 Feminist writer bell hooks has written accessible books intended to introduce feminism, including one directed toward men. Patricia Hill Collins’s academic book, Black Feminist Thought, is deliberately written in accessible language.98 These projects recognize the importance of providing entry points for engagement with theory and politics. Entry points can also be about content and interests. Some feminists see engagement with feminism by celebrities and in popular culture as potential entry points for people who aren’t familiar with feminist ideas.99 Feminist affinity groups also offer spaces for people to engage with feminist ideas in relation to their interests or hobbies. These examples allow for a variety of entry points to feminist and activist work, making room for participants to learn and revise as a part of their engagement. I N THIS BOOK, I map feminist activism and rhetoric through my own set of entry points. In each of the chapters that follow, I use a specific theoretical concept and case study as an entry point for exploring feminist activist work. I map each assemblage differently, using examples and scholarship that reflect a range of relationships and approaches to activist work to highlight the multiple layers and components of activist work. I consider a variety of activity that might “count” as activist if one invested in maintaining a range of entry points for activist participation. However, I also offer strategies for

30 : Introduction

distinguishing between different kinds of work by analyzing how that work is connected to various people, ideas, structures of power, and material conditions. Chapters in the book analyze activist campaigns and groups that use social media to engage with audiences and issues that exceed national borders. Each chapter combines theoretical concepts with practical methods of rhetorical analysis to provide readers with frameworks for understanding the complexity of contemporary activist rhetorics. Together, the chapters provide a comprehensive framework for developing activist literacies informed by rhetorical and transnational feminist theory. These activist literacies include concepts and interpretive heuristics that connect rhetorical activity to material circumstances, transnational relationships, rhetorical processes, and power structures. Each of the literacy frameworks that I outline is a way of mapping an activist assemblage (or part of an assemblage) in ways that attend to situatedness, direction, and collectivity. The case studies I use to illustrate each framework involve different origins, structures, and activities. My goal in choosing these varied examples is to illustrate how the literacies in this book provide entry points for interpreting and engaging with a variety of rhetorical activity. In chapter 1, I examine literacies of positionality. I argue that activists use social media genres to call attention to, and subsequently think about and with, social locations. Through the lens of positionality, activists and their publics can connect individual acts of participation to collective processes and systems of power. Social media genres often engage participants in articulating who they are, what they think, and how they relate to people or ideas. These features can be mobilized for activist purposes. I illustrate this framework through a multilayered genre analysis of a campaign from the Uprising of Women in the Arab World and the ways that participants use a self-portrait genre to engage in disidentification. The analysis contextualizes patterns in the genre and its transnational circulation to show how engagement with the campaign is politically and rhetorically situated. In chapter 2, I outline a framework for developing orientation literacies. Orientation literacies offer ways to read activist rhetoric on social media by attending to how the rhetoric is materially and ideologically oriented and why these orientations matter. The framework focuses on four relational categories: activity, location(s), resources, and participants and relationships. I use these categories and the concept of orientation to investigate and explain the complex relationships that situate activist projects. I illustrate the framework by comparing two superficially similar groups, Girl Up and SPARK Movement, to demonstrate the nuanced analysis and distinction that the framework facilitates.

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In chapter 3, I explore circulation literacies. Drawing on scholarship in rhetorical genre studies, I argue that generic memory and “sticky uptakes” shape narratives about social media genres, but I also show how patterned “counteruptakes” emerge in response to those narratives. I trace the metageneric discourses about #ChallengeAccepted, a social media genre with a contested relationship to activism, to highlight the ways that circulation, memory, power, and uptake shaped discourses about the genre, sometimes in ways that superseded the actual features of the genre. The concept of “sticky uptakes” draws attention to the ways that genre knowledge and ideology shape discourses about activism. “Counteruptakes”, on the other hand, show how people make use of genre and uptake knowledge to revise generic expectations or redirect attention. These two concepts and the processes of tracing metagenre and circulating discourse offer entry points for examining circulating activist genres. Together, these three literacies create a framework that scholars, activists, and publics can use to understand the networked interactions in which rhetoric and power circulate and through which rhetoric can contribute to social change.

ONE Literacies of Positionality Networked Activism, Embodied Genres, and Performances of Dis/Identification ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في الوطن العربي ألني إنسان و لست شرف يصان‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab Countries because I am a human being not anyone’s honor. KHAWLA FROM YEMEN 1 ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألنهم يقولون عني عاهرة ألنني أتمتع بالجنس‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because they call me a whore for enjoying sex! SARAH FROM LEBANON 2 ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألن هللا ساوى بيننا في الحقوق و الواجبات و الرسول قال‬ ‫النساء شقائق الرجال و مع ذلك يصرون على إستعبادنا باسم الدين‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because even though God has made us equal in rights and duties, and the Prophet said that women are men’s sisters, they insist on enslaving us in the name of religion. SALMA FROM EGYPT 3 ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألن اجا الوقت نكسّر الحواجز‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because the time has come to break the barriers/checkpoints. YASMINE FROM PALESTINE 4

: 32 :

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FIGURE 2. Modified screenshot of the Facebook album for the

Uprising of Women in the Arab World’s Self Portrait Campaign.

I

n October 2012, a group called the Uprising of Women in the Arab World (UWAW) launched a campaign asking supporters to share photos of themselves holding signs in support of the campaign (see figure 2). On the signs, participants shared messages that began with the words “I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because” and finished the message with their own reasons for supporting the work of the group. Through this genre, UWAW and its supporters circulated embodied messages about gender and activism that connected individual contributions to a collective project. UWAW’s campaign is an important example of early social media activism that engaged participants in networked self-performance. The examples in this chapter are an antecedent genre that can be connected to more recent examples of social media activism and illustrate some of the affordances of social media for activist work. Social media provide opportunities to facilitate, connect, and amplify the contributions of individual people. However, since social networks, critical literacies, and circulation processes shape the way audiences encounter and interpret this material, different people can experience the same rhetorical activity in vastly different ways. As I argued in the introduction to this book, contemporary responses to digital and transnational activism often oversimplify the complex people and relationships involved in transnational activist campaigns. This chapter addresses these

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oversimplifications by emphasizing activist literacies that connect individual contributions to collective projects and to broader systems of power. The phrase “literacies of positionality” in this chapter’s title refers to reading practices that situate specific examples of rhetorical activity in relation to collective projects, social structures, and systems of power. Positionality, which is also sometimes called social location, refers to a person’s position in society and the ways that position is shaped by social structures and material conditions.5 Scholars often use positionality to identify their relationships to power and privilege; these relationships affect how a person sees and engages with the world, and thus affects the perspective that researchers and writers bring to their work. In this chapter, I provide concepts and an analytical framework aimed at building literacies of positionality. These literacies emphasize the ways that activist rhetorics engage with participants’ embodied identities and social locations. The term “positionality” is especially valuable for connecting things at different scales. Positionality connects things at the microlevel (individual experience, identity, and worldview) with things at the macrolevel (broad social patterns and especially systems of power). Activists, researchers, and everyday people can use activist literacies to make these connections between micro and macro. In the following analysis of UWAW’s work, I draw on two bodies of scholarship that are particularly well-suited for connecting the micro and macro: disidentification and rhetorical genre studies. Together, disidentification and genre connect specific, everyday rhetorical acts to broader processes of belonging, resistance, and collective action. Reading UWAW’s campaign through these lenses highlights the ways that categorizations shape the social world and the ways activists navigate those categorizations as they work to change their world. Activists use social media genres to call attention to, think about, and engage with positionality, and multilayered genre analysis can help researchers and audiences pay attention to these relationships. I illustrate this method through my analysis of UWAW’s creation and use of activist self-portraits, a genre that engages participants in networked performances of “disidentification,” a partial and revisionary form of identification in which someone engages with and reworks an identification.6 UWAW asked participants to create a self-portrait that connected each participant and their ideas to a collective project; that overall project involved disidentification focused on sexist oppression. Participants’ individual self-portraits also performed disidentification through references to ideological norms, oppression, activism, and embodied experiences. Although I focus specifically on UWAW’s campaign and its context, the genre is an important antecedent that can help rhetoricians understand other

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campaigns that have drawn on similar genres and rhetorical strategies for different activist projects in other rhetorical contexts. The broad rhetorical and activist affordances of self-portrait campaigns involve constructing and positioning groups and their members. Campaigns such as UWAW’s offer participants a way to perform the self and to position themselves in relation to a group of people or political issue. As a part of this process, participants might align themselves with a particular worldview or social group, but they might also perform disidentification (opposition or partial alignment) by expressing a critique or revision to what they see as a common theme or idea with which they are expected to identify. For groups, these campaigns offer a venue for organizing participants, listening to participants’ experiences and ideas, and demonstrating support for the group to others. Through responses to the campaign entries, participants and audiences can think and talk through ideas and get a sense of their own position in relation to others’. The questions in chart 1 provide entry points for thinking about activist genres through the framework of multilayered genre analysis. CHART 1: Questions for Multilayered Genre Analysis

COLLECTIVE CONTEXT

1. Who creates, views, shares, and/or responds to the genre? 2. What similarities and differences among participants can be observed through the (visible) traces of this engagement? a. Is the genre (or engagement with it) connected to specific organizations or social groups? b. What are the relationships between those groups of people? c. How are the groups related to the genre and the topic? 3. Who doesn’t engage with this genre? Are there absences or discrepancies in participation that are linked to social groups? 4. How is the project curated? What shows people that the contributions are part of a collective project? SITUATING THE GENRE

1. What political, historical, and ideological conditions and processes have shaped the emergence of the genre? Does it respond to specific political circumstances or events? 2. What previous genres and rhetorical processes have shaped the genre? Is the genre connected to specific genealogies of political and activist work? What is the connection between the participants and groups in these different examples?

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3. How does the genre connect to the process of creating social change? What kind of change do participants seek? How does the genre contribute to that process? How is the genre linked to other activities? GENRE PATTERNS

1. What visual, textual, and ideological patterns are common among the samples? What patterns are less common? 2. How do genre patterns connect to the collective context outlined above? 3. How do genre patterns connect to the ways this genre is situated politically, historically, rhetorically, and in relation to activist work? 4. How do patterns in the genre contribute to connections between the micro, meso, and macro levels? CIRCULATION AND ATTENTION

1. How do people respond to or talk about this genre? What patterns emerge from a review of the ways that people discuss, share, or otherwise respond to the genre? 2. How do these patterns connect to historical contexts, social groups, or power relationships? The first layer of analysis involves connecting the genre to its collective context: the people who create and engage with the genre. The second layer of analysis involves identifying how the genre is situated politically and rhetorically. The third layer of analysis involves identifying patterns in the genre and connecting those patterns to the collective context and situated analysis. The final layer of analysis involves observing processes of circulation and interaction through which people engage with the genre. Each of these analytical layers draws attention to the relationships that situate activist participation on social media; together, the multiple layers encourage connections between specific rhetorical activities, collective processes of belonging and resistance, and systems of power. The rest of this chapter illustrates these analytical categories through an analysis of UWAW’s photo campaign. Collective Context(s)

“Literacies of positionality” involve linking rhetoric and those who engage with it to collective processes and the relationships that influence those processes. In this section, I first situate the genre of UWAW’s campaign by explaining how the campaign fits into a collective project by outlining UWAW’s goals and activity. Then, I connect UWAW and the photo campaign to historical, political, and rhetorical processes that shaped the group and campaign.

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The Uprising of Women in the Arab World The Uprising of Women in the Arab World began in 2011 during the uprisings occurring in many Arab countries. The group described its work as an effort to correct an imbalance in the discourses of the Arab uprisings: the absence of feminist issues. As the group stated on its website, The Arab revolts are led in the name of dignity, justice and freedom, but we cannot reach for those values if women are being ignored or absented from the main scenery . . . We, women and men together, must continue revolting against oppression and put forward our feminist demands.7 UWAW’s online work began on Facebook but eventually grew to include a website with a blog as well as accounts on Twitter and Flickr. UWAW’s four leaders—Yalda Younes, Diala Haidar, Sally Zohney, and Farah Barqawi— are from three different countries: Younes and Haidar are from Lebanon, Zohney is from Egypt, and Barqawi is from Palestine.8 UWAW outlined three goals for its work: (1) to share the forms of discrimination faced by women in Arab countries, (2) to identify shared struggles in order to create a common ground for activism, and (3) to encourage debate on the situation of women in Arab countries, including the experiences of women after the demonstrations and uprisings.9 The group also listed five demands that foregrounded the political stance of the leaders and participants, along with some of the issues that were important for the group: 1. Absolute freedom of thought, of expression, of belief or disbelief, of movement, of body, of clothing, of lodging, of decision making, of marriage or nonmarriage 2. The right to autonomy, to education, to work, to divorce, to inheritance, to vote, to eligibility, to administrate, to ownership, and to full citizenship 3. Familial, social, political, and economic absolute equality with men 4. The abolition of all laws, practices, and fatwas violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as excision, stoning, lashing, and the laws acquitting rapists or tolerating crimes of “honor” 5. Protection against domestic violence, sexual harassment, and all forms of physical and psychological abuse and discrimination facing women today in the Arab world and beyond.10 UWAW gained significant publicity and participation through the Facebook photo campaign that I focus on in this chapter. The campaign

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launched in October 2012 and was called “I Am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World.” The photo campaign asked for photo submissions from audience members to express their support for the group. The campaign received over a thousand contributions that the group shared on social media. Participants included people within and outside of Arab countries. Most contributions were from women; some countries were much more heavily represented than others. The group shared photos across platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and the UWAW website. Most of the photos were translated into both Arabic and English in the caption; photos were also occasionally posted in French or translated into other languages in the comments section. The conventional format for these photos was a shot of an individual, holding a sign, facing the camera. The sign began with the words, “I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because” and ended with a unique reason from that person or group, such as this example by Hajar from Morocco/Dubai: “I’m with the uprising of women in the Arab world, because in 2013, we Arabs still need to justify why Arab women have to uprise!”11 A full understanding of the campaign requires literacies related to cultural and religious practices, regional and national histories and politics, and transnational power dynamics. UWAW’s photo campaign shows how genres can facilitate literacies among activists and their audiences, yet they also require specific literacies of viewers and participants. I focus especially on the photo campaign in this chapter, but it is only one part of UWAW’s activity. An offline component of the photo campaign drew on the photo submissions to create a new genre and action. Organizers created large banners featuring photos from the campaign and used those banners to cover large buildings in major cities. This extension of the photo campaign brought the work of participants to a new audience and context. The banners performed a different kind of work than the initial campaign, extending the ideas and actions of the photos. A second campaign, “Tell Your Story,” collected longer narratives, shared by participants and posted to the UWAW’s blog. A third campaign involved protests against sexual violence against Egyptian protestors. A fourth campaign, Hal t‘alameen? (Do you know?), focused on educating members of the public about laws that discriminate against women in Arab countries.12 Together, these campaigns illustrate the multifaceted activity and audiences that UWAW engaged in their work. UWAW’s photo campaign encouraged attention to social location and embodiment, and particularly to gendered differences in experience. UWAW’s project is unique, but their work shares important features with other social media campaigns. Activist groups such as UWAW use social media and other technological affordances to create an archive that facilitates

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the work of building an activist project. Using platform features, activists create, collect, and curate texts, linking their campaign to specific people or groups in the process. In UWAW’s campaign, this occurred as the group collected participant contributions into a Facebook album; in addition to collecting contributions in a centralized location, groups can also use sharing, reposting, or unique hashtags to collect posts. Campaigns that are more decentralized might use one or several hashtags along with sharing and reposting to collect and circulate material. These collected contributions create an archive with which people can think about the campaign ideas (e.g., a person might compare their own position to the ideas in the photographs or learn from others’ perspectives) and act (e.g., contribute their own photos, share the photos, comment on the photos, discuss the photos with others). Through comments and discussion, the group also creates an archive of public responses and dialogue about the photos. By creating, viewing, circulating, and discussing the photos and responses, participants engage in a process of thinking about social location. Activists use these tactics to develop and circulate ideas and actions that shape contemporary movements through social media. I focus especially on this photo campaign because it highlights a central concern about activist work that happens on social media: the relationship between individual contributions and collective projects. Through this campaign, UWAW participants developed a specific self-portrait genre that connected the individual and collective; in the process, the project facilitated identification and disidentification. Self-portraits are both performative and associated with the self, so the genre is especially well-suited for analysis through the lens of disidentification, which focuses on how marginalized rhetors critique and rework exclusionary discourses. As I will discuss later, UWAW’s campaign is not the only example of a campaign like this. Through the increasing popularity of visually focused platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram in the years following UWAW’s campaign, disidentificatory self-portraits have continued to circulate on social media. More recently, platforms such as TikTok and features such as Instagram stories, reels, and live video have facilitated self-performance through video as well. A common way of misreading contemporary activist rhetoric is to assume that a particular text or campaign is working in isolation, rather than examining how the activity connected to other rhetorical and activist work. My analysis of the photo campaign in the rest of this chapter explores only part of the assemblage in which UWAW’s activity took place. In addition to the photos themselves, UWAW’s work included many people with varying relationships to their group (such as the founders of UWAW, people who contributed photos to the campaign, and audience members who viewed,

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liked, commented on, or shared the photos). Their work also involved ideas about feminism, activism, and the Arab uprisings and material resources that facilitated their activity, such as social media platforms, cameras, and the signs used in the photos. The relationship between these components was one of interaction rather than addition—the whole was greater than the sum of the parts because it emerged from and depended on relationships and interactions between the different elements. UWAW’s emphases on the Arab uprisings and women’s activism provide additional avenues for contextualizing the photo campaign genre. .

Arab Uprisings and Women’s Activism UWAW situated its work as a response to the 2011 uprisings that occurred in many Arab countries. These political uprisings are often referred to as the “Arab Spring,” though that terminology has been criticized by scholars and journalists. For example, journalists argued that “spring” was a term imposed by outside commentators and didn’t reflect the terms that most protesters used.13 “Arab Spring” connects the revolutions to short-term and ineffectual historical examples, draws on frameworks from European rather than Arab and West Asian history, and corresponds to orientalist rhetorical moves.14 The historical and figurative connotations dismiss protesters’ agency, the longevity of the activist work involved, and the impact of participants’ actions.15 Suggested alternatives that better correspond to language used by movement participants are “revolutions” and “uprisings.”16 Using the plural form of these words indicates multiplicity, in contrast to the collapsing of multiple, distinct movements and political contexts suggested by “Arab Spring” as a singular phenomenon.17 In this chapter, I primarily use “uprisings” to refer to these events. I have chosen to use this term in order to align with scholars who have critiqued the use of “Arab Spring” and to emphasize the language used by UWAW, which connects the work of this group to other political and activist activity. The 2011 uprisings are typically traced back to the December 2010 self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi.18 In addition to the uprising in Tunisia, large-scale uprisings occurred in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and Morocco.19 Smaller and less-publicized protests took place in other countries, as well. As Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui wrote, “Every single state of the twenty-two Arab countries is experiencing some level of activism, citizen expression, and demand, from demonstrating in the streets to tweeting online.”20 In interviews about their work, the UWAW leaders explicitly refer to the transnational connection among various movements and political contexts in the Arab uprisings to frame their work.

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Scholarly research and public discourse about the 2011 Arab uprisings have both focused attention on women’s role in the activism associated with uprisings in various countries. Although news media often focus on highprofile incidents and circulate spectacular or exceptional narratives, scholarship that engages in more contextualized and in-depth study often complicates these narratives. In their edited collection about the 2011 Arab uprisings, Frances Hasso and Zakia Salime adjust their definition of “revolution” to account for multiple scales of activity: “rather than relying on social science definitions of revolution as transformed states and overthrown leaders, we use the term to broadly capture affective, intimate, embodied, institutional, and spatial registers of upheaval and transgression . . . Revolution occurred at the levels of identification, imagination, aesthetics, and emotion.”21 Hasso and Salime, along with contributors to their volume, call attention to the ways that activists “engaged in world-challenging and world-making” and explore bodies and spatiality as central to this work.22 UWAW’s social media activism exemplifies this kind of embodied world-challenging and world-making. As the discussion of terminology above indicates, context and location shaped gendered participation in the uprisings. Scholars have emphasized the importance of situated, multiscaled analyses that account for the complex relationships between sexual and gendered identities, national and regional histories, and political participation. For example, Lamia Benyoussef identifies multiple competing “mythscapes” (populist, pluralist, Islamist, and secular) that circulated during the Tunisian uprising through different genres, media, and actions. These different ideological frames each constructed gendered, sexual, and national identity differently. Benyoussef ’s analysis shows that gender and sex in the Tunisian revolution must be considered in relationship to both historical and present-day class divisions, politics, and media literacies.23 Like Benyoussef, Frances Hasso explores how women’s social positions and activist work in Bahrain were shaped by intersecting formations of sect, sexuality, and gender.24 In interviews, Bahraini activists described women’s participation as pivotal to their movement. Hasso shows that women activists faced multiple forms of opposition and their activism took on varied forms in response to these conditions. In her analysis of Tunisian revolutionary graffiti, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui argues for decolonial vernacular discourse as a conceptual framework that highlights the multiplicity of identities and revolutions involved in the uprisings and shows “the hidden power dynamics and discursive strategies used to empower marginalized identities and further mobilize social change.”25 Alaoui argues that Tunisian graffiti artists created “a hybrid and embodied discursive space” that represented multiplicity while also creating grounds for coalition and

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a sense of shared struggle.26 Benyoussef, Hasso, and Alaoui’s analyses draw attention to the ways that even when activist rhetorics are connected, as was the case with the Arab uprisings, the activities are also shaped by specific histories, events, and material conditions. In contrast to movements that emphasized specific national contexts, UWAW organizers framed their project as creating ground for solidarity among women in different countries. In interviews, the organizers discuss the different circumstances in various countries but emphasize the importance of identifying shared elements of oppression in order to build a movement from those experiences. This framing is important in the context of US and European scholarship, journalism, and public discourse about the “Arab Spring” that glossed over the distinctions between governments and uprisings. The 2011 Arab uprisings involved struggles in multiple distinct political and national contexts. These distinctions are important, yet so is the way that the movements were connected and framed within Arab countries and outside of the region. In my analysis of the photo campaign later in this chapter, I will highlight some of the tensions that accompanied this process of connecting various people and movements in UWAW’s campaign.

Arab Women’s Activism and Social Media In addition to the political contexts and knowledges that shaped engagement with the Arab uprisings, activist uses of social media are also part of the collective context for understanding UWAW’s work. Social media and mobile communication technologies create opportunities for organizing, community-building, and political participation that complement other sites of participation. People can also use social media to circumvent or disrupt restrictions on activity in other kinds of space. Social media come with their own restrictions and affordances, and therefore social media provide complementary sites of engagement. Prior to the Arab uprisings, Loubna Skalli argued that women in the Middle East and North Africa have creatively and strategically used social media to contribute to public and political discourses, “creating alternative discursive spaces” in which to resist their oppression and exclusion.27 Creating spaces is an important way that activists facilitate revolutionary activity: this process facilitates the negotiation of identity and collective belonging through rhetoric. UWAW’s photo campaign similarly worked to build a collective space through a social media genre. Through social media affordances, individual performances can easily be connected to one another—either explicitly, through hashtags or curated campaigns, or implicitly through visual patterns, social actions, or other aspects of the genre.

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Activist spaces, whether physical or discursive, allow activists to develop shared ideas and strategies and to support one another in the difficult work that activism requires. Susanne Dahlgren’s analysis of women’s participation in the Southern Revolution in Yemen shows that activists developed collective spaces that facilitated revolutionary participation from people across differences in class, gender, age, and geographic location.28 Although new media “spaces” function differently than the physical spaces Dahlgren is writing about, space is an important metaphor for the affordances that social media offer for activism. Social media allow people to create “space” for discourse and conversation, as well as to negotiate limitations on access to physical space. Although limits and inaccessibility exist in all spaces, the nature of those limitations is different in different kinds of spaces. The Arab uprisings are often cited in both scholarly and public discourse as an illustration of the potential of social media for facilitating activism and social movements. Social media researchers have highlighted the ways that previous understandings of privacy and publicity are complicated by social media, the internet, and mobile technologies. Social media facilitate rhetoric’s movement across geographic and social boundaries in ways that circumvent restrictions on people’s physical movement through space and among one another. UWAW’s organizers showed their understanding of this spatial possibility, as well as their sense of kairos, when they discussed their decision to use social media for their project: Conscious that social media had played a critical role as a mobilizing tool in the uprisings, [Yalda Younes] decided to utilize it in support of Arab women’s struggles for equal rights. The goal of the Facebook page was not to simply raise awareness; it was also to create a platform for solidarity with women activists, who may have felt isolated in their individual struggles all over the region.29 UWAW’s use of social media involved creating collective space that would facilitate women’s activism. Using social media to create communal space through social media connects UWAW’s work to patterns in Arab women’s activism during the 2011 uprisings. Frances Hasso and Zakia Salime argued that “girls and women in the region were major drivers of digital activism” during the Arab uprisings.30 Activists used the internet and social media to create interstitial or third space sites that support politics and activism. For example, Susana Galán writes the following about women’s activism in Saudi Arabia: “the interstitial spaces of automobiles, shopping malls, and cyber sites such as personal blogs and YouTube have become particularly productive for [a]

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modality of cautious politics that unfolds where public and private, and by extension personal and political, become ‘intermeshed.’”31 Zakia Salime argues that the political work of the February 20 Movement in Morocco involved creating space for ordinary people to express themselves, narrate identities, and develop belonging and collectivity.32 These authors highlight how women activists developed tactics that challenge social and cultural divisions, including notions of public and private or political and personal. Salime highlights the multiplicity of tactics, ideologies, collectives, and issues involved in the February 20 Movement, arguing that movement rhetorics “disrupted conventional understandings of spatiality and politics by challenging normative divisions between private/public, male/female, and politics/culture.”33 Social media campaigns facilitated activism that challenged existing discursive and political boundaries or developed new ways of linking across those boundaries. Activists combined tactics focused on social media circulation as well as embodied performance and street protests, creating new spaces and circulating innovative activist genres. If activism involves collectivity, as I argued in the introduction, then people can use social media to transform individual actions into activist ones by connecting individual actions or “microresistance” to a social group, an activist group, or a pattern of activity. For example, Galán describes the use of social media to collect and coordinate individual acts of resistance against the driving ban in Saudi Arabia. Women recorded themselves driving and shared videos of their actions through social media (YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter). In this case, Galán argues, social media is what makes these acts political: “it was only in virtual space where the singular transgressions—some of them carried out and video-recorded in the middle of the night to avoid detection—became visible and legible as protest.”34 In contrast to analyses that characterize social media as a way to echo or amplify something, Galán shows that social media served an essential function. Bringing these individualized, disparate actions together through social media “brought ‘into being’ a space of politics that was promptly filled with images of Saudi women behind the wheel.”35 In addition to creating space, these campaigns also focus on embodied performance, which was a particularly important feature in the activism of the Arab uprisings, especially when that activism engaged with gender and sexuality.36 Collective context, the first layer of multilayered genre analysis, draws attention to the interconnectedness of UWAW’s activist rhetoric. This analysis contributes to literacies of positionality by emphasizing the ways that UWAW’s photo campaign genre is positioned in relation to specific groups of people who created, shared, circulated, and responded to the genre. Rather than examining this campaign in isolation, then, collective context

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emphasizes the ways that UWAW’s photo campaign is positioned in relation to other collective processes, such as the Arab uprisings and women’s activism in the uprisings. Situating the Genre

In this section, I shift focus from UWAW as a group to the photo campaign as a genre. I start by explaining the theoretical concepts of identification and disidentification, which I use to explain how UWAW’s campaign connected genre performances to political goals and a collective project. My use of disidentification as a theoretical framework emerged from my analysis of patterns in the genre and their relationship to the collective context. Because UWAW’s work is complex and multifaceted, disidentification is not the only framework that can be used to analyze their work. However, disidentification is a particularly important aspect of UWAW’s campaign because it highlights how participation involved explicit engagement with social location. I then explore how disidentification and the features of UWAW’s self-portrait genre connect the self-portraits to other activist work and to other activist genres.

Disidentification Activist projects typically involve multiple audiences and persuasive goals. In the highly networked ecologies of social media, audiences might be multiple, diverse, and somewhat amorphous. Social media rhetorics often circulate among multiple audiences and across divergent situations. An activist group might be simultaneously working to persuade some people to join their group as activists while also working to persuade a broader group of stakeholders or decision-makers to understand their perspective or accede to their demands. For example, UWAW asks participants to identify with the “Arab world” and with women. Their goals for the group involve facilitating and politicizing these identifications among potential participants. However, their demands are more outwardly focused, describing the specific ways that cultural and political change can redress gender-based oppression. These demands do not necessarily seem directed toward an audience that UWAW expects to participate in their campaigns. This distinction between UWAW’s goals and demands shows that the analysis of a particular activist genre or tactic should be situated among various networked discourses and participants involved in order to avoid oversimplifying that work. Disidentification builds on information about the collective context of UWAW’s campaign to highlight the ways that UWAW’s work is situated in relation to various groups of people whose connections to one another are infused with power relations.

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Disidentification is a concept from the work of José Esteban Muñoz that highlights how performances of the self can be a site for political work. Muñoz writes that “Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification . . . both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications.”37 Disidentification builds on the concept of identification. Identification refers to the process in which a person forms their sense of self (identity) through the ongoing processes of relating to others and imagining how others see them. A person negotiates their identity through multiple processes of identification with others. Through these negotiations, people develop ideas about who they are and what they can do.38 For rhetoricians, identification is important because it shapes a person’s ability to persuade and act.39 Identification, then, offers a framework for thinking about how our identity and sense of self is social. Through identifications, people situate or position themselves within the social world. Therefore, identifications have political implications.40 As a situated practice, identification offers a framework for thinking about how microlevel everyday rhetorical practices shape and are shaped by macrolevel historical, economic, and political structures. Among activists, identification draws attention to the processes through which people come to participate in collective activity and understand their role in that work. Disidentification, especially as theorized by Muñoz, highlights the complexity of identification processes for people who experience oppression and misrepresentation tied to their identifications. In contrast to identification, disidentification focuses attention on marginalized subjects and their strategies for negotiating identity and social location. In short, disidentification is what happens when a person revises or reworks an identification they are expected to take on. Identification can be a site of interpellation that reproduces power.41 Disidentification is a method of resisting that power. For Muñoz, disidentification is a strategic practice of creation, performance, and interpretation in which people resist the cultural logics that contribute to their exclusion or oppression. Examples of these oppressive cultural logics include heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny. Muñoz characterizes disidentification as “a survival strategy that works within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously.”42 For people who experience oppression(s), rhetorical resistance often requires working both within and against discursive norms and structures of power. Through practices of disidentification, a person “tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against” these discourses.43 Muñoz describes this process as one of saying “not yet” or

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“that’s not it”: someone is “hailed” by ideology and can’t fully identify with the way(s) they’ve been constructed by hegemonic culture. So a person who disidentifies may partially identify with something but also work to revise the way this identification is articulated or understood through disidentification. This process involves engaging with the ways that one is socially positioned and actively working to revise the meaning and value attached to that positioning. Disidentification works in two ways. First, acts of disidentification reveal the ways that a cultural text or discourse defines what is normal and who is included or excluded from the dominant culture. Second, disidentification repurposes the discourse or text in order to include or empower those who have been excluded and oppressed by its logic. Both of these processes are political. Through disidentification, people question, revise, and reframe the meaning and value assigned by ideology. These disidentfications can make other possibilities visible or counteract devaluation and misrecognition. Therefore, disidentification enables us to understand microlevel activity as situated resistance to structures of power.

Disidentification and Genre Networked performances of disidentification rely on the affordances and norms associated with internet-based fora that facilitate practices of performing the self and cultivating community. Connecting personal, everyday communication to collective and structural activist goals is an important tactic that crosses multiple movements. For example, Ghabra and Calafell characterize personal narrative by members of marginalized communities as a decolonial rhetorical tool that “uses individual stories to speak in relation to and talk back to larger histories of domination and power.”44 The authors use reflexive narrative and dialogue to illustrate the decolonial and coalitional potential of personal narrative and emphasize the situated and embodied elements of personal narrative performances. Social media often involve vernacular performances of situated and embodied personal narrative that use tactics such as disidentification to connect individual stories to histories and systems of power. These connections can occur through platform features such as hashtags, processes of sharing and circulation, and deliberate acts of curation; they can also occur through genre. While disidentificatory performances happen in many contexts, some genres facilitate disidentification or make the process especially visible. Part of the disidentificatory charge of UWAW’s photo campaign comes from the choice of genre: the activist self-portrait. In this section, I explain how this genre is situated in relation to other genres: blogs, self-portraits, selfies, and similar activist genres.

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Genres and platforms that connect the personal and social are part of many people’s daily online interactions and play an important role in developing identity, relating to others, and building community. Blogs are an early example of this kind of activity. In their analysis of weblogs as a genre, Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd argue that blogs allow their creators to “cultivate the self in a public way.”45 For some bloggers, this work of selfperformance connects to specific ways of doing politics and activism. For example, Sonali Pahwa analyzed how Egyptian women bloggers negotiate genres and discourse conventions that are gendered and viewed as personal rather than political. Pahwa characterizes the bloggers’ work as everyday “productions of personalized political space.”46 She explores how “personal” bloggers incorporated political and activist rhetoric in their blogs, showing that despite gendered and discursive distinctions between the genres of “personal” and “political” blogs, women used gendered discourse conventions and the genre of the personal blog to foster political discussion, activism, and performances of citizenship. Although her blogging subjects’ work might be excluded from analyses of “conventional” or “mainstream” political and activist work, these bloggers shaped political discourse through “virtual performances of self and the digital spaces that enabled fine-tuning of political voice.”47 Pahwa’s study highlights the importance of nuanced analysis of online rhetoric that seems “personal” and therefore insufficiently political. Instead of upholding an artificial distinction between these two categories, rhetoricians and public audiences can use literacies of positionality to recognize and understand how these two attributes interact. Disidentification’s emphasis on structures of power and oppression makes it especially useful for developing literacies that link individual or personal rhetorical activity to political aims and collective projects. As Muñoz writes, disidentification is a way for subjects to negotiate dominant ideology. Instead of conforming or attempting the impossible feat of breaking free from ideology, disidentification works “to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local and everyday struggles of resistance.”48 For Muñoz, disidentification is an avenue for building counterpublic spaces of resistance. Disidentification involves taking up some parts of the dominant culture’s norms and rhetoric, while also resisting it in specific, strategic ways. This process does not just happen at the level of the individual text or performance; disidentification can be a practice that works at the level of genre as well. When social media genres engage participants in performances of the self, they foreground the processes of identification and disidentification. For activists, public or semi-public performances of the self are a means with

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which to critique or revise socially prescribed roles and identities. Social media platforms are designed to capitalize on the connections between people and are also sites of censorship and oppression, so social media are no activist utopia. They are, however, an important space through which many people understand and perform identities and relationships. Because of these emphases on both identity and connection, social media genres can draw attention to social location. Social media platforms engage participants in ways that prompt them to consider these questions: Who am I? Who am I connected to? How am I connected to them? What do these connections mean? What am I doing? What can I do? These questions have been built into the architecture of social media platforms and their branding. When people sign up for social media accounts, they are often required to identify themselves in some way. At the most basic, they are encouraged to choose a username; depending on the platform, they may be asked to briefly describe who they are, add a photo, identify their interests, or add details about their life or work. Many platforms also encourage new users to connect with others in specific ways (e.g., through interests or existing contacts). Profiles, bios, and feeds ask the person to further think about who they are and how they want to portray themselves to others. As people begin to interact with others by connecting, posting, commenting, reacting, sharing, and otherwise engaging in activity supported by the platform, they may also be encouraged to think about who they are connected to, the nature of those connections, and the meaning of those connections. For example, platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter support various processes of categorizing connections by creating lists or special designations to limit or facilitate access (such as “close friends” or restricted access). Many platforms also support the use of multiple accounts for different purposes. For example, Instagram prompts users to create or connect multiple accounts as a way to curate their communication roles based on different audiences and topics. Users were already engaging in this practice (e.g., “finsta” accounts, accounts for pets, or professional accounts), which is now facilitated by the platform. Through both the cultures of sharing and the platform architecture, social media encourage participants to think about what they are doing, what they regularly do and with whom, and what actions are possible for them. Activists’ uses of social media draw on these affordances to theorize and enact justice-oriented identifications and relationships. If taken today, the photos in UWAW’s campaign would most likely be referred to as “selfies.” Self-portraiture and selfies, which are enabled by social media platforms, smartphone applications, and camera technology, have become ubiquitous features of everyday communication for many people.

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However, although the term “selfie” was in use during the time of this campaign, the group and its participants don’t use that term to describe the photos. For this reason, I refer to the photos as self-portraits. However, I do see this genre as related to selfies. In this section, I situate UWAW’s selfportraiture in relation to selfies and vernacular self-portraiture more broadly. For more on selfies as a genre, see my discussion of selfies in chapter 3. Like selfies, vernacular and activist self-portraits are a rhetorical genre that involves meaning-making and conversation. In addition, understanding self-portrait genres requires understanding the rhetorical ecology in which they circulate. This view builds on the work of new media scholars such as Jill Walker Rettberg and Zizi Papacharissi.49 Rettberg describes selfies as acts of self-representation that people use to reflect, develop their sense of self, and work against misrepresentations and exclusions in the public sphere. Though she is not a rhetorician, Rettberg’s understanding of selfies is quite rhetorical: she describes them as part of a conversation and emphasizes that selfies and other social media genres should be understood as cumulative and serial, rather than isolated texts. Papacharissi also contributes to a rhetorical understanding of the selfie, characterizing selfies as stories that construct meaning: “[Selfies] reveal and they conceal, because that is what a story does. It makes some aspects of an event, a memory, a feeling more visible, and in so doing, it directs attention to certain things and inadvertently away from others . . . We tell stories to make sense of things, our lives, our selves. To make meaning and in so doing, connect with others.”50 Selfies and self-portraits are thus rhetorical and relational actions that must be understood ecologically rather than individually. Contrary to common narratives, selfies are a highly social genre. Definitions of “selfie” often include not just what the photo looks like but what the user does with it (i.e., shares it to social media). In the terms of rhetorical genre theory, a specific “uptake” is associated with the genre. Most important, part of what makes something a selfie is that it is not simply an individual act of narcissism: “The very raison d’être of a selfie is to be shared in social media. It is not made for maker’s own personal consumption and contemplation. By sharing their selfies, Instagram users construct their identities and simultaneously express their belonging to a certain community. Thus performing the self is at once a private act as well as a communal and public activity.”51 This notion of the selfie as an act of performing the self is especially important for understanding how it functions to connect individual acts with collective projects. I emphasize this performative function to show how activist self-portraits connect to political goals. Self-portraits are an example of the ways that social media platforms and genres facilitate disidentification as an activist tactic.

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Selfies, in particular, offer opportunities for subjects to contest conceptions of what is normal or appropriate through performance. Activists regularly use selfies to challenge norms and cultural restrictions regarding gender presentation and appearance, such as norms and ideals regarding body hair, clothing choices, or weight. Several examples from the 2011 uprisings help contextualize UWAW’s photo campaign in relation to other activist genres. For example, Egyptian activist Aliaa Elmahdy used both blogging and self-portraiture to circulate feminist rhetoric. In November 2011, during the Egyptian uprising, Elmahdy shared a nude self-portrait on her blog. In the photo, she wears only sheer black thigh-high stockings with a flower and polka dot print, red shoes, and a red flower-shaped bow in her dark, shoulder-length hair. She is facing the camera and standing, with one foot on the bottom rung of a stool. In the message accompanying her photo, she references nude art and freedom of expression: “Put on trial the artists’ models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise to forever rid yourselves of your sexual hangups before you direct your humiliation and chauvinism and dare to try to deny me my freedom of expression.”52 Sara Mourad analyzes discourse about Elmahdy’s nude portrait, in which people across the political spectrum (conservatives, liberals, and leftists) denounced Elmahdy’s act in the Arab public sphere: “Alia’s act— posing naked and publishing the portrait online—is unconventional both in its medium and its message. It undermines the normative social order, first by transgressing norms of public decency, and second by subverting conventional, institutionalized, and male-dominated forms of political participation and dissent.”53 Elmahdy’s embodied rhetoric was constructed as simultaneously threatening and insignificant, yet the attention that followed illustrates the connections between gender, sex, politics, and citizenship. Mourad argues that there is a “need to investigate the Arab female body, beyond the orientalist gaze, as a discursive site for political meaning-making within national histories that are informed by but irreducible to the colonial experience.”54 Elmahdy’s self-portrait foregrounds the rhetorical moves of some UWAW participants who emphasize the embodied element of the self-portrait genre in their political messages. In addition, Zakia Salime analyzes a video produced by the 20 February Movement in Morocco that shares some important features with UWAW’s campaign. In the video, fourteen activists are featured speaking one-by-one. Each activist shares a message that begins with, “I am Moroccan and I am joining the protest of 20 February because I want . . .” in different dialects and languages (Arabic, Darija, and Tamazight).55 The activist then finishes

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the statement with their own specific reasons. The visual composition is framed to feature each activist’s face, typically from the shoulders up, and is set against a plain background. This video highlights diversity among participants through the multiple languages and people featured while also tying these differences together through visual composition and message structure. Outside of the Arab uprisings, many gender-focused campaigns have used visually similar photos that are linked through hashtags. For example, UN Women’s “He for She” campaign has encouraged men to submit photos of themselves holding a sign featuring the #HeForShe hashtag to promote gender equality. #BringBackOurGirls is another prominent example of a photo campaign in which participants shared photos of themselves holding a sign that linked their image to the cause (in this case, the return of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria). In these examples, most participants do not add their own message but simply reproduce the hashtag on their sign. While the campaigns still enable visual variation, the lack of varied messages doesn’t produce the kind of dialogue and circulation of ideas that UWAW’s campaign facilitated. #AllMenCan, an allyship campaign for men that responded to the misogyny of Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger, also featured portrait photos with individualized messages opposing misogyny and gendered violence.56 Another feminist photo campaign that circulated transnationally began with a Tumblr page created by Sadia Khatri and Sabahat Zakariya called Girls at Dhabas and circulated through submissions or photos tagged #Girls AtDhabas on social media.57 The photo campaign encouraged women to share photos of themselves in roadside restaurants, or dhabas. These photos are visually and textually distinct from the examples mentioned above in that they don’t include signs and are more likely to be group photos, but many of the submissions are self-portraits and they occasionally include locations or short messages. The campaign developed into a feminist collective called Girls at Dhabas that also circulated narratives about participants’ personal experiences with and relationships to public space. One such narrative responds to problematic media coverage of the campaign and a British reporter’s failure to listen to the participant’s statements about safety and how class and colonialism intersect with gender to shape norms related to public space.58 The group has since created additional campaigns, including #GirlsOnBikes, #GirlsPlayingStreetCricket, and a #FeministMapathon. These projects have linked photos, narratives, and specific actions to challenge gender roles and norms surrounding public space in cities in Pakistan. My interest in this chapter is not so much about whether a specific text persuades its audience, but on how specific, situated genres and uptakes

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draw attention to and facilitate engagement with positionality. Both this section and the next section on genre patterns focus on exploring a collection of rhetorical activity that mediates between individual participants, groups, movements, and systems of power. The situated analysis in this section connected the work of the campaign to rhetorical and political processes that shaped and were shaped by UWAW’s project. These texts circulate in complex contexts and have different effects for different audiences. The creation and circulation of networked self-performances has been especially facilitated by the architecture of social media sites as well as by antecedent genres and other internet-based communication practices. Within this context, UWAW’s campaign exemplifies the ways that social media campaigns draw on individual performances to build a movement. Genre Patterns

By facilitating identification and disidentification, or by making some aspects of these processes visible, activists use social media to build collective engagement with the ideas and practices that drive their work. The next stage of multilayered genre analysis explores examples of the genre in more detail to look for patterns. These patterns can be used to identify genre conventions and understand how the genre works broadly. Looking at specific patterns that emerge in a subset of the genre samples also provides a way to make connections across different scales of analysis: specific examples of social media activity (microlevel), groups (mesolevel), and systems of power (macrolevel). On the whole, UWAW’s photo campaign asked participants to publicly perform identification with the uprisings and/or with Arab women. The campaign also encouraged disidentification with the social norms and cultural logics that produce gendered inequality, including the sexism present in existing laws and norms as well as the ways that the revolutions upheld sexist oppressions. UWAW’s self-portrait genre offered an effective balance between constraint and choice and mediated between individual participants and the collective project. While the setting, pose, individual body, and message offered opportunities for variation, the common beginning of the sentence, the inclusion of a sign, and other conventions of the self-portrait genre tied the photos together and created a sense that participants formed a group of diverse people united toward a common goal. While most photos were of a single person, usually a woman, holding a paper sign with Arabic writing, participants created many variations on this format. These variations included writing in other languages; text written in different color(s) or sizes, on surfaces other than paper, or with varying forms of emphasis on certain words or phrases; photos of couples, small groups,

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men, or children; unusual settings or poses; and unique ways of displaying or concealing bodies and their associated identities or identity categories. These creative twists on the genre called attention to its conventions while also highlighting the range of experiences and opinions among participants. Through their curation by UWAW and adherence to some conventions of the genre, the submissions appear as a collective body of work. Variation among the photos, both visually and in the messages, created the impression that many different people supported the work, that there were many different reasons for supporting the project, and that participation looks different for different people. In addition to the common elements of the sentence, organizers also used a common structure for photo attribution that included the participant’s name and a national or geographic affiliation, such as “Asmaa from Tunisia,” “Omar from Egypt,” and “Rahaf from Syria.” This format highlighted the range of individuals and places represented; audience members who view several pictures see multiple names, places, and faces. The designation “from” can have multiple meanings, though: the individual’s country of birth, the country an individual currently resides in, or the country considered “home” by that person. The choice to simplify individuals’ national affiliation this way could, in some cases, gloss over the complexity of national affiliations for many people. Although the majority of posts stick to the simple format, numerous posts do deviate from the conventional format. These deviations actually draw readers’ attention to the nuances of citizenship and national affiliation for many participants by interrupting the conventions of this genre. Examples include “Nahla from Algeria and lives in Cairo” and “Maram from Jerusalem, Palestine. Exiled in USA (banned from the right to return).” Unlike many of the participants, who were photographed in the location they are “from,” these photos were amended in ways that highlighted transnational migration and the influence of settler colonialism on subjects’ geographic locations. Other participants deviated from the form in different ways, such as “Egyptian Director Nadine Khan,” or “a Syrian bride.” Composing a portrait is a performative act. Discussing portraiture in Disidentifications, Muñoz writes that “the portrait photograph is a two-sided performance, one having to do with the photographer who manipulates technology, models, props, and backgrounds behind the camera, and the other with the model who performs ‘self ’ especially and uniquely for the camera.”59 Muñoz focuses on photographs that are not self-portraits and discusses their rhetorical function of giving face and voice to historical figures, an especially important project in the context of historical erasure of Black queerness or the foreclosing of historical subjects’ potential queerness.

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The photos Muñoz writes about are political projects that feature individual subjects in ways that connect the subject politically to a community. The performative and political elements of the photo happen through things such as staging, composition, and printing, evident within the photo itself. Muñoz makes a point to discuss disidentification as something that can happen through both production and reception. In many of UWAW’s photos, as well as other self-portrait campaigns, the “sides” of photographer and model are more concentrated in the participant who acts as both subject and photographer. However, as a genre such as UWAW’s campaign emerges, participants encounter a broad range of genre samples that influence and act on participants as they compose their self-portraits. While these genre examples may not be involved in actually capturing the photo, they contribute to participants’ genre knowledge and therefore infuse participants’ performances as they decide what is possible within the genre and how they want to contribute to the collective project. While vernacular portraiture may involve different photographic literacies, many photos in the campaign show participants’ attention to technology, props, and backgrounds in addition to the subjects’ embodied performance of self for the photo. Social media contexts such as UWAW’s complicate distinctions between production and reception, but Muñoz’s analysis nevertheless highlights the complex performances of disidentification in contemporary visual genres that circulate on social media. Disidentification is one way that activists can negotiate between everyday tactics for survival and revolutionary goals. Through processes such as disidentification, rhetors and publics resist the ways that social media sites foreground individual or personalized activity and therefore occasionally obscure the social, collective elements of activist rhetorics. Disidentification is a strategy for constructing one’s self and relationships with others in ways that respond to cultural logics in which particular identities are either not visible or unrecognizable. It is a process of working toward new social relations in response to failures or exclusions in culture and public discourse. This process is especially important for people who are multiply marginalized because it enables one to make immediate political use of someone or something problematic. Instead of sanitizing a person or a political idea, or rejecting it and waiting for something better, disidentification enables someone to both identify with and reject, taking up what’s useful and reworking its exclusionary or oppressive elements. Muñoz is careful to note that disidentification isn’t about picking and choosing what works, but reworking (interjecting). Through this photo campaign, UWAW created a site for identification and disidentification. Many participants’ messages expressed disidentification

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with misogynist discourses and practices that constrain them as Arab women. Through this process, participants could simultaneously identify with the discourses of the Arab uprisings and their call for participants to struggle for freedom and justice, yet counter these discourses’ neglect of gendered injustices. As Muñoz explains, “disidentification is an ambivalent structure of feeling that works to retain the problematic object and tap into the energies that are produced by contradictions and ambivalences.”60 UWAW’s overall project makes this move to retain the resistant energy of the Arab uprisings but also to point out the contradiction in working toward freedom only for some people or only from certain types of oppression. All of these things facilitate attention to, and understanding of, social location and its relationship to activism. This process is not a given, of course. Social media are used in different ways by different people. However, social media’s affordances and activists’ rhetorical and genre knowledge together offer useful avenues with which to engage in everyday processes of thinking with and through social location. Activist processes of identification and disidentification require an ecological framework for thinking about rhetorical interaction. These processes occur in contexts that involve circulation and that invoke or respond to collective processes. Viewing disidentification at the scale of the rhetorical situation without attending to the broader ecologies in which rhetorics circulate across overlapping contexts risks misinterpreting the import of these acts. I will discuss this below with reference to specific participants in the campaign. With this in mind, then, I turn to a series of examples from the UWAW photo campaign, in which participants used a self-portrait genre to develop identifications and political relationships that worked within and against dominant public discourses and cultural norms. In the analysis below, I focus on observable patterns that emerged from my reading of the photos. Some of these patterns don’t necessarily correspond to a majority of the photos. In some cases, what I found most interesting were not necessarily the most common patterns, but patterns that diverge from the most typical ways of composing a photo and writing a message. Both are relevant to a discussion of disidentification and genre. I have attempted to include both the common patterns and these divergences in my discussion below. The patterns aren’t mutually exclusive; many photos correspond to more than one pattern. For photos with signs written in Arabic, my analysis relies on translations provided along with the campaign entries on Facebook. I have studied Arabic and can understand some of the Arabic messages, but my understanding depends on the topic and dialect. The translations accompanying posts were often done by the organizers. Some participants provided their

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own translation in the entry itself or in the comments, and occasionally community members also translated photos in the comments. I noticed that for many of the entries in my sample that had signs written in English, there was no translation into Arabic. For entries that included translation, I have included both the Arabic and English text.

Pattern 1: Rejecting Ideology and Gender Norms One of the most common patterns in the campaign involved calling attention to the roles, expectations, practices, and values associated with gendered identities. These include both broad social, cultural, legal, and religious practices as well as common everyday situations that exemplify gender norms. Yasmina from Algeria was one of many participants who shared common phrases or examples of the ways that people reinforce gender roles: “I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because I’m fed up with the sentence: ‘Stop acting like a man! Women don’t do this!’” In another example, Sarah from Lebanon says: ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألنهم يقولون عني عاهرة ألنني أتمتع بالجنس‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because they call me a whore for enjoying sex!61 Another photo includes a young boy, Najati, whose sign reads: ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة العربية الن بدي متل ما ينادوني أبو وليد ينادوني أبو ميرا‬

I am with the Uprising of the Arab Woman because I want them to call me “father of Mira” like they call me “father of Walid.”62 Najati’s photo focuses on the cultural and linguistic practice of giving parents a nickname based on the name of their eldest son. Another participant, Dena from Egypt, includes a list of ideas and practices that range from gendered roles and expectations to gender-based violence: I fully support the uprising of women in the Arab world because: 1) ANY woman deserves to walk in the streets without being harassed or assaulted in ANY form, regardless of what she looks like 2) There is no difference between a man and woman staying out late 3) Women can be just as ambitious as men, and are not only good for getting married and taking care of the house, and men are perfectly capable of helping women with raising kids, and around the house 4) The majority of girls in my country are genitally mutilated 5) There are young girls in my country that are forced to quit school and get married to older men chosen for them

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6) Women should choose who to marry and when to marry! 7) There should be no all girls, or all boys’ schools, because they make one gender unusual to the other63 As the examples above show, participants’ messages often involved implicit or explicit comparisons between the rights, roles, expectations, and practices associated with binary gender categories. Participants also used messages that compared men and women to articulate their objection to discourses that privilege them. For example, Ragheed writes, ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة العربية الن الدين والمجتمع حرم المراة من حرية و اعطاني إياها‬

I’m with the uprising of the Arab woman because religion and society have deprived women of freedom and given them to me . . .64 Ragheed’s comparison relies on a binary construction of gender through which he opposes women and men to simultaneously identify himself as a man to disavow the structural inequality he benefits from. Ragheed is both positioning himself and acknowledging the privileges he benefits from in his statement of support for the campaign. Posts such as Ragheed’s are similar to the disidentificatory posts above in their rejection of gender ideologies, but there is an important caveat to keep in mind. Muñoz’s theory specifically focuses on amplifying the strategies of people who experience multiple oppressions making space for their existence within a system that constrains or rejects their identity and their life. A participant such as Ragheed who rejects socially prescribed roles that benefit him might also be performing disidentification by partially reworking an identity that brings him privilege. Ragheed might also be making space for new ways of performing masculinity. However, the positionality of the person makes this a different kind of work than that which makes space for identity performances that come from a position of structural marginalization. Muñoz’s theory is especially concerned with subjects who experience oppression speaking and writing from that position in ways that challenge hegemonic constructions of race, sexual orientation, gender, and class. Ragheed’s statement challenges hegemonic constructions of gender, but his performance comes from different knowledges and carries different risks than the performances of participants who are marginalized because of their gender identity. As the campaign circulated beyond the Arab publics targeted by UWAW’s name, goals, and demands, however, Ragheed’s statement might be read differently by non-Arab audiences who compare these performances to racialized narratives about Arab masculinity. In his overview of Middle

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East masculinity studies, Paul Amar describes a “bottomless well of vernacular Middle East masculinity theories” that circulate publicly to describe the motivations of men ranging from September 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta to protesters in the 2011 uprisings (exemplified by Mohamed Bouazizi) to government leaders such as Muammar Qaddafi.65 As Amar explains, racialized tropes of Middle Eastern masculinity not only circulate in public discourse but also bolster the narratives used to justify state violence: “the same sets of vernacular theories also prop up intelligence services and terrorology industries whose wildly inaccurate studies of Islamism and of politics in general in the Middle East are often built upon pseudo-anthropological or psychological-behavioralist accounts of atavistic, misogynist, and hypersexual masculinities.”66 In the context of these discourses about Middle Eastern masculinities, Ragheed’s self-portrait and message (and those of other male participants) perform a different form of disidentification that reworks racialized portrayals of Arab masculinity in places such as the United States and Europe. Regardless of whether Ragheed had these discourses in mind as he created his post and message, his self-portrait accumulates different meanings as it (and UWAW’s campaign generally) circulates among audiences outside of the countries highlighted by UWAW organizers and participants. In addition, aspects of his identity that were not visible to me, such as his sexual orientation, class position, or sectarian identity, might also influence the ways that his performance is read by other audiences, such as people who know him personally. Some participants also used their photo composition to highlight gender roles and norms. In one photo, for example, a participant is dressed in masculine Arab attire: they have thick eyebrows and a moustache painted on their face and are wearing a kefiyyeh on their head. Their message reads, ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي الن لما بمشي عالطريق ما بدي أبدا بيطلعوا فييي كلن كلن‬

I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because when I walk in the street, I don’t at all want them ALL to look at me.67 The photo is attributed to Maria and Rima from Lebanon/Berlin. Commenters on the post pointed out that the photo is referencing a Lebanese song from the 1980s, “‫ ”ل ّما بمشي عالرصيف‬or Lamma bemchi ‘arrasif 68 by singer Michka; one comment includes a link to a YouTube video of the song.69 The song’s video provides additional reference for the draglike performance of Arab masculinity in Maria and Rima’s photo. In the video, an attractive woman walks through a city singing about the attention she gets from men when she walks on the sidewalk; a group of men follow her in the video, singing about how beautiful she is.

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In another example, Jihad from Jordan shared a photo of himself wearing an apron and cooking. His message reads, ‫إذا جوعان بطبخ بيدي الن ال أمي وال أختي وال زوجتي وال خطيبتي عاملة منزل‬

If I am hungry I’ll cook for myself because neither my mother nor my sister nor my wife nor my fiancé are housekeepers.70 In this post, Jihad is drawing on both gender roles and racial logics, as the position of housekeeper or domestic worker in many Arab countries is a gendered and racialized position.71 Through the Kafala system, employment agencies recruit women from various African and Asian countries, such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya, to migrate to Arab countries in order to find employment as domestic workers. Through various state structures and labor practices, the Kafala system places control of the migration process (e.g., the legal status of the migrant domestic worker and the conditions of employment) largely in the hands of agencies and then individual employers, and these positions are often exploitative and abusive.72 In addition to problems with this employment system, which activists more accurately describe as a modern form of slavery, these migration patterns are intertwined with processes of racialization that dehumanize migrant domestic workers and devalue their labor. By constructing an opposition between female family members and domestic workers, Jihad’s post rejects the notion that men shouldn’t or can’t perform domestic labor yet upholds the devaluation of that labor through the term “housekeeper” and its associated implications of racialized labor. Like Maria and Rima’s post, Jihad’s photo works together with his message to highlight social location and to rework the expectations, beliefs, or behaviors associated with gendered roles and norms. Disidentification also occurred through the juxtaposition of categories through which people are supposed to receive or be denied rights or freedom. Dina from Egypt made this point saliently: ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي الني اريد أن تعامل المراة كانسان و ليست كأنثى‬

I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because I want her to be treated like a human being and not like a female.73 Here, Dina disidentifies with the term “female,” implying that cultural logics position women as less than human. Dina points to the emphasis on humanity often invoked in rights discourses and the ways that this category is not equally accessible to all people. Other posts make similar references to gender, humanity, rights, and equality.

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Pattern 2: Connecting Activist Work A second pattern in the self-portraits involved making connections between specific events or the work of specific activists in different places or about various issues. This facilitated the network-building capacity of the campaign. As organizers explained in an interview, “This campaign is not only about awareness and sharing experiences, but also about building a network of activists, writers and artists, who deeply believe in this uprising of women, and want to cooperate together in future online and offline activities.” In addition to this photo campaign and other projects created by UWAW, organizers also framed the UWAW Facebook page as a place for collecting women’s contributions to the uprisings. The organizers explained that they wanted to “highlight the greatly courageous work and leading role of the females figures of the revolutions such as Samira Ibrahim, Tawakkol Karman, Fadwa Sleiman, Zeinab El Khawaja, Manal Al Sharif, and many others.”74 The Facebook page for the group functioned as a hub that performed multiple functions, including acting as an archive and amplifier of women’s activism. Archiving and amplifying women’s activism are disidentificatory practices that correct narratives by activists and media which exclude or underrepresent women’s activism. In her theorization of amplification rhetorics, Temptaous McKoy defines these rhetorics as communicative practices used by Black/African-American people (or other marginalized groups) that involve “(1) the reclamation of agency (ownership of embodied rhetorical practices), (2) the accentuation and acknowledgement of narratives (validated lived experiences), and (3) the inclusion of marginalized epistemologies (that add to new ways of learning).”75 While UWAW’s work does not center Black communities or US perspectives, McKoy suggests that her theory can be used to analyze other communities. Within the photo campaign, one site of amplification occurred in entries involving famous people or activists. When these public figures participated in the campaign, they used their public visibility as a resource to direct attention and lend credibility to the activists’ work. By sharing their own narratives or directing their audiences to the campaign’s work, they acknowledged and validated the work of the campaign for a new audience. For example, a post by an Egyptian film director, Nadine Khan, included a modification to the caption attribution to highlight this information for viewers. Another post featured a Palestinian hip-hop group, DAM, and Palestinian singer Amal Murkus. Tunisian actress Hend Sabry also contributed to the campaign. Prominent activists were also connected to the group’s

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work. For example, Egyptian activist Samira Ibrahim, who spoke out after being subjected to virginity tests and other forms of abuse by Egyptian soldiers, also contributed to the campaign. Other activists amplified the campaign through their own platforms. Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted an entry in support of the project on her blog. Her post included an illustration that referenced her widely circulated and discussed nude self-portrait, posted to her blog in October 2011.76 Tawakkol Karman, a famous activist (and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner) from Yemen, didn’t create her own entry but shared a photo from the campaign and encouraged her followers to participate. In addition to public figures, participants in the campaign also engaged in amplification by acknowledging and connecting different activists or projects to one another. One example of this is a post about prominent gender-related political issues in multiple countries, shared by Hazem from Syria: ‫يعني‬ ‫ سنة‬15‫بسوريا بيزوجو عال‬ ‫و باليمن بيشلحوها جنسيتها‬ ‫وبتونس بيغتصبوها وبيطالعوها مذنبا‬ ‫و بالمغرب بيزوجوها لمغتصبها‬ ‫وبلسعوديا ما بتسوق سيارة‬ ‫ووين ما راحت ووين ما أجت مدعوس على حقها دعس‬ ‫وبدك ياها ما تنتفض يا‬ !‫بجم ؟‬

So in Syria they marry her aged 15 in Yemen they strip her of her nationality in Tunisia they rape her and they accuse her of being guilty in Morocco they marry her to her rapist and in Saudi Arabia she doesn’t drive a car and wherever she goes and comes her rights are totally crushed AnD YOU WAnT HER nOT TO REVOLT, idiots?!77 In this comment, Hazem combines references to specific national circumstances with a general characterization of women’s rights. In addition to general references to legal structures, Hazem is also connecting specific targets of activism in different countries. For example, Moroccan activists used sitins, social media, art, and other tactics to protest after the suicide of Amina Filali, a sixteen-year-old who committed suicide in 2012 to “end a marriage

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to her alleged rapist.”78 Another participant, Chayma from Morocco, also highlighted this incident, ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألني ما أريد أن أسمع عن طفلة في وطني‬ ‫اغمتصبها وحش ثم يجبرونها على مناداتو زوجي‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because I don’t want to hear about a girl in my country who got raped by a monster and who later was forced to call him “my husband.”79 Article 475 of Morocco’s penal code, which allowed rapists to escape prosecution through marriage, has since been amended.80 Hazem’s post also refers to Saudi activists’ “Women2Drive” campaign in 2011, which began highlighting women’s resistance to Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving.81 The driving ban was lifted in 2018 but at the time of this writing several women’s rights activists are still imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. The structure of Hazem’s post connected specific examples from diverse countries, outlining legal means of structurally oppressing women. By focusing on targets of activism, Hazem’s post gestures to coalition across national contexts. The emotional tone and address of the final lines clearly positions Hazem on the side of UWAW activists and against those who don’t support UWAW’s cause. Hazem was not alone in using his participation in UWAW’s photo campaign to draw connections with other activists’ work. In another example, Yasmine from Palestine wrote: ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألن إجا الوقت نكسّر الحواجز‬

I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because the time has come to break the barriers/checkpoints. This message connects Yasmine’s photo and participation to the oppression of Palestinians—and resistance to that oppression—by referencing the Israeli military checkpoints that restrict Palestinians’ freedom of movement. Some participants also connected their participation to other participants within UWAW. Two posts in my sample referenced Dana Bakdounis, a photo campaign participant who posted a photo that was viewed as controversial by some audiences. Bakdounis posted a photo of herself unveiled, holding a passport that shows a photo of her wearing a hijab. Her message read: ‫ سنة من أن يالمس‬٢٠ ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألني كنت محرومة لمدة‬ ‫ وشعري‬... ‫الهوا جسدي‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because for 20 years I wasn’t allowed to feel the wind in my hair and my body.82

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The post received a lot of attention through Facebook’s platform. Facebook removed the post and suspended UWAW administrators’ pages in response to complaints about the post. The administrators launched another campaign in response to the censorship of Bakdounis’s photo and the page administrators. This censorship incident and UWAW’s response received international media attention. By connecting later posts back to Bakdounis’s case, participants were able to express support for Bakdounis and amplify the previous work of UWAW participants. Finally, participants also connected the photo campaign to the dynamics of the Arab uprisings. For example, Nahla from Algeria (and living in Cairo) wrote: ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألنها حربت مع الرجل جنبا ألي جنب حين‬ ‫ ليال‬8 ‫استقلينا منعها من النزول الى الشارع بعد الساعة‬

I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because she fought side by side with men and when we got our independence, we forbid her from going out in the street after 8 pm This tactic connects back to the original motivation of the group’s founders, which was to connect activists and provide a mechanism for support and solidarity among women activists. In addition to support and solidarity, many participants showed careful attention to positionality in their posts, complicating narratives that oversimplify feminist work or UWAW as too narrowly focused. Instead, participants often highlighted their own social position. By highlighting their social position, participants were able to expose differences or incongruities that marginalize women and to draw connections between different systems of oppression.

Pattern 3: Drawing Attention to the Body One of the most prominent patterns in this campaign involved photos and messages that drew attention to bodies. This pattern connects UWAW’s work to the embodied rhetorical activity highlighted in scholarship on the Arab uprisings. In her analysis of Aliaa Elmahdy’s nude photograph, Sara Mourad argues that “The Arab uprisings brought attention to the body as a medium of dissent.”83 Mourad examines the various rhetorics surrounding Elmahdy’s nude photograph to show how engagement with her photo reveals competing discourses about sexuality, citizenship, and dissent in the context of the Egyptian uprising and the broader Arab sociopolitical sphere. In UWAW’s work, participants drew attention to bodies through both the photos and the messages. The self-portrait genre encourages attention to bodies, though the variety of ways that participants used props, photo composition, clothing

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and costumes, staging, lighting, and photo editing allowed for large variations in the focus on—and visibility of—participants’ bodies in the photos. Some photos highlighted participants’ bodies through techniques such as focusing the photo on specific body parts (e.g., the hand or a bare shoulder), writing directly on the body, or posing in an unconventional way. Other participants obscured part or most of their body, most commonly through the photo composition or placement of the message. In addition to the visual attention to bodies, participants also drew attention to bodies in their messages. Participants referred to their own bodies, to the ways that bodies are gendered and sexualized, to body parts (especially body parts related to sex and sexuality, such as genitalia or the hymen), and to embodied experiences such as sex, rape, and harassment. For example, Zeina from Lebanon wrote:, ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألنه‬ ‫جسمي‬ ‫مش عورة‬ ‫مش أجرة‬ ‫مش أسرة‬ ‫جسمي هو أنا‬

I am with #WomenUprising in the Arab world because my body is not a source of shame, not for rent, not for the family. My body is me.84 Zeina’s photo emphasizes her body and bodies in multiple ways. In the photo, she is facing the camera with her right hand raised and palm facing outward (similar to a swearing in ceremony or holding out a hand to stop someone). The photo is cropped just above her chest. She has short hair and wears brick-red lipstick, earrings, and a bracelet, but otherwise her body appears naked in the photo. The background of the image is white, and most of her message is written over the background on the right side of the photo using photo editing tools. The final sentence, “My body is me,” is also added through editing, but it is written over her body. “My body” appears in Arabic just below her clavicle, and the Arabic word for “I” or “myself ” is written on the palm of her right hand. Zeina’s self-portrait expresses rich, multilayered visual and linguistic references to gender, ideology, and identity, all of which are written about or on her body. Zeina’s message focuses on ideological control of women’s bodies, and her photo asserts her ownership and control of her own body. Other participants also expressed the importance of bodily autonomy, including sexual autonomy. Some participants objected to ideologies and practices that focus on some aspects of women’s embodiment over others, such as focusing on

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women’s reproductive or sexual capacities rather than their intellect. Finally, participants shared their objections to practices that tie honor to women’s bodies or that violate women’s bodies and bodily autonomy, including rape, genital mutilation, and hymen reconstruction. For example, Raghida from Jordan wrote: ‫ ال لختان‬.‫انا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألنو من حقي يكون عندي هوية جنسية‬ !!‫اإلناث‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because it is my right to have a sexual identity. Say NO to Female Genital Mutilation!85 Bahija from Syria wrote: ‫انا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألني ما بدي أعمل عملية ترقيع غشاء بكارة حتى‬ ‫اقرر اتجوز‬

I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World because I don’t want to do a hymen reconstruction surgery to be able to get married.86 Other participants shared experiences of rape or sexual assault. Although each message and photo was unique, some visual elements or themes connect across multiple examples and suggest opportunities for coalition and solidarity.87

Limitations of the Campaign As with all activist projects, UWAW’s work has some potential limitations. One potential problem with UWAW’s goals is the focus on “women” and emphasis on commonality. While shared experiences of injustice are important catalysts for activism, it’s also important for activists to attend to difference and work toward coalition among groups who may have different priorities or needs.88 A critical audience member might have viewed UWAW’s goals and wondered how the group planned to address differences among women of different races, sects, sexual orientations, nationalities, and class positions. The group’s founders mentioned that they used the phrase “women in the Arab world” to be inclusive rather than restricting the movement to Arab women. However, Jihad’s post illustrates the importance of engaging with differences among women; migrant domestic workers, refugees, and ethnic or racial minorities face different oppressions than women with sectarian, class, and racial privilege. The full spectrum of “women in the Arab world” invoked by campaign organizers isn’t necessarily represented in the campaign entries, which is not unusual for an activist project framed

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around a broad identity category that is linked to oppression. Complex factors shape people’s engagement with discourses about politics and identity. I did not have the ability to fully analyze demographic data about who participated in UWAW’s campaigns, and some possible forms of participation aren’t tracked by Facebook. I did tally the countries represented in a sample of 10 percent of the campaign entries. As the list below shows, the countries that participants affiliated themselves with do not include all of the countries that might be considered a part of the Arab world, nor are the countries mentioned in equal proportions. Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon are the countries with which most participants in my sample connected themselves. Algeria: Australia: Canada: Egypt: France: Germany: Italy: Jordan: Lebanon: Morocco:

3 1 1 22 1 1 2 4 13 5

Palestine: 18 Puerto Rico: 1 Saudi Arabia: 2 Sudan: 2 Syria: 15 Tunisia: 6 United Arab Emirates (Dubai): 1 Yemen: 4

Interestingly, Palestine and Lebanon did not experience the kind of sustained, internationally visible uprisings that took place in Egypt and Syria. In each country the uprisings responded to different political, social, and cultural circumstances. Responses by the government, military, and public varied. I was not able to collect data to explain the distribution of photos, but I do have some ideas about what might explain these participation patterns. The distribution of participants could be related to the founders’ social networks, which presumably include many people from Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt. The high participation from Syria could be due to its proximity to Lebanon and Palestine, the presence of many Palestinian refugees in Syria, or the sustained uprisings in Syria. However, there was also a highly publicized participant from Syria, Dana Bakdounis, as I discussed earlier. This case could have led to an increase in participation among Syrian people. Other possible explanations for participant distribution might include internet use and social media participation in each country or the perceived likelihood of censorship or other negative consequences from family, community members, or government. Finally, women’s activism doesn’t always occur in movements that focus on gender. Zakia Salime’s analysis of Moroccan women’s participation in the uprisings showed that

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women’s participation and the participation of the “women’s movement” are not necessarily the same thing. Salime’s work speaks to the importance of contextualized, historicized, and nuanced analyses in which researchers and audiences listen carefully and avoid foreclosing possibilities by maintaining preconceived ideas about what the activity they’re interested in looks like. If Salime had undertaken her study by looking exclusively at what women’s organizations were doing in Morocco, she would have missed important ways that women contributed to the Moroccan uprisings. The distribution of photos and participation in this project should be read with similar care and openness. While I cannot know if any of the hypotheses above explain the distribution of participants in this study, I include these possible reasons in order to highlight the complex factors that might shape participation. UWAW is also framed in a way that occasionally collapses distinctions between various places and people under the label “Arab” rather than explicitly “grounding the transnational ‘revolutionary imagination’ of the Arab revolts in multiple localities.”89 Most explicitly, some participants’ submissions frame the “Arab world” as a monolith rather than attending to specific historical, cultural, economic, and political contexts.90 However, the campaign as a whole includes both broad characterizations as well as entries that attend to specificity in various ways. Circulation and Attention

Facebook comments on the photo campaign entries also provide important context for understanding the circulation of the campaign. In this section, I analyze comments to show that as the campaign circulated beyond the Arab public sphere (its initial target audience), some audience members who saw themselves as benevolent, privileged supporters of the campaign engaged in imperialist moves that may have undermined possibilities for solidarity and coalition with audiences outside of the “Arab world.” Comments on the campaign and other UWAW materials included multiple languages, and unlike the campaign entries themselves, the comments were not translated by the group’s administrators or community members. I focus only on English-language comments in my analysis here because I was not able to translate all of the comments. Although I focus only on a portion of the comments, English-language comments provide insight into the circulation of the campaign beyond Arabic-speaking audiences. What became visible through these comments is the way that the campaign’s success was also accompanied by problematic engagement from some Englishspeaking audiences. In this section, I briefly describe several patterns in the English-language comments before focusing on extended examples that

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show the ways that some viewers misread the photos or engaged with the campaign in racist and imperialist ways. Comments on the photos were often a place for support and community-building. An especially common type of comment was a positive message of support or agreement, including things such as “with you,” “well said,” “I agree,” or a heart emoji.91 Although brief, these comments were an important component of public communication on the site. As danah boyd writes, “through mundane comments, participants are acknowledging one another in a public setting . . . Comments are not simply a dialogue between two interlocutors, but a performance of social connection before a broader audience.”92 This idea of public acknowledgment might reasonably be extended to Facebook’s “like” feature as well, which was the most common response to campaign photos. Most photos had several hundred “likes,” and some had over one thousand. “Sharing” the photo (via Facebook’s built-in sharing feature) was also a common response, though sharing can have multiple meanings that were outside the scope of my data collection for this project. For example, people can share something they agree with and/or want to spread, but they might also share the photos and add commentary to express disagreement or disapproval. Comments were the least common response. For example, the first photo in my initial sample was liked 1,051 times, shared 161 times, and commented on 28 times; the last photo in the sample was liked 221 times, shared 20 times, and commented on 15 times.93 Comments were also a place for interaction and featured a range of activity beyond support, including translation, explanation, and education. As I mentioned previously, community members regularly provided translations for the posts. This happened most often between Arabic and English, but other languages were occasionally included as well. Another type of work that I observed in the comments was clarification about the meaning of the participants’ words or the circumstances in the photo. Commenters would occasionally ask questions about the photo that would be clarified by the person in the photo or by other commenters with relevant knowledge. For example, in a photo of “Yasmina from Algeria,” Yasmina is pictured holding a protest sign in a metro car. Commenters discussed her location, asking whether there were protests or metro trains in Algeria and eventually determining that the photo was taken in Germany. On other photos, comments explained cultural references or specific terms in the messages. In the comments on a photo that referenced Zenobia, participants shared a link to the English Wikipedia page about Zenobia in response to a question about the meaning of the post. Comments were also a site of dialogue, including disagreement and debate. In interviews about the project, founders of the

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page celebrated this aspect of the page. Of course, the comments and dialogue were not always constructive. Some commenters used sexist ideas or reasoning to express their disapproval of specific photos, including the message or the choices of the person in the photo. Others asked for explanations of the group’s purpose and activities in ways that seemed, to me, to involve feigned or deliberate ignorance. Other commenters mocked, insulted, or objectified participants or the group. In addition to these general patterns, problematic patterns in the comments showed that some outside audiences who saw themselves as potential supporters didn’t have sufficient literacies to engage with the campaign in supportive or useful ways. (Although I did not trace the location of all commenters, some commenters identified themselves or wrote comments that positioned them as outsiders.) One form of problematic commentary tied to the campaign’s circulation involved commenters whose comments were orientalist or patronizing. Some commenters focused on the appearance of the person in the photo and ignored the participant’s message. For example, one participant, Bakinam from Egypt, shared the message: ‫ و ما زالت حقوقي‬2013 ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي الننا وصلنا عام‬ ‫مدفونة‬

I support the uprising of women in the Arab world because we have reached the year 2013 and my rights are still buried.94 Below her entry, one commenter, Libor,95 wrote, “Arab girls are so pretty, you really should throw off those black veils and greet the sun .” Nothing about Bakinam’s photo or message referenced black veils. In this sentence, Libor stereotyped, exoticized, and objectified Bakinam instead of focusing on Bakinam’s message. In another example, Rahaf from Syria shared her frustration with the ways that a man in her household silences her: ‫أنا مع انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي ألنو ما بدي “أخرس” لما الزلمة بيحكي! و ما بدي‬ … ‫ أنا كمان “بشتغل” و ما بيسكت و أنا نايمة‬... ”‫أسكت ألنو نايم و راجع من “الشغل‬

I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because I don’t want to shut up when he is talking and I don’t want to lower my voice when he’s sleeping after work . . . I work too and he doesn’t lower his voice when I’m sleeping . . . 96 One commenter, Ruth, oversimplified Rahaf ’s message and advised her about how to be respectful of others when they are sleeping: “You should probably lower your voice when he’s sleeping; that’s common courtesy, but by the same token, he should lower his voice when you’re sleeping. The solution is courtesy on both sides, not discourtesy on both sides. Good luck!”

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Ruth’s comment offered patronizing advice, ignoring the first part of Rahaf ’s message and reducing the issue to an understanding of manners. Another problematic pattern in the comments involved requests for translation from audience members for posts that include signs written in Arabic. While many of these commenters seemed to be from countries outside the “Arab world,” they may not necessarily all be. People’s language proficiency within the region might be affected by their communities, school system, and other factors such as migration. Some comments that requested translation were clearly from outside observers. The demand for translation asked for labor from the activists and participants to make the texts legible to audiences who did not speak or read Arabic. Similar requests included questions about historic references, but this was much less common. Although translation may be normalized in some contexts, fulfilling requests to translate or explain to outside audiences takes up time and energy from participants. This practice and the problem of the expectation that activists individually engage with potential supporters to answer their questions or meet their needs is something that other activists have called attention to on social media. For example, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) activists on social media have called on their audiences to think carefully about positionality and labor in their interactions and to engage in selfeducation before asking for an individualized explanation of a phenomenon that has been explained by many different people fighting racism and oppression. In one example, several commenters on a post about Nawal El Saadawi’s support for the Arab uprisings went beyond asking for translation to complaining about the lack of translation and threatening to withdraw support for the group. One particularly extreme set of comments came from Jane, who claimed that the page organizers were hurting their cause by posting some material in English but not translating all content: You do your cause an injustice. . . . By your comments I presume you have all the answers to the problems and don’t need American support or advocacy, so I would suggest, that you suggest, renaming this site in Arabic and not English, so all of us Americans will not take an interest. Offending interested parties is a great plan, let’s see how well that works for a positive change to Arab Women’s problems . . . Jane’s comments show that alongside widespread circulation and international attention, UWAW also faced the problem of white saviorism, in which participants believed that their support was special and they were doing participants a favor by engaging with the campaign. White saviorism involves implicitly acknowledging differences in power (in this case through

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Jane’s position in a globally powerful nation) but assumes those differences in power are earned or just instead of interrogating the mechanisms by which that power developed and how that power connects differently positioned people to one another. Not only did Jane’s comment suggest that the support of US Americans is special and necessary to UWAW’s cause, it also suggested that US Americans have a right to engage with Englishlanguage material and that anyone who doesn’t want US American involvement should choose other languages accordingly. Other commenters made similar statements. Of course, English is an official language in many countries, including countries that were colonized by the US and England, and is spoken by billions of people around the world; people in the United States don’t have a special right of access to English-language communications. In another comment, Jane withdrew her support for the cause because her demands weren’t being met: I think it has been made clear that the advocacy of ignorant, lazy, Americans, particularly ones that don’t speak Arabic and don’t have translation apps (I tried to download one yesterday and it didn’t work) is not welcome on this site. [My] experience here through responses like yours, has quite jaded my feelings about their cause. Basically I lack the sympathy and interest I did and looking at some pictures of Tahir Square isn’t exactly peaking my interest any longer. . . . I would suggest that these women can’t afford to lose even one person interested in their cause, but as an ignorant, lazy, American, I probably don’t know what I am talking about . . . These comments are an example of the limits of widespread attention and circulation; some audiences may not be willing or equipped to think critically about their relationship to the activist rhetorics they encounter. Superficial engagement can reproduce imperialist dynamics when audiences from places such as the United States see support for an activist movement as an act of benevolence. Jane’s comments indicated that she envisioned herself supporting UWAW by advocating to US politicans on behalf of Arab women. That is, she framed her support through the reach of US imperialism, through which the United States exercises political and economic influence in other places. Other comments on this post responded to the argument over translations by making racist and sexist statements that blamed Arab mothers for the sexism that Arab women experience (because Arab mothers raised children who became sexist). These comments show that translation for outside audiences and widespread, transnational circulation are by no means enough to inspire effective coalition and solidarity.

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The comments quoted here were particularly blunt examples of white saviorism, entitlement, and racism. However, similar demands and attitudes appeared more subtly in other English-language comments. One of the most common patterns in the English-language comments was requests for labor from the organizers or from participants who are proficient in both Arabic and English. These requests were sometimes much more respectful, but there was a wide variation. Some commenters acknowledged the labor involved and some simply made a request for translation. Regardless of the politeness of the request, this pattern reveals an expectation on the part of audiences that the campaign be translated for them and may have shifted some attention and labor toward people who may not have been willing or able to engage the campaign with nuance and sustained effort. Additionally, these interactions reproduce problematic patterns within feminism and activism in which people expect work in the Global South to be made legible and appealing to outsiders for approval, support, or funding. Activists certainly can and do use transnational circulation for their own purposes, drawing on international attention to support their own local goals. Activists can use such attention to put pressure on local governments or organizations and to shape narratives about their work.97 However, the comments shared in this section also illustrate the ways that positionality, political orientation, and activist literacies shape engagement with projects like UWAW’s. To see UWAW’s campaign as merely a site for US American benevolence is an egregious misreading of the campaign. At best, this problem leads to engagement that is superficial, uninteresting, or unhelpful and therefore likely to be ignored by others. More important, though, these rhetorical interactions have relational effects. Responses to a social media campaign can forestall coalition by upholding systems of power that contribute to others’ oppression. Commenters’ attitudes can easily align with the rhetoric of the US government and US-backed organizations such as religious institutions and nonprofits that construct the US as a site of wealth, power, and benevolence. In these discourses, the resources and power of US institutions and people can be shared with people around the world, so long as those people prove themselves deserving of this generosity. Of course, despite limitations of the genre and its circulation, these problematic responses don’t necessarily mean that the effort isn’t worth it. Instead, these varying responses show that the same campaign might be read quite differently by different people and therefore highlights the importance of literacy frameworks that facilitate connections between micro and macro. If UWAW focused primarily on how their work would be read by audiences in the United States when they developed the campaign, they would be

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performing a different kind of work than the project described in UWAW’s goals, which focuses on audiences in the “Arab world.” D ISID ENTIF ICATION is one framework for developing literacies of positionality that highlight how social media genres connect individual performances to histories, power structures, collective identities, and activist movements. For many social media users, participating in a campaign involves identification with a movement or group of people. Disidentification is one way of critiquing or reimagining that collective participation through performances of the self. Not all performances of disidentification are explicitly connected to a group like UWAW. On Instagram, disidentification is especially visible through stories and reposts. Through this practice, a person can share someone else’s post with their friends and/or followers. The person who shares or reposts can use platform features such as writing a comment (if a repost) or adding text on top of or next to the initial post (in stories). This practice allows the sharer to retain an important political message while acknowledging and revising a problematic element. Similar practices occur through videos that remix video and audio on TikTok. Sharing or reposting is not always disidentificatory; some shares and reposts might simply critique or elaborate on the ways that they do or don’t connect to the work. However, this feature can be a place for disidentification when someone affirms part of the message with which they identify while rejecting or revising another part to better represent or include them. In addition to the ways a genre itself can highlight connections between individuals and collectives, literacies of positionality also involve connecting genres and genre conventions to their collective context and circulation. As I have mentioned elsewhere when discussing short genres that are quick to process and easy to circulate, it’s important to understand how such genres fit within a context of other work.98 This work includes other social media genres as well as other kinds of activity. UWAW and other activist campaigns often produce, circulate, and curate multiple genres. Understanding these genres in relation to one another is an important form of activist literacy because it allows potential participants to see the strengths and weaknesses of a particular uptake and to reject oversimplified critiques of digital genres. UWAW engaged with multiple genres and uptakes, and some uptakes addressed limitations of other methods. In addition, UWAW was one of many projects and collectives engaged in the Arab uprisings. Through literacies of positionality, participants and audiences can connect personal or individualized rhetorical participation to collective processes of resistance.

TWO Differences That Matter Orientation as a Transnational Feminist Literacy Practice No one model or practice can be idealized as important to feminist goals. Each has to be scrutinized for its particular space, time, and project. —MANISHA DESAI, “CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY, THEORIES, AND PRAXIS OF TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS”

Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances? These it seems to me are the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients making a politics of interpretation.

U

—EDWARD SAID, “OPPONENTS, AUDIENCES, CONSTITUENCIES, AND COMMUNITY”

nderstanding activist work involves navigating many interrelated elements: social groups, places, historical circumstances, material conditions, individual participation, and communicative tools. In this chapter, I propose a framework for engaging with activist rhetoric on social media by reading for the “orientation” of this work. Activist rhetorics are oriented in ways that are embodied and material, as well as symbolic, and these orientations yield important insights for political engagement on social media. Recognizing and interpreting differences in orientation is a form of literacy that can help feminists, activists, and their publics engage with rhetoric that circulates on social media, especially when that rhetoric is transnational in scope. By attending to orientation, I use the insights developed by transnational feminists to develop a critical literacy strategy, or “a politics of interpretation,” for digital activist rhetorics. Social media provides opportunities for people to create, encounter, and engage with a variety of rhetorical activity as a part of their everyday lives. People often encounter activist rhetoric on social media through feeds that : 75 :

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include a range of other rhetorical activity, as well. Texts shared for entertainment and social connection might be mixed in with material about one’s profession, hobbies, and politics. These texts circulate in complex contexts that shift regularly as popular platforms change, as algorithms change, and as one’s location and connections change. These complex, shifting contexts mean that understanding activist texts on social media isn’t necessarily easy or straightforward. In addition, encounters with a specific text or even a set of related texts in one’s social media feed(s) doesn’t necessarily show how that work is connected to a broader set of activities and political goals. To understand these connections is to better understand activist rhetoric, especially when feminist activists attempt to work across differences in location, social position, and embodied experience. Activist rhetorics, even those that circulate digitally, are connected to specific bodies and unfold from specific points of view.1 These connections, which are shifting rather than stable, are rhetorically significant. In the following pages, I introduce a framework for tracing such connections in order to analyze the orientation of activists’ rhetorical work. Rhetoricians and public audiences can use the concept of activist orientation to interpret, share, and respond to digital activist texts. Orientation gives rhetors and publics a framework for thinking about the structural and material components of activist work. Attending to such conditions is a transnational feminist literacy practice that highlights how people are unevenly positioned and texts unevenly circulated in globalized contexts.2 Rhetorical and activist efforts to engage with people who are differently positioned within global power structures, and with issues that are positioned as international or global, are facilitated by different relationships to systems of power and oppression and different access to material resources. A feminist march in Seattle will involve different people, locations, and resources than a feminist march in Beirut. These differences affect the issues that activists prioritize, the way they do their work, the circulation of their work, the audiences they invoke, and the effects they achieve. Orientation can also offer insight into the differences between activist projects that engage similar issues or publics in different ways. An orientation framework highlights such differences through attention to the “background”—through an exploration of the histories, political relationships, and material conditions that precede or support activist rhetorics, as well as through recognition of the way attention is allocated in an activist projects. What does the rhetoric draw our attention to, and what does it relegate to the background? What is near and what is distant? What aspects of the background (material conditions, intellectual or physical labor, structures or institutions) make the foreground, or attention to the foreground, possible?

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I illustrate this strategy of reading for the orientation of activist work through an analysis of two groups: Girl Up and SPARK Movement. These two groups share many superficial similarities, but their orientations differ in important ways. Both groups circulate rhetoric for and about girls that seems feminist and activist. However, activist rhetoric is not just about using activist words, but about doing activist things. Similar words can be used by different people and in different contexts to do different kinds of work (and thus achieve varying effects). Through these examples, I show how the rhetoric of a group is connected to ways of “doing” activism by engaging with and responding to systems of power. By tracing claims to activism in relation to material, structural, and relational information, I illustrate how superficially similar rhetorical projects can differ in ideology and praxis. These differences are differences that matter. Orientation Literacies

My approach to examining the nuances of these groups begins with the understanding that activist work is oriented. The orientation framework I introduce here is a critical literacy practice: a strategy for facilitating nuanced engagement with digital and activist rhetorics. This method outlines a practice of reading and analyzing rhetorical activity in a deeply contextualized way. Using orientation this way involves attending to the structural and material conditions that shape activist rhetoric. Through this approach, I analyze rhetorical and activist work that engages with people who are differently positioned within global power structures and with different relationships to one another and to the issues they discuss. Broadly, I use orientation to ask: what made this rhetorical activity possible, and why did it spread? Orientation often refers to a body’s literal position in space and a person’s knowledge of their body’s position and direction. In this sense, I am oriented if I know where I am, and perhaps also where I’m going and how to get there. Orientation is often used more broadly than this, though. In addition to being oriented in space, one can also be oriented in relation to other people and in relation to things. My understanding of orientation and its various meanings draws especially on Sara Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomenology. Ahmed describes orientations as ways of being positioned and directed that shape and are shaped by our nearness to (and distance from) things and people. In other words, orientations are social as well as spatial and material. Queer Phenomenology focuses on how people are oriented toward objects and others; what makes these orientations possible, desirable, or compulsory; and what happens when people deviate from the orientations that they are supposed to follow. Ahmed explains, “orientation for me is about how the bodily, the spatial, and the social are entangled.”3 Paying

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particular attention to sexuality and race, Ahmed “queers” phenomenology to show how moments or experiences of disorientation can help us understand how orientations are organized and recognize or make space for other possibilities. All of these senses of orientation are relational: they emphasize relationships between points in space, between people, between groups, between things, between moments in time. These relationships shape activist rhetoric. In addition to Ahmed, my ideas about feminism, activism, and orientation have been shaped by the theorizing of many other feminists and scholars, and the work of women of color in particular, who have discussed the ways that positionality and location shape (or should shape) feminist and activist work.4 For example, Chela Sandoval focuses her articulation of differential consciousness on exploring “a ‘topography’ of consciousness in opposition” that maps out how specific social and cultural locations correspond to “points around which individuals and groups seeking to transform oppressive powers constitute themselves as resistant and oppositional subjects. These points are orientations . . . They provide repositories within which subjugated citizens can either occupy or throw off subjectivities in a process that at once both enacts and yet decolonizes their various relations to their real conditions of existence.”5 Like many feminist theorizations of positionality, Sandoval’s spatial metaphor articulates how social locations— especially those occupied by women of color—are sites of possibility for building relationships, theories, and activisms. Activists’ orientations shape and are shaped by their understanding of power and oppression, the groups they form, the tactics they use, and the goals they work toward. Orientation literacies emphasize how activist work is shaped by social and material contexts, but orientations also shape the ways that publics perceive, pay attention to, and circulate activist rhetoric. As Ahmed explains, orientations “shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.”6 Orientations can be intentional: the way a person occupies and moves about the space they’re in, the way they interact with others, and the way they perceive what they encounter are all shaped by what that person is doing or intends to do. (However, this doesn’t mean that we choose all of our orientations.) Political orientations, especially, are intentional. Through this intentionality, people and their activities are situated within fields of action that take shape in relation to individual and collective orientations.7 These fields of action shape rhetoric, its circulation, and its meaning. Mary Queen has described the digital circulation of feminist activist texts within “global fields of rhetorical action,” noting that the meaning

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of a text can change as it circulates through different fields.8 Because these fields of action are shaped by orientations, certain forms of knowledge, activity, and being are facilitated, while others are obscured. Histories and relationships can facilitate or inhibit attention and affect the shape that attention takes. The orientations that take shape in relation to fields of rhetorical action emerge from experiences that are socially and politically situated by collective histories, political relationships, and material circumstances. Ahmed’s work highlights the ways that perception is not just about what a person attends to and directs energy toward, but also what is pushed to the side or “relegated to the background to sustain a certain direction”; that is, to what isn’t given attention.9 Attention is unevenly distributed, and the differences between what one attends to and what one pushes aside, the “political economy of attention,” differs according to one’s position in society (which is shaped by things such as race, sexual orientation, gender, and class).10 Orientation offers a way to read activist texts on social media—and the campaigns or groups they connect to—in order to understand both how they are materially and ideologically oriented and why these orientations matter. Ahmed models a practice of reading (in her case, reading scholarly texts and social phenomena) through which the people, objects, and places that appear in a text indicate the writer’s orientation and how that orientation is political. This literacy framework focuses especially on the “conditions of emergence” for a text.11 My approach to reading for orientation on social media also involves attending to the people, places, and objects that appear in activist rhetoric as well as the conditions of emergence for the rhetor(s) who produce and circulate activist rhetoric. This means asking questions about what made an activist text12 possible and what shapes the public’s encounter with such a text. I explore these conditions of emergence through four categories: activity, participants, location, and resources. These categories are not mutually exclusive; they overlap and connect to one another in complex ways. Instead of discrete sets of information, then, each category is an entry point for exploring activist orientations. Together, the four categories provide a rich background for a text or campaign. Both of the groups I discuss in this chapter are relatively centralized. Activist work that spreads through digital media does not always come from organizations like this. Some groups gain attention in different ways and might be described as more bottom-up, grassroots, or emergent. My use of “group” in this chapter is deliberate: I do not necessarily mean a formal organization. A group could also be a public that emerged in a more “leaderless” way. As Zeynep Tufekci argues, spokespeople still often emerge in

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nonhierarchical movements, and organizing still takes place.13 The Women’s March is an example of a group that was more emergent but developed spokespeople and a more centralized structure. The process of researching orientation will look different in each case, but the categories should apply to a broad range of contexts. Orientation and transnational feminism provide the theoretical background for my analyses in the following sections. By connecting Ahmed’s reading strategy with insights from transnational feminist and activist scholarship, I outline a framework for connecting activist rhetoric to political, cultural, and historical circumstances. Through this framework, I encourage attention to “the multiple scales that cause women’s oppression” and also to the scales at which activist efforts address these causes.14 Both of the groups I analyze started in the United States, but they discuss their work in relation to “global” issues and have international components to their work. Using transnational feminism as an analytical framework shows that both groups’ work fails to develop the kind of transnational engagement suggested by claims about “global” reach. Developing Girl Activists

In this section I briefly introduce the two organizations on which my analysis focuses in the rest of this chapter: Girl Up and SPARK Movement. Both groups began in 2010 and focus on engaging adolescent women in activity related to gender-based issues. Both organizations describe their work as movement-building, action-oriented, and led by a community of girls. That is, they describe their work (movement, action) and structure (community led) with words that are commonly associated with activism. Both groups offer training and leadership for a core group of girls that is designed to “scale out,” and both groups have engaged in a range of projects that include their own initiatives as well as work with other people and organizations (including politicians, businesses, and established institutions such as the UN). Even their color schemes are similar: Girl Up’s logo and website use a sky blue and pink color scheme and SPARK Movement uses a pinkish purple and sky blue. And finally, both groups have origins in the United States but use terms such as “global” to describe their engagement with people and places outside of the US. Girl Up is an organization created in 2010 by the United Nations Foundation that focuses on engaging girls in organizing, education, and fundraising about gendered issues. The group describes itself as a movement that is led by girls and uses the tagline “uniting girls to change the world” as a descriptor of its work. On Girl Up’s website, the “About” page begins this way:

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No matter their background, girls have the power to transform themselves, their communities, and the world around them. Girl Up is a global movement of empowered young women leaders who defend gender equality. Through leadership development training, Girl Up gives girls the resources and platform to start a movement for social change wherever they are. For those who stand with us in this movement, there is no rest until we achieve equal rights for every girl. Because when girls rise, we all rise.15 The starter guide for clubs, directed at girls, describes Girl Up this way: Girl Up, the United Nations Foundation’s adolescent girl campaign, supports the empowerment of girls everywhere. Since its launch in 2010, the campaign has funded UN programs that promote the health, safety, education, and leadership of girls in developing countries and built a community of nearly half a million passionate advocates— including Girl Up Global Advocates Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan and Latin American business leader Angélica Fuentes. Our youth leaders, representing more than 700 Girl Up Clubs in 44 countries, stand up, speak up, and rise up to support the hardest to reach girls living in places where it is hardest to be a girl. Learn more at GirlUp.org.16 The starter guide defines a Girl Up club as “a group of dedicated youth who have joined together with the common commitment to change the lives of adolescent girls in developing countries and to empower the people around them to take action.”17 Clubs are required to host activities, complete reports, recruit new members, participate in Girl Up’s online community, and participate in fundraising challenges. SPARK Movement is an organization that grew out of SPARK Summit, an October 2010 gathering of girls and adults at Hunter College in New York City and organized by a small group of academics and nonprofit leaders.18 “SPARK” stands for “Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge.” The SPARK Summit focused on the sexualization of girls and was intended to “ignite” a movement; organizers described it as providing girls with “the tools they need to become activists, organizers, researchers, policy influencers, and media makers, so they can push back against the increasingly sexualized images of girlhood in the media and create room for whole girls.”19 The summit included talks by prominent activists, educators, researchers, and experts; workshops on self-expression and media literacy; and panels presenting research on the effects of sexualization and media

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representation on girls. Young women ages 14–22 were invited to participate as attendees as well as activist panelists, bloggers, and members of the “SPARKteam.” The bloggers and SPARKteam members continued working with the organization after the initial summit. SPARK focused on a variety of activities, including petitions, blogging and social media campaigns, resources for activists, and a range of events including media appearances, SPARKteam trainings and retreats, performances, and work with the UN. The organization eventually shifted from its original model of training a core group of 20–35 girls per year to a networked approach designed to “support and extend a network of people and organizations working with and on behalf of girls.”20 SPARK Movement describes itself in various ways: “a girl-fueled organization working to ignite an anti-racist gender justice movement” on its website;21 “A girl-fueled, intergenerational feminist movement” on Twitter.22 On Facebook, the description just says “SPARK change. Join the movement.”23 On the main page of SPARK’s website, two links identify the primary audiences: youth activists and educators. A more detailed description of the organization on the SPARK Movement website indicates some of the priorities and history of the group: SPARK Movement is a girl-fueled, intergenerational activist organization working to ignite and foster an antiracist gender justice movement to end violence against women and girls and promote girls’ healthy sexuality, self-empowerment and well-being. By providing feminist, girl-focused training, consulting services, curricula and resources, SPARK aims to arm activists, educators, community leaders, and girls themselves to foster coalitions and partnerships in order to ignite and support a global young feminist movement. In 2016, with support from the NoVo Foundation and the Ittleson Foundation, we launched “SPARK2.0,” and transitioned from a single, lean, centralized organization working intensively with a core of approximately 35 girls selected annually, to reclaim our original “scaling out” collaborative, movement-building model designed to support and extend a network of people and organizations working with and on behalf of girls.24 The website also provides a timeline of the organization’s work and links to resources. A page titled “SPARK Actions” describes campaigns the group engaged in as “initiated by girls, but designed and launched in collaboration with SPARK adults and alongside many of our partner organizations. Replicate! Imitate! Copy! If you are interested in learning more about any of these campaigns or if you want guidance or consultation about how to adapt any of them for your community, please contact us.”25 SPARK’s emphases and

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priorities appear to have evolved in response to the members and work of the group. In addition, SPARK’s model does not necessarily ask that those who engage with its work to register and report to the organization, but instead offers models and resources for people to use as they see fit. Orienting Girls’ Activisms

Despite the similarities in the way these two groups describe themselves and their work, they are politically quite different. Because of these similarities and differences, I use these two groups to show how reading for orientation exposes the nuances of digital activist work. In order to illustrate how orientation can function as a critical literacy practice, I ask: given the significant overlap between the rhetoric of these two groups, how can we explore their differences and articulate what those differences mean? Below, I analyze some of the material I’ve encountered on Girl Up and SPARK Movement’s websites and social media pages. Web pages and social media sites change; what I discuss here is a reading of the groups’ activity based on specific encounters with their work in particular moments. I have collected examples of each group’s website content and Facebook and Twitter feeds during specific periods between 2012 and 2019. Although I have followed both groups on social media for a number of years, my use of each platform is inconsistent. Of course, algorithms shape what I see, so I don’t reliably see content from both groups. My readings are based on deliberate moments of encounter with the rhetoric of each group, which has changed during the course of my work. Although my reading does not mimic the way most people encounter material on social media, it could resemble a process of “reading” that’s similar to what a person (e.g., a student, researcher, or someone interested in the groups’ work) might do if they wanted to know more about rhetoric they’ve encountered.

Activity As I explained in the introduction, activism is a situated, directed, and collective process of working toward social change. Part of this process involves the rhetorical work of creating meaning out of different events and actions in ways that connect them to a political goal. One way to learn about the orientation of a group is through the activities in which they engage and the ways that they connect those activities to broader political goals. Activity includes what the groups do (both what they say they do as well as what activity is visible through their digital presence) and why they do it (which involves their own statements about the “why” as well as motives that emerge from research). To explore how an activist group or event is oriented through activity, I begin with the following questions:

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•

What topics or issues is this group concerned with? What is their goal? What do they want to achieve? What do they do to work toward that goal? How are they trying to achieve it? What is the structure of this activity? How do people connect with one another as they do this work, and how/where do they interact with their audience? How has this work changed or evolved over time? Why?

These questions are more complicated than they might first appear. Often, activist work involves the difficult task of assessing location, participants, material resources, skills, and time in relation to goals. Activists who want to dismantle systems of oppression might focus on specific projects or discrete goals that relate to a broader aim or shared ideology because their ultimate goal might take a long time to achieve. Girl Up and SPARK Movement make different claims about their work and engage participants in different kinds of activity. SPARK Movement makes more specific claims about its vision of social justice for girls (antiracist gender justice movement, ending violence against women, promoting girls’ healthy sexuality), whereas Girl Up tends to stick with broader terms such as education, health, safety, and leadership. SPARK Movement also uses slightly more politicized language, such as “activist” and “justice.” Girl Up occasionally uses these words, but more often uses terms such as “advocates” and “empower.” SPARK’s website and Facebook photos, which I describe later in this section, reference participation in direct action (a protest march), whereas the Girl Up materials reference the US government and collectivity more generally. These differences say something about who each group is trying to appeal to and why. In addition, differences in activity are linked to other important differences between the two organizations, such as differences in values and worldviews as well as material and structural conditions. Girl Up claims to bring girls together and improve their lives, most prominently through education and leadership. As I described above, Girl Up positions itself as an action-oriented movement that is “uniting girls to change the world.” At first glance, the most obvious focus of its work is girls: the name and online materials feature the word “girl” and photos of girls prominently and often. The organization is led by adults, but the clubs are led by girls, and a national or international team of Teen Advisors is selected every year. Girl Up’s rhetoric suggests that education will make girls’ lives better and that girls can (and should) hold leadership positions. Although Girl Up claims to focus on bringing girls together and emphasizes their similarity, the organization is actually structured around differ-

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ence. When it began in 2010, Girl Up described itself as an effort to engage “American girls” in standing up for their “peers” in “developing countries.”26 Participants in the United States were encouraged to start or join clubs and to learn about and advocate for girls in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Liberia, and Malawi in relation to four broad themes: health, safety, education, and being counted (i.e., collecting official data on women and girls). Girl Up’s language and the participants they engage have shifted slightly to include clubs outside of the United States; to focus on more countries; to include a more racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse group of teen advisors; and to focus on leadership in addition to other issues. However, the initial division between US participants and the girls being “supported” by advocacy and fundraising is still present in a variety of materials produced by the organization. Girl Up engages participants in organizing and political processes, but for many participants, this work is on behalf of others rather than themselves. Instead of asking participants in the United States to lobby congress on behalf of rights that would affect their lives, such as healthcare reform, or to engage in antiracist work in their local communities, or to work against violence in their communities, privileged girls direct their energy toward advocacy and fundraising on behalf of presumably less-empowered girls in other places. By orienting its activity around US clubs and advocacy for girls in the Global South, Girl Up reinscribes privileged girls as global caretakers in the name of feminism. Girl Up describes its clubs as “a group of dedicated youth who have joined together with the common commitment to change the lives of adolescent girls in developing countries and to empower the people around them to take action.”27 Despite the changes noted above, clubs are more concentrated in the United States. The Girl Up Club Starter Guide acknowledges that certain activities are designed for US participants.28 Clubs are typically based in a particular school or community and members engage in awareness-raising, advocacy, fundraising, and service. Although clubs can design their own events, they are especially encouraged to participate in activities designed by Girl Up such as a 5k fundraiser, a Leadership Summit, or a petition. These frameworks for activity create unevenness in Girl Up’s rhetoric and activities. According to this model, participants in the United States and their communities have resources that young women in “developing” countries lack. Club members are encouraged to make use of these resources to advocate for girls outside the United States who have fewer resources and less power. This structure supports what feminist scholars have labeled “missionary girlpower,” in which privileged girls are positioned as global

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caretakers whose empowerment is constructed through work on behalf of girls in other places.29 Some audiences might see this as a positive move, but transnational feminist and activist work highlights the problems with this framework. Girl Up discourse refers frequently to women and girls in the Global South in ways that construct a monolithic “other” in contrast to empowered girls in the United States.30 The organization appeals to the sympathy or affective empathy of privileged participants and donors rather than encouraging critical engagement or deliberative empathy that would encourage participants “to not only deeply consider the experiences of others but also to situate those experiences within specific material, sociopolitical, and historical contexts.”31 Furthermore, Girl Up doesn’t encourage participants to interrogate their own circumstances. Feminists of color and transnational feminists have pointed out the importance of understanding how the circumstances of women in the Global North and the Global South are different yet often related economically and geopolitically. Although many women throughout the world experience privilege, the specificities and contours of this privilege should be examined rather than assumed. When Girl Up doesn’t ask participants from the United States to interrogate their own circumstances, it participates in the construction of “oppositional girlhoods” through which girls in “developed” countries such as the United States are assumed to be free in opposition to the presumed oppression of girls in other places.32 Girl Up’s rhetoric frequently makes visual and textual claims about bringing diverse groups of girls together with positive effects. Girl Up’s website and social media pages often feature photos of groups of girls that suggest that the organization is diverse and inclusive. For example, the screenshot in figure 3 shows a website photo featuring three young women facing the camera and smiling in front of a gray brick wall. Their clothing and the background feature purple, gray, and white. The similarities in the subjects’ clothing, the plain gray background, and the cropping of the photo draw attention to the subjects’ faces and hair, and therefore to the subjects’ different skin tones and hair styles. On Facebook and Twitter, Girl Up’s cover photos typically appear to be taken at Girl Up events. The photos feature larger groups of young women wearing white t-shirts with the Girl Up logo on them. In the Facebook photo, six women are holding hands and jumping into the air. On Twitter, a larger group of girls are gathered and smiling with their right hands raised in front of the Washington Monument. These photos use similar clothing or poses to create the appearance of commonality, emphasizing that Girl Up brings girls together. These photos also show girls jumping, smiling, and laughing, expressions that may be associated with the youthfulness and joy that Girl Up wants all girls to experience. Both types of

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FIGURE 3: Girl Up home page, 2018

FIGURE 4: Girl Up home page, 2021

photo described here are genres common to Girl Up’s visual rhetoric; while the photos change as the organization updates its website and social media pages, some of the features and messages in the photos persist. For example, figure 4 is a more recent photo from Girl Up’s website that shares many of the visual features of the social media cover photos described above.

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While there is likely much good that can come from engaging girls in organizing, Girl Up’s strategy seems more focused on numbers than on encouraging girls to advocate on behalf of the communities to which they belong or develop an understanding of their connectedness to other communities. The website boasts an impressive number of clubs and supporters at high schools and college campuses in the United States and in many other countries. In the community section of Girl Up’s website, club members can use a “coalition” feature to connect with other clubs in their region. Club members can also download educational materials, share their events on a calendar, and see what other clubs are doing. However, despite the claims about bringing girls together, there are very few opportunities for participants to actually meet and speak with girls from other communities, and especially for participants to engage across the “developed”/“developing” divide. Instead, girls connect to people around them on behalf of the presumably disempowered beneficiaries of the UN programs for which they’re raising funds. The relationship is not about solidarity but about philanthropy. Club members are primarily encouraged to empower themselves to fundraise, advocate for others, and report back to the organization. Girl Up’s social media activity focuses on publicity for the organization and is driven by Girl Up’s predefined priorities. Girl Up typically posts and retweets material daily on both Facebook and Twitter. Many of the posts reference Girl Up programs or activities (such as its teen advisor program and its leadership summit) or feature the activity of members or clubs. Other posts refer to issues that the organization prioritizes (e.g., girls’ education, women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) or that are timely (e.g., Black History Month). Two issues that are especially prominent in their online work are education and leadership. Fundraising and awareness-raising are especially important activities for Girl Up. As I viewed Girl Up’s website in 2019, I scrolled past the initial photo and encountered a statistic about the organization’s work (“Girl Up has impacted the lives of 80,000 girls worldwide”), followed by a set of “Three Ways to Get Involved”: donate, lead, or take action (see figure 5). Most of these links took me to further information. The donation link was the most direct, leading to a donation form that included suggested donation amounts and a description of what the organization can do with that money (e.g., “educate a refugee girl” or support a girl’s participation in a youth club). The “lead” link led to another set of links that encompassed different options for joining Girl Up: starting a club, promoting Girl Up on college campuses, or signing up as an individual member. Finally, “Take Action” led viewers to a page that focused on advocacy as a way to influence US policy. It also included a set of links: to a specific issue (“Girls Education”),

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FIGURE 5. Three “Ways to Get Involved” from Girl Up’s website, 2018

an introduction to advocacy, suggested ways to advocate, and “Advocacy Resources” that included an app, a toolkit, and a list of Girl Up advocacy successes. The introduction to advocacy, “Advocacy 101,” described advocacy as “the best tool for large-scale change.” On social media, other activities were visible: Women in Science (WiSci) STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and design, mathematics) camps, a leadership summit, and a 5k fundraiser. Since Girl Up identifies leadership as a key component of their work, two questions that emerged from my analysis of their activity were: Who is being asked to lead? Who are they leading? I will discuss these questions in the next section on participants and relationships. SPARK Movement also positions itself as action-oriented and girlfocused, but its activity is more aligned with intersectionality and resistance. The main page of SPARK’s website describes it as a “girl-fueled organization” and the website features a photo of five girls (figure 6). Rhetorical choices on the website draw attention to the group’s purpose, audience, and previous activity. For instance, the website’s interface specifies SPARK’s primary audiences through two buttons that direct activity on the website: “for youth activists” and “for educators.” A description of the group on another page also mentions other possible audiences or participants: activists, educators, and community leaders.33

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FIGURE 6. SPARK Movement home page, 2018

In addition to gender justice and empowerment for women and girls, SPARK Movement’s description includes the phrase “antiracist,” implying some attention to intersectionality in its work. Intersectionality is a concept from Black feminist theory and activism, specifically the work of Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, that describes how different systems of oppression—such as racism, sexism, and capitalism—intersect.34 People who experience multiple forms of oppression often find that their experiences of oppression are ignored or marginalized in movements because efforts focus on the needs of the most privileged participants. Because of intersecting oppressions, people experience the same system of oppression in different ways. For example, sexism affects Black women differently than white women, and racism affects Black women differently than Black men. To resist oppression, then, people must understand how oppressions intersect and pay specific attention to the needs and experiences of people who experience intersecting oppressions. A famous, oft-quoted line from Audre Lorde summarizes the necessity of understanding different experiences of oppression and their connection: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free

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as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.”35 Many transnational feminists take positions similar to those of Crenshaw and Lorde, expressing the importance of feminists’ attention not only to the different ways that women experience oppression, but also to the interconnectedness of systems of oppression and to the importance of fighting all forms of oppression. Like Girl Up, SPARK Movement’s website and social media pages show images of girls together; however, SPARK Movement’s rhetoric uses images and text to connect more specifically to protest and resistance. SPARK Movement’s website and Facebook page have featured the same photo for years; it shows five young women walking together in a city, holding protest signs. While the initial effect suggests that they are participating in a protest march, their signs are written on dry erase boards and the background doesn’t clearly show other protesters. Regardless of whether the photo is of an actual protest, though, the group’s visual reference to this activity tells us something about how they situate their work. Similarly, the SPARK logo, which is the profile photo on SPARK’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, features the words “resistance” and “protest.” SPARK’s images look less polished and coordinated: although the images include deliberate references and poses, the images do not include color-coordinated clothing and seem to be taken by amateur photographers, whereas Girl Up’s images are often professionally photographed. Whereas figure 4 shows Girl Up participants pictured in front of the United States Capitol, a setting that symbolizes the US government and powerful political institutions, SPARK Movement participants are pictured in a position more commonly associated with resistance to those institutions. SPARK is most active on Facebook, where one or more posts are typically shared daily; on Twitter, the frequency is more varied: posts and retweets are typically shared about every other day but occasionally as often as several times a day and or as infrequently as every 6–10 days. At the time of this writing, it is unclear whether SPARK Movement’s website is still being updated, but the SPARK Movement social media pages are still active. Whereas Girl Up focuses on telling visitors what they do, with whom, and what effects they’ve had, SPARK Movement’s website interface focuses on helping visitors find information about projects or resources created by the group. The menu includes the categories “actions” and “resources,” and some of the featured content on the main website page is about specific projects and resources. SPARK Movement’s website describes several types of activity that the organization supports: “By providing feminist, girlfocused training, consulting services, curricula and resources, SPARK aims to arm activists, educators, community leaders, and girls themselves to foster

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coalitions and partnerships in order to ignite and support a global young feminist movement.”36 The organization describes its approach as a “‘scaling out’ collaborative, movement-building model” that will build a network of people working with and for girls. SPARK also encourages girls and their mentors to engage in projects that are specifically adapted for their own communities. Although the main page of SPARK Movement’s website doesn’t tell a clear story about where its participants are or how many people engage with their work, it does show specific projects, including toolkits about activism (one for young people and another for parents and teachers); a guide to a book on girls’ activism called “Powered by Girl”; information about activist theater performances in New York City and a toolkit for helping others produce similar work in their own communities; a fellowship application called SPARKworks; and a link to information about research created in coordination with the project. Another page of the website that lists actions created by the group positions it as an archive from which others might draw inspiration: “These campaigns were initiated by girls, but designed and launched in collaboration with SPARK adults and alongside many of our partner organizations. Replicate! Imitate! Copy! If you are interested in learning more about any of these campaigns or if you want guidance or consultation about how to adapt any of them for your community, please contact us.”37 While Girl Up and SPARK Movement both provide some space for flexibility, SPARK Movement’s rhetoric tends to emphasize adaptation and Girl Up’s rhetoric tends to emphasize cohesiveness. Activity on SPARK’s social media accounts often engage with intersectionality by focusing on multiple systems of oppression. When I reviewed SPARK Movement’s Facebook posts in October 2018, I found posts engaging with gender, race, Indigenous rights, disability, sexual orientation, and abortion. On Twitter, retweets engaged with prison conditions, Black history month, adolescent boys and emotion, blackface, imperialism, and trans rights. SPARK Movement’s social media pages feature a wider range of content than Girl Up’s, even though they post and share less frequently. This is, in part, because Girl Up re-circulates a lot of the same material. SPARK Movement’s social media feeds also tend to feature more shares and retweets of other users’ material, whereas Girl Up tends to feature more material that references their own activities. The social media posts for both groups often speak about and to audiences of young women. Although SPARK Movement and Girl Up overlap in some of their areas of focus (empowerment, health, and violence/safety), there are noticeable differences in the material each group shares.

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Participants and Relationships This component of orientation literacies involves examining the rhetors who create and circulate the activist rhetoric, the audience(s) that they address, and the groups of people or communities implicated in the texts. In addition to considering who creates, appears in, or is addressed by the texts, an analysis of participants should also consider relationships between participants, especially when participants occupy different relationships to systems of power and oppression. It is not enough to just understand who participates in a project; attentive audiences should also ask themselves how different kinds of participants are related to one another and pay attention to the different roles that participants occupy. For instance, many activist projects have leaders, strategizers, or otherwise highly active participants in addition to other supporters who participate in actions but don’t strategize or who participate less heavily. As I discussed in the example of the Women’s March in the Introduction, asking who leads a group or campaign can point to important information about values and priorities. In the case of the Women’s March, the initial lack of diverse leadership connected to problems with appropriation and white feminism, which affected participation and attitudes toward the events. In order to explore how an activist group is oriented through participants and relationships, I ask the following questions: • • •

• • •

Who participates in the group? What differences exist between participants? What roles do participants have? (Who initiated their work? Who leads or organizes the group’s work? Who do they imagine will benefit from the results of their work?) How are participants represented in the group’s discourse and activities? How are participants connected to one another? How are participants connected to the goals of the group?

Understanding relationships and differences in roles is particularly important for groups that engage participants from diverse positionalities. Differences such as race, class, location, gender identity, disability, and sexual orientation affect one’s experience of oppression and influence the tactics and goals that people prioritize for working against that oppression. More specifically, transnational feminist rhetoricians have often asked questions about the roles of different people addressed or represented in texts: Are there people who are addressed or discussed in the texts, who aren’t involved in producing those texts? If so, what are the differences between

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those who create the texts and other participants? To what extent do the texts acknowledge and engage with these differences through analyses of power and relationality? To pay attention to these differences is the first step in interrogating the amount of power different groups of participants have. These differences in power can be specific to the group and its work (leadership, a platform for speaking, access to audiences), or they can be a part of the group’s broader social or cultural context. Orientation offers a way of reading activist projects in relation to participants’ roles and agency. In Ahmed’s theorization of orientation as it relates to race, she discusses the difference between being oriented “toward” and “around,” by connecting the relationship between orientation, the Orient, and the East to the ways these terms and perspectives assume certain points of view as given. By associating “the East” with particular people and places, an orientation toward the East is oriented around the West.38 Ahmed’s discussion of orientation around can usefully be compared to activist language about who is “centered” in a group, space, or movement. In my experience, discussions about who or what is “centered” are often used to emphasize the importance of listening to and working from culturally marginalized perspectives. My initial study of Girl Up in 2012 focused on the representation of Girl Up participants on YouTube.39 Through a content analysis, I found that despite claims about uniting girls globally, the organization involved girls from different places in very different ways. Girl Up’s rhetoric categorized girls oppositionally, positioning US girls as different from girls in “developing countries,” despite their claims that all girls are alike. Participants from the US were positioned as global leaders, whereas girls from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Liberia, and Malawi were positioned as recipients of aid. Teen advisors, who were initially all from the US, were positioned as leaders in the organization whose work includes “advising on strategy and [serving] as leading voices for our work to advance global gender equality.”40 Teen advisors and other participants from the US were featured speaking for themselves and in detail about their interests and lives. When participants from outside the United States were featured, they were often positioned as representatives of their country or of a specific issue, such as child marriage. Girl Up has revised its website and materials in ways that complicate some of these discrepancies. They have shifted toward claims about leadership training for girls that are meant to describe the program’s work more broadly for both club members and those who participate in UN-sponsored programs. Teen advisors are more ethnically and nationally diverse. Rhetorically, this is an important change that reduces some of the egregious othering and white saviorism in the organization’s earlier rhetoric. However, some

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of that earlier rhetoric is still there. In addition, some of the newer rhetorical activity still maintains important differences between participants. One example of these differences comes from material about Girl Up’s WiSci STEAM camps, in which participants from the United States and from other countries participate in two-week summer camps. The camp locations have included Rwanda, Peru, Malawi, Georgia, Namibia, Kosovo, and Estonia. Two stories from Girl Up’s 2017 WiSci Girls STEAM Camp in Malawi show how this positioning is still present. One story, written by a 17-yearold US participant named Ruby, is framed as a list of 10 things she’s learned during her time in Malawi.41 Five of the list items tell readers about how the girls she met from Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Liberia are like her or have things in common with her. She explains that the girls she met listen to music from the United States, understand US humor, like hugs, and love to dance. This rhetorical move was familiar to me from my previous engagement with Girl Up; it fits the organization’s message that girls are fundamentally similar. Three items on Ruby’s list tell readers about education in Africa generally, without reference to specific countries: “School is not free for everyone in Africa.” This also fit a familiar pattern of homogenizing the Global South. However, the narrative also seems to include attempts by Ruby to avoid constructing Africa as monolithic. She mentions that African countries are different, as are all of the girls from different countries who she met at camp. She also talks about how stereotypes about Africa aren’t true, though she doesn’t mention what stereotypes she refers to. Reading Ruby’s narrative in relation to Girl Up’s mission and rhetoric leads me to interpret her narrative as an effort to educate US audiences about two ideas that Girl Up promotes: that girls are similar to one another and that education is important. She does this by sharing what she learned about Africa from her experience at the camp. In contrast, another story from the 2017 WiSci camp is from Promise, a 15-year-old participant from Malawi. Promise’s story also talks about bonding with other girls, but most of the story discusses her previous life experiences of economic hardship and education, including a scholarship she received from US donors. She speaks about wanting to use her time at camp wisely and says “I want to make my own lipstick or products during my time here because it can help girls like me learn entrepreneurial skills.” She shares the hope that she will eventually be able to donate money to help other girls go to school.42 Promise’s story shares much in common with what Rachel Riedner calls a “neoliberal development narrative . . . [in which] a (third world, presumably woman of color) citizen who is (developing) entrepreneurial responsibility for herself ” is empowered through participation

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in the marketplace.43 Riedner argues that such narratives imply progress and obscure the violence of neoliberalism. These two stories are representative of broader patterns in Girl Up’s discourse and show how different kinds of participants play different roles in the organization. I came up with the categorization of girls into two groups (US girls and girls in “developing” countries) based on my initial study of Girl Up’s rhetoric and the language the organization used.44 My ongoing review of Girl Up shows that these categories do still underlie Girl Up’s rhetoric and activities, but they could also be usefully expanded. Girl Up clubs are still positioned as a way for participants to learn more about the world and the challenges that people in specific countries face. The people targeted by UN programs are positioned as impoverished and in need of resources that will change their situation. The categories could be shifted, then, to reflect that Girl Up now distinguishes between privileged girl leaders and girls who need help. However, patterns in these categories still tend to position US participants as leaders and position girls in the Global South as needing help. Girl Up uses clubs to disseminate the message that people need the UN’s help and that they can offer that help by raising money and educating others about this need. There are important discrepancies between who is typically positioned as a leader and who is typically positioned as needing help. Using Ahmed’s language, we might say that Girl Up is oriented toward marginalized girls in the Global South and around privileged girls in the United States. In a Ms. Magazine article about the WiSci camps, counselors from the US explain that the camps have given them “global” perspective: “[We] always talk about the challenges girls face around the world but when you finally get to meet them and learn how they overcome challenges—that knowledge has been the biggest thing that has changed me.”45 Ruby’s story, described above, takes on the role of globally informed girl as she tells her audience about Africa. She also introduces her audience to nine other campers and a counselor. One of these fellow campers is also from the US, and the others are from six different countries in Africa. Ruby’s introduction of her fellow campers fits the role that Ruby is being asked to play. Her public role as a Girl Up participant is to educate others about issues facing girls around the world. In taking up that mission, Ruby struggles to write a narrative that doesn’t homogenize the girls she met who come from different countries. Whereas Ruby and other US participants’ two-week experiences at the camp presumably give them the expertise with which to educate US audience members about Africa, campers and counselors from less wealthy and powerful countries are quoted talking about their own communities or countries. Promise’s narrative centers on her own life and her own community.

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She narrates her life experiences in order to show the audience that their donations matter and that her progress will benefit others in her community when she succeeds. Promise’s role in the organization is quite different from Ruby’s, then, despite Girl Up’s claims about girls’ similarities and the important role they have in changing the world. Ruby doesn’t talk about her own community and how her experiences might impact it. What these two narratives have in common are the principles that Girl Up promotes. In fact, the benefit of Girl Up programming is so unanimously agreed upon in the narratives that it seems coached. To be clear, I don’t think the problems with Ruby’s narrative are necessarily her problems. Instead, her narrative points to problems with Girl Up’s structure and orientation. Girl Up is a large organization that mobilizes its substantial resources around girls in the US and toward girls in the “developing world.” Ruby’s narrative shows that she’s trying to find a more nuanced perspective than this—one that’s critical of and resistant to the imperialist move of homogenizing diverse countries, cultures, and people into a singular “Africa.” Unfortunately, the framework in which she is engaging with girls of different cultural, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds from her own doesn’t seem to be giving her the tools to do this. In contrast to Girl Up, SPARK Movement categorizes participants into roles that could be associated with age or activist knowledge. The two most prominent categories on the website are “youth activists” and “educators,” which are interface options on the website’s main page. Other SPARK Movement materials mention their intergenerational focus and identify additional categories of adults who work with the organization or might be interested in their work: activists, researchers, community leaders, and parents. From 2011 to 2015, a group of activists ages 13–22 were selected each year to receive training and contribute to the planning and activities of SPARK Movement.46 During that time, the website featured a page with names and biographies of each member of the team. In 2017, the website domain and structure changed, and the section about SPARKteam was adjusted to summarize the work of SPARKteam members from 2011 to 2015: “In just 5 years, SPARK Movement welcomed and trained over 60 girls . . . SPARKteam activists brought their passion, their expertise, their energy, their fear, their vulnerability, and their incredible power to every single thing SPARK has done. SPARK was, at its heart, their organization, driven by their needs and desires, and we want to honor and thank them for their achievements.”47 A timeline on the same page features a photo and description of each year’s SPARKteam that focuses on the activities they engaged in. At the bottom of the page, the names of all participants for all five years are provided in a single list.

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In contrast to Girl Up’s focus on giving numerical evidence of impact and representative stories of people involved in the organization, SPARK Movement’s website focuses more on the activities that participants engage in. SPARK Movement includes some numbers, such as the number of participants, their age range, and the number of countries represented by participants, but they are presented descriptively rather than as evidence of impact. In addition, while Girl Up is driven by a top-down structure in which the key areas of focus are identified by the organization and taken up by participants, SPARK Movement shifted from an initial, organizationdefined focus on sexualization and media to incorporate activities and issues developed in coordination with SPARKteam members. Whereas Girl Up has consistently prioritized similar issues, SPARK’s work has shifted more substantially in ways that appear to be tied to participants. SPARK’s timeline of SPARKteam members and their activities shows a relationship between the SPARKteam members and the activities the organization has engaged in. Pairing each group of participants with specific activities suggests that those activities derived from the work of the group. Most years include a unique theater production as well as other projects focused on creating resources for specific issues or groups of people, raising awareness in online and offline spaces, and campaigning to specific organizations (LEGO, Seventeen, Google). The first two years highlight activities relating to sexualization, photo retouching, eating disorders, and gendered marketing. The third year’s group, described as “larger and more diverse,” mentions additional issues: racial justice, capitalism, and colonization. The following year includes projects focused on the representation of women and people of color and on Black women working in film and television. The organization’s final shift in the SPARK team involved a focus on training participants for work in their communities. Although SPARK Movement, like Girl Up, claims to be doing global work, this claim to global action looks different because SPARK Movement is not structured around an opposition between privileged girls and girls needing help. Nevertheless, Ahmed’s distinction between toward and around is useful in understanding the limitations in SPARK Movement’s claim to global work. Although SPARK’s work may encompass multiple countries, and therefore be oriented toward the global, it is still oriented around people and organizations in the United States or the “West.” Most of the corporations and organizations targeted in SPARK’s campaigns originated or are based in the United States: Cover Girl, Teen Vogue, Seventeen, Google, HalloweenStore.com, and the National Federation of High School Associations. The two exceptions are campaigns that speak to companies based in Europe (LEGO and H&M); for both campaigns, narratives about the

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project online highlight mostly US perspectives. Campaigns that target companies such as Google, LEGO, and H&M may have a more global reach than those with US-specific goals, but audiences should still be mindful of whose “local” serves as the origin point. Feminists, and especially feminists of color, have shown that claims about building “global” movements should be approached with skepticism. Transnational feminist scholars and activists have written extensively about the ways that “global” movements have often been led by or prioritized the concerns of privileged women, such as white feminists in the United States.48 When this happens, initiatives that claim to be working against gender oppression may fail to address—or worse, contribute to—the oppression of women with less privilege. Linda Alcoff writes that “the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for.”49 Feminists need to analyze multiple axes of privilege and oppression in order to avoid lifting up one group of women and oppressing another. Arianne Shahvisi argues that women “who enjoy privileges along other axes (class, race, nationality) can often find safe intersections from which to outsource their gender oppression to another location, while leaving global patriarchy intact . . . Making gains at the expense of other women, or at the expense of poor or racialized communities is no victory.”50 While making connections across borders can be fruitful and energizing, coalition-building across difference is hard work. As Chandra Mohanty writes, “Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together. Diversity and difference are central values here—to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of alliances . . . solidarity is always an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences.”51 SPARK Movement does not make the same kinds of claims about girls’ similarities as Girl Up, but its claim to the global reproduces a problematic practice in which work oriented around the United States, Europe, or the “West” makes a claim to the global that erases many women around the world whose needs and concerns aren’t addressed by this work. One important feature of both groups’ work that affects participation is the language in which their materials are available. From 2010 to 2017, both groups’ websites and other resources were in English. While English is spoken by many people in many different places, there are also billions more people in the world who don’t speak English. If English isn’t someone’s primary language, English literacy might be a marker of privilege. Of course, there are many ways to learn English and many places where English is a

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native language. However, when activist projects involve places or people whose first language is not English, yet their materials are in English, audiences should ask themselves: who is this for? The answer might be complicated. A project that serves local audiences but seeks funding to support their work might create materials in English because it is the language of business for those they seek funding from. However, a discrepancy between the language of some participants and the language of the organization’s public rhetoric could also tell audience members something about whose voices the organization values. In 2018, Girl Up began adding resources in other languages. Their website and resources for Girl Up clubs now include material in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Hindi. This is an important step if the organization claims to work on behalf of girls worldwide. However, most of the organization’s work is still in English. For example, a 2020 search of resources by language brought up almost twice as many results in English (63) than in Spanish (34) or Portuguese (33), which were the second and third most common languages.52 There were only six resources available in French and none available in widely spoken Ethiopian languages such as Amharic or Oromo, even though Ethiopia is a country of focus for Girl Up. SPARK Movement’s social media posts occasionally engage with the topic of language difference. Through searches, I found a few social media posts on Facebook and Twitter in Spanish, but I was unable to find material on SPARK Movement’s website in languages other than English. Trying to understand these relationships and the differences within them gives insight into the group’s work and its values. Activism is a collective pursuit. Exploring who is involved in an activist project, and the relationships that the work encourages among participants, is important for understanding the kind of political work they are doing. Different groups and activities allow for different forms of connectivity, and the way connectivities take shape is political. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar write that “grounding feminisms in activist communities everywhere is a means to interrogate all forms of implicit and explicit relations of power (e.g., racist/classist/ casteist), and to contest those power relations through ongoing processes of self-critique and collective reflection.”53 Whether or not a particular group is a community, its participants are related in specific ways and most likely hold different amounts or kinds of power. Exploring who participates, what their role is, and how they are connected to other participants is one way to identify the kinds of power that operate in a feminist project.

Locations Rhetoric, even digital rhetoric, is created, read, and circulated by people who are located, and location influences orientation. Even if modern

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technological, economic, and political connectivities reshape the ways we experience and understand our location and our proximity to others (and they do), location still shapes the way that rhetors are oriented. Even when texts travel, location matters. Locations intersect with positionality to affect the perspective of rhetors or activists, the people and resources they’re connected to, and the circulation of activist rhetoric. Scholars such as Angela Haas and Lucy Suchman have argued for the importance of “located accountability” for teachers and technology designers. Activists also need to develop accountabilities that are located, and looking for these forms of accountability is one way to examine and interpret activist work.54 As Suchman writes, “our vision of the world is a vision from somewhere” and one’s location influences one’s perspective and responsibility.55 This notion of responsibility is especially important for activists’ use of accountability. For feminists and activists concerned with the “global,” locations are especially important because power and oppression look different and have different effects in different places. Understanding a group or text that engages with “global” concerns requires attention to the geographies and histories in which that group does its work. Geographic locations might include the places involved in rhetoric’s production and circulation as well as those represented in the discussion. Location can also be a way to think about historical positioning, or the time period in which rhetoric is created and circulated. For texts produced by a group or collective, inquiring into geographic and historical locations involves asking when and where that group originated, when and where it does its work, and when and where it circulates texts. The “when” and the “where” are not necessarily separable. Each “where” has a specific “when”: its own history. Both of these locations matter, as do their interconnectedness with other times and places. The location of rhetorical activity, especially when shared through digital technology, is not fixed or even singular. In addition, questions about location overlap with an inquiry into the participants who are involved in engaging with the group and its rhetoric. I use the following questions as a starting point for examining activist rhetoric’s geographic location(s): • • • •

Where does the group’s work take place? How are participants connected to the place(s) where the work is taking place? What historical, political, economic, and cultural phenomena have shaped the place(s) where the group works? If the group and its work involves multiple places: • How does the group characterize this aspect of their work?

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• • •

What words do they use to describe it? How does the group represent the different locations? How are the different places related in the group’s discourse and activities? What historical political, economic, and cultural interactions have shaped the relationship between these places? How does the group engage with these relationships?

A feature of Girl Up’s rhetoric that has persisted across changes to the organization is the differential representation of the locations involved in their work. One example of this was foregrounded on the main page of Girl Up’s website in 2019. Viewers who scrolled down encountered a heading that read “Where We Are” above a world map featuring blue dots in a range of countries. The dots represented the locations of UN programs and Girl

FIGURE 7 (ABOVE AND FACING): Screenshots of Girl Up page about Uganda, 2019

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Up clubs. Clicking on a dot pulled up a box with an image of a girl, her name and location, and, usually, a description of her relation to Girl Up’s work that was supplemented with numbers: “Meet Abhilasha, one of 1,830 peer educators who lead 610 Clubs and have helped us train 13,000 girls in Rajasthan”; “Meet Terri, one of 800 girls in our training program”; “Meet Nasttho, a refugee girl who was able to return to school as part of our program that has supported 6,505 refugee girls.”56 The featured photos included teen advisors, club leaders, and participants in UN programs that are funded by Girl Up fundraising. The locations included Guatemala, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, India, Uganda, Canada, Brazil, France, Mexico, Georgia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Site visitors who clicked “learn more” were taken to different pages depending on their location. For Guatemala, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, India, and Uganda, the link led to a page with information about the country, adolescent girls in that country, and the initiatives that Girl Up supports in that country (figure 7). For Georgia, the link led to a page about Girl Up’s Women in Science STEAM camps, one of which was held in Georgia. For Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, the link led to a blog post about an activity

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in that country. For Brazil, France, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the link led to the page of a teen advisor. These differences tie into the distinctions that Girl Up makes between participants. In most cases, girls in “developing” countries, who were positioned as recipients of aid, were included as representatives of their country or of Girl Up’s work. When I clicked one of these stories on the map, the link took me to a page that provided general information from the organization about a program or country. In contrast, when I clicked the story of a girl positioned as a privileged leader, the link took me to a narrative written by that girl, sometimes with accompanying video, in which she discussed her activities and experiences. These distinctions overlap with the discrepancies between types of participants that I noted in my analysis of participants because location is the framework through which Girl Up positions participants differentially. SPARK Movement’s website does not direct its audiences’ attention to location in the same way that Girl Up does. Finding references to location took a little more digging, with the exception of the reference to a global movement in SPARK’s tagline. The “About” section of the website provided a timeline and history of SPARK Movement’s work, and that timeline referenced the location of several projects. In the past, SPARKteam members’ biographies often (though not always) included the participant’s location. The summary of past SPARKteam participants refers to the number of countries participants in training sessions come from. Unlike Girl Up, SPARK Movement didn’t highlight specific locations outside the US to characterize its work. However, by reading about their projects and scrolling through their blog, readers might see engagement with people and places outside the United States. For example, SPARK Movement’s Women on the Map project, which was a response to the lack of diversity in Google Doodles, featured stories about the accomplishments of women in different places.57 In some ways, this is an improvement over Girl Up, because the group does not construct unequal relationships between participants based on location. However, for transnational feminists, the reference to global work without explicit attention to specific locations could also signal a problem. As Swarr and Nagar remind us, activist projects are often grounded in communities, and communities are often shaped by location. While communities can certainly exist across locations, people often have experiences that are grounded in particular places or relationships to specific groups of people because of location. In the previous section, I discussed the importance of understanding privilege in feminist work that attempts to engage across differences. Feminist projects that make global claims have been critiqued for

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failing to adequately address the ways that sexism intersects with other forms of oppression, so that different groups of people have different needs and priorities. A related problem occurs when feminist projects subsume varied locations into a “global” project. Whose needs, experiences, and priorities shape the project? How many locations are involved, and how many are left out? Using “global” to characterize the work of people in a select number of places is a form of erasure. Feminist and activist projects are oriented in relation to specific places. Including multiple places in a project requires attending to their specificity by identifying not just similarities, but also differences between the ways that oppression manifests in different places, differences that are connected to specific histories, cultures, and sociopolitical contexts. Whereas Girl Up’s rhetoric is concerning because of the way its website references location, SPARK Movement’s is concerning because it claims a global reach yet doesn’t engage enough with location. The second component of the location category is historical location(s). Transnational feminist theorists point out the ways that specific historical circumstances shape the development of oppression and activism in different places. To understand how feminist rhetoric and activism has taken shape in relation to a place or group of people, analysis of historical location explores the various kinds of power that have shaped the cultural, political, and economic circumstances in a particular place or in relation to a particular group of people. In order to understand how a group is shaped by history, I ask: • • • •

When and where did this group begin? What events before, during, and after the group’s formation might have influenced the formation of the group and the shape it took? What historical circumstances have shaped the people and places involved in this group’s work? How has the group changed over time?

These two organizations, both of which are focused on engaging “girls,” can be connected to culturally and historically specific phenomena. For instance, rhetorics associated with “girl power” emerged in US popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s. The United Nations has directed rhetorical attention to girls through their Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, both of which reference girls. In 2012, the UN declared October 11 the “International Day of the Girl Child.” Media attention has also focused on famous individual girls, such as the widely circulated story of Malala Yousafzai58 or UN campaigns featuring popular celebrities such as Emma Watson. Within this historical moment, a number

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of recent initiatives have focused on engaging not just youth but girls specifically in taking political action on gender-based inequalities. Therefore, it is not especially surprising that both of these organizations began in the United States in the same year (2010) with a focus on engaging girls in feminist activity. Both organizations began with a focus on activity in the United States and have shifted to involve participants outside of the United States or to involve them differently. As I mentioned above, Girl Up’s rhetoric initially described its work as organizing girls in the United States to help advocate for their “peers” in other countries. Girl Up has shifted this rhetoric, but there are still important discrepancies between participants in different places. SPARK Movement began its work in the US and then expanded to include participants from other countries. These organizations and their engagement with location can be understood as part of broad patterns in US history and in the history of US and European feminisms. However, a more in-depth analysis of historical positioning could provide even further insight into the histories of the many locations and historical relationships that can be linked to this work. Girl Up’s move to position girls from “developed” places as the leaders and caretakers of women in “developing” countries can be situated within geopolitical history. White European and US settlers have engaged in colonial and imperial violence and oppression, which they have often justified through differential positioning of people and places. This differential positioning has been used to develop a variety of systems of control in which one group of people decides what’s best for another (e.g., colonial governance, global governance, foreign aid, military intervention). This process has historically been justified through claims to benevolence that rely on this differential positioning. People who are positioned as superior (more civilized, more wealthy, more free) claim to be “helping” others. Girl Up’s work positions club members, the United States, and the UN as global caretakers who can use their privileged positions to help people in “developing” countries. SPARK Movement’s claim to global movement can be situated within feminist histories in which privileged women dominate discussions about women’s oppression and contribute to the oppression of other women, as I referenced earlier. Privileged white women in the United States have often contributed to or been complicit in the oppression of women of color and women in the Global South, and privileged US feminists have often spoken on behalf of women with less privilege. Although SPARK Movement’s work is generally more attentive to privilege and intersecting systems of oppression, their use of global is problematic because of these historical links, which are often associated with the use of “global.”59

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Historical and geographic location influence the perspective and practices of activist groups. The locations involved in activist work, and the relationships between those locations, are entry points for examining how activist groups engage with difference and power. Through the category of location, I determined that both Girl Up and SPARK Movement are oriented toward the global but oriented around the United States and the “West.”

Resources Groups need resources to do their work, and activist groups often also provide resources for others. The kind and variety of resources a project or group needs often varies according to the size of the group, its goals, and its history (e.g., how it started and how its work has been taken up and circulated). It might also vary according to location; resources are unevenly distributed both within specific locations and globally, and these differences in resources affect activists’ work. For instance, not everyone has access to reliable internet, public meeting spaces, or affordable public transportation. A group’s participants can also affect its resources. Some projects are sustained by pooling individual participants’ spare resources such as time, money, meeting space, and skills. Other groups seek support through fundraising or grants to facilitate their work. Many feminist and activist projects find this support through nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations. However, as transnational feminists have pointed out, funding from governments, foundations, and other sources is not neutral. Instead, funding is another site of power. Whether a group receives funding, and from whom, are important for understanding the orientation of that group. Other important resources include the group’s relationships with organizations or powerful people that facilitate the group’s work. To begin an analysis of the resources that affect a group’s work, I ask the following questions: • • •

•

How did the group begin? Was it a “top-down” or “bottom-up” initiative? How does the group sustain its work? Is it supported by funds or does it rely on the spare resources of participants? If the group receives funding, who/where does it come from? What conditions are attached to that funding? How does that funding shape its activities? How is the group connected to other groups or organizations (including activist groups, businesses, nonprofits or nongovernmental organizations, governments, or supranational organizations)? Are these connections hierarchical or horizontal? What form do these

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•

connections take (e.g., coalition, sponsorship, partnership)? How are these connections linked to resources? Does the group make use of connections to powerful people, such as politicians, celebrities, or public figures? How are these people involved in the group and its work?

Both Girl Up and Spark Movement have access to resources that facilitate their work. Each group uses different resources and addresses its access to resources differently. Girl Up’s website and social media posts regularly refer to Girl Up’s relationship to the UN Foundation, its partnerships with other organizations, and its corporate sponsors. Girl Up’s connections to powerful people and organizations are important resources: not only do these connections involve funding that helps them sustain their work, they also lend visibility to the group and its activity. Girl Up’s “Global Advocates and Champions” include celebrities such as Priyanka Chopra, Victoria Justice, Wade Davis, Nigel Barker, and Monique Coleman who have social media followers ranging from several hundred thousand to tens of millions.60 Former US First Lady Michelle Obama has spoken at Girl Up Leadership Summits.61 A press release for a WiSci STEAM camp in Rwanda illustrates the diverse forms of governmental, institutional, corporate, and celebrity resources connected to Girl Up’s work: This first-of-its-kind program is organized by the U.S. Department of State, Microsoft 4Afrika, Intel, AOL Charitable Foundation, the United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up campaign, and the Rwanda Girls Initiative, with support from Meridian International Center, the Rwandan Ministry of Education, the African Leadership Academy, and the Global Entrepreneurship Network. Additional programmatic support was contributed by UNESCO, HeHe Labs, and Indego Africa. The WiSci Camp is part of the Let Girls Learn initiative, promoted by First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, to ensure adolescent girls get the education to build brighter futures and stronger communities. It is also part of LIONS@FRICA, an initiative founded by the U.S. Department of State along with Microsoft, Nokia, DEMOAFRICA, VC4Africa, the Global Entrepreneurship Network, and other partners to help entrepreneurs start and scale new businesses throughout Africa.62 The press release goes on to explain that the curriculum is developed “in partnership with science and technology industry leaders Microsoft, Intel and AOL Inc.” and that mentors from these companies and “inspiring guest speakers” will be involved with the project.

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For some audiences, Girl Up’s connection to the UN, US Department of State, or even to corporations, prominent celebrities, or political leaders might lend the organization credibility. However, these connections should spark critical questions about the role that these institutions play in Girl Up’s work. How “feminist,” “activist,” or “girl-led” can a project be when it is supported by powerful organizations that are part of the systems of violence and oppression the organization claims to be working against? In Girl Up’s rhetoric, the focus on powerful role models and “leadership” training are not just about resources, but also a particular political view. This structure requires one to believe that change can come from within dominant systems (nationally and internationally). In its most egregious form, Girl Up encourages participants to view the United States as a global caretaker and participate in this role. For example, the Girl Up website describes US foreign policy as an important area of success for the organization and describes efforts to pass laws that shape US policy toward “developing” countries (in this case, laws about discouraging forced and early marriage and encouraging documentation of girls). According to Girl Up, participants supported efforts to pass a law against child marriage through “17,000 online actions” and meetings with the US Congress. Afterward, a message from US Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois addresses Girl Up participants: you formed clubs with your friends, you reached out to tell your family and neighbors about this issue, and many of you even met with members of congress so that girls that you’ll never really meet, but living in countries around the world, will have a chance to go to school, be healthy, and most of all, be kids . . . [this legislation] will change the lives of millions in some of the world’s most forgotten places . . . now that you’ve seen what you have the power to accomplish, promise me that you won’t stop . . . promise me that you’ll keep standing up for the rights and freedom of young girls and women in developing countries all around the world.63 In other words, Girl Up encourages participants to see themselves as potential participants in powerful institutions and suggests that through this participation they can effect change. SPARK Movement’s language emphasizes education and activist training for girls, community leaders, and educators. However, their focus seems to be more about supporting participants who develop their own activist projects rather than suggesting specific institutions with which to do this work. This model seems more open to possibilities that aren’t currently represented in existing institutions because of the ways that funding and institutions shape activist work.

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While SPARK Movement’s website also mentions connections to other organizations, these connections are not as visible. The main description of SPARK Movement’s work on the “About” section of the website mentions two foundations that supported a major change in their organization. Elsewhere, its work on specific projects is connected to support from foundations or organizations. Unlike Girl Up, which lists ongoing partnerships with the UN, UN Foundation, celebrities, and corporate partners, SPARK Movement’s partners are less prominent and are typically mentioned in relation to specific projects. Examining the website also reveals its connection to higher education: SPARK Movement’s contact address is Colby College in Maine, and the summit event that launched SPARK Movement took place at Hunter College in New York City. Transnational feminists have drawn attention to the impact of material resources, such as funding, on feminist work. Material resources are a specific mode of power that affect activism. Funding can connect feminists in different locations to one another, but this connection is a site of power and can often illustrate power differentials. The need for funding in the Global South is the result of histories of colonization and imperialist economic policies.64 Furthermore, funding is often tied to “priorities” that determine who gets funding, what kinds of projects get funded, how the projects need to be carried out in order to receive funding, whether they continue to receive funding, and so on. Arianne Shahvisi illustrates this through her analysis of Donald Trump’s Global Gag Rule as a form of moral imperialism.65 The rule, which was the latest iteration of Ronald Reagan’s “Mexico City Policy,” stipulated that organizations receiving US global health funding could not perform or promote abortion, regardless of local laws, and must allow the US Department of State to surveil their documents and records for the purposes of upholding the rule.66 These restrictions attached to funding force healthcare providers to choose between two forms of service reduction: either they no longer discuss or provide referrals for abortions, or they reduce all of their healthcare services in order to cope with their likely inability to replace US funds. The United States is the largest provider of global healthcare funding, so these impacts are significant. Critics of the Global Gag Rule note that these practices would be illegal within the United States due to the First Amendment protection of free speech. Not only does funding thus allow the United States to supersede local laws through the provision or restriction of funds, it does so in a way that oppresses women and avoids the legal measures that would prevent this abuse of power in the US.67 US funds, then, are a source of power that affects feminist work. Concerns about funding processes and the influence of funding on feminist activism, labeled “NGOization” and “the nonprofit industrial

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complex,” encompass a variety of concerns about ways that money and power are intertwined.68 Islah Jad writes that Arab women’s nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, “have been viewed as a new and growing form of dependency on the West, and as a tool for it to expand its hegemony.”69 US-based women of color have raised similar concerns: INCITE! argues that the system of nonprofits and NGOs derails or obstructs radical politics and organizing.70 Through conditions attached to funding and the structures through which these funds and activities are managed, political initiatives within the nonprofit or NGO structure are shaped to fit within and cooperate with capitalist and state systems. These problems are not limited to government funding. The Ford Foundation, a private organization, withdrew a grant from INCITE! because of its statement of support for Palestinian struggle, including support for boycott and divestment.71 The statement outlines the group’s opposition to settler colonialism and includes specific critiques of the relationship between the United States and Israel.72 Having to consider donor politics and priorities in shaping funding applications and presenting activities is something that affects the work that activists do and the way they do it. However, recent writing on NGOization has called for more nuanced analysis that recognizes activists’ agency to resist or attempt to negotiate the constraints imposed by funding processes.73 The processes for allocating material resources to certain kinds of political projects are nevertheless important to understanding activist work. Funding is also often, though not always, tied to institutional support, such as support from governments, international or supranational organizations (such as the UN or World Bank), or even support from established local organizations or groups. Some of the major criticisms of funding mechanisms are about these institutional structures: the ways that funds are connected to elements of power and established modes of organization and politics. These critiques of institutions aren’t just about resources. Institutions also have specific priorities, rules about how things can be done, and a certain pace of working. While these might work for some purposes, they aren’t the only way to do things. Most activist initiatives will rely to some extent on networks of resources, including personal and professional networks of participants, but the extent to which these involve formal structures and ongoing relationships varies, and there are likely benefits and drawbacks to each way of operating. A major concern of some activists is that the systematization of activist work within institutions might lead to structures and processes that are more aligned with (rather than opposed to) existing forms of national, corporate, and supranational power. This critique of institutionalization has also been levied at academics’ institutionalization of feminism through departments and programs focused on studying women, gender,

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and sexuality. In short, many feminists and activists see institutions as a site of power. They therefore position feminism and activism as oppositional to institutions, since these activities are about resisting power.74 However, scholars concerned with oppression and injustice have also argued that since people cannot operate completely outside of systems of power, we need to find multifaceted ways of resisting power, and some forms of resistance might occur within existing institutions.75 Some feminists and activists distinguish between reformist and revolutionary feminist thinking. For example, bell hooks characterizes reformist feminism as focused on gaining equality within society as it currently exists. Revolutionary and radical feminist politics, on the other hand, take issue with the system itself. Radical or revolutionary feminists believe that oppression is built into social structures and institutions, and therefore society needs to be restructured in order to truly dismantle oppression. Audre Lorde famously characterized this problem in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” She describes a practice of survival for women “who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older” as one that requires coming together in order to create change that builds on the very differences for which they are excluded: “It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”76 People who experience intersecting oppressions are oriented differently in relation to sexist oppression than people who are primarily or only oppressed on the basis of their gender (e.g., white, middle-class, straight, nondisabled women with US citizenship). In short, some people think that existing society and institutions could potentially include them, whereas other people believe that these structures are founded on exclusions and oppression, and the structures themselves are the problem. For advocates of revolutionary feminisms, reformist feminism often falls short because it fails to understand how privileges shape visions of feminism and activist work. USING ORIENTATION as a method for developing transnational feminist literacy shows that Girl Up and SPARK Movement do different kinds of work, despite their superficial similarities. Both groups successfully organize girls, but in very different ways and toward different ends. Girl Up asks club members to see themselves as participants in powerful institutions who can care for those in other places. Girl Up also directs girls’ activity in the service of its unified message instead of asking girls to contribute their own perspective

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and shape their own message. Although Girl Up as an organization uses rhetoric about uniting across differences, its structure and message contradict this work by constructing oppositional girlhoods and eliding discussion of the complex differences between girls with different backgrounds and identities. SPARK Movement does a better job of amplifying the perspective or “voice” of girls who participate through its blog and social media pages as well as activities that relate to participants’ goals and communities. SPARK Movement makes more explicitly intersectional claims, using terms such as “antiracist” to describe its position rather than using the involvement of girls from diverse social locations as a metric for inclusivity. However, SPARK’s engagement with “global” participants fails to acknowledge how specific locations shape its work. Instead of worrying about effort and effect (criteria that often oversimplify activist processes), orientation provides a way to investigate the nuances of collective work that makes claims to activism. Whether those collectives originate as a group or emerge through discourse, examining the activity, participants, location, and resources tied to activist rhetoric highlights the ways that activist rhetoric is situated through various circumstances and relationships, involves collective groups and processes, and is directed in ways that are shaped by systems of power and oppression.

THREE Activist Genre Knowledge

I

Sticky Uptakes, Counteruptakes, and Circulation Literacies

n July and August 2020, a photo campaign using the hashtags #Challenge Accepted and #WomenSupportingWomen circulated on Instagram. My interest was piqued by a critical tweet, liked by more than a dozen people I follow on Twitter, in which author Bess Kalb referred to the campaign as an “empowerment challenge” that involved women posting attractive photos of themselves. She wrote: “Sorry I missed your call. Women on Instagram started posting their most flattering selfies in black and white and calling it an ‘empowerment challenge’ and I threw my phone into the sea.” Kalb’s tweet received 122k likes and 11.4k retweets. The next day, she added a second tweet: “If you ever want to be called a c*nt by a stranger, tweet a joke that gets over 100k likes.” As the circulation of her tweet suggests, it resonated with many people. Some of what resonated became visible through replies. Chrissy Teigen’s reply, “Annnnnnd follow!” likely boosted its circulation significantly through Teigen’s 13 million followers. As Kalb’s second tweet indicated, she also encountered backlash for criticizing the campaign. Many of the top replies to her tweet defended the challenge and compared her tweet to the phenomenon of “women tearing each other down,” which the challenge opposed. Other commenters accused Kalb of internalized misogyny. Yet many people also simply agreed with her comment or questioned the usefulness of the challenge. The next day, I received an invitation to participate in the challenge from a friend through a direct message on Instagram. The message read: “I was careful to choose who I think will meet the challenge, but above all who I know who shares this type of thinking, among women there are several criticisms; instead, we should take care of each other. We are beautiful the way we are. Post a photo in black and white alone, written ‘challenge accepted’ and mention my name. Identify 50 women to do the same, in private. I chose you because you are beautiful, strong and incredible. Let’s ♥ each other! :)”.1 : 114 :

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As I looked into the challenge in order to decide whether and how to participate, I noticed that participation was transnational, crossing multiple countries and languages. As I browsed recent Instagram posts that used the English-language hashtags #ChallengeAccepted and #WomenSupporting Women, I looked for participants’ locations and saw entries from people in the United States, Mexico, Poland, Chile, Nigeria, Venezuela, Italy, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Germany, Japan, Bangladesh, Korea, Turkey, and Thailand. Some posts included strings of hashtags in more than one language; searching for other hashtags from those posts helped me find examples of posts in languages other than English. However, the English hashtags were the most widespread I found, with more than 8 million posts tagged #Women SupportingWomen and more than 6 million posts tagged #Challenge Accepted on July 31, 2020, compared to about 600,000 for the Turkish hashtag #IstanbulSözleşmesiYaşatır (enforce the Istanbul convention), which was the next most popular hashtag I found. Many discussions of the challenge criticized it as vain, superficial, misguided, pointless, meaningless, narcissistic, and slacktivist. The charges of slacktivism caught my attention, but I also found them puzzling; the challenge didn’t really appear to me to be asking participants to engage in activism. The invitation I received didn’t mention activism explicitly, nor did most of the posts I saw in my feed. The invitation, hashtags, and many descriptions used the word “challenge.” While “challenge” implies a kind of action and even sacrifice that might compare to what many people feel activism entails, there are certainly plenty of contexts in which challenges are issued or encountered that have no relationship to activism. TikTok is full of nonactivist challenges. In my invitation, the challenge was framed as an opportunity for “care.” Care is certainly involved in activism, and I believe it should be more central to understanding and engaging in activism. However, care isn’t necessarily a common concept or behavior associated with activist work in public discourse, and care is certainly not limited to activist relationships. The invitation also focused on gendered identification, acceptance, and support; the hashtag #WomenSupportingWomen aligns with this framing. While this kind of gender-based identification and support are emphasized in many feminist and activist contexts, activist settings are by no means the only contexts in which people encourage women to support one another. The invitation didn’t frame participation as a feminist act or as a way to resist oppression, nor did it claim that participating would achieve an activist goal. In short: the campaign’s rhetoric and participants didn’t necessarily make claims about activism, oppression, or justice. What, then, can explain responses to the campaign that critiqued it as a failure of activism? In this

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chapter, I explore how circulation literacies enable people to interpret rhetoric that emerges from distributed rhetors and gains widespread public attention as it does so. In particular, I use the concepts of genre knowledge and uptake to investigate how people interpreted the #ChallengeAccepted campaign, why some interpretations resonated, and what knowledge people drew on as they responded to the circulating #ChallengeAccepted rhetoric. Social media campaigns and discourses about them make public genre knowledge visible and highlight public circulation of that knowledge. Building on what rhetorical genre theorists call “uptake”, I coin several terms to describe the processes at work in this case study: sticky uptakes, counteruptakes, and activist uptake knowledge. In the #ChallengeAccepted campaign, I show that sticky uptakes shape narratives about social media activity, overshadowing more useful questions and critiques. Critics of the campaign read it through the lenses of selfies and slacktivism, two sticky uptakes that shore up collective anxieties about social media and meaningful political activity. However, these narratives didn’t quite fit the campaign. By exploring the gaps between these narratives and the rhetorical activity I observed, I show how genre and uptake can be used to highlight the ideologies that shape interpretations of and engagement with digital rhetorical activity. Finally, I show how some participants used counteruptakes to address critiques of the #ChallengeAccepted campaign, illustrating their activist uptake knowledge. Together, these concepts contribute to circulation literacies that activists, rhetoricians, and publics can use to interpret and engage with rhetorical activity that spreads quickly and gains widespread public attention as it does so. These circulation literacies enable a more nuanced and careful reading of the #ChallengeAccepted campaign. Rhetorical Genres and Activism

Rhetoricians use the word “genre” to refer to the ways that categories and relationships shape texts and interactions. As people view, read, share, and produce rhetoric, they also develop ideas about the relationships between various rhetorical activities and the interactions in which they circulate. Within rhetorical genre theory, many scholars trace their work to Carolyn Miller’s influential definition of genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.”2 That is, over time similar social situations occur, and the participants in those situations develop similar methods of using rhetoric to navigate those circumstances. As genre scholars have pointed out, recurrence isn’t inherent to the situation itself; no two situations are exactly the same, so our perception of recurrence involves interpretations that are shaped by both cognitive and social processes. Some of the critiques of

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#ChallengeAccepted involve interpretations of recurrence, which I discuss in more detail in the following pages. Texts that are connected through genre often have similar formal conventions, but those conventions alone don’t typically define a genre or encompass the work that a genre does. For example, formal conventions alone aren’t enough to explain how someone recognizes a genre such as a letter, résumé, or advertisement. There are formal features that are common to each genre, such as a greeting and signature on a letter or a list of previous jobs on a résumé. If I add a greeting and signature to a text message, though, that doesn’t make it into a letter, and students in my technical writing classes regularly create résumés even though they don’t have any paid employment experiences to list. As Carolyn Miller argues, “a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish.”3 Following Miller, rhetorical genre scholars see genre as more than just a way of understanding what a text looks like or is about; it helps us understand what the text does. Rhetoricians often explain this action by examining the connections between genres and their rhetorical situation(s). Connecting a text to its purpose, audience, and context can provide insight into the genre and the social action(s) it accomplishes. The purpose of sharing one’s qualifications and relevant experience with a particular audience (a potential employer) in order to get a job, in addition to conventional content, structure, and design choices, are all part of what makes something part of the résumé genre. Genres help people make sense of their world and their possibilities for acting in it. As rhetors develop their understanding of the various genres they encounter regularly, they develop genre knowledge about how those genres work and what kinds of social action(s) the genres accomplish.4 This knowledge can come from experience with the genres through reading, viewing, creating, sharing, or commenting on the texts, but it can also come from discourses about genres that are widely recognized. For example, critiques of the selfie often draw on genre knowledge, including, for example, the critic’s prior experiences with selfies as well as ideological elements of the genre. Because selfies are a stereotyped genre, rhetors are likely to develop perceptions of selfies that are influenced by their relationship to ideologies of sexism, racism, and classism. Generally, the extent of one’s genre knowledge might depend on their relationship to and interest in a particular genre. It can include tacit or explicit knowledge about who uses the genre, as well as when, why, and how the genre is used. This complex knowledge involves understanding the social relationships in which rhetors communicate with one another; the political, historical, and cultural contexts that shape their

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communication; the purposes of communicating; and the ways that different choices relate to different effects. Identity and positionality shape activists’ genre knowledge and performance. In their overview of key concepts in rhetorical genre scholarship, Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff write that “subjectivity and identity are bound up in genre knowledge and performance.”5 Bawarshi and Reiff are referring here to the ways that one’s identity and position within an activity system affect their genre knowledge (in this case, a graduate student’s ability to acquire and use genre knowledge in their discipline). This genre knowledge also shapes the ways that publics create and circulate genres for social and political purposes. For instance, the genre of the protest sign is a way for people engaged in a physical occupation of space, such as a protest march or other demonstration, to position themselves in relation to the activity and its participants. A protest sign might be how a person adds their unique perspective to the group, demonstrates affiliation with the group, or shows onlookers what the protest is about. Since many participants create signs prior to showing up at a protest, sign-making often draws on prior genre knowledge, such as memories of previous protests the person has attended or circulating media that depicts protests. Collective sign-making among friends or in specific communities can also be a way to build interest in and collective engagement with a protest. At the protest itself, the sign might accomplish more than one social and rhetorical action for the person holding it. Genre knowledge contributes to the ways that people in similar situations develop texts such as protest signs that share similar characteristics and social purposes and can therefore be classified together as a genre. One of the important social actions associated with activist genres involves building collectives and linking those collectives to political conditions. While the work of building a collective can’t be reduced to genre, many activist genres connect people and ideas to collective experiences and to the structural and material conditions that shape those experiences. Even seemingly individualized genres can be connected to collective goals through public performances; by engaging with such a genre, a rhetor (publicly) demonstrates membership within or connection to a public. For example, creating one’s own sign and bringing it to a protest can demonstrate commitment in ways that go beyond just showing up; it can indicate the person’s reasons for participating, align the sign-holder with a particular belief or group of people, or attempt to persuade others. A sign can also be used to distance oneself from a group or part of a group. Of course, sometimes the relational work that an activist genre does might be insufficient. In some circumstances, attempts to publicly demonstrate one’s relationship to a group

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or a cause might not advance the goals that the communities or movement prioritize. Activists circulate concepts such as “performative allyship” in order to push people to engage in multifaceted ways with social justice issues and to engage in conversations about what kinds of activity support systemic change.6 These concepts encourage attention to the relationship between different types of engagement and their effect on movement goals. In public writing, concepts like performative allyship are often explained through reference to widely recognized genres. Therefore, activist genre knowledge is relational knowledge. Activists use social media genres to construct identities, develop relationships with others, and evaluate the impact of activist tactics. All of these activities are important to activism. However, processes of constructing identities, developing relationships, and evaluating activity have shifted alongside technological changes. These changes coincide with changing understandings of activism, such as those discussed in the introduction to this book, as well as changing conditions of activist rhetoric, such as differences in the visibility and spreadability of activist genres. Zeynep Tufekci writes about how easy it is to make connections using social media and the internet, but this ease comes at a cost: the work that traditional organizers did in the past to build those connections served other functions that also get skipped over in the process of building quick connections.7 This will come as no surprise to seasoned activists who know that activism is not just about stringing together a series of actions that work toward a goal. These changing conditions mean that people need literacies for recognizing how activist genre knowledge engages participants in relational processes. The sticky uptakes I explore in this chapter that stereotype social media activity as individualistic, narcissistic, and performative8 persist despite innumerable examples of social media campaigns and conversations that foster connection and work toward collective goals. These narratives are oversimplifications. Circulation literacies respond to these oversimplifications by recognizing and foregrounding the relational work that activists accomplish with the help of social media genres. Examining activist rhetoric through the lens of uptake highlights the complexities of circulation while also offering a framework for understanding how rhetors engage with ideologies and relationships as they engage with rhetorical genres. What Is Uptake?

Genre theory illuminates how social purposes play a role in circulating activist rhetoric. The concept of uptake is particularly useful for examining how activist genres circulate. Uptake highlights the relationship between genres and the ways that people respond to genres. In my previous work, I have

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used the term “spreadable genres” to highlight the social actions involved in circulating texts: creators of a text make specific rhetorical choices to facilitate the spread of that text, and people who encounter a text also make choices about whether, how, and with whom to share that text.9 The term “spreadable genres” focuses on the implications of spreadability for rhetorical genre studies, particularly the notion of uptake. Anticipating or engaging in the practice of spreading activist genres involves negotiating the connections between individuals, collectives, and ideologies. Uptake is a concept from speech act theory, and in particular J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, which involves the relationship between performative utterances and responses to them.10 Whereas an utterance such as “it’s raining” describes reality, a performative utterance does something by saying something. For example, saying “I’m sorry” performs an apology; saying “take out the trash” performs an order. Many performative utterances (though not all) are intended or expected to elicit a response from their audience. This response is an uptake. Some utterances that are intended to perform a particular act require a certain uptake to be successful. For example, “I bet you $10 that it will rain tomorrow” is an attempt to perform a bet, but the wager must be taken up by the audience in order for the performance to be successful. Genre theorists extend these ideas to think about how genres accomplish their social actions by securing uptakes from those who encounter them. Uptake highlights the relational processes in which genres, actions, and people are linked and interact with one another. In this context, uptake refers to the interaction between texts and the relationship between text and action. For example, Anne Freadman examines how a sentencing became an execution through generic uptake in the case of the hanging of Ronald Ryan, which was the last legal execution in Australia. Freadman characterizes uptake as an act of translation, with specific intentions for the outcome, which is informed by the genres and uptakes preceding it.11 When a person takes up a genre in a particular way, they are making a specific choice from a set of possible choices; uptake thus includes interpretations and choices much like the act of translation does. Other scholars have emphasized the performative nature of uptake.12 Taking up a genre often involves performing a specific role or position in relation to an institution or other form of social organization. For example, Kimberly Emmons highlights the relationship between uptake, social organization, and individual positioning in medical genres: when a person takes up a symptoms list by positioning themselves as a patient, they take up not just a genre but a particular role and the social organization that it is a part of. On social media, which is organized around creating and responding to circulating rhetoric, uptakes are often attached to

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a specific identity (a user account or profile). In this context, uptakes often position rhetors in ways that are visible and/or traceable by semi-public or public audiences, and these acts of positioning merit attention from scholars interested in rhetorical genres. Some scholars have called for more detailed accounts of how uptake works. Dylan Dryer has developed a typology of uptake to describe different uses of the term and the elements of uptake processes that researchers focus on. Dryer’s typology distinguishes among five elements of uptake as a process: affordances, artifacts, enactments, captures, and residues.13 These categories provide a framework for researchers to consider how uptake might be visible through material traces or specific moments while not necessarily implying a fixed or stable process that is accessible to researchers. Dryer’s terms are textually and materially focused, whereas my analysis focuses more on social and ideological positioning, arrangements, and relationships. I explore the relational work of uptake by focusing on uptake knowledge: a concept that builds on the idea of “genre knowledge,” in which previous encounters with genre shape rhetorical interactions.14 Uptake knowledge is a specific type of genre knowledge through which people learn to interpret and respond to genres they encounter. This knowledge can shape the ways that people take up texts, whether or not they’ve been told directly how to do so. One form of uptake knowledge involves understanding the links between genres. Two genres, such as a job advertisement and a resume, might be linked to another through typified uptakes. In this example, sending one’s resume to a business is one possible uptake of a job advertisement. Since this is a very common uptake of job advertisements, people who are preparing to look for jobs might use their uptake knowledge to prepare for this process by updating their resume with their most recent experience or preparing several versions of their resume for different types of work. In addition, people who are seeking work might send a resume to an employer they’d like to work for even if that employer hasn’t listed any job openings. While the relationship between genres isn’t the only factor motivating these interactions, it does help shape the ways that people link the two genres and interpret their circulation. Uptake is also an important component of activist participation. Activists use genres to share ideas and information, call others to action, and promote change. Activist engagement typically involves genre knowledge and uptake. For example, in June 2020, I attended several protests in Lubbock, Texas. Information about the protests was shared through word of mouth, a digital poster, and a Facebook event titled “L.C.A.P.B. Peaceful Protest.” (L.C.A.P.B. stands for Lubbock Citizens Against Police Brutality.) The Facebook event description listed the time, location, and audience

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for the invitation. The event page described the purpose of the protest: “to show solidarity and support to our POC community esp with the recent events and attacks on Black Lives.” The description instructed attendees to wear comfortable shoes, bring water, and use masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The photo featured on the Facebook event page focuses on a single protest sign that reads “I can’t breathe” in all caps. Although the image is closely cropped, viewers can see that the photo is being held above the heads of nearby people, suggesting that the photo is from a demonstration or march. The photo provided a visual link to the Movement for Black Lives, even though the event never mentioned those words or the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Although the event organizers did not explicitly instruct participants to create and bring protest signs, many people brought signs to the event. Some people also brought blank cardboard and markers for people without signs to create their own. Creating and bringing a sign is part of the repertoire of protest for many people: even if the invitation never referenced signs at all, people would likely still take up the invitation by making signs. Protest organizers and attendees brought and circulated a variety of other genres, including zines, community watch stickers, large banners, locally printed Black Lives Matter t-shirts, chants, and voter registration forms. All of these uptakes were shaped by the cultural context, genre knowledge, and rhetorical ecology surrounding the event. Such typified uptakes are often linked to previous experiences or knowledge of genres and the contexts in which they typically appear. Uptake can contribute to entrenched expectations and conventions, but it can also be a site for creativity in which rhetors draw on their genre and uptake knowledge to contribute to activist work. For example, the Lubbock protest took place on a fairly busy street corner (for Lubbock). Most people just drove past the protest, but some people expressed support or disapproval by honking or shouting. These uptakes were familiar to me and matched patterns created by other relatively small protests I’d attended in the US. However, I also encountered new, unexpected uptakes. A number of people drove past the protest in cars or trucks that showed their support through messages written on their car or signs held up in their car windows. Many of these people also honked their car horns or shouted (similar to the bystanders’ responses), but because the cars had writing on them or the passengers had made signs, the unfamiliar show of drive-by support was clearly planned. This made these latter uptakes different from those whose honks or shouts were passing reactions. I don’t know whether these uptakes were a local phenomenon or whether they were a way that people negotiated the risk of protesting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, these uptakes highlighted the ways that people negotiate material conditions and

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genre knowledge as they decide how to take up a genre such as the protest invitation or flyer. Some genres, such as the invitations for #ChallengeAccepted, explicitly call for specific uptakes. Activists often circulate genres that request specific kinds of participation, too. Calls for individual contributions certainly aren’t confined to activist genres, but they are an important feature of contemporary activist rhetoric. Many activists, especially Black activists in the US, have recently used social media rhetoric to focus attention on positionality and relationships, encouraging people to define community-based action, goal-directed interpersonal activity, and material support as central to engagement with social movements. As a part of this work, activists often make an effort to link information and awareness-raising to specific actions that people can take in order to support a movement or redress an issue. In genre terms, these posts specify the uptake that they are looking for. For example, the Instagram “social justice slideshow”15 from @the_digital_abolitionist pictured in figure 8 is an example of an activist text that specifies uptakes. The image of the title slide shows that the post will discuss nine ways that readers can make “solidarity commitments to/with incarcerated people.” As the caption text next to the image shows, the commitments include both self-education and specific actions such as writing letters or donating money to incarcerated people. The goal of social media posts like this one is often to encourage people to act on the activist rhetorics they encounter in ways that connect social media activity to other kinds of participation. Specifying uptakes involves relational and pedagogical work; when people share specific

FIGURE 8: An activist slideshow from @the_digital_abolitionist

on Instagram that encourages specific uptakes, 2021

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actions that their social media connections can take, they are inviting people to engage and showing them what that engagement might look like. Examining genres through the lens of uptake focuses attention on interaction and connection, especially the relationship between genres and the ways that people respond to genres. An important function of uptake as enacted through spreadable genres is to mediate between the individual and the collective. This idea builds on Kimberly Emmons’s work, which explores the ways that uptake can work collectively and individually within social systems. Emmons notes that “in most scholarship on uptake, analysis focuses on sequences of texts at the expense of attending to individual, embodied subjectivities.”16 When rhetors take up an activist genre by spreading it— by retweeting something or sharing an Instagram post in their stories, for example—they are also making themselves visible to others and performing their identity/ies as an activist or a supporter or sympathetic audience. As Heather Bastian writes, “uptake helps us better imagine the ways in which individuals assert an (somewhat) individual agency within a social agency.”17 Uptake is one way that individual activists position themselves in relation to political discourses and social movements. Spreading genres, as a form of uptake, shapes individuals’ public identities and social relationships and often does so as a part of individuals’ everyday rhetorical activity. In a public context, selecting and sharing material can be a way for individuals and groups to perform cultural and political identification or disidentification. For example, audience members who shared posts from the Uprising of Women in the Arab World photo campaign (discussed in chapter 1) might articulate their identification with the project or the post they’re sharing, either through the act of sharing or by commenting on the photo. Similarly, in On African American Rhetoric, Keith Gilyard and Adam Banks discuss how this works when Black Twitter participants use hyperbole to comment on the content they share. They write, “when this happens, the repost or retweeted item becomes an occasion not only to express identification with the content, but with the person or networks who either created the content or also shared it. The THIS!!!!! expresses an affinity with that person and the larger collective.”18 Not all acts of sharing involve affinity and identification, but this form of sharing is quite common on a range of social media platforms. Knowledge of genres and previous uptakes influences individuals’ decision to choose a specific uptake in relation to their positionality, needs, and desires within a particular context. Anis Bawarshi discusses this relationship between genre, uptake, and agency, describing how individual actors within genre systems become “double agents”; a writer is “both an agent of his or her desires and actions and an agent on behalf of already existing desires

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and actions.”19 The decision to create or share a text occurs within what Bawarshi calls “the ideological interstices that configure, normalize, and activate relations and meanings within and between systems of genres.”20 As individuals encounter digital, activist genres, their interaction with those genres is shaped by their previous experiences: experiences with digital communication, experiences as participants in advocacy and activist campaigns, experiences with the cause addressed in the genre. These experiences will influence how different individuals “take up” a genre in this context. Finally, uptake is central to understanding genres as social action. Uptakes can be understood as the linkages in complex networks of discursive interactions through which an individual’s relationship to their social context is negotiated. People who choose to take up a genre by spreading it perform acts of interpretation and meaning-making. If I make a choice to retweet something, for example, I am interpreting the original tweet as relevant to me and at least some of my followers. I am performing an interpretive act in making this decision, and my followers who see the tweet will do similar interpretive work. In addition, retweeting places the tweet in a collection of shared material (my feed or profile) that says something about me (explicitly and implicitly). Uptake isn’t just about the relationship between individual texts, but about the relationship between genres. So if a graduation announcement is typically taken up with a graduation card, these two genres are related to one another through uptake. The relationship is not just at the level of one text and response, but at the level of genre. My knowledge of this relationship— that I need to respond to the graduation announcement with a card—is what Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff describe as uptake knowledge: the ways that people understand “when, why, where, and how to take up a genre in relation to other genres within a system of activity.”21 They maintain that this knowledge is something that people learn tacitly through their memories of and interactions with other genres. In this case, I remember what happened when I graduated high school: many people attended my graduation party and brought cards and gifts; others who didn’t attend sent cards. I also remember what my mother did in response to graduation announcements from other people (my friends, our neighbors, her friends’ children, our relatives). Uptakes spread. When people circulate rhetoric through social media platforms and mobile devices, they don’t just circulate texts; they often circulate interactions between texts as well. In other words, social media don’t just facilitate the circulation of texts; they also facilitate the circulation of uptakes. This process facilitates the spread of uptakes across genres and rhetorical contexts. Through the networked rhetorical ecologies in which people

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participate, the reach and replicability of social media texts contribute to a collective, circulating archive of uptake memories through which dominant or powerful uptakes continue to circulate as they spread to new situations. People encounter this archive through circulating texts, which contribute to collective memories that shape people’s uptake knowledge. This archive is also created and preserved through references in conversations, news stories, metagenres, hashtags, and other rhetorical activity. The archive is an excellent example of assemblage, because it relies on both memories and rhetorical knowledge of rhetors, collective recognition, and stored information through which people encounter and circulate genres and within which people can find information or examples to help them interpret or create genres. For example, protesters have shared tips from one recent or ongoing movement to another across national and colonial contexts. In 2014, activists from Palestine shared protest tips and tactics with activists in Ferguson. In 2015, activists in Ferguson shared tips and messages of support with activists in Baltimore. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives released a statement in support of Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock; Black Lives Matter activists from Minneapolis and Toronto also visited the protests at Standing Rock. Later in 2016, Water Protectors at the Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock held a gathering in solidarity with people in Aleppo, Syria; social media announcements of the solidarity event referred to the support that Standing Rock had received from people in Aleppo. At around the same time, activists from Lebanon and Hong Kong shared protest tips and tactics with people protesting in the United States. The zine I received at the Lubbock protest shared examples of protest tactics used in Hong Kong. All of these uptakes draw on the credibility associated with other activist movements to construct protests as linked and to position people in relation to other groups or activities. These uptakes draw on the ethos associated with protests and their rhetorical circulation, focusing attention on position while also communicating across protest contexts. Such uptakes make interpretations of recurrence visible and use that interpretation to encourage attention to connectivities across time and space. This process contributes to narratives about activist movements as interlinked, but it’s important to recognize the limits of these narratives, which sometimes rely more on assumed links between movements rather than the complex and difficult work of articulating the differences, similarities, and relationships among various movements. As Dana Olwan writes, “activism must always concede complex power differentials amongst groups whose struggles, though intertwined, might also diverge.”22 Olwan encourages academics and activists to move away from “assumptive

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solidarity,” in which links between movements are assumed and not interrogated, toward a focus on “responsible, ethical, and mutual forms of solidarity that are historically situated and politically conscious.”23 Olwan’s caution is particularly important in the context of social media: texts that construct assumptive solidarities are often affectively comfortable or comforting, and these texts might spread more easily and more widely than texts that raise difficult questions or require people to focus on experiences of discomfort. This more difficult and complex work is how transformation occurs. The spread of uptakes across situations is certainly not a brand new practice or one that is exclusive to social media. In fact, taking up an activist tactic in multiple contexts is sometimes part of how movements spread and gain visibility. For example, in Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker, she describes effects of the 1960 lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four Black college students (David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil) sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, which had a “whites only” service policy, and refused to move. They continued this for several days, with more protesters joining each day, and were eventually served.24 This protest “ignited a blaze of sit-in demonstrations that spread quickly across the South. By the spring, over 100 cities had been affected, several thousand youthful protesters had been arrested, and violent counterdemonstrations had made headlines across the country. What began as a single protest action had rapidly generated the sparks of a movement, freeing the pent-up political ambitions of students, in particular black students, all over the country.”25 An NPR headline similarly describes the initial sit-in as “The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement.”26 Of course, as Ransby explains, the spread of these events and the movement that activists continued afterward involved a great deal more than just the collected sit-in events. The tactic spread and the movement continued because of communication among social contacts and family members as well as planning, organizing, and mentorship. In this example, I interpret the lunch-counter sit-ins as an embodied rhetorical genre and the spread of this genre to various cities and towns as an example of activist uptake. Examining activist rhetoric on social media highlights that as uptakes spread, some uptakes become what Sara Ahmed might call “sticky.” Ahmed uses stickiness to explore the social and material aspects of emotion: in public discourses, the “sideways” movement of emotions involves “‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures, and objects.”27 As objects and signs circulate, they accumulate affective value. In one particular example, Ahmed examines public discourse about asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, noting that different speeches became connected to one another, “partly through the repetition with a difference, of some sticky words and language.”28 Ahmed’s

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example in this theorization of stickiness is about racialized language and the perpetuation of oppression through emotions such as anxiety, fear, and hate that “stick” to the bodies of people who are racialized and constructed as threatening to the nation. In this chapter, I focus on sticky language used to describe the genre of #ChallengeAccepted posts. I call these descriptions “sticky uptakes”: powerful uptakes that shape the circulation of social media campaigns and condition other uptakes that emerge in response to those campaigns. The stickiness I noticed was tied especially to the bodies and generic performances of privileged women (primarily white women and celebrities). Sticky uptakes can help rhetoricians understand how genre and uptake work in public contexts. Much of the foundational scholarship in rhetorical genre studies focuses on specific institutional or professional contexts such as workplaces or academic disciplines, but researchers are increasingly turning toward public contexts in order to understand how genres develop and circulate among rhetorical publics. In “Between Genres,” Anis Bawarshi writes about the ways that memory and power relations influence the uptake of genres about Palestine and Israel in the United States, and in particular genres that critique Israeli policy. Bawarshi argues that impasses in public discourse are shaped by rhetorical memories through which “dominant uptakes often . . . elide important genre distinctions.”29 As Bawarshi writes, “Uptakes have memories in the sense that they are learned recognitions and inclinations that, over time and through affective attachments and formations of power, become habitual and can take on a life of their own . . . As much as genres shape our uptakes, our uptake memories and their residues shape our genre encounters, helping us select from, define, and make sense of those encounters in ways that genre research has yet to fully acknowledge.”30 Bawarshi writes about the ways dominant uptakes of discourses about Palestine and Israel supersede the influence of genre or the text itself in public discourses. That is, our uptake memories may shape our perception of and interaction with public genres. Uptakes are shaped by systems of power. Uptakes are also a site where systems of power are reinforced and reproduced. In “Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner,” Jennifer LeMesurier illustrates the ways that racism can be perpetuated and amplified through the process of uptake. In one of LeMesurier’s examples, the nuances of various medical texts (including the use of satire) are glossed over as journalists take up these texts to write about MSG for popular audiences. LeMesurier writes that uptake is “not only a selective translation of content into a new form but also a transfer of ideologically tinted ways of enacting relationships and identities.”31 LeMesurier calls on genre theorists to consider the implications of uptake

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and its subversive potential, or “powerful flexibility” when it is directed toward “ends we do not find palatable.”32 The example of #ChallengeAccepted in this chapter shows both palatable and not-so-palatable effects of uptake. For example, people attempted to turn the attention generated by #Challenge Accepted toward activist conversations, which is surely something that many rhetoricians would applaud. However, some people also took up racist discourses in their attempt to take up activism. In sum, genre and uptake highlight the situated, relational processes of engaging with activist rhetoric. Activist rhetorics that circulate through social media are shaped by complex rhetorical assemblages that include platform features, activist goals and priorities, movement histories, collective memories, material conditions, systems of power, and situated people who encounter and engage with these assemblages. Reading social media activity through the lenses of genre and uptake is a form of circulation literacy that can help people understand and navigate these rhetorical assemblages. Uptakes position people in relation to one another and in relation to institutions and ideologies. As people develop knowledge about genres, they also develop knowledge about uptake; this uptake knowledge exists at both the individual and collective level. Collective memories shape uptakes, and these memories are shaped by ideologies and power relations. These collective memories and ideologies shape the ways that uptakes spread and the ways that people engage with activist rhetoric on social media. Uptake and #ChallengeAccepted

As I viewed circulating images and critiques associated with the #Challenge Accepted campaign, I began to ask more questions. If the invitation and the posts didn’t mention activism, why was this genre perceived as (failed) activism? What prompted some participants to revise their participation to better incorporate activism? Reading the campaign through the lens of rhetorical genre theory invited more questions but also helped me begin to develop some answers. One site for developing these answers came from my observation that genre knowledge shaped people’s interpretations of the campaign. To further analyze the ways that this genre knowledge circulated, I examined articles and blog posts about the #ChallengeAccepted campaign, both supportive and critical. I also reviewed some tweets and Instagram posts related to the campaign. Here, I read these conversations about the campaign through the lens of uptake. I examined the circulating rhetoric about #ChallengeAccepted by looking for genre interactions and metageneric discourse, paying special attention to evidence of genre knowledge and memories. As I mention above, uptake involves the connection between genres and the social actions that genres accomplish. Interpretations of the campaign

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were shaped by the cultural and historical context in which the campaign circulated, people’s previous experiences with social media genres, and sticky uptakes that persist in shaping discourses about social media. While following the invitation guidelines was probably the most common uptake that occurred as this challenge circulated, two other uptakes stood out to me as I followed the campaign: critiques and counteruptakes. Both of these processes were shaped by sticky uptakes. Sticky uptakes are affectively powerful, and because they draw attention and emotional responses, they can obscure more nuanced critique and analysis that focuses on understanding the specific relationships and practices involved. Critiques of #ChallengeAccepted that circulated through news outlets, magazines, blogs, Twitter, and Instagram drew on public genre knowledge by comparing this challenge to other, similar genres with contested relationships to activism. This process helps explain the surge of attention in which people critiqued #ChallengeAccepted’s relationship to activism. The invitations did not clearly position the challenge as an activist one through the language used to describe the campaign and its purpose. However, much of the discourse that circulated about the campaign interpreted it as an inadequate or failing attempt at activism. This criticism drew on powerful uptakes that were shaped by the accumulation of genre knowledge as well as the cultural context and historical moment in which the challenge circulated. The campaign also circulated at a time when a lot of public attention and social media activity was focused on activist work due to the visibility and reach of US protests against police violence. Local organizers in places such as Minneapolis and Louisville (where the police murdered George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, respectively) and the Movement for Black Lives organizers nationally were calling people in the United States to support abolition efforts such as the campaign to defund the police. Social media conversations were drawing national and international attention to various forms of antiracist organizing and activism in connection with this work. In addition, the global COVID-19 pandemic may have contributed to the spread of social media texts. As people experienced lockdowns and adjusted to social distancing measures, they may have turned increasing attention to social media as a way to maintain social connection while confined to their homes. Discussions of #ChallengeAccepted illustrate the ways that genre knowledge circulates in online public discourses. In particular, discussions of the campaign showed how people use genre knowledge to make sense of new discourses that they encounter online. Most articles about the campaign relied on genre knowledge to describe the campaign and to support the writer’s analysis of it. That is, writers relied on comparison with familiar or

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antecedent genres to describe the #ChallengeAccepted campaign entries or to convey their attitudes toward the campaign. The most common comparisons included other social media campaigns,33 selfies,34 and chain mail.35 These discussions show how people interpret not just the formal conventions of this genre, but also its feminist or activist potential (or lack thereof ), through the lens of other genres. Conversations about #ChallengeAccepted drew on the similarities between this campaign and other genres, including several campaigns that were criticized because the tactics or uptake of the campaign was problematic, such as #BlackoutTuesday as well as older campaigns that made use of selfies, such as #BringBackOurGirls.36 They also connected the project to previous campaigns that worked very similarly, such as a 2016 campaign involving black-and-white selfies that presumably raised awareness about cancer and another black-and-white selfie campaign focused on spreading positivity.37 Genre theorists often discuss uptake in terms of genre chains: sequences of texts that respond to one another, such as a call for proposals that is answered through a proposal, which is answered with a response from editors or reviewers, and so on. With this in mind, one of the first things I did to explore critiques of #ChallengeAccepted was look at the invitations that prompted people to participate in the challenge. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the invitation I received didn’t frame the campaign or participation in it as a form of activism or a way to support a specific cause. While many of the invitations, including the one I received, circulated privately, some participants posted an open invitation in the caption of their post and some articles about the campaign shared invitation language. Most of the invitations I saw were identical to the one I received or contained only slight variations (such as a difference in the number of people a person should nominate).38 Two of the examples I found had very similar messaging but with slightly more substantial differences. For example, the following invitation frames the challenge as a “woman empowerment” challenge, which I didn’t see in most of the other invitations: There is a woman empowerment challenge going around on Instagram. I think you are so bad ass and amazing and I was careful to choose who I think will meet the challenge. . . . but above all I chose women I know who share my values and views of the world. You are one of those women. Post a photo in black-and-white alone, write “challenge accepted” and mention my name. Identify 50 women to do the same, in private DM. I chose you because you are beautiful, strong and incredible. Let’s [heart emoji] each other! 39

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In contrast, the example below frames the challenge as an opportunity for positivity and support of women but is more concise and doesn’t compliment the recipient: Too often, some women find it easier to criticize each other or themselves instead of building each other up. With all the negativity going around, let’s do something positive! Upload 1 picture of yourself . . . OnLY YOU. Then tag 10 more women to do the same.40 Finally, the following invitation comes closest to framing the campaign as a collective effort linked to social change, thus gesturing toward a broader social purpose behind the campaign: Your Turn I was careful to choose folks who I think will meet the challenge, but above all those who I know already share this type of thinking, and are pushing the collective of women forward every day. Among women there are often criticisms and judgements; instead we should take care of each other. Hype each other. Champion each other. Defend and lift. We are all beautiful the way we are—and the way we are is the way we deserve to be seen and celebrated. The Challenge: Post a photo of yourself in black and white, just you alone, and write “challenge accepted” and mention my name. Then select a group of women to do the same, and message them in private. I’ve chose you because you are beautiful, strong and incredible. An unstoppable force of energy with the potential to move mountains and change narratives. (double high-five emoji) Let’s ♥ each other! Have fun! 41 These small differences in the invitation language are important to note, but I don’t think they fully explain responses to the campaign. Most of the invitations I saw did not contain language related to empowerment or helping women as a collective. Even the invitations that do frame the campaign this way don’t directly claim that the challenge itself is what will “push the collective of women forward.” The invitation frames the challenge as something

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that is shared with people who push that collective forward and celebrates those people. Presumably, the invitation genre is what prompted many people to take up the campaign by posting a black-and-white photo. However, circulation and uptake are distributed processes, and social media campaigns such as #ChallengeAccepted make some aspects of that distributed ecology visible and traceable. Participants had different genre knowledge to draw on depending on when they received an invitation and how (or whether) the campaign had been taken up by people in their network. For example, the timing in which one received their invitation could influence whether they had seen other #ChallengeAccepted posts or conversations about #ChallengeAccepted, and it would also influence the content they would encounter if they looked at other posts associated with the hashtag. In addition, one’s relationship with the person who sent them the invitation and/or with other people who took up the campaign might also influence their interpretation of the campaign. Most people probably drew on the invitation and the circulating photos (either those created by people they’re connected to or those associated with the hashtag) as they considered how to take up the campaign. The most common way to take up the #ChallengeAccepted campaign was to simply share a black-and-white photo with one or several hashtags. Some captions thanked the person who invited them to the challenge, tagged others to participate, or included a short message related to supporting women. In addition to the influence of circulating #ChallengeAccepted photos, participation in the campaign was also shaped by metageneric discourses about the campaign. Janet Giltrow uses the term “meta-genre” to refer expectations, atmospheres, and discourses that suggest how readers and writers should take up a genre.42 As participation in the campaign grew, so did a variety of uptakes that extended beyond the instructions in the invitation. One category of uptakes was the creation of metageneric rhetoric about the campaign. In addition to the spread of black-and-white photos linked to the challenge, a growing collection of articles, essays, and social media posts described and evaluated the campaign. Much of this conversation was critical, though as Kalb’s tweet suggests, many people also defended the campaign, sometimes through abusive language directed at critics of the challenge. A central theme of these critiques was a critique of the #ChallengeAccepted campaign as a poor or failed example of feminism or activism. Some people also appeared to respond to metageneric narratives about the campaign when they connected their post to specific issues, organizations, and activist efforts.

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These discourses and the counteruptakes that they inspired highlight the ways that networked participation and circulation shape uptake processes and discourses about activism. Contextualizing a circulating genre in relation to metageneric discourses, related genres, and other circulating rhetorical activity is a form of circulation literacy that reveals both patterns and gaps in narratives about the genre. Exploring #ChallengeAccepted through the lenses of metagenre and uptake highlights the ways that power and ideology shape the circulation and interpretation of social media genres. As the following examples show, #ChallengeAccepted uptakes highlighted the blurred boundaries between misogynist dismissals of feminized activity (and women who dare to voice confidence in or satisfaction with their appearance), dismissiveness of social media activity, and feminist or activist critiques through which people discuss the best ways to fight oppression and support justice. Sticky Uptakes

In order to understand the campaign and its limitations better, I will elaborate on two sticky uptakes that influenced interpretations of the campaign. Sticky uptakes show how circulating genres and metagenres condition uptakes, and I explore this process by discussing how narratives about selfies and slacktivism stuck to the #ChallengeAccepted campaign.

Sticky Uptake 1: Selfies Uptake memories about selfies showed up in many discussions of the #ChallengeAccepted campaign. As I reviewed discussions of the campaign, I noticed that most news articles, magazine essays, and blog posts discussing the campaign referred to the campaign posts as “selfies.” However, many of the photos weren’t necessarily ones that I would categorize as selfies. As I examined discussions of the campaign, I noticed that some writers were attentive to this distinction and opted for an umbrella term instead, such as “photos,” “images,” or “portraits.”43 Other writers used unique terminology to distinguish among photos. For example, Kathleen Foody’s Associated Press article used the umbrella term “images” and then characterized posts as “magazine-style captures of celebrities, spur-of-the-moment selfies and filtered snaps from weddings or other special occasions.”44 On Vox.com, Terry Nguyen described the photos as “flattering candids, selfies, and posed shots.”45 Despite these high-profile texts that attempted to describe the different types of photos, the description of #ChallengeAccepted as a “selfie campaign” was a sticky uptake, appearing repeatedly as a broad characterizations of the photos. As I began to review critiques of the campaign, I noticed

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that references to selfies came with accumulated baggage. Many of the references to selfies dismissed the genre outright, either using the term selfie to dismiss the campaign entirely or constructing selfies as a foil against which real activism could be measured. Selfies are a feminized genre, and critiques of selfies often draw on misogynist tropes to dismiss selfies and those who take them as inconsequential and insignificant. These dismissals often draw on attitudes toward social media as well as attitudes toward women and young people. I attribute the stickiness of this description to the convergence of genre knowledge, uptake memories, and power relations. Discussion of #ChallengeAccepted became closely tied to selfies as a genre, and especially to gendered stereotypes about selfies that accompanied critique and dismissal of the campaign and its participants. According to Oxford English Dictionary Online, a selfie is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” Selfies are a relatively new rhetorical genre that have been compared to “ancestral” or “antecedent” genres such as artistic self-portraiture.46 However, selfies emerged from the convergence of specific social and material processes, and modern selfies differ in important ways from previous forms of self-portraiture.47 For example, a self-portrait taken by an artist does not have the spontaneity or vernacular character associated with selfies. Although modern artists can and do take selfies (e.g., Cindy Sherman), the genre isn’t typically associated with serious art. Selfies, along with some other forms of vernacular photography, are gendered in ways that might align selfies more with amateur photography or family photographs than the self-portraiture of artists.48 Furthermore, a self-portrait shared in an art gallery or museum, or even one placed in a photo album, does not circulate in the same way as a selfie shared on social media. Material and technological developments that have facilitated the spread of selfies include camera technology (such as webcams or front-facing phone cameras that offer the ability to see and take a photo simultaneously); internet connectivity (the ability to connect phones and the ubiquity of internet in many places); and social media architectures (such as applications that allow easy and instant sharing, interfaces that display images, and algorithms that prioritize images). As communication practices have shaped and been shaped by changing material circumstances, selfies have become a well-known genre that many people engage with on a regular basis. In short: modern selfies are a particularly vernacular and social genre, enabled by specific material and social processes, and therefore the selfie is a distinct genre of self-portraiture. Some conventions that are commonly associated with selfies are tied to specific technologies, such as the use of a smartphone camera or webcam, the use of a filter or application to alter the image,

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and the process of sharing the selfie on social media.49 Other conventions such as subject(s) facing the camera, deliberate facial expression(s) such as smile, pout, or smirk, and close cropping or framing link selfies to antecedent genres such as portraiture and vernacular photography genres such as snapshots or photo booth images.50 Finally, composition choices involving specific poses, camera angles (e.g., those that highlight the subject’s appearance, activity, or location), evidence of how the photo was taken (an outstretched arm or mirror), or more than one person in the frame are ways of using the genre to position the subject(s) in relation to activities or relationships that extend beyond the selfie-taker. Any particular selfie could use many of these conventions or only one or two. Different people will likely have different opinions regarding which features are essential to the genre. So, for example, the selfie may not need to include an outstretched arm, but some folks might disagree with the notion that a webcam image is a selfie because they associate selfies with mobile phone cameras. Many people see sharing as central to the genre, though selfies can be taken for personal purposes.51 In many discourses about selfies, the stereotypical selfie is associated with specific formal features and specific people. In 2018, I was surprised to see how clearly these stereotypes were reproduced in the results of a Google Image search for “selfie.” Most of the results showed young, slender, whiteand feminine-presenting people with long blonde or light brown hair taking a photo of their face with an outstretched arm and a mobile phone. Associated terms at the top of the search included “iphone,” “background,” “self,” “beautiful,” “woman,” and “Instagram.” Despite these stereotypical associations, the label “selfie” is used to describe a broad range of photos with quite a range of features. In addition, the ubiquity and reach of this “truly transnational genre” may also complicate attempts to define and study it.52 Yet this reach and recognizability may also make it useful for a range of social purposes and situations.53 Selfies provide people with opportunities to make meaning out of their experiences and to position themselves in relation to public conversations or collective projects. Selfies are an important form of relational expression and self-representation: through selfies, people think and communicate with others about who they are, how they feel, and what they believe.54 Despite their ubiquity and nuanced purposes, selfies and those who take them are often mocked in popular discourses. These discourses stereotype selfie-takers as superficial and narcissistic, often drawing on gender stereotypes and misogynist tropes to critique the genre.55 Anne Burns critiques the discourse about selfies as a mechanism for disciplining behavior and devaluing women. In short, this discourse about selfies tells (young) women how to behave, while also allowing people to engage in a socially acceptable form

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of sexism by dismissing a gendered behavior instead of dismissing women directly.56 Discourse about selfies, like so much discourse about new uses of technology, often verges on moral panic. For example, cultural critic Henry Giroux sees selfie culture as taking up public space that was once focused on dialogue and important social problems.57 However, Giroux’s argument draws on a somewhat nostalgic reading of public discourse in previous eras, since speakers and writers have not historically had equitable access to public discourse.58 Furthermore, these stereotypes about selfie-takers ignore the wide range of people and purposes associated with selfies. These ideologies are visible in narratives about #ChallengeAccepted that rely on stereotypes about selfies to critique the campaign. Many writers constructed narratives that associated selfie-takers with appearance obsession, compliment-seeking, and self-promotion. Some of these narratives drew on circulating counterdiscourses about #ChallengeAccepted and activist campaigns about femicide in Turkey. In these narratives, an original “worthy” cause spiraled out of control as women latched onto the excuse to share attractive photos of themselves. As Nadine von Cohen wrote in The Guardian, “Even if it started or borrowed from something more substantial, the campaign, as it swept across social media, seemed to be the most banal of performative western pseudo-feminism.”59 In Body+Soul, Alison Izzo wrote, “The #ChallengeAccepted Instagram trend has gone truly global, but it seems the true origins of this hashtag—taken by many to bolster female empowerment—has been forgotten in the rush to post a flattering selfie.”60 These narratives portray women as so hungry for attention, compliments, and self-promotion that they are unable to think carefully about their participation decisions. In this way, misogynist discourses become linked to collective anxieties about the ways that ideas spread through digital communication. These references show that derogatory stereotypes about women and social media “stuck” to discourse about the challenge and conditioned uptakes of #ChallengeAccepted. Through genre stereotypes and discourses that devalue feminized engagement, narratives about #ChallengeAccepted tended to generalize about selfies and those who take them rather than considering the rhetorical situation, the positionality of the selfie-taker, and the relationships that people cultivate through their social media posts. These narratives appear all the more convincing because news stories and blog posts that circulate examples of #ChallengeAccepted photos almost exclusively feature celebrities. While this seems reasonable when one considers the ethics of amplifying a post not intended for the kind of audience that some of these publications receive, it also leads to a skewed representation of participation. As a result, these narratives don’t typically distinguish between the behavior of celebrities and social media influencers and that of

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everyday people who participate in #ChallengeAccepted. Other commentary about #ChallengeAccepted drew attention to the fact that positionality matters by highlighting writers’ perceptions about who participated. Critics claimed that one of the problems with the campaign was that it featured privileged white women and that the campaign would be more empowering if it featured more disabled, trans, queer, or BIPOC women.61 For example, Taylor Lorenz’s article in the New York Times featured the following quotation: “‘I think that if this “movement” featured trans women or differently abled women, or showcased female businesses or accomplishments or women in history, it would make more sense,’ Ms. Segel explained further, in a direct message on Twitter. ‘But the idea of this as a challenge or cause is really lost on me.’”62 I am not sure why critics assumed that they can necessarily read trans identity, disability, queerness, or race in a small black-and-white photo (or that all participants would announce these identities as part of their participation). However, what’s more important is how these metageneric discourses devalue the selfie by tying it to privileged white, cisgender, heterosexual, nondisabled women. These genre stereotypes minimize or erase a wide range of important selfie activity by BIPOC, disabled, trans, and queer people. Interestingly, in their interviews with social media users on selfie attitudes and behaviors, Williams and Marquez found differences in attitudes and selfie-taking behavior along lines of both race and gender. Black and Latino participants in their study were more likely to report posting selfies and to report posting a large number of selfies than white participants, and white participants were more likely to disapprove of selfies. However, representations such as the Google Image results for “selfie” that I mentioned previously include a disproportionate number of white women compared to a set of “most recent” posts associated with the hashtag #selfie on Instagram. My point here is not necessarily to defend white women’s social media behavior, but to point out that the focus on white women leads to erasure of the posts that some writers claim would be more valuable. Even when writers didn’t portray selfies as harmful, they still tended to dismiss them rather than consider selfies as a potentially valid form of engagement: “Why should a black-and-white selfie be condemned simply because a person felt like posting it on their personal page? Sure, it might be a silly or hollow signal, but the internet is inundated daily with images and poor Twitter takes that are arguably more damaging than a harmless, selfindulgent selfie.”63 This comment still devalues selfies by associating them with superficial or frivolous aims. However, as I will discuss in the section on counteruptakes, selfies are regularly used for influential and innovative activist work through which marginalized speakers and writers respond to public

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dialogue by highlighting its exclusions or adding perspectives that challenge dominant discourse. Interestingly, I encountered one of the most positive references to selfies as a genre in a description of Pınar Gültekin’s social media feed. Pınar Gültekin was a Kurdish woman from Turkey who was murdered by an ex-boyfriend in July 2020.64 Her photo and story became associated with a counternarrative to #ChallengeAccepted. The counternarrative was that #ChallengeAccepted began as an activist campaign about a “real” issue, femicide in Turkey, which then became overshadowed by frivolous selfies. Gültekin’s selfies came up in this quote from an interview with Sena Başöz, an artist based in Istanbul: “The most popular image of Gültekin on social media shows her at the beach, sitting on the shore, smiling and laughing. ‘As soon as we heard the news, we were exposed to her online presence—her selfies, her photographs, the [TikTok] video of her singing along to a song in a car, the wind blowing through her hair,’ Başöz explained in English by phone. ‘She is a woman who expresses herself through photographs on social media . . . and I think that’s what the images communicated to us, that she embraces her womanhood, she enjoys life to the fullest, and she is beautiful in that respect.’”65 As a reader, I found it hard to reconcile the two versions of selfie-taking women in this article, written by Alicia Eler for the online arts magazine Hyperallergic. Eler describes women participating in #ChallengeAccepted as engaging in superficial, attention-seeking behavior that “fell flat” for not engaging with femicide or some other worthy activist cause; on the other hand, the quotation from Sena Başöz characterizes Gültekin’s selfies as part of an archive of self-expression that shows livelihood and beauty.66 The label “selfie” became a sticky uptake through which people critiqued #ChallengeAccepted and its participants. As a label for activity, “selfie” sticks to particular kinds of people and activity. For some audiences, this stickiness forecloses nuanced reading and analysis. Despite the range of activity and people who participated in #ChallengeAccepted and the range of people and attitudes toward selfies, many popular news outlets featured critiques of the campaign that drew on the same ideologies that people use to devalue selfies, many of which are also used to denigrate women. My examination of metageneric discourses about the campaign showed that these discourses overemphasized the behavior of privileged white women and celebrities, which contributed to the negative perceptions of the campaign. Tracing the metageneric discourse shows that “selfie” stuck to the #ChallengeAccepted campaign and associated the campaign with particular people and with attitudes about behavior. In the process, ideology and power intertwined with genre to shape narratives about #ChallenceAccepted.

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Sticky Uptake 2: Slacktivism #ChallengeAccepted critiques also highlight the mixed messages that circulate on social media regarding effective forms of political participation and support. These discourses often fail to distinguish between different kinds of people and the varying levels of reach and influence that people have (e.g., conflating individual people who are not activists with activists, or conflating regular people with influencers, celebrities, and businesses). As I suggested in the introduction to this book, despite plenty of research and analysis suggesting that “slacktivism” is a misguided concern, concerns about slacktivism continue to appear in discussions of activism and social media. While some discussions of social media activism acknowledge that social media campaigns can achieve important results for activists, disparaging attitudes toward social media and concern about effective forms of political engagement contribute to persistent criticisms of activity that is deemed ineffective. Encouraging people to think about the connection between the ways they engage with politics and activism—especially how those forms of engagement affect others or relate to their goals—is certainly a worthwhile activity. However, critiques of slacktivism often lack nuance, relying on the baggage associated with the charge of slacktivism instead of engaging in nuanced ways with the topic in question. Many critiques of #ChallengeAccepted warned audiences about the danger of confusing this challenge with real activism. In addition to powerful uptakes regarding selfies, then, discourses about #ChallengeAccepted were also shaped by powerful narratives about slacktivism. These critiques rested on the assumption that references to “empowerment” or “challenge” meant that the campaign was an attempt to engage in feminism or activism, that those tasks must involve difficulty, and that selfies and social media are ill-equipped for this work. These concerns were visible in social media conversations about the campaign (such as Kalb’s tweet and replies to her) as well as journalists’ coverage of the campaign. Underlying these critiques about what activism should look like, though, are other evaluations. While the term “slacktivism” is what sticks, the associated conversations involve a range of critiques that are more nuanced and expansive. However, these more compelling criteria for engaging with social media rhetoric were largely overshadowed by the powerful uptakes that characterized the campaign as slacktivist. The less visible critiques that circulated about #ChallengeAccepted included critiques of the goal or outcome associated with the campaign; critiques of the tactic (including the medium, the commitment involved, and the message(s) associated with the campaign); and critiques of inclusivity and representation among campaign

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participants. For example, writers critiqued the goal of the campaign as meaningless and ineffective, as in Lorenz’s tweet stating that “the black and white selfie challenge is basically meaningless and doesn’t accomplish anything aside from self promotion.”67 One writer even seemed to claim that women were being tricked (or attempting to trick others) into believing that their selfies served activist purposes: “The reality I saw was that this campaign was the perfect ruse. A way to disguise a selfie as social activism, so it appears more noble.”68 Critics also claimed that the campaign was not feminist or activist because it directed focus toward the person posting and their appearance. One writer seemed to acknowledge the relational purposes behind the campaign, yet still deemed the tactic insufficiently activist: “not every recent black-and-white selfie was posted in solidarity with Turkish women; many selfies fell flat, appearing as attention-grabbing, though beautiful, gestures of boredom—a way to ‘connect’ during pandemic times.”69 This might be a good place to reiterate that #ChallengeAccepted did not make a clear claim about being an activist or justice-oriented campaign. It isn’t unique in using the term “challenge” to refer to social media posts that focus attention on appearance and do not connect to an activist cause. If it were an activist campaign, these evaluations about goals and tactics might make sense. However, even in that case, I do not think that slacktivism draws attention to the most productive elements of these conversations. Criticisms of the tactic did also comment on the effort involved, claiming that posting a selfie is too easy to count as a challenge or to be an effective form of activism. For example, Nadine von Cohen wrote, “where’s the challenge? It would surely be a greater challenge to half of Instagram to not post a selfie for a day.”70 Blogger Sarah Haufrect made a similar point: “The campaign provides women with an excuse to post a selfie. That’s the challenge. As far as social causes go, most selfies require the almost absolute minimum amount of effort.”71 I disagree that selfies require no effort, but perhaps it depends on the person. The point, however, is that these critiques involve much more than effort. These critiques involve misogynist stereotypes about Instagram users (and women, in particular) as attention-hungry, selfie-obsessed people who are looking for excuses to claim that their typical social media behavior serves a greater good. They are about perceptions of the people who circulate social media discourse, perceptions of the genres they engage with, and perceptions of the worthiness of a cause. Collapsing all of these conversations into one term does a disservice to activist campaigns and the publics who engage with them. For example, many critics compared #ChallengeAccepted to #BlackoutTuesday, but these critiques failed to acknowledge important distinctions between different activities. #BlackoutTuesday was a social media campaign that was started

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by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, two Black women in the music industry.72 The campaign spread widely in early June 2020 and became infamous as an example of performative allyship. In the New York Times, Taylor Lorenz characterized the campaigns as similar because they both allow people to feel as though they’re doing something without putting much effort into learning, reflection, or action in relation to an issue: “Though the portraits have spread widely, the posts themselves say very little. Like the black square, which became a symbol of solidarity with Black people but asked very little of those who shared it, the black-and-white selfie allows users to feel as if they’re taking a stand while saying almost nothing. Influencers and celebrities love these types of ‘challenges’ because they don’t require actual advocacy, which might alienate certain factions of their fan base.”73 #ChallengeAccepted and #BlackoutTuesday share some important similarities, but the differences between them are significant. #BlackoutTuesday was positioned much differently than #ChallengeAccepted. It was explicitly linked to activism, including a specific audience (people in the music industry) and specific actions (pausing “business-as-usual” to develop ways to support Black communities). Part of the problem with #BlackoutTuesday was that it circulated beyond its initial intended audience, and this change in context changed the meaning of the genre. If a major corporation or their representatives, who presumably engage in promotional activity on social media, ceased their marketing and other public work for the day to invest time and resources in conversations about racism and supporting Black communities, this is a different action than for an individual person who doesn’t engage with racism on social media to post a black square as a signal of “solidarity”; many critics of the campaign highlighted this distinction in their critiques of the campaign. As the genre spread, it was taken up by people who hadn’t engaged with ongoing protests. Critics saw the black squares as a problem because (1) they were drowning out other material, and (2) people posted a black square without engaging in other forms of dialogue or action, and the black squares didn’t encourage connections to other conversations or forms of action, though plenty of that dialogue and plenty of suggested actions had been circulating in the days leading up to the campaign. #ChallengeAccepted wasn’t occurring within the same kind of context, with lots of discourse about specific actions and demands and calls for people to participate and speak up. The concept of sticky uptakes contributes to circulation literacies by highlighting how patterns in metageneric discourse draw on collective memories that shape public genre knowledge. This genre knowledge is infused with power relations, and together genre and ideology shape responses to

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circulating rhetorical activity. In particular, two especially powerful sticky uptakes shaped critiques of #ChallengeAccepted. First, the campaign was shaped by disparaging narratives and stereotypes that construct selfies as a superficial, frivolous, and narcissistic genre. Second, the campaign was shaped by narratives about slacktivism, including comparisons to other genres that were perceived as slacktivist. Although these sticky uptakes dominated narratives about #ChallengeAccepted, conversations about the campaign also hinted at more productive questions that could be used to evaluate activist or activist-adjacent rhetoric on social media by focusing on tactics, participation patterns, and goals. In the final part of the chapter, I turn to counteruptakes that emerged in participants’ responses to the campaign. These participants responded to the campaign’s call for participation and the circulating examples of the genre in revisionary ways, often by connecting the campaign to issues and conversations that they found more politically useful. Counteruptakes highlight the activist and social media literacies of campaign participants, but they also draw attention to the limitations of the sticky narratives that circulated about #ChallengeAccepted. Counteruptakes

As I reviewed #ChallengeAccepted posts, I began to see examples of what I call activist uptake knowledge: knowledge of when, where, how, and by whom uptakes can serve activist goals. In the introduction, I defined activism as a situated, directed, and collective process of working toward social change. In my engagement with social media genres, I have observed many ways that activists use social media to engage in this work by circulating information about how oppression works and why it should be resisted, sharing tactics or campaigns for resisting specific manifestations of oppression, and building forms of collectivity that are central to this work. The two examples of counteruptakes I discuss here highlight some of the nuances of this work. The term “counteruptake” draws on the notion of a counterpublic. Nancy Fraser describes “subaltern counterpublics” as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”74 Counterpublic rhetorics draw attention to, and challenge, the oppressive functions of mainstream public discourse. The counteruptakes that I focus on here perform this work through genre. Counteruptakes involve taking up a specific genre in ways that oppose common genre performances or perceptions of the genre.

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This work is not limited to #ChallengeAccepted or other identifiable campaigns; it can also occur in less collective or more distributed ways when people subvert genre conventions or expectations. For example, the selfie conventions that I described earlier in this chapter indicate that people often compose selfies in ways that uphold ideals related to appearance and beauty. However, many people use selfies to deliberately contest or reject those ideals. Some social media accounts and hashtags highlight the value of bodies that do not fit beauty standards or work to counter absences and misrepresentations in public discourse, journalism, and entertainment. Selfies can be used by feminists or activists to make supporters of a movement or issue visible. In addition, selfies offer an opportunity for rhetors to draw attention to a political issue by making use of a genre that is often otherwise seen as social. By merging representation of oneself (presumably something that one’s social contacts are interested in) with a political message, selfies are a useful strategy for spreading awareness of an issue beyond the publics who normally follow that topic through news articles or interest-based pages and groups. Hashtagged selfies can connect people who share an identification or an interest, developing communities that are built around rejecting specific cultural logics. Hashtags don’t create communities automatically, but they do offer interested rhetors or audiences a way of tracing a hashtag to find other terms, images, texts, and people that build on their interest or connect it to other issues. When I browsed Instagram posts associated with the #Challenge Accepted and #WomenSupportingWomen hashtags, the majority of posts followed the invitation guidelines. However, a subset of participants added variations to their posts by foregrounding a specific action or cause and encouraging others to support it, despite the fact that the invitation didn’t ask them to do so. That is, participants took up the ideas of challenge, support, or empowerment and connected them to specific types of support or empowerment. These uptakes took advantage of the attention and energy being directed at the #ChallengeAccepted campaign while also subverting the invitation and the genre in strategic ways. In addition to many unique variations, I found several counteruptakes that became uptake patterns performed by a number of participants. These counteruptakes responded to the campaign’s call for participation, the circulating examples of the genre, and critiques of the campaign. The counteruptakes didn’t circulate as widely as the initial challenge and critiques of it. However, the two examples I explore in this section involved efforts by #ChallengeAccepted participants to connect their posts to political goals and collective projects in ways that seem to respond to the metageneric sticky uptakes discussed in the previous section.

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Counteruptake 1: Sharing an Image of Breonna Taylor The first counteruptake I noticed involved US participants who posted black-and-white photos of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman murdered in her home by police in 2020. Despite months of protest, activists were still seeking accountability from the police officers who killed her. By taking up the challenge but posting a photo of Breonna Taylor instead of themselves, participants disidentified with the campaign in order to highlight what they saw as a more important or more appropriate way to focus the hashtag and the attention. Other US participants used the campaign hashtags in addition to other existing movements’ hashtags such as #SayHerName and #MMIW to call attention to murders of Black women and missing and murdered Indigenous women, respectively.75 Dedicating the challenge to Breonna Taylor was an uptake that spread among participants. I found several examples of this practice as I scrolled through posts using the campaign hashtags on Instagram and later found many more examples through a targeted search. Several articles about #ChallengeAccepted also mentioned that celebrities such as Padma Lakshmi and Susan Sarandon dedicated their #ChallengeAccepted posts to Breonna Taylor.76 In comments on the posts and Twitter threads, many people praised this counteruptake. Timing and antecedent genres both played a role in this uptake. In the weeks leading up to the challenge, activists had been using social media to encourage people to continue engaging in antiracist practice, supporting the Movement for Black Lives, and working toward police and prison abolition (e.g., posts that encouraged participation “when it’s no longer trending”). In addition to these conversations, uptakes that specifically involved shifting messages toward the lack of action in Breonna Taylor’s case had been circulating on various social media platforms. Through these uptakes, people directed attention to Taylor’s case and the unresolved demands of activists by using clickbait-style leads to draw in viewers or readers before delivering the message, sometimes repeated for emphasis, “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.”77 These uptakes circulated widely, but this activity was also criticized for turning Taylor’s murder and the process of seeking justice for her into a meme. In a Jezebel article, Cate Young critiqued this process, sharing her own concerns and interviewing others who expressed concerns about ease and personal reward of circulating these memes.78 Young and her interviewees highlighted the dismissiveness and misogynoir of turning Taylor’s life and death into an avenue for people to showcase their cleverness. Furthermore, the memes calling for this arrest circulated much more widely than conversations that drew attention to more complex and substantive issues,

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such as the conflict between the demand to arrest Taylor’s murderers and the movement calling for abolition of the police.79 In another article on Vox, Aja Romano interviewed Young, discussing her critiques as well as the perspectives of other activists, some of whom didn’t share Young’s perspective and felt that the continued attention to Breonna Taylor was important.80 Interviewees quoted in this article seemed to agree that certain forms of sharing were inappropriate, such as material that made jokes or seemed to obscure the seriousness of Taylor’s murder. Again, context is important to consider when evaluating uptakes. Sharing memes alone will not create a more just world than the one in which Breonna Taylor was murdered by police officers in her own home. However, the widespread circulation of Taylor’s name was not the only thing happening. Among the circulating memes, people also circulated conversations and critiques such as those expressed in Young’s and Romano’s articles, campaigns that called for multifaceted actions, and acts of public memorializing. As Black Lives Matter activists have called for people to engage in action, not just discussion, circulating texts have more frequently included suggestions for action and encouraged people to think about the relationship between their positionality and their contribution to antiracist conversations and activities. Dedicating a #ChallengeAccepted post to Breonna Taylor was a counteruptake that connected genre enactments to metageneric discourses about the relevance and function of participation in this challenge. By posting a photo of Breonna Taylor instead of themselves, participants who chose this uptake countered sticky uptakes of #ChallengeAccepted as self-promoting and appearance-oriented. By calling for accountability and justice tied to the Movement for Black Lives, calls to defund the police, and police or prison abolition, the counteruptake also responded to sticky uptakes about frivolity and ineffectiveness by tying participation to ongoing activism against white supremacy and anti-Black violence. By revising the genre conventions to post a photo of Taylor, a message about her life and death, or a call for accountability, participants connected this campaign to other genres and rhetorical ecologies. This counteruptake responded to the critiques that “stuck” to #ChallengeAccepted and drew on other circulating discourses in order to address those critiques. Such responses show how everyday social media users develop and use activist uptake knowledge as they engage with circulating rhetoric on social media.

Counteruptake 2: Connecting the Campaign to Femicide in Turkey A second counteruptake responded to circulating narratives about #Challenge Accepted as a campaign that spiraled out of control and drowned out

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efforts by Turkish feminists to draw attention to a “real” issue: “Whether the [#ChallengeAccepted] challenge has any teeth is up for debate (a lot of debate), but the widespread violence against women in Turkey is very much a real issue. Here’s everything you need to know.”81 This and similar critiques created the impression that #ChallengeAccepted was frivolous, a judgment supported by comparing #ChallengeAccepted selfies to activist work that was seen as more substantial or important. One such comparison involved activism related to femicide in Turkey. In this narrative, critics claimed that #ChallengeAccepted actually originated from activists in Turkey and the true origins (and “real” issue) had been overshadowed as #Challenge Accepted spread: In the days and weeks following Gültekin’s murder, protests spread across at least 12 major cities in Turkey, calling attention to the country’s high rate of femicides, and demanding adherance [sic] to the Istanbul Convention. On social media, some who posted hashtagged black-and-white selfies attracted viral, global attention to Turkey’s femicide issue. Celebrities Christina Aguilera and Salma Hayak [sic] tagged their black-and-white selfies with both #istanbulsözleşmesiyaşatır and #ChallengeAccepted, while Eva Green cited info on femicide in Turkey from @auturkishculturalclub. But others simply performed a surface-level gesture of “empowerment,” tagging flattering selfies with #ChallengeAccepted, #WomenSupportingWomen.82 As people began to amplify the campaign by “Turkish feminists,” another set of powerful uptakes emerged. People chastised “Western” and “American” participants for coopting a hashtag created by Turkish feminists. This narrative opposed a singular group of Turkish women or Turkish feminists with “Western” or American feminists, reducing the broad reach of the campaign and the complexities of participants’ locations and identities. Underwriting this narrative is the assumption that participants in #ChallengeAccepted are privileged and should be using their social media participation to help others rather than to lift themselves up or celebrate themselves. This erases the complexities of participation: participants in the campaign had varying relationships to privilege and oppression. The opposition between privileged white Americans and oppressed Turkish feminists doing “real” activism didn’t lead to connections among feminists in different locations; it led to the amplification of one specific story. The opposition between Western feminists and Turkish feminists and the urge for people to “fix” their participation by sharing the same singular narrative about femicide in Turkey continued the problematic participation patterns. Many participants either removed their original post and shared

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a new one or updated their post to add a reference to femicides in Turkey. “Once I learned about the Turkish link to the trend, I edited my caption to highlight those activists’ intentions.”83 Most of these narratives referred briefly to femicide in Turkey and/or Pınar Gültekin’s story. Several posts became hypervisible as they were reshared widely, including posts by the accounts @auturkishclub, @minaonthemoon, and @stopfemicides. Here’s one writer’s narrative about this situation: What can you do if you’ve posted a #ChallengeAccepted selfie? Social media can be a confusing place at times, and unless you’re doing some serious Instagram-sleuthing it can be hard to find the true origins of a photograph, a hashtag or a movement. The best we can all do is to keep searching for the truth, and when it does dawn on your door (or feed) that you take steps to rectify things. A public acknowledgment of the domestic violence issues facing women in Turkey (and indeed, the world), and the origins of the hashtag via an update to your caption or Insta Stories is a quick and relatively pain-free way to redress the situation. After all, this Insta trend is about a whole lot more than giving your girlfriends a digital high-five.84 However, note the emphasis on “quick” and “pain-free” solutions. If slacktivism were the problem with #ChallengeAccepted (and I do not think it is), these easy fixes should be no less slacktivist. Resharing someone else’s post about femicide in Turkey or briefly referencing Pınar Gültekin’s story must surely be examples of “performative” allyship. At the level of the individual participant, this urge to “fix” participation by finding a worthy cause to amplify does not improve much on the original campaign. Fixing something problematic by finding the right thing to share or making a quick edit to one’s post is public relations work, not activism. While many activists model processes of accountability and apology that activists need to use in order to build relationships and shape their activity, these processes involve situated reflection and engagement with positionality, audience, and context rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. In addition, quick fixes can be actively harmful rather than simply not helpful. Sharing vague references to the plight of Turkish women sometimes reinforced racist narratives. For example, one Instagram user85 contributed to the #ChallengeAccepted conversation about femicide in Turkey by sharing a story about visiting Turkey as an athlete for “a few days” in 1998. She shared some of the orientalist narratives she was told about how unsafe and threatening Turkey is and how she was at risk of being kidnapped as a blonde. She then explained that she felt unsafe during the trip, which is perhaps unsurprising given the ways her experiences were framed by those

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around her. She used this experience to generalize about what life is like for Turkish women. This participant’s attempt to perform the right kind of participation reproduced harmful discourses rather than encouraging nuanced engagement with femicide in Turkey. The hypervisibility of Turkish femicide as a “real” cause worth amplifying should prompt other questions. Who are these posts for? What goal are they trying to achieve? Writing in Jadaliyya, Ronay Bakan and Seda Saluk argued that even though narratives that circulated about #ChallengeAccepted began to direct attention toward femicide in Turkey, these discourses also lacked local specificity, reproducing colonialist language and erasing ethnic difference.86 Pınar Gültekin, the woman whose narrative was amplified through posts connected to the #ChallengeAccepted campaign, was Kurdish. Bakan and Saluk contextualize Gültekin’s story in relation to the civil war between the PKK and the Turkish military, during which many Kurdish people have been displaced, and the discrimination and state violence that Kurdish people, and Kurdish women in particular, face in Turkey. Bakan and Saluk explain that in the 1990s and 2000s, many discourses about violence against women focused on domestic violence and not state violence, and media narratives circulated racist and colonialist narratives that constructed Kurds as “backward others”; as a result, many groups led by women and feminists stopped specifying the ethnic identity of women who had been murdered. However, as social media discourses circulated narratives about the rates of femicide in Turkey that referred to “Turkish women” and campaigns by “Turkish feminists,” these discourses erased Gültekin’s ethnicity and the intersecting oppressions that she faced as a Kurdish woman living in Western Turkey.87 BOTH OF THE COUNT ERU PTAK ES I have discussed here responded to circulating metageneric discourses about #ChallengeAccepted. Sharing an image of Breonna Taylor and a message about her murder was a performance that addressed both of the sticky uptakes that shaped narratives about the #ChallengeAccepted genre. Using captions, hashtags, editing features, or follow-up posts to connect #ChallengeAccepted posts to femicide in Turkey also addressed these critiques, though this counteruptake didn’t always involve a different image. In both cases, the counteruptakes show the activist uptake knowledges that people use to engage with social media rhetoric, but a careful interpretation of these performances involves reading them in relation to other discourses and ideologies. Counteruptakes highlight the activist uptake knowledge that everyday people use when they engage with circulating rhetoric. Scholars and publics can use the concept of counteruptakes to develop circulation literacies that link patterns of rhetorical activity to

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broader ecologies of activist rhetoric and to the circulating narratives about how to engage in effective activism. AS RHETORICAL ACT I VI T Y EMERG ES and spreads quickly in distributed, networked contexts, activists and publics who wish to engage with this activity face the complex task of interpreting many intertwined texts and narratives. Circulation literacies show how genre and uptake provide opportunities to connect rhetorical patterns to ideologies and systems of power. As social media campaigns and metageneric discourse make public genre knowledge visible, they provide opportunities for rhetoricians, activists, and everyday people to examine narratives about social media activity and to reshape or revise circulating rhetorics in ways that respond to personal and collective values. These circulation literacies highlight the relational work of genre and uptake. Genre provides a lens for connecting rhetorical activity to collective and social processes. Uptake provides a framework for interpreting discourses about activism and intervening in those discourses. Together, genre and uptake knowledge can help rhetoricians and activists investigate the processes of interpreting social media texts, the reasons that some texts and interpretations resonate and spread, and the resources that people draw on as they encounter and respond to these circulating rhetorics. While the genres I focus on in this chapter involved contested relationships to activism, the processes of tracing generic links can also be used to explore how texts and ideas that are more clearly “activist” circulate among various publics and social movements.

Conclusion

A

lthough social media have transformed many communicative and political practices, including activist practices, in the past two decades, many public conversations about politics, activism, and social media are shaped by misunderstandings or inadequate frameworks. For example, conversations about activism on social media often focus on perceived effort instead of contextualized analysis of participants, goals, and resources. Likewise, the speed and reach of digital media have made many aspects of globalization more visible to public audiences, but stories about “global” activist projects often fail to engage with the complex relationships through which people and political projects are connected transnationally. Instead, these discussions often essentialize activists’ location at the expense of attention to other participation details. As rhetorical activity increasingly circulates transnationally among everyday audiences with different resources and positionalities, rhetoricians and activist publics need to foreground concepts and reading practices that highlight the complex relationships and strategies involved in this work. These circumstances highlight the importance of “activist literacies.” If literacies are practices that people use to “make sense of, negotiate, and contribute to their social, political, and cultural world,”1 activist literacies are practices that help audiences make sense of, negotiate, and contribute to social change. The literacies outlined in the preceding chapters can be used to explore the nuances of digital rhetoric while paying specific attention to transnational connectivities and power relationships. In this book, I have argued that careful examination of the circumstances and relationships within which people create and circulate activist rhetorics can lead to more nuanced interpretations of, and engagement with, digital and transnational activist projects. When people engage with activist work that crosses borders, a central concern should be about the kinds of connections being created rather than simply their existence or number. Activist literacies explore these interconnections in order to learn more about how activist rhetoric works. : 151 :

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The concepts and frameworks I have drawn on and developed call attention to the complexity of feminist and activist participation and the ways that activist work responds to (or neglects) transnational systems of power and oppression. This attention to the nature and effects of connections, and to questions about how the connections work in each direction, is helpful for understanding transnational feminism as well as activist work. In chapter 1, I use multilayered genre analysis and disidentification as frameworks for understanding how a specific activist campaign is shaped by, and speaks to, ideologies, rhetorical memories, and other activist work. Through these references to power relationships and collective phenomena, individual participants draw on and shape transnational conversations about gender and the 2011 uprisings. Multilayered genre analysis enables a focus on “situated formations of power”2 as well as situated modes of resistance. In chapter 2, reading for orientation explores the relationships among participants, locations, activities, and resources in two organizations that make similar claims about organizing girl-led movements. The framework reveals many differences between the two organizations as well as some discrepancies between the organizations’ activities and their claims. As a lens for exploring how people and activities are shaped by positions and relationships, orientation highlights the uneven connections between different people and places in transnational projects. In chapter 3, I examine metageneric discourse about a decentralized, networked social media genre. Through the lens of uptake, I show how participants drew on collective memories and ongoing conversations to critique #ChallengeAccepted and to redirect participation and attention through counteruptakes. These counteruptakes reveal the limits of the original critiques for facilitating transnational activism. The circulation of critiques and counteruptakes highlights the ways that social media discourses are shaped by “multidirectional connections between locales,”3 yet it also shows how power emerges within these circulating discourses. In the introduction to this book, I argued that if activism is defined as the process of working toward social change, then activists and researchers can distinguish among different activity that makes claims to activism by examining how that work is situated, directed, and collective. Each type of literacy in this book—literacies of positionality, orientation literacies, and circulation literacies—provides a lens for examining the situated, directed, and collective elements of activist rhetorics. Activism’s situatedness involves understanding how activist rhetorics are shaped by the relationships between specific people, resources, locations, histories, and ideologies. Each chapter situates the rhetorical and activist work of organizations and participants through concepts and frameworks that highlight these relationships. In chapter 1, I situate the work of the

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Uprising of Women in the Arab World (UWAW) through recursive consideration of the collective context and rhetorical ecologies connected to UWAW’s photo campaign. Attending to the historical context of the Arab uprisings, the rhetorical context of Arab women’s activist practices, and the generic context of activist self-portraits highlights participants’ nuanced and skillful engagement with circulating discourses and the campaign genre. The orientation framework outlined in chapter 2 offers another set of entry points for examining how activist work is situated. Reading for orientation allows rhetoricians and publics to evaluate a group’s claims about what they do in relation to knowledges developed by activists and transnational feminisms. For example, Girl Up and SPARK Movement both claim to be girl-led, but SPARK Movement’s work shows more evidence that their activities and priorities have been shaped by participants. Finally, my analysis of #ChallengeAccepted in chapter 3 shows that collective memories, ideologies, and circulating rhetorical activity shape the ways people take up social media genres. Examining sticky uptakes draws attention to the ways that this engagement is historically and ideologically situated. Counteruptakes highlight participants’ awareness of and engagement with this situatedness, though these counteruptakes do not necessarily always involve careful engagement with different groups of people and different locations. Activism’s directedness involves the ways that activist projects are directed toward various goals and audiences. In chapter 1, my analysis of the activist self-portrait genre created by the Uprising of Women in the Arab World shows how participants used genre and the campaign to position themselves in relation to rhetorics, movements, and ideologies. In particular, the campaign encouraged participants to disidentify with the 2011 Arab uprisings. Patterns in the genre show that participants used the genre to reject harmful ideologies and practices and to position themselves in connection with other activists, events, and practices. Finally, my analysis of comments shows that some audiences for UWAW’s work saw themselves as potential supporters of UWAW but failed to engage in the relational moves necessary for coalition or solidarity. In chapter 2, both Girl Up and SPARK Movement identify goals related to organizing girls globally. However, reading for orientation reveals differences in word choice, visual references, structure, and audience that distinguish between the two groups. Girl Up’s rhetoric often lacks analysis of power and their organizational structure maintains power differentials through the differential positioning of participants, whereas SPARK Movement’s rhetoric tends to acknowledge power more explicitly. In chapter 3, metageneric discourse shows that people used #Challenge Accepted’s language (challenge, empowerment, and support) and genre to interpret activist direction. Conversations about the campaign criticized it

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as self-centered and slacktivist, critiques that presume the campaign should be centered on other directions and tactics. Counteruptakes of the challenge drew on these criticisms and attempted to redirect the challenge and the attention it received toward different goals: amplifying conversations about Breonna Taylor and femicide in Turkey. These counteruptakes highlight the inadequacy of frameworks such as slacktivism for critiquing #Challenge Accepted. Finally, activism’s collectivity involves the ways that activist work involves both organized and social groups. As I explained in the introduction, discussions about feminism and activism have been grappling with changing understandings of and perspectives toward activist work. Scholars and activists have been increasingly interested in the role of individual activities, semi-public or behind-the-scenes activities, and small, everyday actions in activist work. Digital media make these conversations even more important: much scholarly and activist theorizing emphasizes the importance of collective effort to activism and social movements, but social media architectures often draw our attention to individual people or singular actions. In chapter 1, a multilayered genre analysis of UWAW’s photo campaign shows that the organizers and campaign participants drew on collective experiences, circulating genres, common themes, and other tactics to create self-portraits that positioned participants in relation to social groups and communal discussions. Reading the campaign in relation to other circulating discourses draws attention to the complex ways that the campaign positioned and engaged participants and audiences. In chapter 2, I use analysis of orientation to examine how projects that make claims about global work involve specific groups of people with varying relationships to one another and to the organization. For example, Girl Up’s work makes claims about uniting girls globally, yet only a small number of girls have the opportunity to engage with peers outside their own communities. Much of the organization’s rhetoric positions US participants differently despite claims that girls everywhere are the same. Identifying these groups and relationships is an important form of activist literacy with which to understand transnational rhetorics. Finally, when a collective conversation emerges from distributed activity, as in the case of #ChallengeAccepted, the circulating rhetorical activity can be overwhelming and difficult to trace. Through both metageneric discourse and uptake patterns, chapter 3 offers entry points for examining circulating rhetorics that aren’t clearly linked to a specific group. In addition, my analysis complicates narratives about #ChallengeAccepted by revealing patterns, gaps, and contradictions in this circulating rhetorical activity.

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M Y WORK in this book offers one set of entry points for examining activist rhetorics, though these are certainly not the only concepts or approaches that one could use to develop activist literacies. My approach highlights several productive avenues for future research. Methodologically, this book focused especially on public rhetoric that engaged or claimed to engage audiences across national boundaries, circulated on social media, and connected in some way with feminism and activism. I attempted to diversify the chapters by focusing on groups with different resources, origins, audiences, and goals. However, I did not exclusively choose groups that would fit circumscribed definitions of activism or whose work aligns with my own political goals and priorities. This choice provided me with opportunities to consider not just the activities of people who identify or are seen as activists, but also those of people who may not identify as activists but engage with activist work. Nevertheless, a more explicit focus on groups or people who see themselves as activist, or on examples more closely united in their ideological frameworks, would likely yield additional insights about activist rhetorics. A second avenue for building on the work in this book would be to supplement analysis of public rhetoric with interviews or observation. As my research and my own activist participation have progressed and changed, I have become increasingly cognizant of, and interested in, the ways that activist work exceeds what is publicly visible. A limitation of this project is that it does not allow greater insight into the processes of producing or engaging with these activist rhetorics. Methods that examine how participants describe or reflect on these projects and connect their participation to other aspects of their lives would yield important insights about how people develop and employ activist literacies. For example, a research project using the framework of orientation could usefully combine a reading of public rhetoric with interviews, focus groups, or observations that would most likely reveal that participants engage in complex negotiations as they encounter and contribute to an organization or movement such as Girl Up, SPARK Movement, or the Uprising of Women in the Arab World. The literacy frameworks that I develop in this book introduce methods and concepts that contribute to the academic and public need to understand how to analyze and participate in contemporary activist discourses. For scholars and students interested in public genres, methods such as multilayered genre analysis and concepts such as sticky uptake and counteruptake provide tools for analyzing genres that circulate across various social media platforms and among multiple publics. For scholars and students interested in transnational feminist rhetorics, the literacies in this book attend to the intricacies of rhetorical movement between local and global and among

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people located in various geographic places. That is, these frameworks move beyond celebrating the “transcendence” of space and borders toward critical engagement with how and why rhetoric travels.4 Likewise, these critical engagements with place and movement will be useful for scholars of digital rhetoric who are interested in the ways that digital rhetorics emerge, spread, and transform. A challenge that is common to both rhetorical and activist work is finding ways to assert agency within complex rhetorical assemblages and the invasive, pervasive systems of power and oppression that shape our world. In both academic and activist settings, I’ve observed a tendency for people to respond to conversations about activism and social movements by asking: was this campaign, project, or movement successful? I think this question comes from a good place, but I do not think it is the most helpful question to ask. Activists and social movements often undertake almost Sisyphean tasks. The very nature of systemic power and oppression makes the odds of overturning these systems unfavorable. Therefore, to look at activist projects and social movements through the lens of a summative overarching success or failure misses so much of the transformative activity and creative possibility that takes place within activist and movement rhetorics. The literacies in this book provide frameworks for identifying, understanding, and participating in this transformative and creative rhetorical activity. The value of these frameworks is that they cut across and weave together various scales of analysis to highlight patterns through which individual and collective activity is not extracted from nor immobilized by macrolevel processes but acts within and in relation to those processes. At the microlevel, literacies of positionality, circulation, and orientation highlight ways of understanding and enacting personal agency. Activists are embodied beings whose brains and nervous systems respond to our experiences of being able to act in the world or being shut down. To sustain motivation, avoid burnout, and contribute their love and labor to activism, individual activists need to see where, how, and why their words and actions can make a difference. At the mesolevel, groups need to sustain motivation and find possibilities for agency that draw on the work of individual participants as well as the relationships, interactions, and accumulations of a collective. I hope that the literacies in this book contribute to our understanding of collective achievement, agency, and the value of building relationships and communities through which people connect, heal, sustain, and flourish. Through frameworks such as orientation and sticky uptakes, these literacies explore how the narratives that we circulate about activist work shape collective understanding and engagement. At the macrolevel, these frameworks

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provide opportunities to recognize what power looks like and where it shows up in everyday rhetorical interactions. Each chapter provides frameworks for not just recognizing and critiquing institutional, cultural, and systemic manifestations of power, but also for thinking about how and where activist rhetorics uncover and resist those manifestations of power. The literacies in this book build on the work of scholars in transnational feminist studies, digital rhetoric and media studies, rhetorical genre studies, and activist rhetorics. They also build on a wide range of activist work, from the activists I engage with every day on social media, to the people I’ve protested with, to the people whose words and actions I’ve read about in my research. The literacies that have emerged from this work balance attentiveness to both situatedness and circulation and have much to offer scholars, students, and activists who wish to understand the complexity of activist rhetorics and movements. Activist literacies aren’t just for activists. Encouraging people to develop activist literacies is an important form of rhetorical education that can help everyday people navigate the complex, networked rhetorical assemblages in which we connect with others, learn about the world around us, and advocate for the ideas and practices that matter to us. New technologies and changing processes of connection mean that people are constantly surrounded by moving rhetorics, and activist literacies help us explore that movement. Rhetoric moves all around us. Activist literacies highlight how rhetoric moves and how movements engage rhetoric to transform and remake the world. My hope for this book is that it inspires you to find ways to move with and through rhetoric, to challenge and remake the world around you, and to be moved by the relationships you cultivate through this rhetorical movement.

NOTE S Preface 1. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 17–25. 2. Ibid., 20. 3. Kynard, “Teaching While Black,” 2. 4. Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 3. 5. See hooks, Feminist Theory, 6. 6. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others”; Vieira, “Writing about Others’ Writing”; Ghabra and Calafell, “Intersectional Reflexivity and Decolonial Rhetorics.” 7. Price, Mad at School, 101; Dolmage, “Mapping Composition” (cited in Price).

Introduction 1. Crockett, “The ‘Women’s March on Washington,’ Explained”; Lemieux, “Why I’m Skipping the Women’s March on Washington”; Adams, “To Every White Woman Attending the Women’s March.” 2. See, for example, Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; Mohanty, Feminism without Borders. I discuss some examples of these processes in chapter 2. 3. Lemieux, “Why I’m Skipping the Women’s March on Washington”; Crockett, “The ‘Women’s March on Washington,’ Explained.” 4. Dejean, “‘Million Women March Protest Was Appropriating Black Activism.” 5. Oliver, “Why I Do Not Support the Women’s March on Washington”; Lemieux, “Why I’m Skipping the Women’s March on Washington.” 6. Young, “Gender as Seriality,” 718. 7. Angela Davis, “Feminism and Activism” (speech, February Sisters 40th Anniversary Celebration at the University of Kansas, Lawrence Kansas, February 7, 2012). 8. See, for example, Smith-Spark, “Protesters Rally Worldwide in Solidarity with Washington March”; Ortiz and Silva, “Women’s Marches Held around the World.” 9. “Massive Women’s March Turnouts Prompt Change of Plans in D.C., Chicago,” CBS News; Kennealy, “More Than 1 Million Rally at Women’s Marches”; Bakhtian, “Women’s Marches, Occurring across Seven Continents”; Barr, “Women’s March London.” 10. Downes, “Females in the Middle East Show Solidarity with the Women’s March.” 11. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders; Grewal, Transnational America; Mack and Na’puti, “Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius.” 12. Pink “pussy” hats were knitted pink hats with cat ears that were taken up by Women’s March participants as a response to Donald Trump’s endorsement of sexual assault in a leaked 2005 Access Hollywood tape, in which he stated, “I just start kissing

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160 : Notes to Pages 5–11 them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything” (Mandler, “Please Stop Wearing Those Pussy Hats to Women’s Marches”). The creators of the hat intended to protest Trump’s comments and reclaim the word pussy. Since the hats were pink and associated with a term for genitalia, critics argued that the hats are racist and transphobic: “the pink pussyhat excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don’t have typical female genitalia and to women of color because their genitals are more likely to be brown than pink” (Shamus, “Pink Pussyhats”). For a more detailed discussion of the rhetoric and labor involved in the Pussyhat Project, see LeMesurier, “Searching for Unseen Metic Labor in the Pussyhat Project.” 13. Tetreault, “‘White Women Voted for Trump’.” 14. Dingo, Networking Arguments; Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric; Alouai, “Arabizing Vernacular Discourse.” 15. Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution.” 16. Baca, “Rethinking Composition, Five Hundred Years Later”; Gilyard and Banks, On African-American Rhetoric; Diab, Shades of Sulh. 17. Al-Khateeb, “Toward a Rhetorical Account of Refugee Encounters”; Vieira, “On the Social Consequences of Literacy.” 18. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean”; Miller, “What Can Automation Tell Us about Agency?”; Cooper, “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” 19. Marwick and boyd, “I Tweet Honestly.” 20. Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution.” 21. Royster, Traces of a Stream, 45. 22. Ibid., 46. 23. Ibid., 58–61. 24. Brandt and Clinton, “Limits of the Local,” 338. 25. Pritchard, Fashioning Lives, 24. 26. Brandt and Clinton, “Limits of the Local.” 27. Dingo, “Networking the Macro and Micro”; Yam, Inconvenient Strangers; AlKhateeb, “Toward a Rhetorical Account of Refugee Encounters.” 28. Dingo, Riedner, and Wingard, “Toward a Cogent Analysis of Power.” 29. Dingo, “Networking the Macro and Micro,” 548. 30. Yam, Inconvenient Strangers. 31. Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines; Licona and Chávez, “Relational Literacies and Their Coalitional Possibilities”; Riedner, Writing Neoliberal Values. 32. Morozov, “The Brave New World of Slacktivism.” 33. Morozov, “The Brave New World of Slacktivism”; Morozov, The Net Delusion, 190–91. 34. Tufekci, “#Kony2012, Understanding Networked Symbolic Action.” 35. #Kony2012 was a viral social media campaign produced by a charity called Invisible Children. The campaign was based on a 30-minute viral video that touted the transformative power of technology and told a story from the perspective of Jason Russell, the director and a white US-American, about violence in Northern Uganda perpetrated by a Christian terrorist group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (and its leader Joseph Kony). The video explicitly claimed that the reason for the ongoing violence was lack of awareness and proposed that the video and its audience could help “stop Kony” by making him a household name. The problems with the video are too extensive to detail here, but they include white

Notes to Pages 11–16 : 161

saviorism, an overly simplified narrative, a focus on US viewers and US military aid as the “solution” to this ongoing violence, and a set of neoliberal, consumerist, and ill-conceived actions for viewers to take, such as purchasing bracelets or putting up yard signs and posters with the campaign name (Kony 2012) on them. Unlike #Kony2012, which told a story about Uganda through the voice and perspective of a white charity worker from the United States, #BringBackOur Girls was a viral social media campaign started by activists within its country of focus (Nigeria). Nigerian activists formed a coalition whose leaders and spokespeople included Oby Ezekwesili, Hadiza Bala Usman, Maryam Uwais, Saudatu Mahdi, and others. #BringBackOurGirls was a response to the Nigerian government’s inaction after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 female students from a school in Chibok, Nigeria. The hashtag spread widely among politicians, celebrities, and everyday people on Twitter and other social media platforms. Many US celebrities and political figures (such as Ellen DeGeneres and US First Lady Michelle Obama) participated by sharing a photo of themselves holding a sign with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. Criticisms of #BringBackOurGirls were not typically directed at the work of Nigerian activists, but at the campaign’s circulation among global audiences. For example, many people shared oversimplified narratives about Nigeria and Boko Haram or encouraged intervention from US and European countries. 36. Cole, “The White Savior Industrial Complex.” 37. “activism, n. 3b,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 38. Ibid. 39. Cammaerts, “Activism and Media.” 40. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? x, xi–xiii. 41. Cooper, Fat Activism; Harris and Schwedler, “What Is Activism?”; Moghadam, “Transnational Feminist Activism and Movement Building.” 42. Bobel “‘I’m Not an Activist’”; Craddock, “Doing ‘Enough’ of the ‘Right’ Thing”; O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy, “Relational Activism.” 43. Bobel, “I’m Not an Activist”; brown, Pleasure Activism; Caouette, “Thinking and Nurturing Transnational Activism”; Harris and Schwedler, “What Is Activism?” 44. Activist Handbook, “Getting Started.” 45. “Introduction to Activism,” Permanent Culture Now. 46. Cited in Bobel, “I’m Not an Activist,” 147. 47. See brown, Pleasure Activism, 13. 48. Ibid. Other examples include Carruthers, Unapologetic; Flaherty, No More Heroes. 49. See, for example, Bobel, “I’m Not an Activist”; Martin, Hanson and Fontaine, “What Counts as Activism?”; Cortese, “I’m a ‘Good’ Activist, You’re a ‘Bad’ Activist.” 50. Cooper, Fat Activism, 81–82. 51. Carruthers, Unapologetic, 11–12. 52. See brown, Pleasure Activism; Cooper, Fat Activism. 53. Maher, Johnstonbaugh, and Earl, “‘One Size Doesn’t Fit All’.” 54. O’Shaughnessey and Kennedy, “Relational Activism”; Craddock, “Doing ‘Enough’ of the ‘Right’ Thing”; Maher et al., “One Size Doesn’t Fit All.” 55. Harris and Schwedler, “What Is Activism?”; Hodgson and Brooks, “Introduction: Activisms.” 56. Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries; Prashad, The Darker Nations. 57. Daou and Al-Saadi, Where to, Marie?

162 : Notes to Pages 16–28 58. Ransby, “Listening to the Ancestors.” 59. Bobel, “I’m Not an Activist”; Craddock, “Doing ‘Enough’ of the ‘Right’ Thing.” 60. Craddock, “Doing ‘Enough’ of the ‘Right’ Thing,” 150. 61. Haritaworn, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others, 12–23. 62. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere.” 63. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. 64. Ibid. 65. Maher et al., “One Size Doesn’t Fit All.” 66. Martin et al., “What Counts as Activism?” 79. 67. O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy, “Relational Activism,” 555. 68. Martin et al., “What Counts as Activism?” 79. 69. “Craddock, “Doing ‘Enough’ of the ‘Right’ Thing.” 70. Collected Authors (@tgirlinterruptd, @chiefelk, @bad_dominicana, @aurabogado, @so_treu, @blackamazon and @thetrudz), “This Tweet Called My Back.” 71. Pronouncing the letters “NDN” aloud sounds like the English word “Indian.” In “Q & A with Billy-Ray,” Billy-Ray Belcourt describes NDN as a term that “emerged during this most recent decade as Internet shorthand for Indigenous peoples to refer to themselves. I’ve also seen it used as an acronym to mean Not Dead Native, which is likely a refutation of stereotypical renderings of Indigenous peoples as dead or dying; for a long time that was one of the primary modes in which we were allowed to ‘appear’ in public life, especially in the media.” 72. Ibid. 73. Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 18. 74. Ibid., 191. 75. Quoted in Ruiz-Grossman, “You Don’t Have to March to Be in the Resistance.” 76. Cooper, Fat Activism, 94. 77. O’Shaughnessey and Kennedy, “Relational Activism,” 553. 78. Helou, “Women and Activism in the Arab World,” 13. 79. Martin et al., “What Counts as Activism?” 79. 80. See brown, Pleasure Activism; Carruthers, Unapologetic. 81. See hooks, Feminist Theory, 26. 82. Quoted in Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 367. 83. See, for example, Licona and Chávez, “Relational Literacies”; Lozano, Not One More!; Kahn and Lee, Activism and Rhetoric; Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. 84. See, for example, Riedner and Mahoney, Democracies to Come. 85. Moghadam, “Transnational Feminist Activism,” 56, 64. 86. Moghadam, “Transnational Feminist Activism”; Caouette, “Thinking and Nurturing Transnational Activism.” 87. See, for example, Baniya, “The Implications of Transnational Coalitional Actions and Activism in Disaster Response” and Roy, “Transnational Feminism and the Politics of Scale.” 88. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 89. Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society. 90. Delanda and Cox, “Possibility Spaces,” 92. 91. Ibid. 92. Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)”; Alexander and Jarratt, “Introduction.” 93. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.

Notes to Pages 28–37 : 163

94. Tr`ân, “Calling IN”; Ferguson, “Calling In.” 95. brown, We Will Not Cancel Us, 40. 96. See brown, We Will Not Cancel Us, for a much more in-depth, nuanced discussion of the uses and limits of call outs, including a thoughtful discussion of their relationship to different types of harm or conflict and the impact of “call out culture” on movements. 97. Nguyen, “How Social Justice Slideshows Took Over Instagram.” 98. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, vi–vii. 99. Friedman, “Pop Feminism Doesn’t Mean the End of the Movement.”

ONE Literacies of Positionality 1. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ خولة من اليمن‬/ Khawla from Yemen,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 14, 2012. Throughout this chapter, I quote many social media posts shared by a Facebook account called the Uprising of Women in the Arab World (UWAW). Participants submitted photos and messages to be shared by UWAW rather than posting photos from their individual accounts. This process likely drew participants’ attention to the public nature of their posts (something that distinguishes these posts from many other social media interactions), and the posts were shared across several platforms (Facebook, Flickr, and UWAW’s website). Many participants showed their attention to privacy and disclosure by modifying their posts to ensure that their identity wouldn’t be recognizable (e.g., by obscuring their face or not sharing a first name). Other participants showed their faces, were tagged in their photos, or weighed in on discussion of their post with their personal Facebook account. I read these variations in disclosure as an indication that participants viewed these posts as relatively public and assessed their own participation accordingly. However, because participants’ desire to speak publicly about their experiences might change over time and because this book draws attention to posts that are not likely to be viewed or circulated widely years later, I have chosen not to include screenshots of the posts I discuss. The modified screenshot here shows some examples of the photos. My intention in sharing a small, altered screenshot is to avoid sharing photos in which participants are recognizable. I have not used pseudonyms for the posts because they typically include first names only. I have used pseudonyms for the comments I discuss, since commenters may not have considered privacy as carefully as those who posted photos. 2. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ سارة من لبنان‬/ Sarah from Lebanon,” Facebook, photo and caption, April 19, 2013. 3. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ سلمى من مصر‬/ Salma from Egypt,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 14, 2012. 4. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ ياسمين من فلسطين‬/ Yasmine from Palestine,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 6, 2012. 5. My understanding of positionality and social location comes from Black feminist theory, especially the work of the Combahee River Collective and Patricia Hill Collins. 6. Muñoz, Disidentifications. 7. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “Why This Intifada.” Since this website is no longer maintained by UWAW, the best way to access this material is

164 : Notes to Pages 37–46 through archive.org. The original address (without http://) can be pasted into the archive.org search bar to find archived versions of the site. 8. O’Neill, “Female Facebook Revolution: Arab Women Rise up for Change.” 9. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “Why This Intifada.” 10. Ibid. 11. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫دبي‬/‫ هاجر من المغرب‬/ Hajar from Morocco/Dubai,” Facebook, photo and caption, March 24, 2013. 12. In Arabic, verbs addressed to a singular “you” can take a masculine or feminine form. “T‘alameen” is the feminine form, which is a linguistic way of presuming or prioritizing women as an audience of this campaign. 13. Alaoui, “Arabizing Vernacular Discourse,” 138; Alhassan, “Please Reconsider the Term ‘Arab Spring’”; Abusharif, “Parsing ‘Arab Spring’”; Khouri, “Arab Spring or Revolution?” 14. Abusharif, “Parsing ‘Arab Spring’”; Alessandrini, “The ‘Arab Spring’ Never Happened”; El-Mahdi, “Orientalising the Egyptian Uprising.” 15. Abusharif, “Parsing ‘Arab Spring’”; Khouri, “Arab Spring or Revolution?”; Alhassan, “Please Reconsider the Term ‘Arab Spring’.” 16. Khouri, “Arab Spring or Revolution?”; Alhassen, “Please Reconsider the Term ‘Arab Spring’.” 17. Alaoui, “Arabizing Vernacular Discourse,” 135; Abusharif, “Parsing ‘Arab Spring’,” 1–2. 18. Alaoui, “Arabizing Vernacular Discourse”; Benyoussef, “Gender and the Fractured Mythscapes of National Identity in Revolutionary Tunisia”; Mili, “Citizenship and Gender Equality in the Cradle of the Arab Spring.” 19. Hasso and Salime, “Introduction”; Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo. 20. Alaoui, “Arabizing Vernacular Discourse,” 136. 21. Hasso and Salime, “Introduction,” 3. 22. Ibid. 23. Benyoussef, “Gender and the Fractured Mythscapes of National Identity in Revolutionary Tunisia.” 24. Hasso, “The Sect-Sex-Police Nexus and Politics in Bahrain’s Pearl Revolution.” 25. Alaoui, “Arabizing Vernacular Discourse,” 114. 26. Ibid., 123. 27. Skalli, “Communicating Gender in the Public Sphere,” 36–37. 28. Dahlgren, “Making Intimate ‘Civilpolitics’ in Southern Yemen,” 80. Dahlgren explains that she uses “Southern Revolution” as an umbrella term to refer to “the Southern Movement (Hirak, literally ‘movement’) and multiple independent informal projects.” 29. Abbas, “Revolution Is Female.” 30. Hasso and Salime, “Introduction,” 8. 31. Galán, “Cautious Enactments,” 185. 32. Salime, “‘The Women Are Coming’,” 138–39. 33. Ibid., 144. 34. Galán, “Cautious Enactments,” 173. 35. Ibid., 174. 36. Salime, “‘The Women Are Coming’”; Hasso, “The Sect-Sex-Police Nexus and Politics in Bahrain’s Pearl Revolution”; Mourad, “The Naked Body of Alia”; Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo. 37. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 31.

Notes to Pages 46–59 : 165

38. Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening, 51. 39. Ibid., 52. 40. Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening, 49. 41. Interpellation describes the process through which a person develops their sense of self as a subject through ideology. Ideology—a process through which power is reproduced—assigns meaning and value to people and things. Interpellation refers to the ways that people internalize ideology and their position in relation to structures of power. When one recognizes oneself within the categories society has made available to them, they are taking up a role, an identity that positions them in relation to other people. Through interpellation, people adopt these ideological positions and roles and come to see those identities as who they are. These identities are collective, but they often function at an individual, psychological level. When people recognize their self within this milieu and act from that position, they have been interpellated by ideology. This positioning is socially constructed and reinforced by power relationships and material conditions. 42. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 5. 43. Ibid., 12. 44. Ghabra and Calafell, “Intersectional Reflexivity and Decolonial Rhetorics,” 66. 45. Miller and Shepherd, “Blogging as Social Action.” 46. Pahwa, “Politics in the Digital Boudoir,” 27. 47. Ibid., 46. 48. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11–12. 49. Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology; Papacharissi, “A Networked Selfie.” 50. Papacharissi, “A Networked Selfie.” 51. Tifentale and Manovich, “Selfiecity,” 118. 52. Eileraas, “Revolution Undressed,” 206. 53. Mourad, “The Naked Body of Alia,” 67. 54. Ibid., 74. 55. Salime, “‘The Women Are Coming’,” 145. 56. Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, #Hashtag Activism, 162. 57. Sheikh, “Here’s Why South Asian Women Are Uploading Photos of Themselves at Dhabas.” 58. Ansari, “Girls at Dhabas.” 59. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 65. 60. Ibid., 71. 61. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ سارة من لبنان‬/ Sarah from Lebanon,” Facebook, photo and caption, April 19, 2013. 62. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “/ ‫ فلسطينيين مقيميين في سوريا‬/ 11 ‫العمر‬ ‫ نجاتي و محمد ومحمود‬/ Najaty & Mohamad & Mahmoud / Palestinians residing in Syria, 11 years old,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 8, 2012. 63. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ دينا من مصر‬/ Dena from Egypt,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 28, 2012. This particular photo and caption were posted in English only with no Arabic translation. 64. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ رغيد من سوريا‬/ Ragheed from Syria,” Facebook, photo and caption, November 18, 2012. 65. Amar, “Middle East Masculinity Studies.” 66. Ibid., 38–39. 67. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “☺ ‫ برلين‬/ ‫ ماريا وريما من لبنان‬/ Maria & Rima from Lebanon / Berlin,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 15, 2012.

166 : Notes to Pages 59–66 With almost all of the posts in this chapter, I have used the Arabic and English text provided in the post itself, without editing the translations. This decision was, in part, because I noticed in my larger review of the campaign (i.e., comments or captions on some posts) that the post authors occasionally provided their own translations. Since it was not clear who the translator was on most posts, I did not have a way to check whether the translation was from the author, the group leaders, or audience members. If the translation was provided by the author, I did not want to adjust their words. Here, I’ve made a small adjustment to add “at all” to the English translation, since that part of the Arabic text was left out of the English text on Facebook. 68. Lamma bemchi ‘arrasif translates to “When I walk on the sidewalk.” 69. WALEEDAnO, “‫ ”لما بمشي عالرصيف بيلحقوني كلن كلن كلووون‬YouTube, May 15, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7MX_u3qjOw. 70. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “♥ ‫جهاد من األردن‬/ Jihad from Jordan,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 16, 2012. 71. Thank you to Kathryn Maude for pointing out the racialized language in this message. 72. Daryn Mary Howland’s master’s thesis (“Racist Capital: The Racialization of Migrant Labor under the Kafala System in Beirut”) describes the structures and economic processes that contribute to racialization and exploitation of migrant domestic workers in the case of Lebanon. Jordan’s labor laws are better on paper than Lebanon’s, but reports indicate that many of the same problems exist in practice (see, for example, Human Rights Watch, “Domestic Plight”). 73. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ دينا من مصر‬/ Dina from Egypt,” Facebook, photo and caption, November 9, 2012. 74. Ibrahim, “The Uprising of Arab Women.” 75. McKoy, “Y’all Call It Technical and Professional Communication, We Call It #ForTheCulture,” 28. 76. Mourad, “The Naked Body of Alia”; Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo. 77. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ حازم من سوريا‬/ Hazem from Syria,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 11, 2012. 78. Salime, “‘The Women Are Coming’,” 156. 79. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ شيمة من المغرب‬/ Chayma from Morocco,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 9, 2012. 80. “Morocco Amends Controversial Rape Marriage Law,” BBC News. 81. Galán, “Cautious Enactments.” 82. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “ ‫ دانا من سوريا‬/ Dana from Syria,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 21, 2012. 83. Mourad, “The Naked Body of Alia,” 74. 84. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “!‫ صورة رائعة لزينة من لبنان‬/ Great photo of Zeina from Lebanon,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 4, 2012. Arabic speakers will notice that there are some word-for-word differences between the Arabic and the English translation of it. I have retained the original translation provided on Facebook except for the word “me.” The English text on Facebook read “my body is mine”; after consulting with a couple of Arabic speakers, I have adjusted the translation to read “my body is me.” 85. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ راغدة من االردن‬/ Raghida from Jordan,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 6, 2012.

Notes to Pages 66–79 : 167

86. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ بهيجة من سوريا‬/ Bahija from Syria,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 24, 2012. 87. These performances of embodiment also call to mind processes of listening to and valuing the body as a source of knowledge in cultural rhetorics scholarship and the work of Indigenous activists. See, for example, Riley-Mukavetz, “Developing a Relational Scholarly Practice”; Mack and Na’puti, “‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius.’” 88. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics. 89. Salime, “‘The Women Are Coming’,” 149. 90. Thank you to Nicole Khoury for prompting me to engage more critically with the phrase “Arab world.” 91. This was prior to the introduction of multiple “reaction” options alongside the “like.” 92. See boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics,” 45. 93. Here, “like” and “share” refer to options on a Facebook post to click a link and “like” or “share” through Facebook’s architecture; this does not account for other places it might be shared as a link and not counted, including sharing it through Facebook’s chat/message system, which does not affect the share count, or taking a screenshot and sharing the screenshot, either within the application or through other messaging platforms. 94. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “‫ باكينام من مصر‬/ Bakinam from Egypt,” Facebook, photo and caption, May 21, 2013. 95. I have created pseudonyms for all commenters. 96. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, “ ‫ رهف من سوريا‬/ Rahaf from Syria,” Facebook, photo and caption, October 14, 2012. 97. For example, Indigenous activists in Canada have used transnational advocacy on behalf of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada to create a “boomerang effect” through which pressure from outside the nation-state influences national acknowledgment of ongoing colonial violence; see Nagy, “Transnational Advocacy for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” 98. Nish, “Rhetorical Genre and Digital Activism in the Pixel Project’s 16 for 16 Listicles”; Nish, “Spreadable Genres, Multiple Publics.”

TWO Differences That Matter 1. Haas, “Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.” 2. Dingo, Networking Arguments. 3. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 181 (emphasis in original). 4. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others”; Chávez, Queer Migration Politics; Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; Naber and Zaatari, “Reframing the War on Terror”; Puar, “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess”; Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. 5. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 11. 6. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 3. 7. Ibid., 65–66. 8. Queen, “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World,” 474.

168 : Notes to Pages 79–92 9. Ahmed, “Orientations,” 547. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 549, 554. 12. Here, I use “text” as a broad category encompassing a variety of digital and multimodal rhetorical activity that circulates on social media. 13. Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, xxiii–xxiv. 14. Dingo, “Networking the Macro and Micro,” 535. 15. Girl Up, “We Believe in the Power of Girls.” 16. Girl Up, “Club Starter Guide,” 2015, 3. 17. Ibid (emphasis in original). 18. L. Brown, “We’re Taking Back Sexy,” 65. 19. Jussel, “Teen Girls!” 20. SPARK Movement, “About.” 21. SPARK Movement. 22. SPARK Movement (@sparkmvmnt), Twitter, accessed October 4, 2018, https:// twitter.com/sparkmvmnt. 23. SPARK Movement (@sparkmvmnt), Facebook, accessed October 4, 2018, https:// twitter.com/sparkmvmnt. 24. SPARK Movement, “About.” 25. SPARK Movement, “SPARK Actions.” 26. The language of “developed” and “developing,” as descriptions of nations, as well as previous categorizations such as “first” and “third” world, has been criticized for suggesting that some nations are behind others in terms of historical progress rather than acknowledging the relationships of colonization, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation that have shaped differences between various people and places. These terms have been replaced in many contexts with the terms “Global North” and “Global South.” While Global North and Global South are often used to refer to entire nations in ways that replace previous terms, “Global South” is also used in some contexts to refer to a political positioning in which subjugated people develop transnational solidarity and resistance to capitalist globalization (see Mahler, “Global South”). Because language about development infuses Girl Up’s structure and rhetorical activity, I use the terms “developed” and “developing” in this chapter to describe the ways its work distinguishes among different places and people through those categories. I use quotation marks to signal to the reader that these are Girl Up’s terms, not mine. 27. Girl Up, “Club Starter Guide,” my emphasis. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. Bent, “A Different Girl Effect,” 14–16; Switzer, Bent, and Endsley, “Precarious Politics and Girl Effects,” 39; Sensoy and Marshall, “Missionary Girl Power,” 296. 30. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders. 31. Yam, Inconvenient Strangers, 4. 32. Bent, “A Different Girl Effect,” 7–8. 33. SPARK Movement, “About.” 34. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” 35. Lorde, “The Uses of Anger” 285. 36. SPARK Movement, “About.” 37. SPARK Movement, “SPARK Actions.”

Notes to Pages 94–112 : 169

38. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 112–20. 39. Nish, “Transnational Feminist Publics.” 40. Girl Up, “Teen Advisors Overview.” 41. Rios, “10 Things I’ve Learned at WiSci Girls STEAM Camp in Malawi.” 42. Girl Up and Promise Chipeta, “Meet Promise, 2017 WiSci STEAM Camper from Malawi.” 43. Riedner, Writing Neoliberal Values, 6. 44. Nish, “Transnational Feminist Publics.” 45. Nowell, “Subverting Science—and Fighting Sexism—with Girl Power.” 46. SPARK Movement, “About.” 47. Ibid.; SPARK Movement, “The SPARKteam.” 48. For an overview of this phenomenon in contemporary feminist movements, see Mack and Na’puti’s review of the ways that #MeToo discourses have reflected colonial power relations in “‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius,’” 348. 49. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 7. 50. Shahvisi, “Feminism as a Moral Imperative in a Globalised World,” 8. 51. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 7. 52. Girl Up, “Resources.” 53. Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, 5. 54. Haas, “Race, Rhetoric, and Technology”; Suchman, “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production.” 55. Suchman, “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production,” 96 (emphasis added). 56. Girl Up. “When Girls Rise, We All Rise.” 57. SPARK Movement, “Women on the Map.” 58. Dingo, “Speaking Well”; Ryder, “Beyond Critique.” 59. Grewal, Transnational America, 59, 143, 153; Naples, “Changing the Terms,” 5–6. 60. Girl Up, “Meet Our Squad.” 61. Obama, “Remarks by The First Lady at The Girl Up Leadership Summit”; Ice, “Mrs. Obama Shares a Special Message with the Girl Up Summit.” 62. Girl Up, “120 Girls to Participate in the First-ever WiSci Girls STEAM Camp.” 63. Girl Up, “Our Success”; Girl Up, “Senator Durbin’s Statement on Child Marriage and Passing of VAWA.” 64. Shahvisi, “‘Women’s Empowerment.’” 65. Ibid. 66. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s Global Gag Rule in January 2021. 67. Shahvisi, “‘Women’s Empowerment.’” 68. Jad, “The ‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements”; INCITE! The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. 69. Jad, “The ‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements,” 38. 70. INCITE! The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. 71. Smith, “Introduction,” 1–2. 72. INCITE! “Points of Unity with the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination.” 73. Hodžić, “Feminist Bastards”; Alvarez, “Beyond NGOization?” 74. De Lauretis, “Feminism and Its Differences”; Scott, “Feminism’s History.” 75. Powell, “Stories Take Place”; Strickland, The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies. 76. Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 99.

170 : Notes to Pages 114–131 THREE Activist Genre Knowledge 1. As I discuss later in the chapter, the invitations were often circulated through direct messages, but they also circulated publicly in social media posts, blog posts, and other discourse about the challenge. The one I received, for example, was reproduced in public social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as in blog posts, forums, and online magazines. 2. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” 159. 3. Ibid., 151. 4. Reiff and Bawarshi, “Tracing Discursive Resources.” 5. Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 104. 6. Phillips, “Performative Allyship Is Deadly.” 7. Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, xiii, xxiii, 75. 8. The use of “performative” in this context refers to acts that are self-serving and virtue-signaling, rather than deep, genuine engagement with an issue or movement. As the following discussion will show, “performative” does not always carry negative connotations. 9. Nish, “Spreadable Genres, Multiple Publics.” 10. Green, “Speech Acts.” 11. Freadman, “Uptake,” 48. 12. Emmons, “Uptake and the Biomedical Subject,” 140; Bastian, “Capturing Individual Uptake.” 13. Dryer, “Disambiguating Uptake.” 14. Reiff and Bawarshi, “Tracing Discursive Resources.” 15. Nguyen, “How Social Justice Slideshows Took over Instagram.” 16. Emmons, “Uptake and the Biomedical Subject,” 136. 17. Bastian, “Disrupting Conventions,” 58–59. 18. Gilyard and Banks, On African-American Rhetoric, 91. 19. Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer, 50. 20. Bawarshi, “Taking Up Language Differences in Composition,” 653. 21. Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 92. 22. Olwan, “On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms,” 97. 23. Ibid., 100. 24. Norris, “The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement”; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. 25. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 237. 26. Norris, “The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement.” 27. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 45. 28. Ibid., 46 (emphasis in original). 29. Bawarshi, “Between Genres,” 46. 30. Ibid., 49–50. 31. LeMesurier, “Uptaking Race,” 16. 32. Ibid., 20. 33. Lorenz, “‘Challenge Accepted’”; Karlis, “Scrutinizing the #ChallengeAccepted Meme”; Nguyen, “The Complicated Origin of Instagram’s #ChallengeAccepted”; Rodriguez and Gralki, “What’s the Real Story Behind those #ChallengeAccepted Photos on Instagram?”

Notes to Pages 131–136 : 171

34. Alexandra, “‘Empowerment’ Selfies Are Burying a Turkish Women’s Rights Campaign”; Barbour, “Everything You Never Wanted to Know about That Controversial Black-and-White Selfie Challenge”; Eler, “For Turkish Women Artists and Advocates, #ChallengeAccepted Is About More Than Just Selfies”; Fenwick, “What Is the Challenge Accepted Trend on Instagram?”; Haufrect, “#ChallengeAccepted Selfies by Women, I Call Your Bluff”; Karlis, “Scrutinizing the #Challenge Accepted Meme”; Lampen, “ What Is ‘Challenge Accepted,’ Exactly?”; Rogin, “Behind the #ChallengeAccepted Campaign”; von Cohen. “Is the #Challenge Accepted Trend Simply a Miss Instagram Pageant or Something More?”; Young, “Challenge Accepted.”. 35. Nguyen, “The Complicated Origin of Instagram’s #ChallengeAccepted”; von Cohen, “Is the #ChallengeAccepted Trend Simply a Miss Instagram Pageant or Something More?”; Eler, “For Turkish Women Artists and Advocates, #Challenge Accepted Is About More than Just Selfies.” 36. Attiah, “The #ChallengeAccepted Trend.” 37. Lorenz, “‘Challenge Accepted’”; “#ChallengeAccepted Sees Women across the Globe.” 38. Attiah, “The #ChallengeAccepted Trend”; Eler, “For Turkish Women Artists and Advocates, #ChallengeAccepted Is About More than Just Selfies”; Jepsen, “What Is ‘Challenge Accepted’?” 39. Young, “Challenge Accepted.” 40. Enthoven, “The Instagram #ChallengeAccepted and How to Make Your Own.” 41. Haufrect, ““#ChallengeAccepted Selfies by Women, I Call Your Bluff.” 42. Giltrow, “Meta-Genre.” 43. Attiah, “The #ChallengeAccepted Trend”; O’Malley, “Challenge Accepted”; Sternlicht, “#ChallengeAccepted”; Young, “Challenge Accepted.” 44. Foody, “Women Embrace #ChallengeAccepted, but Some Ask.” 45. Nguyen, “The Complicated Origin of Instagram’s #ChallengeAccepted.” 46. Miller and Shepherd, “Blogging as Social Action”; Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology; Tifentale, “The Selfie: Making Sense of the ‘Masturbation of Self-Image’ and the ‘Virtual Mini-Me.’” 47. Tifentale and Manovich, “Selfiecity”; Tifentale, “The Selfie: More and Less Than a Self-Portrait.” 48. Tifentale, “More and Less.” 49. Bruno et al., “‘Selfies’ Reveal Systematic Deviations from Known Principles of Photographic Composition”; Tifentale and Manovich, “Selfiecity”; Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology; “selfie, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 50. Losh, “Beyond Biometrics”; Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology; Tiidenberg, Selfies. 51. In her dissertation research on self-care practices of fat activists, Janene Amyx Davison found that some activists took selfies just for themselves, which she characterized as a form of “self-talk” that contributed to the process of valuing and caring for their bodies: Davison, “Vulnerable Entanglements,” 210–11. 52. Losh, “Beyond Biometrics.” 53. Tifentale and Manovich, “Selfiecity”; Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology; Tiidenberg, Selfies. 54. Tiidenberg, Selfies. 55. On misogyny and selfies, see Burns, “Self(ie)-Discipline”; for examples of misogynist

172 : Notes to Pages 137–146 critiques of selfies, see Ryan, “Selfies Aren’t Empowering”; Wallop, “Selfies—How the World Fell in Love with Itself.” 56. Burns, “Self(ie)-Discipline.” 57. Giroux, “Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State Surveillance.” 58. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 59. von Cohen, “Is the #ChallengeAccepted Trend Simply a Miss Instagram Pageant or Something More?” 60. Izzo, “If You Posted a Black and White Selfie for #ChallengeAccepted You Need to Pull Up.” 61. Bakan and Saluk, “Challenge Accepted?”; von Cohen, “Is the #ChallengeAccepted Trend Simply a Miss Instagram Pageant or Something More?”; Lorenz, “‘Challenge Accepted.’” 62. Lorenz, “‘Challenge Accepted.’” 63. Nguyen, “The Complicated Origin of Instagram’s #ChallengeAccepted.” 64. “Bakan and Saluk. “Challenge Accepted?” 65. Eler, “For Turkish Women Artists and Advocates, #ChallengeAccepted Is About More Than Just Selfies.” 66. Ibid. 67. Attiah, “The #ChallengeAccepted Trend.” 68. Haufrect, “#ChallengeAccepted Selfies by Women, I Call Your Bluff.” 69. Eler, “For Turkish Women Artists and Advocates, #ChallengeAccepted Is About More than Just Selfies.” 70. von Cohen, “Is the #ChallengeAccepted Trend Simply a Miss Instagram Pageant or Something More?” (emphasis in original). 71. Haufrect, “#ChallengeAccepted Selfies by Women, I Call Your Bluff.” 72. Thomas and Agyemang, “About.” 73. Lorenz, “‘Challenge Accepted.’” 74. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 67. 75. For discussions of activism and advocacy about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people, see Mack and Na’puti, “‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius’”; Presley, “Embodied Liminality and Gendered State Violence”; Pyle, “‘Women and 2spirits’.” 76. See, for example, Richards, “Here’s Why Women Are Posting Black and White Photos of Themselves for #ChallengeAccepted”; “#ChallengeAccepted”; Youn, “Hesitant to Post a Black-and-White Selfie on Instagram?” 77. As a collective practice, these circulating examples of one-upmanship can be connected to African American rhetorical traditions such as signifyin’ and call-andresponse. See, for example, Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin; Gilyard and Banks, On African-American Rhetoric (especially chapter 6, “Rhetoric and Black Twitter”). 78. Young, “Memes Are Robbing Breonna Taylor of Her Story.” 79. See, for example, Kaba and Ritchie, “We Want More Justice for Breonna Taylor Than the System That Killed Her Can Deliver.” Kaba and Ritchie’s article acknowledges the importance of accountability for the three officers involved in Taylor’s murder yet also argues for the importance of finding accountability outside of the police and prison system. The authors acknowledge that “individuals, families, and communities—including Breonna’s—are entitled to decide on their own paths for justice—including seeking justice in courts and criminal punishment.” However, they argue that this path will ultimately lead to disappointment because the system remains intact.

Notes to Pages 146–156 : 173

80. Romano, “‘Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor’.” 81. Minutaglio, “Instagram’s ‘Women Supporting Women’ Challenge Inadvertently Brings Awareness to Turkish Femicide.” 82. Eler, “For Turkish Women Artists and Advocates, #ChallengeAccepted Is About More Than Just Selfies.” 83. Attiah, “The #ChallengeAccepted Trend.” 84. Izzo, “If You Posted a Black and White Selfie for #ChallengeAccepted You Need to Pull Up.” 85. This post was made by a person whose Instagram account has more than 5,000 followers and is one of several social media accounts focused on her knitting business. She positions herself as a blogger and vlogger and sells knitted items and patterns that she promotes along with other knitting-related content. Her platform primarily posts knitting-related images and directs followers to her YouTube channel, where she has over 17,000 subscribers and a paid membership option, though like many people who use social media to earn money, she occasionally posts material about her daily life and personal reflections. I took this information about her audience into account when deciding whether to discuss this example, because I know that many of the public social media posts I viewed may have been from people who did not expect a wide audience for their work. However, I have chosen not to use her Instagram handle in order to protect her privacy. 86. Bakan and Saluk, “Challenge Accepted?” 87. Ibid. This process of erasure through references to the nation-state also resonates with scholarship on Indigenous and Native feminisms and activisms that draw attention to ongoing settler colonial violence in nation-states such as the United States and Canada, which is often either erased in scholarly and public conversations about gender and justice or perpetuated by White feminist theory and practice. For examples of this scholarship, see Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism”; Simpson, “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-Resistance” and As We Have Always Done; Mack and Na’puti, “Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius.”

Conclusion 1. Pritchard, Fashioning Lives, 24. 2. Tambe, “Transnational Feminist Studies,” 1. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. Fernandes, Transnational Feminism in the United States, 21.

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I NDE X accessibility: of tactics and forms of participation, 10, 16–17, 18–19, 20–21, 43, 137; of texts, 29, 60, 121 accountability, 15, 22, 101, 146, 172n79 activism: activities of organizations, 83–84; author’s perspective, xi–xviii; 14, 23–24, 29–30; and collective engagement, 14–15; collectivity, 14, 22, 44, 154; definitions of, 12–14; directedness, 22, 153; entry points, 21, 29; heritage and history, 15–16, 23; and inclusivity, 18; and rhetorical genres, 116–19; situatedness, 21–22, 152; stereotypes of activists, 16–17; uptake and activist participation, 121–23; value of, 156–57 “Activist Handbook,” 13 activist literacies: definitions of, 5, 8, 151 agency: of activists 40, 94, 111, 156; in rhetorical scholarship 5, 9, 17, 61, 124 Agyemang, Brianna, 142 Ahmed, Sara, 28, 77–78, 79, 94, 98, 127–28 Alaoui, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi, 40, 41–42 Alcoff, Linda, xiv–xv, 99 Alexander, Jonathan, 28 #AllMenCan, 52 Al Sharif, Manal, 61 Amar, Paul, 59 Amplification, 33, 61, 62, 64, 113, 137, 147, 148–49, 154: and disidentification, 58; McKoy’s theory of, 61 “Arab Spring,” critique of term, 40, 42 Arab uprisings (2011), 40–45, 51, 61. See also Uprising of Women in the Arab World (UWAW) photo campaign archival function: of digital texts, 92, 139; of social media, 38–39, 61; of uptake memories, 126 assemblages: definition of, 24–25; mapping of assemblages, 28, 30; social media archive, 126; Women’s March as assemblage, 25–28

Atta, Muhammad, 59 audience: of activism, 7, 17, 22, 33, 38–39, 45, 71–72, 100, 124, 142, 148, 153; of Girl Up, 92, 95–97; and genre, 117, 121, 124, 128; and orientation, 84, 93, 100; on social media, 6, 11, 49, 124, 137, 142, 144; of SPARK Movement, 89, 92, 104; of UWAW, 38–39, 52–53, 58–59, 61, 63, 68–74 Austin, J. L., 120 Bakan, Ronay, 149 Bakdounis, Dana, 63–64, 67 Baker, Ella, 16, 17, 127 Banks, Adam, 124 Barqawi, Farah, 37 Başöz, Sena, 139 Bastian, Heather, 124 Baumgardner, Jennifer, 13 Bawarshi, Anis, 118, 124–25, 128 Benyoussef, Lamia, 41, 42 Black Feminist Thought (Collins), 29 Black Lives Matter, 16, 27, 122, 126, 130, 145–46 #Blackout Tuesday, 131, 141–42 Blair, Ezell, Jr., 127 Bouazizi, Tarek Mohamed, 59 boyd, danah, 69 Brandt, Deborah, 8 #BringBackOurGirls, 11, 52, 131, 160–61n35 brown, adrienne maree, 13–14, 28–29 Burns, Anne, 136 Calafell, Bernadette Marie, 47 calling in and calling out, 28–29 Carruthers, Charlene, 14–15 #ChallengeAccepted: author’s experience, 114–16; counternarrative to, 139; counteruptakes, 143–50; critiques of slacktivism, 140–43; and genre knowledge, 129–31; language of invitation,

: 191 :

192 : Index #ChallengeAccepted: (continued) 131–32, 170n1; and sticky uptake, 134–43; and uptake, 129–34 circulation: in assemblage theory, 25; and attention, 68–74; circulation literacies, 31, 116, 119, 129, 134, 142, 150, 152; and power dynamics, 15; and reterritorialization, 27; on social media, 5, 6, 11, 44, 47, 78, 114, 146; of uptakes, 125, 126, 133; UWAW photo campaign, 30, 52. See also sharing Clinton, Katie, 8 coalition: Girl Up, 88; importance of, 9; and personal narrative, 47; SPARK Movement, 82, 92, 99; transnational, 63, 66, 68, 72–73. See also solidarity Cole, Teju, 11 collective context: questions for multilayered genre analysis, 35–36; UWAW’s photo campaign, 42, 44–45, 153 collectives, building, 118–19 Collins, Patricia Hill, 29 community: activism and transformation, 18–19, 22; among girl activists, 80, 81, 82, 85; relationality, 17; social media and community-building, 42, 48, 50, 69 connectivity: frameworks of, 5–7, 9, 24; and network-building, 61 “context collapse,” 6 Cooper, Charlotte, 14, 21 counterpublics, 143–44 counteruptakes, 31, 130, 134, 138, 143–49, 152–53, 154 Craddock, Emma, 17, 19 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 90–91 critique, process of, 2–5, 9, 11, 27–28, 130, 133–37, 140–41 Dahlgren, Susanne, 43 Davis, Angela, 3 DeLanda, Manuel, 26 Deleuze, Gilles, 25, 26, 28 deterritorialization, 26–27 difference: among feminist activists, 4, 76, 83–84, 93–95, 99, 112; among women, 66; language differences, 72–73, 99–100; in power, 8, 72, 94, 101, 107, 126 Dingo, Rebecca, 8–9 discourse: counterdiscourse, 143; and

disidentification, 47; feminist discourse, 5; metageneric discourse, 31, 129, 133–34, 138, 139, 142, 146, 153, 154; networked discourse, 45, 130; political discourse, 20, 42, 48; public discourse regarding activism, 7, 9, 41, 42–43, 56, 59, 67, 127–28, 136–37, 144, 149–50 disidentification, 34–35, 45–49, 54–55, 74 Disidentifications (Muñoz), 54 Dryer, Dylan, 121 Duggan, Lisa, 13 Durbin, Dick, 109 Earl, Jennifer, 18 Eler, Alicia, 139 El Khawaja, Zeinab, 61 Elmahdy, Aliaa Magda, 51, 62, 64 El Saadawi, Nawal, 71 embodied identities, 34, 38, 41, 47, 65, 66 embodied performances, 44, 55, 167n87 embodied rhetoric, 33, 41, 51, 61, 64–66, 127 Emmons, Kimberly, 120, 124 English language, hegemony, and inclusion, 72–73, 99–100 Facebook: and girl activist groups, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92, 100; and local protests, 121–22; sharing feature, 69; and Women’s March, 1. See also Uprising of Women in the Arab World (UWAW) photo campaign Fairey, Shepard, 25 Fat Activism (Cooper), 21 February 20 Movement (Morocco), 44, 51 feminism: definition of, 23 Feminism Is For Everybody (hooks), xvii Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (hooks), 23 Filali, Amina, 62–63 Flickr, 37, 38 Fontaine, Danielle, 18 Foody, Kathleen, 134 Fraser, Nancy, 143 Freadman, Anne, 120 funding, influence of, 110–12 Galán, Susana, 43–44 genre: activist genres, 5–7, 116–19; stereotypes, 135–38

Index : 193 genre analysis: circulation and attention, 36, 68–72; collective context, 35, 36, 44–45; multilayered framework, 30, 34–35; genre patterns, 53–57; questions for, 35–36; situating a genre, 35–36, 52–53 genre knowledge, 31, 56, 116–18, 119, 121, 123, 129–130, 142. See also counteruptakes; sticky uptakes; See also under circulation literacies genre theory: genre chains, 131; “spreadable genres,” 120, 124; definitions of, 116–17; and uptake, 119–129 Ghabra, Haneen Shafeeq, 47 Giltrow, Janet, 133 Gilyard, Keith, 124 Girl Up: activities engaged in, 84–89; background and overview, 80–81; celebrity support for, 108; developed/ developing nations divide, 85–88, 94–97, 103–4, 106, 109, 168n26; languages used, 99–100; location, importance of, 102–4; participants and relationships, 94–97; resources, 108–9; social media activity, 86–88; website, 86–87, 88–89; WiSci STEAM camps, 89, 95–96, 108 Giroux, Henry, 137 Global Gag Rule, 110 globalization: and importance of location, 100–102, 105–7; resistance to, 168n26; and rhetorical practices, 5–7; and transnational activism, 6, 24 Global South: as focus of Girl Up, 85–86, 95, 96, 168n26; need for funding, 110 Guattari, Félix, 25, 26, 28 Gültekin, Pınar, 139, 147–48, 149 Haas, Angela, 101 Haidar, Diala, 37 Hanson, Susan, 18 Haritaworn, Jin, 17 Hasso, Frances, 41, 42, 43 Hatcher, Paris, 15 Haufrect, Sarah, 141 “He for She” campaign, 52 hooks, bell, 23, 29, xvii How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 120 Ibrahim, Samira, 61, 62

identification, 34–35, 39, 41, 45–47, 48–49, 53, 55–56, 74, 115, 124, 144 identity: activist identity, 17; identity performances, 49, 58, 124; negotiation of, 42, 46, 48–49, 119; and subjectivity, 118 ideology: and activism, 41, 44, 152–53; and disidentification, 47–48, 58, 165n41; and genre, 34, 35–47, 116–17, 119–20, 125, 128–29, 134, 139, 142–43, 149–50; and orientation, 77, 79, 84; in UWAW campaign, 57–60, 65 images, 44, 86–91, 103, 134–36, 138–39, 144. See also photography; visual rhetoric INCITE!, 111 individual: and collectives, 22, 29, 30, 33–34, 39, 47–48, 53–55, 74, 78, 118–19, 124–25, 154; connections between, 42– 44, 50, 53–55; contributions to activism, 18, 20, 22, 34, 44, 47, 53–55, 154, 156; and definitions of activism, 14–15, 18 Instagram: #ChallengeAccepted, 114, 129, 130–131, 133–35, 137, 138, 144, 145, 148; critiques of, 141; disidentification, 74; and uptakes, 123 intersectionality, 41, 52, 89, 90, 99, 112, 149: and critique, 5; explanation of, 90–91; and location, 101, 105, 106 Izzo, Alison, 137 Jad, Islah, 111 James, Joy, 23 Jarratt, Susan, 28 Johnstonbaugh, Morgan, 18 Kalb, Bess, 114 Karman, Tawakkol, 61, 62 Kennedy, Emily Huddart, 17, 18 Khan, Nadine, 61 Khatri, Sadia, 52 #Kony2012, 11, 160–61n35 Lakshmi, Padma, 145 language difference, 72–73, 99–100 LeMesurier, Jennifer, 128–29 literacy, definition of, 7–8 locations, historical and geographical, 100–107; social, 10–11, 30, 34, 38–39, 46–47, 49, 56–60, 78 Lorde, Audre, 90–91, 112

194 : Index Lorenz, Taylor, 138, 141, 142 Maher, Thomas V., 18 Mallory, Tamika, 2 Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Baumgardner & Richards), 13 Marquez, Beatriz Aldana, 138 Martin, Deborah G., 18 McCain, Franklin, 127 McKoy, Temptaous, 61 McNeil, Joseph, 127 metagenre, 31, 126, 129, 134, 139, 142, 146, 149–50 macrolevel: See microlevel microlevel: microaggressions, 20; “micro fat activism,” 14; microresistance, 44; rhetorical practices, 8–9, 14, 46–47, 156; as linked to macrolevel, 8–9, 34, 36, 44, 46–47, 53, 73, 156 Miller, Carolyn, 48, 116, 117 Moghadam, Valentine, 13, 24 Mohanty, Chandra, 99 Morozov, Evgeny, 9–10, 11 Mourad, Sara, 51, 64 Movement for Black Lives, 130, 145, 146 Muñoz, José Esteban, 46–47, 48, 54–55, 56, 58 Murkus, Amal, 61 Nagar, Richa, 100, 104 narratives: counternarratives, 139; histories and public narratives, 16; media narratives, 3, 147–49; personal narratives, 47, 61, 95–96, 97; on social media, 3, 52, 137; and uptakes, 116, 126, 143. See also story neoliberalism, 11, 13, 95–96 networking arguments, 8–9 networks: linkages within, 125; of resources, 111; social networks, 22, 29, 33, 67 NGOization of activist organizations, 110–11 Nguyen, Terry, 134 nonprofit industrial complex, 110–11 Olwan, Dana, 126–27 On African American Rhetoric (Gilyard & Banks), 124

oppression: gender-based, 2, 22–23, 45, 80, 86, 99, 105–6; identification and disidentification, 46–48, 58; and intersectionality, 66–67, 90–91, 92; of Palestinians, 63; and systems of power, 2, 7, 8–9, 14, 28, 34, 76, 84, 93, 112, 156; transnational, 8–9, 11, 42, 73, 80, 86, 99, 101, 105, 106, 147, 149, 152; and UWAW, 37, 42, 45, 53, 56, 64 orientation frameworks, 75–80; and frameworks of relationality, 78; and location, 100–102; participants and relationships in groups, 93–94; and resources, 107–8. See also Girl Up; SPARK Movement O’Shaughnessy, Sara, 17, 18 Pahwa, Sonali, 48 Papacharissi, Zizi, 50 Peoples, Angela, 5 Perez, Carmen, 2 performance: of disidentification, 34, 46, 47–48, 55, 74; embodied, 44, 47, 55; and genre, 118, 128, 143, 149; networked, 33–34, 42, 45, 47, 53, 58–59, 74, 149; self-performance, 33, 39, 46, 53, 58; selfportraiture as performance, 50–53, 135 performative allyship, 119, 142, 148 performative utterances, 120, 170n8 personal, as site of political work, 43–44, 47–48, 52; social media’s emphasis on, 55. See also individual; private “Permanent Culture Now,” 13 photography: amateur contrasted with professional, 91, 135–36; nude photos, 64; portraiture and disidentification, 54–55; rhetorical function, 54; selfies, 49–53, 55, 134–39, 144; on social media, 139; UWAW’s Facebook campaign, 39, 54 Pleasure Activism (brown), 13–14 positionality: background and overview, 34, 78; and #ChallengeAccepted, 137–38, 146–48; and genre knowledge, 118, 123–24; literacies of, 36, 44, 48, 53, 58, 64, 71, 73–74; and orientation, 78 power: and colonialism, 16, 41, 47, 51, 52, 54, 106, 149; differences in power, 8, 72, 94, 101, 126; and disidentification, 46–48; gendered power relationships, 17; global power dynamics, 9, 11, 21, 38,

Index : 195 76; and imperialism, 11, 16, 72, 110; and oppression, 78, 93; power analysis, 13, 22, 153; power relationships, 2, 17, 100, 128, 152; systems of power, 6–7, 34, 53, 73, 76, 112, 128, 152 Pritchard, Eric Darnell, 8 private, public and 6, 16, 21, 29, 44, 50. See also personal privilege: gender privilege, 19, 58; and participation in activism, 16, 17, 85–86, 96, 99, 106, 128; and participation in social media campaigns, 11, 68, 138; and Women’s March, 2 protest, 27, 38, 40, 69, 126; and girl activism, 91; local protests, 121–22; protest signs, 118; and use of social media, 44, 51, 157 publics: Arab public sphere, 51, 68; counterpublics, 143–44; and public discourse, 7, 9, 41, 42–43, 56, 59, 67, 127–28, 136–37, 144, 149–50; public sphere activity, 18, 46, 50; Squires’ typology of publics, 17 pussy hats, 26–27, 159–160n12 Qaddafi, Muammar, 59 Queen, Mary, 78–79 Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed), 77 race: and definitions of activism, 16–19; and counteruptakes of #ChallengeAccepted 145–46; and genre, 128–29; orientalism in comments on UWAW campaign, 66; orientation and race, 79, 93, 94; racialized portrayals of Arab masculinity, 58–59; racialization of domestic labor, 60; racism within feminism, 78, 99; racist responses to activism, 70–72, 148–49; and selfies, 138; and the Women’s March, 2, 5; See also intersectionality Ransby, Barbara, 16, 17, 127 Reagan, Ronald, 110 Reiff, Mary Jo, 118, 125 “relational activism,” 18 relationality: and activism, 14–17, 20, 21–22, 118–19, 141, 153; and assemblages, 26; and genre knowledge 118–19; O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy’s concept, 18; and orientation, 77–78; and rhetorical scholarship, 8–9; and selfies, 136; and

uptake, 120–24; and UWAW, 50, 73. See also connectivity resources: importance of, 107–12; lack of, 17; redistribution of, 13; and systems of power, 73, 76, 85, 91, 96 reterritorialization, 26–27 Rettberg, Jill Walker, 50 rhetorical situation: analysis of, 5–6, 21–22, 24, 116–118, 137; and disidentification, 56; and genre, 116–18, 126–27, 136–37; of social media rhetoric, 45, 126–27, 136–37; of Women’s March, 4 Richards, Amy, 13 Richmond, David, 127 Rodger, Elliot, 52 Romano, Aja, 146 Rowe, Aimee Carrillo, xvi, 1 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 7–8 Ryan, Ronald, 120 Sabry, Hend, 61 Salime, Zakia, 41, 43, 44, 51–52, 67–68 Saluk, Seda, 149 Sandoval, Chela, 78 Sarandon, Susan, 145 Sarsour, Linda, 2 Saudi Arabia, driving ban, 44, 63 scale: of activity, 12, 13, 18, 21–22, 40, 41, 56, 80, 89; of analysis, 9, 22, 34, 56, 156; connections between, 22, 34, 53; of oppression, 9, 80. See also microlevel; macrolevel selfies, 49–53, 55, 134–39, 144 self-portraits, 50–53, 135 Shahvisi, Arianne, 110 sharing: as activist tactic, 37, 44, 51–52, 143; in different genres, 117, 124, 148; on social media, 38–39, 49–50, 61, 69, 74, 91– 92, 120, 135, 145–46. See also circulation Shepherd, Dawn, 48 Skalli, Loubna, 42 slacktivism, 9–12, 115, 140–43 Sleiman, Fadwa, 61 Snapchat, 39 social media: and activism, 1–2, 6; archival functions, 38–39, 61; and awareness, 10; comments and reactions, 68–74; and connectivity, 49; and creation of alternative spaces, 42–45; and education, 10;

196 : Index social media: and activism (continued) identification and disidentification, 48–49, 74; individual contributions contrasted with collective, 39; multiple platforms, 49; and sharing, 39, 49–50, 61, 69, 74, 135, 145–46 social media platform architecture, 39, 47, 49, 74 social media platforms, 49, 50, 76, 125. See also names of individual platforms solidarity, 3, 4, 16, 42, 43, 64, 68–72, 99, 123, 126–27, 142. See also coalitionbuilding SPARK Movement: activities engaged in, 89–92; background and overview, 81–83; claim to global movement, 106–7; languages used, 99–100; global mindset and privileged participants, 98–99; and intersectionality, 90–91, 92; location, importance of, 104–5; participants and relationships, 97–100; resources, 110; social media activity, 91–92; website, 89–91, 97–98, 110 Squires, Catherine, 17 sticky uptakes, 134–43 stories: and #ChallengeAccepted, 147–48; and Girl Up participants, 95–97, 104; and power relations, 47; selfie as story, 50; “Tell Your Story” campaign, 38. See also narratives Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 17 subaltern counterpublics, 143–44 subjectivity, 118. see also Identity Suchman, Lucy, 101 Swarr, Amanda Lock, 100, 104 Taylor, Breonna, 145–46, 172n79 Tetreault, Elliot, 5 “This Tweet Called My Back,” 19 Thomas, Jamila, 142 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari), 25 Tiegen, Chrissy, 114 TikTok, 39, 74, 115 Trump, Donald, 1, 110, 159–60n12 Tufekci, Zeynep, 10, 11, 19–20, 79, 119 The Twilight of Equality? (Duggan), 13

Twitter: Black Twitter, 124; #Challenge Accepted, 114, 130, 138, 145; and girl activist groups, 82, 83, 86, 88, 91, 92, 100; Saudi women driving, 44; UWAW photo campaign, 37, 38; and Women’s March, 3 Uprising of Women in the Arab World (UWAW) photo campaign: background and overview, 33–35, 37–42, 163n1; comments and reactions, 68–74; disidentification, 45–49, 57–66; format of entries, 54; genre patterns and norms, 53–57; Hal t’alameen? campaign, 38; limitations of, 66–68; participants’ countries of residence, 67; questions for genre analysis, 35–36; self-portraiture, 49–53; “Tell Your Story” blog campaign, 38; translation from Arabic, 56–57, 68–69, 72–73, 165–66n67 uptakes: and #ChallengeAccepted campaign, 129–34; counteruptakes, 31, 133, 138, 143–49, 152–53, 154; Dryer’s typology of uptake, 121; and genre theory, 119–29; sticky uptakes, 127–28, 134–43; uptake knowledge, 125–26 visual rhetoric, 39, 50–55, 65, 86–87, 91, 121–22; pussy hats as, 27. See also images; photography; self-portraits von Cohen, Nadine, 137, 141 Where to, Marie?, 16 white saviorism, 71–72, 73, 94 Williams, Apryl A., 138 Women’s March (2017), 1–2, 5, 25–28 Women’s March Global, 3–4 #WomenSupportingWomen, 114–15 Wong, Alice, 20–21 Yam, Sharon, 9 Younes, Yalda, 37, 43 Young, Cate, 145–46 Young, Iris Marion, 3 Zakariya, Sabahat, 52 Zohney, Sally, 37

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