Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action 1793616523, 9781793616524

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Embodied Activisms

Embodied Activisms Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action

Edited by Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newsom, Victoria A., editor. | Lengel, Lara Martin, editor. Title: Embodied activisms : performative expressions of political and social action / edited by Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021048349 (print) | LCCN 2021048350 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793616524 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793616531 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social movements. | Social action. | Political participation. | Pressure groups. Classification: LCC HM881 .E64 2022 (print) | LCC HM881 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4—dc23/eng/20211123 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048349 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048350 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to the activists who put their bodies on the line each day to make the world a better place.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Ouverture: Embodied Activisms Lara Martin Lengel and Victoria A. Newsom

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SECTION I: THEORIZING EMBODIED ACTIVISMS 1 Centuries of In/Visibility: The Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Martin Lengel, and Desiree A. Montenegro 2 Police Accountability Activism as Feminist Ethics: Theorizing Nonviolent Embodied Witnessing Mary Angela Bock

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3 Visual Disruptions as Embodied Activism: Leisure Spectacle Demonstration55 Casey R. Schmitt 4 The (De)meaning of Incorruptible Flesh: Marginalized Bodies and the Performance of Desire Billy Huff and Margaret Cavin Hambrick 5 Lay Down Your “Body Burdens” and Write: (Re)Forming Environmental Science through Narratives of Toxicity and Healing Arlene Plevin

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Contents

SECTION II: WITNESSING, REMEMBERING 6 Palestinian Dedications, Commitments, and Persistence: Decolonial Memory-Work during the 70th Anniversary of the Nakba Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik

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7 Embodied Witnessing and the Struggle for Memory in Budapest’s Szabadságszínpad Protests Natalie Bennie

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8 An Actor-Network Approach: The Role of Art in Public Spaces in the Gezi Protests Nora Suren

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SECTION III: SILENCE AND IN/VISIBILITY 9 A Handmaid’s Tale of Protest: Analyzing Intersectionality through Silence-Body-Image Jordin Clark 10 Embodied (L)activism: Mothering and/as Embodied Nourishing Molly Wiant Cummins 11 Subversive Silence: Productive Discomfort as Embodied Activism Sakina Jangbar 12 Emerging Activisms: Responding to Current and Future Crises Desiree A. Montenegro, Victoria A. Newsom, and Lara Martin Lengel

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Editors and Contributors

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Acknowledgments

At first it was a conversation as we asked ourselves: Why and how activists are willing to risk their bodies, their lives, and their identities to promote social change? This led us to another question: What are the limits to embodiment within activism? As we expanded the conversation, we asked this question to colleagues, friends, former students, and our families. This text built out of the answers we collected to those questions, and we wish to thank the numerous people who helped us organize, categorize, and evaluate these answers. In particular, we must acknowledge those who helped us develop and continue this project even as our own embodied activities were impacted by the very same issues we were collectively investigating, including changing global and local politics, social, human, and institutional challenges, and a global pandemic. First, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the studies included in this scholarly volume. We are well aware of the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and taking on any extra work is much appreciated. As the project progressed, we invited the help and support of an editorial assistant and chapter coauthor, Desiree Montenegro, who provided invaluable assistance throughout the process of compiling and editing this collection. Other colleagues who have provided ongoing support and guidance to this collection include Priya Kapoor, Sahar Khamis, and Michelle Yeung, as have the insights of our student/activists who have informed our work, notably Abdelrahman Abdelghany, Nora Abdul-Aziz, Maria Guadalupe Lopez Davila, Anthony King, Ross Martin, Meriem Mechehoud, Sophia Stockham, and Marianne Vanderbeek. We are also thankful for the mentoring of Larry Frey, Wenshu Lee, Philip Wander, and the late and beloved John T. Warren. We are grateful to Nicolette Amstutz for the opportunity to publish this work. ix

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We give utmost thanks to our families. In particular, for Victoria, her mother and, brothers and, for Lara, her spouse, Scott, and their children. Finally, we are most grateful to the activists and their work which brings this volume to life. Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel

Ouverture Embodied Activisms Lara Martin Lengel and Victoria A. Newsom

Identity resides in the body. Struggle lies in the body. Trauma persists in the body. A recent notable testimony provides evidence of how struggle and trauma can reside in the body for up to a century. As we were completing this volume, in May 2021, Viola Fletcher, at age 107, the oldest living survivor of the May 31–June 1, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Massacre, was testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives. The movement is building into a crescendo, though only one of many. Fletcher gave voice to the trauma she, as a 7-year-old girl, her family, and her community experienced. A white mob, which included city officials, murdered an estimated 300 African Americans, and robbed and set fire to more than 1,200 businesses, homes, and churches, destroying 35 square blocks of one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country. Thereafter, Black residents filed more than $4 million in insurance claims. Every single claim was denied (Stecklein, 2021). It was one of the worst manifestations of racial violence in U.S. history and, until recently, it was also one of the most strategically “forgotten”: the city of Tulsa spent many of the past 100 years either outright denying or dismissing the massacre, and what incited it a false claim of a white woman being assaulted by a Black man. A century later, the city is finally acknowledging the massacre and its ongoing traumatic history, while continuing to resist activists’ efforts to advocate for the survivors and descendants to be awarded reparations (Brown, 2021; Jordan, 2021). The voices of survivors, ignored for nearly a century, were then appropriated by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which raised $30 million, but reportedly refused to share any of those funds with the survivors while using survivors’ names and stories to further their fundraising goals without permission (Stecklein, 2021). On the eve of the centennial xi

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of the massacre, as U.S. House subcommittee considered legal remedies to atone for the Tulsa Massacre, subcommittee members listened to Fletcher, her World War II veteran brother Hughes Van Ellis, age 100, and to a third survivor, Lessie Evelyn Benningfield Randle, who, in her livestreamed testimony, gave her eyewitness account of seeing Black bodies being dumped into the nearby river. Randle (cited in Jordan, 2021, para. 5) said to the subcommittee, “I have survived 100 years of painful memories and losses. I have survived to tell this story. I believe that I am still here to share it with you. Hopefully, now you all will listen to us while we are still here.” In her testimony, Fletcher (cited in C-SPAN, 2021) stated, “I will never forget the violence of the white mob, when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day.”

Viola Fletcher, Hughes Van Ellis, Lessie Evelyn Benningfield Randle, and other survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre have witnessed more violence throughout their lives. Their hearts broke in August 1955 when they saw the image of Mamie Mobley standing over the open casket of her brutally murdered 14-year-old son Emmett Till. Four months later, they watched as Rosa Parks was arrested and, 2 years thereafter, as another 14-year-old Carlotta Walls Lanier and eight fellow students walked up the steps of Little Rock Central High School. They participated in the local Civil Rights protests when they could, inspired by the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and reflected on the murder of Emmett Till that occurred 8 years prior to the day. Months later, they quietly concurred with Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos in 1968, and years later, with Colin Kaepernick in 2016, and were deeply saddened by the death threats that all three athletes received (BBC, 2016; Blakemore, 2021). They said an extra prayer on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The survivors have witnessed activists engage their bodies when, similar to their own experience, their voices have been largely ignored. These examples are their embodied experiences and are the basis of the collective memory of thousands, if not millions of activists. The actions the Tulsa Massacre survivors took to share their witness testimonies are a form of advocacy we frame as embodied activism. The body is a site of resistance (Grosz, 1990). How activists use their bodies to engage with institutions, with collective and cultural memory, resist social norms, and promote change are aspects of embodied activisms we explore in this book. In particular, this book centers on an examination of how the experiences of embodiment are heightened by deviations from normative and hegemonic structures, and how

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activisms are designed to address societal, political, and cultural mechanisms based on bodily differences and performances. Activism, as enactments that challenge and attempt to change power structures, has always held an element of embodiment as a means of generating resistance to systemic, hegemonic oppressions. Embodied activists use their bodies to engage in this resistance political and social action. Embodied activists are willing to take those risks in order to draw attention to issues related to human, environmental, and other rights issues. They enact their embodied activisms through performative forms of civil disobedience and other radical behaviors and personal actions to heighten visibility of their issue of choice, and in an effort to promote status change. Embodied elements of activism are aimed at disrupting the mechanisms by which systemic inequalities are reinforced and reified by allowing advocacies and systemic power shifts within localized, limited spaces, thereby constructing a means for the appearance of empowerment without alteration to institutional structures. Real equity cannot happen within individual institutions of power but must simultaneously cross through the interrelated systems of oppression. In this way, embodied activisms are disruptive to hegemonic norms because they promote dismantling institutional norms that reinforced personal comforts, and personal justifications for people to maintain systemic power. There is a myriad of individual and collective enactments of embodied activism that illustrate the variety of approaches, theoretical and ideological considerations, and styles of advocacy evoked within these social change efforts. Witnessing and testimonial, as evidenced by the Tulsa Massacre survivors, as well as forms of citizen-journalism as witness testimony, as in the case of the killing of George Floyd and multiple examples from the Middle East and North Africa during and since the 2011 uprisings, provide narrative elements of advocacy building that can be effectively utilized to reach audiences in consciousness-raising efforts.1 Similarly, artistic endeavors such as music, theater, and street art highlight elements of embodied experience that can be used as affinity-building techniques for consciousness-raising.2 The Center for Artistic Activism (2021) suggests, “culture and creativity are critical to the future of social and environmental justice” because “this stuff matters: Our modern political terrain is a highly mediated landscape of signs and symbols, stories and spectacles. To operate successfully on this cultural topography, we need to respond creatively” (paras. 1–2). The organization argues that creativity has a level of accessibility that can make a substantial difference: Unlike the law, technology, and political access, cultural creativity and artistic expression is often already in the possession of those who are most marginalized

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from formal spheres of power. It is critical for marginalized people and groups to effectively and collaboratively use their powerful creative skills for lasting social change. (para. 3)

The scholars, researchers, and activists in Embodied Activisms provide evidence for the impact of embodied creative practice. For example, “The Standing Man” performance of political activist Erdem Gündüz underlined the fact that the body is a site of resistance (Grosz, 1990) by standing quietly for days in Taksim Square as a form of nonviolent protest against Turkey’s conservative government and leadership, particularly that of Recep Tayyip Edoğan. In Foucauldian terms, the body always entails the possibility of a counterstrategic reinscription. As Foucault often draws connections between political power and the body, he argues that one can train the body to make it socially productive. Gündüz’s silence, as well as his presence within the protest, thus became a socially productive space. In this text, we seek to ground the role and impact of embodied activisms as simultaneously personal and politically driven social justice efforts. Our text and the chapters within address a research gap regarding the embodiment within activism. We also address a lack of scholarly and testimonial address regarding the transformative experience of participatory body-based action. We frame this within a need for distinguishing embodied performances of activism from contemporary, pejorative accounts of “Astroturf” and “performative” activisms that are designed to reinforce rather than change hegemonic status-quo (Birzescu et al., 2021; Durkee, 2017; Mix & Waldo, 2015; Walker, 2016). Thus, we offer our notion of embodied activisms to address embodied activities as participatory advocacy to resist structural and systemic limitations and inequities. We have compiled an edited volume that examines embodied activisms in a variety of theoretical and applied settings. The authors bring to this volume a wide range of cultural, international, and transnational experience and contexts. They have lived, worked, and conducted research in the Americas, Asia, Europe, including East Central and Southeastern Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa, bringing wide expertise and diverse methodological perspectives, including ethnography, in-depth interviewing, critical rhetorical analyses, critical/cultural analyses, and participatory criticism, to their contributions. They draw on the work of diverse and interdisciplinary scholars such as Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, Karma Chávez, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michel De Certeau, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Bruno Latour, Henri Lefèbvre, and Edward Soja, among others. The authors interrogate the relationship between embodied experience and activism, the role of embodiment within advocative processes, and the impact of body-based argumentation upon communities of practice and global lived experiences.

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Authors contributing to this volume analyze the identity construction within activists’ roles and vocalizations as part of advocative and evocative resistance narratives. The participatory experiences of marginalized individuals and communities create conflicting sets of stereotypical and experiential categories for those taking activist roles. We have compiled an edited volume that examines the performance of embodied activisms in a variety of theoretical and applied settings. Embodied Activisms begins with a theoretical framework for contextualizing the implications and ramifications of embodied activisms as sites of social and political action. The collected chapters engage the concept of embodied activism as a product of cultural production-consumption centered on disseminating performative engagement from “slacktivisms.” The collected embodied activist performances discussed in this volume are simultaneously political and artistic in nature, utilizing intentionally theatrical, musical, and other artistries in order to draw attention to particular injustices. Embodied Activisms is organized into three sections. The first set of chapters provide the theoretical grounding of the book. The second set of chapters focus on activism in global and transnational contexts. The third and final section focuses on activism in gender and feminist contexts. Authors in the first section provide theoretical framework for contextualizing the implications and ramifications of embodied activisms as sites of social and political action. The chapters in the second section engage with current and critical activisms in various global contexts, from Hungary to Palestine to Turkey. THEORIZING EMBODIED ACTIVISMS In our introductory chapter, we are joined by our colleague Desiree Montenegro in discussing “Centuries of In/Visibility: Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice.” In this chapter we theorize embodied activisms, provide historical perspectives, current contexts, and the most current scholarly literature in relation to how embodied activisms are read, performed, understood, and actualized. We focus on three historically understood framings of embodied activism through our own labeling: hypervisible activist bodies, or those most viewable to a wide audience that serve to draw attention to body-based advocacies and needs; invisible activist bodies that are intentionally or necessarily muted in order to allow the advocating goals to function within systemic constraints; and emphatically visible activist bodies, belonging to system agents who function in systemically sanctioned roles while working to dismantle and alter that same system. Finally, we examine an area that is not well discussed, in viewing what we call authenticated activist bodies, who are simultaneously hypervisible, invisible, and emphatically

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constructed within institutional agencies. These activists use hypervisible and invisible system-outsider status to engage directly with the system in a type of sanctioned outsider role, working to dismantle the system from both outside and within. Our work is followed by that of Mary Angela Bock, who in her timely and important ethnograpic study, “Police Accountability Activism as Feminist Ethics: Theorizing Non-Violent Embodied Witnessing,” blends feminist thought with Foucauldian philosophy to analyze how cop-watching engages the body, encourages the potential for peaceful activity, and interrogates structural issues associated with toxic masculinity and policing. Discussing the impacts of video witnessing and testimony as both necessary and potentially destabilizing to the system, Bock argues that the embodied act of witnessing provides a more wholistic and consumable impact for both citizen-activists and audiences. In her investigation of police accountability activism through a feminist embodiment lens, Bock suggests the potential of witnessing to advance democratic goals. In “Visual Disruptions as Embodied Activism: Leisure Spectacle Demonstration,” Casey Schmitt presents a historical overview of embodied protest demonstrations, with particular focus on what he identifies as the most celebrated and recognized embodied activisms in the twentieth century— 1960s Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements—enacted through peaceful mass assembly. He traces the history of activists situating their bodies as “literal evidence” for demonstrations and protests. Informed by the work of Judith Butler (2015), activists put their bodies “on the line,” often at substantial risk of injury and arrest (p. 18). Schmitt employs a multi-methodological approach to analyzing embodied public spectacle gatherings. Using critical/ cultural analysis and rhetorical criticism, Schmidt interrogates the material and image rhetorics of leisure-structured events to determine whether such spectacle gatherings function as persuasive and disruptive culture-jam or as spaces of constitutive identity performance. He presents the nuances of differences between leisure spectacles, slacktivism, radical culture jamming, and everyday acts of embodied resistance in the public sphere. Activist, poet, and scholar Arlene Plevin, in her work “Lay Down Your ‘Body Burdens’ and Write: (Re)Forming Environmental Science Through Narratives of Toxicity and Healing,” analyzes the work of activist writers who articulate identity constructs as a negotiation of environmental concerns, scientific awareness, and the notion of being connected to the earth and the land upon which they live. Plevin explores how activist writers intertwine the narrative of their injuries and trauma to injured, traumatized natural environments. These activist writers apply an embodied form of feminist criticism (see, for example, Audre Lorde, 1988 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003) to discuss the nature of lived spaces as wombs (see, for example, Anne

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Fausto-Sterling, 1986 and Emily Martin, 1991), highlighting the feminine body narratives of mother earth. They further explore how the chemicals encountered in those spaces expand to their own bodies, spreading disease and body trauma. Thus, this chapter explores previously unacknowledged linkages between gendered aspects of the body and the land in terms of environmental damage, and provides grounding for advocating how science must grow “teeth” and argue through narratives of healing change. “The [De]meaning of Incorruptible Flesh: Marginalized Bodies and the Performance of Desire” by Billy Huff and Margaret Cavin Hambrick analyzes the meaning of performing desire, and how the performance of desire matters to those interested in social dissent. The authors analyze the ways that bodies can be staged in performance to call attention to the paradoxical lacks and excesses that communicate desire. Focusing our critical attention to the voiceless and the excess of their pain beyond intelligibility points us toward the limits of rational discourse and leads us to consider that perhaps we should learn to listen to that which cannot be said. Through our own primary research with queer performance artist Ron Athey, as well as other critical accounts of his work, and engagement with Tim Dean’s psychoanalytic work on desire, we characterize the performance of desire and point to its significance for theoretical work on social dissent. The authors begin by explaining Dean’s Lacanian-influenced definition of desire that informs our perspective. We then turn to our analysis of Athey’s performance of desire, paying particular attention to his ecstatic and masochistic use of pain. They conclude by suggesting why it is important to pay attention to the desiring excess of performances like Athey’s. For some subjects, the performance of desire is the only means to communicate a position that exists outside rational explanation. To ignore these desiring bodies is to overlook a productive site of power, pleasure, and possibility. WITNESSING, REMEMBERING The relationship between activist embodiment and cultural memory is significant. Cultural memory, after all, is tied to the underlying mythos that drives activism, and shapes embodied identity. Memory is created in the present, and in present embodiment and embodied need, and shapes the way a group or culture encounters narratives of a historical past. Thus, our bodies become spaces for performing layers of cultural memory (Hirsch & Smith, 2002). Embodied activisms take place between spaces of continuous history that seeks to reinforce hegemonically established and authenticated understandings of truth, identity, ideologies, and people, and discursive amnesia (Lee & Wander, 1998). Discursive amnesia attempts to normalize through

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the “collective forgetting” of people, events, places, and ideologies which fall outside the center of hegemony. Lee and Wander explain, “Specific acts of collective forgetting that perpetuate privilege and interest in a particular economic and political context” (p. 152). “Palestinian Dedications, Commitments, and Persistence: Decolonial Memory-work during the Seventieth Anniversary of the Nakba,” by Sarah Majed Dweik examines one of the most current areas of study in embodied activisms—Palestinian protests. She addresses how the protests surrounding the 70th anniversary of Nakba day in 2018 established a new era of protest for Palestinians, and how this era has continued to the present. Dweik asserts that processes of remembrance and resistance reimagine the future of the fight for Palestinian rights and freedom. Her work focuses on three interlocking modes of embodied resistance: remembering shared trauma, engaging in public resistance against their everyday oppression, and committing to ongoing activist resistance efforts until Palestinians have freedom, equality, and justice. In “Embodied Witnessing and the Struggle for Memory in Budapest’s Szabadságszínpad Protests,” Natalie Bennie interrogates right-wing populism and revisionist public memory. Focusing on the current Hungarian government, the right-wing Fidesz Party, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the study critiques Orbán’s and Fidesz’s revisionist politics of memory. Drawing on her ethnographic participant observation research in Budapest, Bennie analyzes the widely critiqued 2014 Szabadság tér, known as the “Memorial for the Victims of the German Occupation,” and the resistant, countermemorial activist efforts of second-generation Holocaust survivors who meet at Szabadságszínpad (Liberty Stage) in Budapest to engage in public performances, speeches, and upkeep of a physical counter-memorial. Bennie’s research underscores the importance of embodied resistance to revisionist politics of memory and the activists’ engagement to ensure ethical commemoration of the past. Nora Suren, in her study “Art as Protest: The Role of Art in Public Spaces, Actor-Network Theory and the Gezi Protests,” critically engages the role of art in public spaces and public performance of the Gezi protests, first, in Taksim Square in central Istanbul, then nationwide throughout Turkey. The summer of 2013 wave of largely peaceful demonstrations were evidenced by the positioning of publics in “negotiations with power” (Bayraktar, 2016), where the body of the individual is geared toward the pursuit of survival and supported by new forms of counter-hegemonic movement. Suren argues that the Gezi protests illustrate the importance of hybrid public space as a prominent element in the Gezi network for constructing a counter-hegemony against the political and economic authorities as well as providing a stage for interaction, community-building, humor,

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creativity, performance, and art among the protestors who gathered and performed both in the Gezi Park and Taksim Square. Suren uses a framework derived from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory which allows for a non-essentializing approach to understanding the narratives around the Gezi protests. SILENCE AND IN/VISIBILITY The final section of the book examines embodied activisms that address the in/visible impact of silent protest, a powerful form of nonviolent resistance, which we discuss further in chapter 1. This section also lays out a discussion of activisms that obscure or modify practitioner bodies, whether artistically to heighten understanding of activities and goals over individuals, or to protect the practitioners for perceived and systemic threats. For example, “A Handmaid’s Tale of Protest: Analyzing Intersectionality in SilenceBody-Image Protest Form,” by Jordin Clark is an analysis of protestors who invoke Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel The Handmaid’s Tale, during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanuagh in the U.S. Senate. One of a series of protests across the globe, the Kavanaugh confirmation protest involved 15 women clad in vibrant full-length red robes and white bonnets standing in silence on the second-floor gallery of the Senate Chamber and looking down upon the proceedings. The novel and Hulu television series adaptation is a cautionary tale regarding how reproductive legislation can restrict women’s bodies and bodily rights. Clark analyzes the use of silence within the protests to reflect and highlight the silencing of women’s voices in reproductive legislative activity as a type of embodied activism that reinforces the trauma of women’s removal from legislative and legal actions regarding female embodiment, and a disconnection from women’s lived experience within public narratives of reproductive justice. In “Embodied (L)Activism: Mothering and/as Embodied Nourishing,” Molly Wiant Cummins interrogates the social conditions that create a hindrance to breastfeeding mothers and the stigma associated with breastfeeding. To fight this stigma, some breastfeeders engage in “lactivism” to demonstrate the art of breastfeeding. Global Big Latch On events are one iteration of this lactivism. The Global Big Latch On is a worldwide, embodied practice where “people gather together to breastfeed and offer peer support to each other,” as well as having friends, family, and the community celebrate, promote, and support breastfeeding. In this chapter, Wiant Cummins rhetorically analyzes the website and public Facebook page of the event using feminist rhetorical criticism to investigate how the worldwide embodied initiative frames breastfeeding as activism, speaking back to stigma, social norms, and capitalism.

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Sakina Jangbar, in her work “Disruptive Silence: Productive Discomfort as Embodied Activism,” looks at the role of silence as a strategy for creating safe spaces for LGBTQIA+ youth. Contrasting this type of action with the “noise” associated with the marches, sit-ins, and speeches of highly visible movements, Jangbar interrogates what she considers the counterintuitive nature of remaining silent in order to be heard. Focusing on examples of silence as anti-bullying protests in educational settings, particularly the Day of Silence activist campaign, organized by GLSEN (formerly known as the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network), Jangbar considers how silence functions as an intentional strategy for advocation, and the interdependence of visible silence and an agency’s available resources. Finally, Jangbar considers the popular conflation of nonviolence with silence, and how silent protest functions as hegemonic subversion. In the final chapter, “Emerging Activisms: Responding to Current and Future Crises,” Desiree Montenegro and we propose that interrogating embodied forms of activism need be both intersectional and intergenerational in order for the body to be a vehicle for evolutionary, effective, and lasting change. We see varied applications present in this form of activism while looking at the themes and results that guide us to critique and question how we move forward and craft effective practices associated with activist efforts. We conclude by proposing variables that must be considered in all embodied activism, such as interconnected identities, communities of practice, and participatory governance and institutional roles, and reemphasize the importance of continued efforts toward illuminating voices and cultivating ongoing embodied activist practices through community and cross-generational collaboration. As we continue our conversations about embodied activism, we consider the words of Eli Clare (1999/2015) and his theorizing on the body. The body, for him, and for us, is a type of home that sees us all face hunger, inequity, environmental concerns, unfair work practices, violence, and illness. We also keep in mind foundational and ovular ideals, such as the labeling of Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1970/1973) as we remind ourselves, and our readers, to articulate, analyze, and actualize the linkages between activism, political agency, and embodiment.

NOTES 1. For scholarship on witnessing as activism, please see Al-Ghazzi, 2019, 2021; Allan, 2013; Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013, 2014; Chouliaraki, 2015; Katriel, 2021; Lockwood, 2018. For more on the ongoing impacts of the Tulsa massacre, 100 years

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later, please see Perry et al., 2021. For an analysis of the self-immolation protest of Mohammed Bouazizi that sparked the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia and the subsequent wave of protests across the Arab world, please see Lengel and Newsom, 2014; Newsom and Lengel, 2012a, 2012b. For analyses on the impact of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests worldwide, please see Anand and Hsu, 2020; Corpuz, 2021; Haimson, 2020; Heaney, 2020; OnwuachiWillig, 2021. 2. For scholarship on activist and resistance efforts through the performing arts and other forms of creative practice, please see Abendroth, 2020; Akindes, 2005; Branagan, 2005; Burnard et al., 2018; D’Aponte, 2005; Essin, 2020; Hess, 2019; Kowalski et al., 2018; Lengel, 2005; Lengel et al., 2013; Lengel and Warren, 2005; Loots, 2005; Mattern and Love, 2013; Newsom and Inuzuka, 2005; Qoza, 2020; Warren and Lengel, 2005; Westlake, 2005.

Section I

THEORIZING EMBODIED ACTIVISMS

Chapter 1

Centuries of In/Visibility The Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Martin Lengel, and Desiree A. Montenegro

We begin with an opening, a historical moment of massive proportions: “I am Toussaint L’Ouverture, you have perhaps heard my name. You are aware, brothers, that I have undertaken vengeance, and that I want freedom and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue” (cited in Rachedi, 2020). L’Ouverture, the name that the revolutionary reportedly gave himself in 1793, means “opening” in French. Indeed, François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture himself opened up centuries of possibilities of embodied activism, protest, and revolt.1 L’Ouverture’s actions exemplify a type of embodied activism. His story articulates how identity, struggle, and trauma within the body can become a means of engaging with institutions, resisting social norms and restrictions, and promoting change as embodied activisms. L’Ouverture’s evolving status from a person born into slavery to revolutionary illustrates how embodied activism can impact the status of an individual, as well as influence social change. Known as the “Black Spartacus,” named for the Thracian soldier captured and sold into enslavement by the Romans, and forced to train as a gladiator, Toussaint L’Ouverture transformed a slave rebellion in 1791 into a successful revolution of Haiti, defeating Napoleon’s army and English colonizing efforts. Haiti declared independence in 1804, becoming the first Black republic and one of the First Nations in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery (Charles, 2013; Girard, 2011; Walsh, 2013). L’Ouverture’s success as a revolutionary to reclaim the land and its peoples who were colonized and enslaved by French colonial ruling powers serves as an example of a successful form 3

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of embodied activism seeking to bring about an end to slavery. L’Ouverture’s revolution echoes earlier slave rebellions and revolutionary efforts, including that of Spartacus in Rome. Spartacus led a slave rebellion of enslaved people in 73 bc following Spartacus’ uprising, there were four recorded revolts of enslaved people large enough to be considered a war—the first two in Sicily, from 135 to 132 bc, and 104 to 100 bc, respectively, the third in Italy from 73 to 50 bc, and the fourth in 1804 in Haiti (Hall, 2021; Urbainczyk, 2008). Slave rebellions are a type of embodied activism: identity-based social movement practices using the body as a site of power and grounded in narratives of resistance to structural existence and oppressions. This past year, another ouverture occurred, this time the eyes of the world were opened. On May 25, 2020, we watched the video footage taken by 17-yearold Darnella Frazier. She and another young woman, Alyssa, kept their phone cameras steadily focused on George Floyd, as an officer with a knee of police brutality stopped life-giving breath from entering Floyd’s lungs. Darnella and Alyssa continually begged the Minneapolis police officers to stop suffocating Floyd. In addition, Genevieve Hanson, an off-duty EMT, approached police to offer her assistance to resuscitate Floyd, only to be blocked by one of the other three Minneapolis policemen. Through Darnella Frazier’s eyes, the world began to see the vast number of unjust murders helped to also see other unjust murders by police, including, but most certainly not limited to, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Aura Rosser, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright, and Demetrius Stanley, as well as Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered by white supremacists.2 In order to contextualize embodied activism and how it functions within social movement efforts, we begin with an investigation of the rhetorical construction of bodies within agency and how this relates to institutional norms. Because the body is used as a site of power, the self and identity of a person is directly connected to this form of advocacy. Political and social movements have often revolved around conflicts of double consciousness (DuBois, 1903). Contemporary racial, ethnic, and sexuality social justice movements, such as #blacklivesmatter, #brownlivesmatter, #lovewins, and #metoo, highlight how differences in standpoint impact both social norms and understandings of identity as well as political, legal, and economic statuses. Current and historical discussions of activism have been limited by their framing of embodied experience as an aspect or component of activism rather than investigating how bodies are directly and indirectly impacted by advocating practices. A majority of these studies and accounts focus on systemic and oppressive impacts to bodies, and how activism can change those impacts, but fail to describe the transformative experience of participatory body-based action of the activists and those who witness their activism. Accounts that do

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focus on practitioners’ bodies are generally limited discussions of specialized body practices and events, such as accounts of self-immolations, body modifications, or imprisonment. Ones that focus on the status of an oppressed community, such as discussions of immigrant experiences or the account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and other revolts of enslaved people are heavily framed as efforts of political reform, with little focus on the individual bodies through the stages and processes of advocacy. Further complicating the relationship between embodiment and activism, many contemporary accounts highlight bodies in a type of “performative activism” that uses the term in a pejorative sense, implying a falsehood or, at least, problematic motivations for activism (see, for instance, Abrams et al., 2019; Anderson, 2020; Kelley, 2020). While other performance-studies rooted accounts of performativity and activism highlight the need for transgressive and subversive behaviors within advocacy, the negative contemporary accounts illustrate the need for an effective means of distinguishing progressive acts meant to destabilize hegemony and generate change from “Astroturf” (Durkee, 2017; Mix & Waldo, 2015; Walker, 2016) and other efforts meant to reinforce the status quo. In this capacity, as well as to address the gap in accounts and scholarly literature that interrogate the relationship between embodied practices of advocacies and the lived experiences of those who will benefit from systemic reform, we offer the notion of embodied activisms. In this chapter, we seek to interrogate how identity and embodiment function within activist efforts and narrative constructs. Concepts of difference are culturally produced and irrefutably tied to narratives of power. Codifications of the human body within institutional structures place limits upon personal identity, expectations, and goals. Systemic biases are self-perpetuating and resist activist ideals and change efforts. Consider Foucault’s (1975/1977) discussion of bio-power as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (p. 140). The systemic norms of bio-power create implicit and explicit biases that are at the core of embodied activist goals for generating change or reinforcing systemic norms. However, histories of political, moral, legal, economic, and religious identity norms illustrate how systemic power is reinforced by the ways that systems interact and work to support each other. These systems also work to make efforts for change invisible, or to render visible only those that become incorporated into the systems after change mechanisms are applied. RESISTANCE THROUGH EMBODIED ACTIVISM Activisms centered on human and civil rights are rooted in the emancipatory critiques of the framing of bodies within hegemonic structures and

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oppressions. Embodied activisms, therefore, are advocative and direct actions taken to disrupt body-based systemic inequalities and encourage power shifts within institutional norms. Such activisms promote the dismantling of systems and norms that reinforce oppressive standards for distributing systemic power to specified, embodied categories. Among the more visible examples of these activisms are destabilizing and disruptive movements that reveal the inconsistencies and binary and social constructs that center hegemonic systems (Berman, 2017). In contemporary social movements and political action, there is an increasing visibility of embodied activisms developing over the past decade. A number of these movements have generated worldwide interest in the status of bodies as a reflection of rising far-right ideologies and narratives, “fake news” denial of the climate catastrophe, as well as in response to the various “parallel” pandemics, including economic injustice, rising gender-based violence, and housing insecurity, highlighted by the global COVID-19 pandemic. These include some of the most well-known, such as the Standing Rock Sioux protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Extinction Rebellion in the UK, Occupy Wall Street and the broader Occupy movement, ‫ةروث‬ ‫( ةماركلا‬Thawrat Al-Karama; The Revolution for Dignity, widely known as the “Arab Spring”),3 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) global protests following the murder of George Floyd. They also include those somewhat lesser known, such as BLM, protests outside the United States, most notably one on June 6, 2020, in Bristol, England, where protestors toppled a statue of Edward Colston, one of England’s wealthiest seventeenth-century enslavers. Protestors rolled the statue through the city center square before dumping it into the River Avon. Artist Marc Quinn created “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid),” a sculpture of protestor Jen Reid with her fist raised in a Black Power salute. After erecting the sculpture on the empty plinth that once held the Colston statue, city officials ordered it to be removed 24 hours later (Greenberger, 2020; Owoseje, 2020). Other protests are even less wellknown, such as the Red Umbrella Protests for sex worker activism (ICRSE, 2013), the Southall Black Sisters in London, and other anti-violence activist initiatives (INCITE!, 2006), animal rights activism, such as those of Peta India to support vegan Ramadhan (Abdul-Aziz et al., 2020), and those that are contested, most notably the “sextremist” bare-chested protests of FEMEN (Kowalski et al., 2018; Newsom et al., 2018). Embodied activisms are a negotiation between hegemonic resistance and body awareness. Resistance to bodily conscription as well as resistance of body experience are both forms of embodied activist engagement. Such engagement is ongoing and evolutionary. In her book How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation, Maureen Johnson (2018) notes that “acts of resistance vary . . . ways of approaching issues will differ. . . . That’s the way

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it should be. Resistance isn’t a series of steps—it is an ecosystem in which all the different creations live and help one another grow” (p. 2). Resistance to structural norms through the body allows for reshaped and re-scripted identities, and as these are shared, change is able to manifest. We must also consider the relationship between resistant bodies and institutional resistance to change. Hegemonic systems are conservative by nature, in that they resist change. Therefore, conservative activisms, whether this is acknowledged by those within the movements themselves, are encouraged by broader systems. Therefore, moments of social justice change efforts are often met by moments of social inertia and resistance movements. This is also challenged by the context of the public argument, and where the constituencies lay along political and ideological lines. When a marginalized group makes gains within hegemonic structures, the system itself accommodates by reinforcing hegemonic norms. This adds complexity, by having the system reinforce tensions between marginalized categories of intersectional need rather than encouraging overall systemic change (Jackson, 2015). However, micro-shifts in visible statuses in relation to embodied privilege and authority are also complex. Consider, for example, the embodied advocacy of Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer severely injured during the January 6, 2021, insurrection by supporters of then-president Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. The insurrectionists attacked the Capitol in a strategic effort to stop Congressional approval of the U.S. Electoral College vote count confirming the election of Joe Biden to the Presidency. A number of Capitol and DC Metropolitan police officers were injured by insurgents in the attack, some severely, with at least two associated officers’ deaths (Kaplan & McDonald, 2021; Shabad, 2021). Fanone’s advocacy in practice includes attempting to meet with GOP Congressional Representatives and Senators to discuss his experiences and trauma from the attack on the Capitol building and encourage investigation of the incident. Significantly, many GOP politicians, reluctant to upset Trump and his claims of a “rigged” election, have avoided meeting with Fanone, even to the point of one Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, publicly refusing to shake Fanone’s hand (Shabad, 2021). Against the backdrop of police violence against blank bodies highlighted by the BLM movement, this response is jarring, tragic, and ironic, particularly as the GOP claim a history of backing police activity against protestors. Yet, these bodies are scripted by two institutionalized power entities placed in a contextual conflict driven by larger strategic narrative concerns. The existence of such a conflict between systemically privileged, embodied actors raises questions of how power and the ability to generate hegemonic change are influenced and restricted by institutional norms. Grounding one approach to an answer, Luce Irigaray (1977/1999) argues that power is

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not directly tied to the system but is instead created within individual bodies. From a feminist approach, she explains that female voices and bodies historically have been represented in the patriarchy as hysterical or irrational, which disenfranchises them and denies them authority. Therefore, she suggests a new, feminine form of language rooted in femaleness and female embodiment. The creation of an embodied form of language is an aspect of embodied activism. Irigaray’s argument suggests the need for multiplicity in language, to account for the multiplicity of experiences associated with identity, and the ideals associated with the embodiment. Irigaray’s (1977/1999) argument transcends the mind/body and male/female binaries by making the body a site of knowledge construction rather than institutions as the site of knowledge. Further, for Irigaray, the body represents a way to relate to each other through shared experience that can generate shared language. However, as a form of activism, this is challenging, because activist places in society are still tied to the structures of hegemony. For Michel Foucault, resistance to hegemonic bio-power provides a basis for generating social change. Foucault (1976/1978) explains, “An explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (p. 140). Arguing that prisoners’ bodies are both physically and psychologically conscripted into behavior codes, Foucault (1975/1977) examines how this represents the policing of our bodies within cultural norms. Laws and systems change, though the process is slow and are tied to temporal or provisional contextual concerns. However, because people tend to be desensitized to this form of social control, activists must work to change both the system and perceptions of the system as normal. Activist bodies destabilize perceptions by pointing out inconsistencies within systems and providing alternatives to understood norms. Embodied activists use this to bring attention to needs that might not be otherwise encountered by various audience groups and potential political constituencies. Building on similar premises, Pierre Bourdieu (1980/1990) provides central conceptualizations to explore embodied activisms through habitas, or the acquired and durable habits that act as unconscious forms of conditioning. Lesser known is Bourdieu’s theorizing of hexis, which builds on phenomenological analyses of the body by Husserl (1910/1965, 1929/1993, 1948/1973, 1954/1970), Lafontaine (2016), Throop & Murphy (2002), Melançon (2014), and Merleau-Ponty (1964, 1968). Bourdieu views the body as an aspect of hegemonic cultural structuring, analyzing both hexis, a Greek term for habit, and habitus based on far earlier work, most notably a 1935 essay on the techniques of the body by Marcel Mauss (1935/1979). Mauss theorized about “the ways in which from society to society men [sic] know how to use their bodies” (p. 97). Mauss explicates how bodies are socially constituted into culture(s). Bourdieu (1980/1990) builds on this, explaining how bodies are

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therefore conscripted into hegemonic systems, built around the binary cores of those systems: It is not hard to imagine the weight that the opposition between masculinity and femininity must bring to bear on the construction of self-image and world-image when this opposition constitutes the fundamental principle of division of the social and the symbolic world. (p. 78)

To Bourdieu, and others such as Blaise Pascal, the body is a pense-bete (thinking animal) (p. 11), which is inscribed with culture. A key aspect of that culture, and how it influences the body, is cultural capital. Cultural capital exists in many forms, one of which, Bourdieu (1984) argues, is “embodied capital.” Embodied cultural capital is acquired through inherited attributes and is connected to one’s structural location at birth and through upbringing. It cannot be transferred and is acquired over time through bodily experience and systemic assignment shifts. Building on Bourdieu, others such as Connerton (1989), Strathern (1998), Roodenburg (2004) see the body as a site of bodily or habitual memory and as socially constituted, culturally shaped, and socially moderated in its practices. Embodied activisms engage from the ideal that identity is not arbitrary, but the result of accumulated habits and perceptions: identity is embodied in the habitas and responsive to hegemonic experience. Rachel Holroyd (2002), in her study, “Body work,” on physical capital and habitus, analyzes the importance of the body as foundation for the construction of self, subjectivity, and identity, particularly for young people, and the underlying tensions between resistance, power, control, and conformity to social norms and expectations. She highlights the importance of promotion of agency and access to protected spaces where young people can meaningfully and safely exercise resistance to authority (see also Blakemore & Jennet, 2001; Oliver & Lalik, 2000; Shilling, 1991; 1997). The centrality of agency is also critiqued in other marginalized populations, such as the working class and the working poor. In A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, Charlesworth (2000), analyzing the classed body in Rotherham, in the British region of South Yorkshire, writes, “Labour is unrooted, disembedded . . . creating people so vulnerable and atomized that they carry the marks of their impoverishment in their bodies” (p. 9). Similarly, in their study on “Reflections on Embodiment and Vulnerability,” Wainwright and Turner (2003) analyze the vulnerability of [M]anual labourers’ lack of cultural, symbolic, economic, and social capital compels him to use his physical capital. This is the one form of capital with which he can make a living, but this then traps him in a social world from which there is no

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escape. It is almost impossible for the manual worker to accrue the forms of capital that would enable him to become “a fish in water” in another (and better) social world. His body, like that of some boxers and dancers (below), is a fragile instrument that “wear and tear” will ultimately destroy at a relatively young age. (p. 5)

All of this scholarship on habitus, hexis, and physical and embodied capital influences the structures and applications of embodied activisms. The ongoing negotiation of bodies as capital, including as economic, cultural, and institutional forms of embodied capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986), situates activisms as rooted in body attributions. There are three key ways that such heightening is performed: as narrative, emotional appeal drawing strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1987), as subversive efforts to change a system from within, or as transgressive agency (Butler, 1990/2011b). Strategic essentialist narratives commonly draw upon metanarratives that amplify existing institutions and structures and are often constrained by a conflict of progressive versus conservative issues associated with dominant cultural norms. Subversive advocacies involve actions meant to be inconspicuous or done as part of a collective effort that protects activists from panoptical jeopardy. Transgressive arguments are designed to attack the limitations and oppressions observed within institutions and hegemonic systems. All three of these patterns highlight multiple oppressions and marginalizations experienced by groups of individuals, often with a focus on a particular individuals’ lived experiences. This involves a type of performative role play rooted in the stereotypes associated with both the marginalized and the powerful within the systems and institutions of concern. Building on these observed trends, we identify three applications through which embodied activisms are performed and studied: (1) hypervisible embodied activisms that highlight particular body attributes in order to aggressively draw attention to human body-based rights and needs; (2) invisible embodied activisms that mute body attributes and advocated efforts in order to generate change with low visibility and risk to the performers and those being served; and (3) emphatically visible activisms wherein body attributes of interest within the advocacy and movements are strategically manipulated by and within specified confines of hegemonic systems. Finally, we present a fourth category, authenticated embodied activisms, which utilizes the placement of bodies as sites of negotiation within and outside of hegemonic systems and structures. HYPERVISIBLE EMBODIED ACTIVISMS Hypervisible activisms require the use of conspicuous characteristics, stories, embodied ideals, and identities in order to heighten awareness of the issue and

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need addressed on the part of mass audiences. These activisms are publicly and intentionally broadcast and shared with consciousness-raising at their core. Recall, from the earlier paragraphs, our discussion of François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture. His hypervisibility is evidenced by the various names he was given by those in power. Along with the moniker “Black Spartacus,” he was known as the Napoléon Noir (Black Napoleon) as seen in Figure 1.1. As a leader of a revolt against colonial power, L’Ouverture was seen as a hero by many (oppressed persons) and, given his early contributions to the prefiguration of Black power, was conversely identified as a “devil” by the white ruling class, including those in the present, such as Pat Robertson (Marquand, 2010). As early as 1819 Pamphile de Lacroix noted, “Toussaint Louverture has been successively depicted as a ferocious beast or the best of men . . . as an execrable monster or a martyred saint” (p. 204). As a leader of a revolt against colonial power, L’Ouverture has been seen as a hero by many (enslaved and oppressed persons) from the nineteenth century to the present. Conversely, given his early contributions to the prefiguration of Black power, L’Ouverture was seen by nineteenth-century, white ruling class as a distinct threat, as they feared the revolution in Haiti would inspire uprising of enslaved Africans in the United States, and disrupt the comfort and security of the new (white) American Republic. Even at present, the disruption of

Figure 1.1  Artistic Rendering of Toussaint L’Ouverture on July 1, 1801, as He Presents the Signed Constitution of the Newly Independent Haiti. Source: Library of Congress.

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comfort is evident; Pat Robertson referred to Haiti as having made a pact with the devil (Marquand, 2010). Peniel Joseph, a Haitian-American on the faculty of Tufts University, argues L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution have “remained a touchstone for radical black political activists” (2010, para. 14). L’Ouverture inspired other highly visible activists, such as Frederick Douglass, who, on the eve of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass spoke of the “bright example” of Haiti and “the noble liberator and law-giver” who lead “his brave and dauntless people” to independence (cited in Joseph, 2010, para. 11). Toussaint was also considered one of the greatest self-made men of the nineteenth century by radical abolitionists, such as John Brown who raided Harpers Ferry, Virginia in October 1859 (Clavin, 2008), and other activists that followed (Joseph, 2010). These serve as examples of conspicuous activism, openly revolutionary and aggressive in nature, and meant to advocate to a large-scale audience through public messaging strategies. Indeed, the hypervisible migration of people from the Caribbean to the United States in the early twentieth century inspired further Black political activism by Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison who rose in prominence in their activist speaking in Harlem. From the mid-twentieth century onward, a new type of hypervisibility emerged that of celebrity activisms which are intentionally highly visible in scope, rhetoric, and action. Consider the impact of celebrities, actors, musicians, and athletes. One particularly noteworthy mid-twentieth-century actor and vocalist Harry Belafonte who, Brownstein (2011) argues, “possessed the rarest of commodities for a black man in the 1950s: a public platform. For years, he deployed that asset with commitment and creativity to support the civil rights movement” (para. 8). Hypervisible celebrity activism ranges from the anti-war protests of Jane Fonda in the 1960s and 1970s to Bob Geldoff organizing the 1985 Live Aid music festival to Sir Elton John who founded his AIDS Foundation in 1992 to, more recently, Stephen Curry’s Nothing But Nets, a collaboration with the United Nations Foundation to provide mosquito netting to families in Tanzania, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Burundi, and South Sudan to fight against the devastation of malaria. Conspicuous, hypervisibility can be due to contextual need, such as a world economic or political event or natural disaster heightening awareness on a topic and thereby providing space for a visible activist effort. They can also be connected to shifts in public opinion, such as the rising awareness of and response to victim advocacies such as #MeToo. The hypervisibility of these well-known activists and subject matters allows the narratives they espoused to hold a visibility in historical and contemporary framings of the issues for which they sought change. What narratives are included in public consciousness, and even which histories should be taught and valued is a matter of constant debate. Visibility is a means of

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legitimizing stories, bodies, and needs. Yet, visibility can also create additional challenges, especially given the ability of state and hegemonic forces can use the same narrative tools to attack and delegitimize activist goals. Hypervisibility therefore requires constant maintenance that includes branding mechanics as well as outreach to potential allies, especially those with intersectional marginalizations. Coalition-building is one often hypervisible means of addressing the status of the intersectional and multiply marginalized, by using the recognizable status of one activist group or set of values to highlight the needs of the less-visible. Another is through heightened appeal of a particularly visible individual or team, as practiced within celebrity activism or partnering with a political agent. However, in both of these cases, as well as in the case of an activist group working independently in a hypervisible manner, the use of branded, narrative, and performative elements to gain support and sympathy from audience groups is necessary. Activisms respond to how marginalized individuals and groups “become targets” of regimes’ “cultural indoctrination” (Kashani-Sabet, 2012, p. 156). Take, for instance, the 1979 regime change in Iran. With immediate effect after the newly instituted Ayatollah announced the ban of women practicing law and other professions, and the requirement of hijab in public, a spontaneous uprising of both women and men formed in Tehran on International Women’s Day to protest the policies and critiqued the Islamic revolution’s ideological and material commitment to inequality (Newsom & Lengel, 2019). Activist narratives both highlight and are constrained by the evolution of larger political narratives often centered around progressive versus conservative hegemonic frameworks. Progressive arguments seek to change or eliminate aspects of systemic power; progressive embodied activisms argue against Foucauldian (1976/1978) bio-power limitations. Conservative narratives, in contrast, seek to defend and preserve the system and institutional structures. Thus, conservative embodied activisms promote the status quo. Progressive arguments tend to focus on shifting economic and social standards. Conservative arguments are often legalistic and religious-based. This can cause a challenge for activists to locate their arguments, particularly if those arguments traverse the gap between an era’s conservative and progressive ideals. Structural locations of identities have further challenged embodied activists in various eras. Inherent privilege connected to systemic values can help promote agency when enacted by those who hold or can obtain that privilege. This is why arguments regarding the value of illustrating how people of multiple races and ethnicities have all joined in the BLM protest movements. Systemic “othering” can remove and limit the ability for groups of individuals to access means of voicing their concerns. On the other hand, those with

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systemic power or who have heightened access to visible status within the system, such as celebrities, can lend their voices to promoting the needs of the disenfranchised. This collaboration style includes activists with more systemic authority that may or may not recognize their status, or their potential impact on those with more layers of oppression. Consider, for example, the U.S.-based examples of militant pre-revolutionaries dressing in Native American costumes to dump tea into Boston’s harbor during the “Tea Party” or “grass roots” efforts by middle and workingclass white suburbanites, frustrated by COVID-19 stay-at-home directives, to “protest” for the “right” to have haircuts and assuage masks or, worse, to rally to forbid the teaching of what they view as “Critical Race Theory” in “their” school systems. Scholars (Birzescu et al., 2021; Durkee, 2017) have interrogated the irony that the construction of the Other reflects right-leaning populist ideologies that promote ethnocentric values and emotional bias about immigration, terrorism, and economic concerns. These populist ideals influence the nature of education, and therefore influencing pedagogical concerns regarding cultural stereotypes, media and confirmation bias, and post-truth presumptions, in contrast to educational values centered on critical thinking, media literacies, and the understanding of cultural nuances. Recalling Bourdieu’s embodied capital, which can be defined as shaped by education (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970/1977), then we can understand how embodied activisms must respond to and seek to shape educational constructs and goals. Our earlier discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus, hexis, and physical capital further applied to conspicuous forms of activism. These foci are central to the grounding of theorizing embodied activisms, particularly for bodies that are hypervisible in resistance, protest, and activist engagement. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977; 1984; 1983/1986) work on the intersection of class and capital, Chris Shilling (2004), in “Physical Capital and Situated Action,” reminds us that physical capital “is key to the reproduction of social inequalities” (p. 478). Shilling notes physical capital of the working class and working poor “is most usually converted into economic capital (money, goods and services),” while “the symbolic value of upper-class bodies,” the elite, more often than not, white male privileged bodies can convert physical capital into cultural and “social capital (interpersonal networks that allow individuals to draw on the help/resources of others)” (p. 478). “For example,” Shilling argues, While qualifications serve as an initial screening device, the interview, in which the management of speech and body is central, remains integral to the selection process for elite jobs, private schools and entrance to Oxbridge (about which there has been such controversy in recent years). These situations share in common the management of the body in exclusive social occasions where contacts can be forged leading to the future accumulation of resources. (p. 478)

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One example is particularly striking as it relates to the body and privilege: five days after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, Mark McCoy, at the time a 44-year-old Irish-American professor of archaeology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, sent a tweet (McCoy, 2020) that read, “George Floyd and I were both arrested for allegedly spending a counterfeit $20 bill. For George Floyd, a man my age, with two kids, it was a death sentence. For me, it is a story I sometimes tell at parties. That, my friends, is White privilege.” That tweet has received 1.9 million “likes” and 564,800 retweets. The majority of recognized activist movements of historical note were highly visible attempts to shift institutional, often political, power structures. The legitimization and codification of embodied norms elevates different identities to different positions of power and visibility within structures. The disenfranchised are limited, erased, and/or and removed from public discourse. As a result, a necessary function of activism is to highlight the stories and experiences of those otherwise removed from recognition. For many, this process involves playing into existing narrative structures and performing highly visible forms of activism. Responding to narrative hegemonic structures and the role of activists in resisting those structures, scholars investigating Black embodied activisms highlight the racial binary core in their deconstruction. Virginia Mapedzahama and Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo (2017) argue the “black body in white space has always been constructed as a problematic difference to whiteness: an inferiority and an ‘other’” (para. 1). Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo build on a substantial body of scholarship (see, for instance, Frantz Fanon, 1952/1967; 1961/1963; George Yancy, 2008; bell hooks, 1989; 1990) on invisibility and hypervisibility of the Othered body. A powerful form of hypervisible activism that feeds contemporary social movements are the Women’s Suffrage movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A notable example is the August 28, 1917, picket of the White House in protest of President Woodrow Wilson’s opposition to a Constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote (see Figure 1.2). The protestors, many of whom were also protesting U.S. involvement in World War I, held signs promoting women’s right to vote, and eventually clashed with bystanders (Woyshner, 2020). Many of the suffragettes were arrested, some going on a hunger strike in prison. A year later, the 19th Amendment was passed by Congress, though ratification was not complete until August of 1920. On July 28, 1917, nearly 10,000 African American men, women, and children marched in silence from Fifth Avenue to 57th street to Madison Square in New York City (Keene, 2018). The monumental event, now recognized as the first silent march and the first-ever African American protest,

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Figure 1.2  Photograph Shows a Suffragist-led Anti-World War I Protest at the U.S. Capitol, Rallying against President Wilson’s Speech to Congress Asking for a Declaration of War. Source: Library of Congress.

was organized after waves of murders of Black men, most notably in East St. Louis, Illinois. James Weldon Johnson, of the newly formed NAACP, and W. E. B. DuBois formed the Parade Committee, who organized what would set the stage for future civil rights demonstrations nearly half a century later. For attendees, the only sound easily heard was the drums (Morand, 2020). More than a century later, on June 12, 2020, 60,000 people participated in the March of Silence in Seattle, Washington, to protest police brutality and institutional racism (Cipalla, 2020). Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County (BLMSKC), who organized the march, recommended those marching maintain silence “out of respect for the Black lives killed by police, and to decrease the risk of COVID-19 transmission, which has disproportionally hit Black and Latinx communities” (Smith, 2020, para. 2). One of the participants, 29-year-old Jordan from Redmond, Washington, commented on the profound nature of the silence which, he said (cited in Smith, 2020, para. 7), was “really powerful . . . marching down the street and letting the bodies speak for themselves.”

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INVISIBLE EMBODIED ACTIVISMS Activists are not always safe. When activisms are themselves a potential danger to themselves and others, a type of invisible or muted activism is a likely result. Such activisms occur when change agents must hide their most visible aspects in order to generate change that is not overt or immediate and, in some cases, small and gradual occurring over time and therefore occurring unnoticed. Invisible activisms refer to advocacies that require or encourage practitioners to disguise their activities, either by blending them into a larger series of efforts, or by moving underground or out of sight in the mainstream. In many cases, this form of activism is undertaken by practitioners at high risk to their bodies, their families and communities, and their personal identities. Unlike the hypervisible performances discussed earlier, these activists and their efforts are not centered in openly transgressive narratives. Instead, they use a muted or silenced form of visibility to improve the status of individuals by retraining or offering existing systemically sound options rather than overt attacks on the system. In other words, they use the system to meet the needs of the population being served and to reshape structures in favor of disempowered or marginalized groups and individuals. We define this resulting activity as invisible activism, borrowing from multiple discussions of forms of embodied activism that are not actively voiced or seen outside of welcoming and participating groups (Caughran, 1998; Martin et al., 2007; Newsom & Lengel, 2012a; 2012b; Schuster, 2013; Staudt, 2014; Sudbury, 2005). Such invisibility, muting or silencing, may be due to multiple intentional and unintentional reasons, or simply because it is silenced by the activist practitioner as part of the process and intention or by power structures for the purposes of delegitimizing or discrediting minority voices and/or activist voices seeking change or raising awareness. For example, the term has been used to discuss women muting feminist goals while working within other movements, such as the women who drove the formation of and early implementation within the NAACP, or those women who disguised their feminism within greater calls for democratization during the uprisings and resulting movements associated with ‫( ةماركلا ةروث‬Thawrat Al-Karama; The Revolution for Dignity, widely known as the “Arab Spring”). The term has also been used in conjunction with “underground” movements such as the “Underground Railroad” that helped enslaved people escape the U.S. Confederate regions before and during the U.S. Civil War, and efforts to resist Nazi expansionism in the years leading up to and during World War II. A third association for the concept is in discussions of online activisms, including hashtag movements, that are bringing to light formerly lesser-known advocacies, including some formerly underground movements (Eisenbruch, 2020; Hennings, 2019).

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Within these types of invisible embodied activism, assimilationist methods are blended with subversive qualities to promote a change-from-within shifting of the system. These efforts can be muted by the activist’s placement within the system, by the systemic biases inherent in that placement, or by the activist’s need to keep their efforts hidden from a panoptical eye. For example, consider the efforts, now memorialized in Hollywood film, of Oskar Schindler and Itzhak Stern to employ Jewish workers at the Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik (USHMM, 2021) by continuing to promote the idea that this was beneficial because they were less expensive workers, thereby aiding in saving the lives of those workers during the Nazi regime and World War II (Levine, 2019; Lipkin, 2002). Even more obscured is the complex story of Sugihara Chiune, a Japanese diplomat who worked to rescue at least 10,000 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust while posted in Lithuania (Levine, 2019). Similarly, the efforts by Isaac Hopper and John Brown to establish what would come to be called the “underground railroad” to smuggle slaves to free states and provinces in mid-nineteenth-century United States and Canada illustrate the variety of practices of invisible embodied activisms (Hamm, 2006). Other forms of invisible activisms occur when different activist groups mobilize to promote social change while resisting the labels and functions associated with particular styles of activisms. Grouping together and linking various intersectional issues and movements help protect their status both as activists and as citizens, as well as help ground overlapping orientations, interests, and safety and security needs. This is particularly useful for activists working within authoritarian or dangerous settings, when visibility is not advantageous and could completely stall the efforts being put forth (Abdulhadi et al., 2005). Visibility status may be detrimental in these circumstances because the visibility itself produces a heightened and focused target of policing mechanisms within national and regional institutions. In addition to issues of hiding visibility, some advocacies and activisms are too distant from power structures to be easily made visible. In these cases, working from behind the scenes or through intentionally obscure means encouraging resource-building for future generations at lower relative cost; generating efforts for change at lower risk of exposure; and minimizing potential pushback or censorship from discriminatory institutions and systems of power. Marginalized groups have persisted in seeking public roles and participating in public policy and activisms, even while many of these groups remain traditionally removed from those power structures, they are participating within, therefore they are navigating from an already muted or silenced position (El Haitami, 2014; Michielsen, 2017; Moghadam, 2014). For example, rooted in feminist activism and theory is the argument that women need to speak out in order for women’s issues to be heard and

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recognized within patriarchal structures. These arguments revolve around the silencing of women within patriarchy, and how women’s voices, when allowed and acknowledged, are still denied authority within the system and its self-perpetuating structures. However, the role of feminist voices as potential agents of change therefore resides in the potential for uprooting silence (Singer & Shope, 2000). The argument highlights that when particular groups of women, such as those with multiple marginal statuses, have no clear access to power structures, they must utilize the resources available in order to get representation in political power structures. Furthering these arguments, Narain (1997) and Wallace (1997) argue that voicelessness or silence can be strategically empowering. Associating silence with powerlessness, Wallace (1997) argues that the perception of voice ultimately determines any actuality of agency. She claims that those without agency cannot come to power on their own terms, and therefore must be empowered by or within those who have legitimized agency. For example, through language, as bell hooks (1989) explains, it is possible to reclaim and repurpose the master language that was originally developed to oppress minority groups and use it to empower and educate and redefine spaces and realities that are confined by the traditions and limitations of those spaces. Therefore, voices seeking authority must bargain in the language and ideals of established agency. This means that sometimes they have to borrow another, more powerful, voice. Similarly, embodied language incorporates nonverbal as well as verbal attributes. Nonverbal voice can include the ability for some to pass as another of higher system authority or value. “Passing” as a theory explains how historically disenfranchised ethnic groups used the ability to pass, for example passing as Anglo in the United States or Canada in order to navigate exclusive spaces in society only available to white privileged groups, as well as to avoid slavery and other categorizations applied to persons of color in that culture. Activists use passing to embody that change they wish to see by using their ability to pass as the legitimate power in order to make available opportunities that would otherwise be denied access to due to ethnicity, gender, or perceived value in power structures and society. In addition, persons of undocumented status, in contemporary society, that appear Anglo can use their appearance to access privilege and opportunity by utilizing the existing racially motivated advantages afforded to those of a lighter skin tone. By taking back power through the claiming of authority through such embodiment then the person, practitioner, or activist is able to appropriate the power that is otherwise withheld. However, the dangers of passing, particularly in an oppressive regime, reinforce this form of advocacy as invisible, since acknowledging the passing would endanger the participant. Thus, it serves as a form of subversive (Butler, 1990/2011b) agency that

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changes the status of a person’s role within the system without notifying the system of the change. The ability to pass had an impact on individuals, but other forms of invisible embodied activism had more direct impact on hegemonic systems. Some of the most lasting efforts by invisible activists include women who were both feminists and also worked in broader civil, environmental, and human rights organizations. Consider the earliest known founders of the NAACP, whose story is seldom articulated, repeatedly overlooked, and almost forgotten. Sartain (2015) argues that these women worked behind the scenes in roles necessarily to the efficiency and survival of the organization. Many of these women faced intersectional marginalizations of sexism and racism, with sexism impacting their ability to rise within the ranks of the organization itself. One of the more recognized of these women is Ida B. Wells, who had herself once passed as older than she was to obtain a teaching job and care for her siblings, rose in recognition as a journalist, and thus was able to use her visibility to further enhance the impact of her advocacies. However, her attendance at the Niagara Falls event hosting the founding of the NAACP, and her role in creating the organization are not listed in the official founding documents. Therefore, she cut ties with the organization due to what she saw as a lack of clear direct and activist goals. A lesser-known activist in the NAACP is Septima Poinsette Clark, a teacher and advocate who started citizenship schools focused on literacy for adults to help African Americans participate in voter registration (Clark & Brown, 1986; Mellen, 2006). She joined the NAACP in her efforts to increase the ability for African American teachers to be hired in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1956, after South Carolina banned membership in activist organizations for state employees, Clark lost her teaching position to maintain her membership with the organization. Significantly, her work establishing citizenship schools would be echoed by the continued leadership of women and participation of women at higher rates than men, and women participants were therefore well placed to help advance their own communities. She saw this women’s networking as a success, regardless of her lack of visibility on a national level. A more recent example is Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, (see Figure 1.3), cofounder of the United Farm Workers Association. Her activism illustrates an understanding of how rhetorical agency is intersectional and negotiated through gender, ethnicity, race, and class (Sowards, 2010). Huerta’s efforts, particularly in the face of immense intersectional challenges, function through what Gloria Anzaldúa (1990) names haciendo caras (making face, making soul) and what Chela Sandoval (2000) identifies as “differential consciousness” (p. 176). Like Ida B. Wells and Septima Clark, Huerta’s role within her respective organization and movement is often overlooked and credit for implementation

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Figure 1.3  Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, Cofounder of the United Farm Workers Association Honored at the Summit on Race in America, April 8, 2019. Source: LBJ Library.

and success is instead given to her male counterpart César Chávez. Chávez is highly recognized in some activist and political circles, even having a U.S. State holiday bearing his name in California. In contrast, Huerta is one of the most influential yet relatively unknown labor and Chicano civil rights activists of the twentieth century, and thus serves as an example of an invisible embodied activist. Today’s invisible activists are, by nature, neither well-known nor easily recognizable. The names and roles of both agencies and individual agents are not always meant to be seen. Some are working within government structures in efforts like that of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners to generate prison reform efforts and must remain at low visibility in part to protect the prisoners that they are serving. They advocate for the early release of women and trans-women prisoners and to support efforts to reduce recidivism, efforts often taken on behalf of individuals and therefore remaining at low levels of visibility. Similarly, activists in Rwanda, Myanmar, Armenia, and other locations of significant civil unrest, violence, war, and ongoing genocides illustrate invisible activisms reminiscent of Oskar Schindler’s and other resistance efforts to provide basic human rights services and even perform rescue operations. Some of these activists and organizations work with established non-governmental

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organizations (NGOs) such as Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], the International Red Cross, The World Bank, UNICEF, and Oxfam International, among others. These entities provide opportunities for coalitionbuilding and a means to undertake activist goals without increasing the danger and victimization of the populations being addressed. These and other ongoing efforts illustrate the need for invisible and behind-the-scenes activism. EMPHATICALLY VISIBLE ACTIVISMS In order to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, activists must function within and between existing strategic narratives by highlighting story-based elements that appeal to international, national, and issues-focused constituencies. Activists must interact with established narratives that “describe how the world is structured, who the players are, and how it works” (Roselle, et al. 2014, p. 76) at global, national, and local levels. Strategic narratives political and ideologically driven messaging used by activists and propagandists to promote ideological objectives both within and counter to hegemonic frameworks (Jenkins, 2015). The process of becoming part of these narratives, however, is a process of essentialization that reflects emphatically visible bodies. For many activists, the challenge of making embodied needs visible is complicated by the structural emphasis placed on bodies. These emphases constrain but also categorize bodies as a process of legitimization within hegemonic systems. Legitimization, however, is a double-edged sword and can take on reductionist qualities, reflective of Raymond Williams’ (1958) warning about over-simplifying and applying cultural capital to particular identities into “an outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people” (p. 93). Simplification can be beneficial, as it allows for processes of legitimation to be applied to a group via a label, but it can also encourage dismissal or minimization of the needs of those to whom the label is applied. To avoid the potential for over-simplification, Spivak’s (1987) strategic essentialism, in its ideal form, allows a demographic category to be formed for policy decisions, therefore allowing systemic recognition of that demographic, with categorical definitions that attempt not to limit the possibility of dissention within the category itself. However, in activism and policy making, this plays out as intentionally vague definitions and instructions, and often results in simplified, tokenistic, and limited identity constructions (Danius & Jonsson, 1993). In contrast, essentialist political tactics are mobilized to highlight shared goals but fail to illustrate the value of embodied orientations and ideals in the process (Arfaoui & Moghadam, 2016; Moghadam, 2014). The reason for

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this shortcoming is due to the limitation and inflexibility present in emphatic designations which may prevent activists and practitioners from being able to grow and change a category in order to encourage more direct change. The categorical definitions used to frame and approach activist groups create categories of “other” that simultaneously legitimize and delegitimize and reinforce stereotyping. Opposing strategic narratives further add to these challenges as they can create a complex layering of contradictory identifiers on an embodied group of persons. Consider the layers of womanhood associated with marriage, procreation, and independent choice and how those have both evolved and been reconstituted throughout history. The history of political, religious, moral, and legal definitions norms about sex and gender illustrates how various narratives have shaped our understanding of and essential category of “women” (Evans, 1993; Foucault, 1976/1978; Laqueur, 1992). Hegemonic gender narratives often work together to construct consistent biases across institutions and are reinforced by a perceived lack of gender variance in the way history is told (Foucault, 1976/1978; Laqueur, 1992). Gender did, of course, play a role in many historical political constructs, but the visibility of gender was often hidden. Wierling (1989/1995) explains, Gender considerations are present everywhere: there are but few political decisions that have not been influenced by conceptions regarding men, women and the relations between them. . . . A more difficult yet equally crucial task of gender history is to seek out the presence and traces of gender in the high echelons of the state or in the material constraints generated in government bureaucracies, in technology, and in the world economy. (p. 162)

How women have been historically legally categorized within institutions influences their ongoing categorical framing. Consider the history, or lack thereof, of the recognition of gender in legislative acts. Very few cases of activist engagement have resulted in legislative reframing of gender and gender rights. The English Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 generated a flurry of interest in the decade that followed in stories of bigamy and adultery; a special paper, The Divorce News and Police Reporter, was founded to cater for specialized tastes, but other Victorian papers, like their more familiar contemporary offspring, were full of divorce cases and other sexual scandals. This prurient exposé of other people’s sex lives was complemented by a slow trickle of neo-Malthusian birth-control propaganda from the 1820s, and a torrent of advertisements for potions for, or to safeguard against, potency, abortion, masturbation, and so on (Weeks, 2012). It was also the first-time women in England mounted a formal public protest against their husbands (Perkin, 1989).

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Another procreative legislative example that women’s rights activists, and others, sought to resist are the Comstock Act of 1873, which was passed by the U.S. Congress for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” (42 U.S.C. § 211, 1873). These rules were created to prevent the distribution of tools and literature related to contraception and abortion. They were monitored through the public mail service, which would open and examine packages and letters in order to prevent anything viewed as “obscene” from reaching recipients. Even medical textbooks that scientifically discussed genitalia were banned. Individuals who were convicted of violating the Act faced up to 5 years in prison with hard labor and a fine of up to $2,000 (equivalent to nearly $45,000 today). Changes in these laws would only occur through judicial purview, as there have been few procreative-related examples of legislation. Roe v. Wade officially changed some of the abortion-related elements of the Comstock Laws, and individual states have created laws since then, both some to reinforce restrictions related to abortion and contraception, and some to lessen the restrictions associated with those issues (DeLacey, 2020). McBride and Parry (2016) explain, Contraception and abortion have not been in the policy arena continuously. In fact, legislators have acted infrequently on these subjects. Perhaps they avoid them. After all, these topics are difficult for politicians...With emotive-symbolic issues, the demands of interest groups are not for money or contracts but for values: these demands force legislators to decide between strong but conflicting convictions of right and wrong. (p. 92)

Laws regarding pornographic materials have similarly been implemented, with many feminists pointing out that when pornography benefits male audiences it is given more legal and cultural welcome than when it is female-centered. Many feminists and other gender-oriented embodied activists have historically focused on issues related to procreation such as medical standards and rights and disease prevention as well as personal privacy rather than advocating directly about procreative rights as a means of avoiding potentially damaging public pushback. For example, early twentieth-century moments promoted procreative choice for women in terms of “voluntary motherhood” and avoided abortion as a term (Hamlin, 2014; Jensen, 2017; McBride & Parry, 2016). Such essentialized activisms are also subject to commodification, with the notion of “motherhood” sold to the public more easily than abortion. The notion of bodies and identities being bought and sold is, of course, not new, the use of essentialized categorizations in order to promote

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social change often overlaps with the commodification of identity, as well as the colonization of the body. Activists often draw on such essentialized notions of embodiment to promote categorical issues (Hasan, 2015; Jenkins, 2015). Activisms aimed at particular identities and the status of those identities within various structures also reflect essentialism, though problematically seldom with the strategy espoused by Spivak inherent in the essentialization (Danius & Jonsson, 1993). When activists highlight essentialist characterizations of identity in issue-based strategic narratives, they take on a symbolic role that connects the issue to national and international narratives. Building on her own standpoint theory, Harding (1991/1995) supports this type of emphatic visibility, acknowledging that the system of political oppression is multidimensional and cannot be deconstructed through only one style of attack. She argues that coalition aids in the abandonment of essentialisms. Making issues visible across multiple identity groups is therefore a vital means of engaging embodied activisms. Essentialized embodied activism manifests in both deconstructive and reconstructive actions, as evidenced by the simultaneous and contradictory calls to limit, control, and defund policing and the military by both progressive, intersectional activists, and conservative, white rage-espousing pundits, advocates, and insurrectionists in the United States in 2020–2021. The strategic placement of police bodies in both authoritarian and victim roles in the contrasting BLM and Blue Lives Matter campaigns accentuates how ideological narratives drive body narratives, and therefore how bodies are authorized and legitimized within systemic institutions. However, as representations of hegemonic authority, police bodies are stereotyped and essentialized into symbolic tools for political argument. Much like women’s bodies are reduced to serving as vessels for reproduction within public arguments about procreation (Hadd, 1991; Penny, 2019), and Black, indigenous, and migrant bodies to commodities within discussions about labor and legal status, essentialized police bodies function as marketable tools for other bodies’ narratives, rather than being featured players in their own stories. Activists have faced, and continue to face, challenges related to balancing their individual and organizational needs with larger political goals, as well as challenges in solidifying arguments for human rights reflective of multiple ideological conflicts about authority and authentic need. Identity categories, especially on a global scale, and as categories are particularly problematic because of the many intersectional oppressions marginalized groups experience. Yet, legal rhetoric and political change is impossible without categorization and the assumption of a stable category. Thus, strategic narratives become a tool for strategic essentialist-style organizing so that activists can

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promote individual, specific goals in tandem with larger political motivational efforts. The rhetorical construction of identities within institutional structures is itself a form of essentialization that places bodies within an “us” and “them” binary, with the impact of empowering one side of that binary. Thus, discursive strategies of the system seek to reinforce that structure through constant reiterations of embodied essentializations. This can create a clash, sometimes one that ironically places contradictory structural values and authorities on the same embodied entities, resulting in confusion among audiences and potential participants in activisms about those bodies (Bashir et al., 2013). For example, anti-masking and anti-vaccine protests during COVID-19, profascist, anti-union, and other supremacist-inspired advocacies that simultaneously critique and reinforce the same aspects of hegemony illustrate how embodied activist efforts can be contradictory and counterproductive. It can also reveal the irony of authority seeking to re-empower itself through claims of loss and disenfranchisement (Bashir et al., 2013; Meeker, 2020). One example of the ironic clash that can result from the application of strategic narratives to the bodies of embodied activism is highlighted by interactions between U.S. GOP Congressional authorities and Michael Fanone, the Capitol police officer severely injured during the January 6 insurrection. Politicians’ resistance to meet with Fanone to validate his experiences and trauma, reflects the political arguments and larger strategic narratives surrounding Trump’s election loss and claims of voter fraud espoused by many GOP authority figures (Spocchia, 2021). GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California was among those who sought to avoid meeting with Fanone. When they did finally meet, it was on the same day as the sentencing of convicted murderer of George Floyd, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Revealed by this timing are contradictory-embodied advocacies of policing, and of political and ideological support, as the GOP was historically associated with support of the U.S. police officers and institutions. Also of note, these events occurred the same week that conservative media pundit and Fox News host Laura Ingraham suggested “defunding the military” for being too “woke” after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley suggested that Critical Race Theory being taught in military academies, as well as understanding white rage, are valuable attributes within the military (Kurtzleben, 2021). These contradictory-embodied advocacies underscore the tension between embodied realities and systemic authority within polarized narrative frameworks. Such tensions need investigation, particularly to avoid re-essentialization and the removal of lived experiences from activist narratives. The visibility of social movements as they have been encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic has also added to the complexities associated with

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identity navigation. Additionally, the pandemic has highlighted intersectional needs for individuals and communities that illustrate multiple systemic oppressions as well as issues that have developed due to the impacts of the pandemic itself. For many, the critical stress that has developed and lasted over an extended period of time has become a type of posttraumatic stress in need of embodied activisms. These activisms must be pluralistic, engaging in the physical and mental stresses of the pandemic as well as the preexisting structural conditions exacerbated by the spread of the disease as well as political and social responses. AUTHENTICATED VISIBLE ACTIVISMS Because structural inequities permeate through embodied experience, it is important that advocacy and activism acknowledge and address the processes by which body-based realities are constructed and actualized, and how they can be reshaped, reconstructed, and redefined. This is the role of embodied activisms, and the rationale as to why these movements and forms of activism justify further investigation. The bodies represented within these movements must be enticed into and welcomed within the community of practice, advocacy best performed by practitioners actualizing strategic change activities. However, for real systemic change to result, these actions must not be limited to sophistic or empty performativity and must instead subvert or transgress hegemonic norms. Embodied activisms must be responsible to the bodies they inhabit. They must acknowledge the being within the body. And they must carefully negotiate the dangers and benefits of engagement. Thus, they are best when they are authenticated presentations of real-bodied need, working to change the individual status of real bodies, and interact effectively to negotiate that embodiment within hegemonic systems. Thus, a key means of bridging between the multiple types of visibility espoused by embodied activists is to engage in activism that is simultaneously hypervisible, invisible, and emphatically constructed within institutional agencies. For example, an early activist who bridged between hypervisible, invisible, and emphatically visible activisms was English artist, Eyre Crowe who, after the abolishment of slavery in England, attended an auction of enslaved Africans in Richmond, Virginia, on March 3, 1853. With his intent masked by the privilege he represented, he was able to sketch what he witnessed which he then adapted to his painting, “Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia” (1856), and wrote a series of articles detailing his first-hand experience with auctions of enslaved people in the United States (Wood, 2013). Not normally viewed as an activist in his day, in fact he avoided visibility as such preferring the moniker of artist, Crowe’s paintings

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and words were hypervisible and helped raise awareness of the slave trade and humanized the enslaved African people. Indeed, as Crowe’s work was exhibited during the 1861 Royal Academy of London, a critic (cited in McInnis, 2013) reported it was “one of the most important pictures in the exhibition” and provided “significant visual evidence of the material reality of the trade” (p. 103). The visual evidence of the auction also fed into the British government’s condemnation of the American Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. Through this process, Crowe served as both institutionally backed representative of authority and arbiter of truth looking at the slave auctions from an outsider’s perspective. Not unlike Darnella Frasier’s capture of the murder of George Floyd on her cell phone, whose use of a widely utilized media form allowed the digital transmission of “the authority of flesh witnessing” (Harari, 2008, p. 7) to those with power in an irrefutable way as well as with a broad, global audience, Crowe’s role as witness would heighten resistance to his era’s human trafficking. A more contemporary example of how the bridging of hypervisible, invisible, and emphatically constructed activisms is seen in multiple advocacies and actions taken by and for indigenous, First Nation Americans in the United States and Canada. Indigenous identities have long been conflated by historical and ideological narratives, as well as Hollywood and other popular cultural tellings, to a singular-style Other. While the indigenous peoples of the Americas are themselves made up of multiple tribal and local identity constructs, leadership from within tribes and indigenous structural entities have often used coalition techniques to group together in activist appeals to national and federal entities. By joining their efforts, they play into the stereotyping and hegemonic identity constructs associated with indigenous people and rights under federal law to maintain their tribal rights, lands, and legal statuses. This can be a beneficial effort, as they use this technique to survive as a collective while resisting the historical efforts to assimilate them into the European-influenced, Christian-dominant culture. Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada are granted special status within their respective national governments’ jurisdictional prudence. This special status, while evoking an emphatically visible status, has historically required the various indigenous nations to coalition together for survival and resistance, or what Minnesota Chippewa scholar Gerald Vizenor (2008) terms “survivance” (p. 1). Assimilationist efforts by the governments of the United States and Canada were aimed at encouraging indigenous, Native Americans to adopt characteristics associated with Eurocentric American cultural norms. These efforts were legal mandates, rooted in the 1806 establishment of the U.S. Federal Office of the Superintendent of Indian Trade, which was created to monitor and control economic activity between Indian nations and the U.S. government. These economic activities included land

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rights, water rights, and institutional relationships. This entity was absorbed into the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) upon that entity’s 1824 creation. Among the notable assimilationist and repressive actions undertaken through these agencies’ efforts are the Indian Removal Act of 1840 which forced those with tribal identities East of the Mississippi to relocate to the West, primarily to Oklahoma, including the Cherokee-forced relocation referred to as the Trail of Tears. After the relocation efforts, tribal lands were formally established as Reservations through the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. Indigenous identities were thus legally defined, through these acts, as commodities associated with trade and subject to governmental appropriation. Similarly, the Dawes Act of 1887 which authorized the U.S. federal government to partition tribal lands and allot them to those individuals who became the U.S. “heads of households” and citizens, but simultaneously required indigenous Americans to relinquish tribal status (Hsu, 2020). All lands not claimed by indigenous people agreeing to become citizens were then distributed to other, white citizens. This effort to define culture through negotiating land ownership through assimilationist agreement was echoed in educational “reform” efforts organized by federal and local agencies. Indian Residential Schools were established in the 1800s to “civilize,” “assimilate,” and “Christianize” Native American children into white, Anglo culture (Haig-Brown, 2018; Markowitz, 2018; Palmer, 2019; Reyhner & Eder, 2017) as illustrated in Figures 1.4 and 1.5.

Figure 1.4  Government Indian School, Swinomish Reservation, La Conner, Washington, Circa 1907. Source: Library of Congress.

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Figure 1.5  “Preparedness Parade” Showcasing Men Trained at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Circa 1916. Source: Harris & Ewing Photographs/ Library of Congress.

The Code of Indian Offenses was established in 1883 and used to justify assimilation through such educational efforts, as well as banning native ceremonies and dances that were viewed as deviating from Christian traditional values. The Courts of Indian Offenses were then defined through an 1888 Federal Court decision. Citing “guardianship” of tribes under the U.S. government, “educational and disciplinary instrumentalities” the Courts were created to help the government control and shape tribal culture (U.S. v. Clapox, 1888, p. 4). The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave tribal members dual citizenship4 with the goal of encouraging attendance in the U.S. schools requiring English language learning among other assimilationist education methods. A core, repeated goal of these legislative acts was to get rid of the traditions and cultural behaviors associated with the tribes. Such hardline assimilationist efforts would finally decrease after tribal participation in World War I allowed the recognition of Native Americans as the U.S. citizens on a hypervisible stage. The resulting 1934 Indian Reorganization Act reestablished formal agreements with tribes with a goal to increase tribal self-reliance, and set up shared infrastructure programs including public education, healthcare, and economic institutions, and was framed to merge tribal goals and traditions with the U.S. standards and expectations.

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The Indian Reorganization Act became the core of self-determination efforts and arguments within the United States. Similarly, Canada’s relationship with the collective First Nations starts with the 1763 establishment of Indian Reserves by royal proclamation. Individual treaties were used to establish and recognize these Reserves until the 1860s. In 1867 Parliament claimed jurisdiction over Reserve lands through the Constitution Act. The Indian Act of 1876 then established a formal relationship between registered members of established First Nations and the Canadian government. This effort served to shape the role and legal authority of tribal “band councils” and set up parameters on legal autonomy for those living within the boundaries of Indian Reserves. A key effort included the assimilationist effort of Canada’s Indian residential school system established by Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches. As a response to these and similar ongoing assimilationist efforts, indigenous survivance has long been enacted through established political entities that negotiate with the U.S. federal government and Canadian Parliament. Contemporary activisms emerging from the tribes and First Nations bridge the visibilities of embodiment and include the 1964 Sioux occupation of and demonstrations at Alcatraz Island to highlight removal and assimilation histories (Johnson et al., 1997; Kelly, 2014); the 1970 Sioux occupation of Mount Rushmore (Abbot, 2013); the October, 1972 “Trail of Broken Treaties” march to Washington, D.C., by the American Indian Movement (AIM) (Deloria Jr., 2010), to address treaty policy reforms; the 1973 Sioux occupation of Wounded Knee (D’Arcus, 2003); “The Longest Walk(s)” in 1978 (Johnson et al., 1997; Sanchez & Stuckey, 2000) and, later repeated in 2008, to raise awareness and seek resources regarding poverty, mental illness, and substance abuse rampant in indigenous communities (Johansen, 2013); the 1981 First Nations march on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and Edmonton Arena in Alberta in protest of the removal of indigenous and treaty rights from the proposed new Canadian constitution (Dance, 2014); the 1981 Yavapai protests of the building of Orme Dam in Arizona (Cooper, 2020); the 1990 armed standoff in Oka, Quebec, between the Mohawk Nation and the town over disputed land rights over a proposed golf club expansion (Pertusati, 1997); the 1992 National Coalition of Racism in Sports and Media Forms (Johansen, 2010); the 2004 “Protect the Peaks” coalition to save Arizona’s San Francisco mountains from development (Dunstan, 2019); the 2011 launch of the Keystone XL Pipeline protests (Estes, 2019); and the 2006 Six Nations of the Grand River protests over a proposed development of a subdivision (Cooper, 2016; McCarthy, 2016). Survivance status remains a core aspect of the indigenous embodied experience of Native American and First Nations activists and practitioners. Two

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current issues of note that highlight the ways in which survivance permeates efforts toward indigenous agency are the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the discovery of multiple mass graves at Canadian Indian Residential School sites. In 2020, the Navajo Nation was one of the populations most devastated by COVID-19 (Mozes, 2020). In order to deal with the crisis of the pandemic Navajo leaders joined with leadership from other First Nations and Native American tribal communities and federal agencies to seek to assuage the impacts of the pandemic in their communities by mobilizing to collect and allocate resources to frontline organizations working directly to address the resource gap faced by these vulnerable communities (Azocar et al., 2021). However, federal recognition of tribal status remains necessary for full cooperation (O’Neill, 2021). This coalition process has become a common approach to highlight the needs of individual indigenous peoples dealing with the ongoing effects of colonialism. There are multiple problems that need to be addressed, especially in light of the pandemic and its associated crises, such as a lack of clear data in relation to ethnic groups, a lack of trust in health-care authorities, limited space and resources, food and housing insecurities, institutional challenges, higher risk of COVID-19 complications because of predisposed health conditions, aging population and lack of available health-care providers, in the Indian Health Service System that privilege direct care over preventative care and public health measures, and the impacts of colonization such as broken treaties and layered representation and support (Azocar et al., 2021; Brosemer et al., 2020). As a result of the structural inequities faced by tribes across the United States and Canada, activists have responded to generations of unmet needs and quality of life concerns among indigenous groups. Activists collaborating with organizations such as the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development (2015) have worked to provide publicly viewable spaces where tribal government responses to the crises could be monitored to create a semblance of transparency. Another example is the COVID19 advocacy efforts of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) (2021) aimed at providing support and guidance for tribal students during the pandemic, addressing a historical gap in resources. Such organizations work through authenticated visible activist processes with the National Education Association (NEA) to raise awareness of racial and social injustice in education faced by tribal communities (NIEA, 2021). With already inadequate government funding and resources, indigenous and tribal communities, activists, and leaders have been left doubly vulnerable, and in the shadows of long-lasting effects of COVID-19. The National Congress of the American Indians (NCAI) has voiced the concerns of American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs). NCAI leader Kevin Allis (cited in NCAI press, 2020) announced, “We cannot ignore the elevated

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risks faced by Indian Country from this virus. The federal government’s chronic underfunding of its treaty and trust responsibilities to American Indians and Alaska Natives must end–lives are at risk” (para. 2). The efforts of NCIA and similar organizations demonstrate the continuing need for advocacy and consciousness-raising, as well as resource allocation and negotiation, particularly as tribes and First Nations remain dependent upon state and federal agencies in order to dynamically and effectively enact change. Like activisms aimed at addressing the systemic inequities involving indigenous Americans and tribal communities that were brought to light by pandemic, activism in relation to the displacement and forced removal of children to residential schools has become highly visible since the June 2021 discovery of 215 children’s bodies in a mass grave in Kamloops, British Columbia, on the grounds of a former residential school. Advocacy and activism, in response to the discovery, continued later that month, as we were working to complete this edited volume, when news of a second set of graves at the site of an Indian Residential School in Marieval, Saskatchewan, containing at least 751 bodies was announced. In an action indicating his authenticated visibility as activist and leader, Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme confirmed the discovery, and its connection to long-told stories that such a grave site existed. “All we ask of you listening is that you stand by us as we heal and get stronger,” Delorme (cited in Coletta & Miller, 2021) explained. “We all must put down our ignorance and accidental racism of not addressing the truth that this country has with Indigenous people. We are not asking for pity, but we are asking for understanding” (para. 3). First Nations’ members and their allies have called for accountability of both the Canadian government and the Catholic Church that ran the schools. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who is himself a proponent of reconciliation, a movement to reconcile past differences and seek new paths forward for members of the First Nations with all Canadians (cited in MacDonald, 2021), responded to the discovery of all 966 graves: The [bodies] in Marieval and Kamloops are part of a larger tragedy. They are a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced—and continue to face–in this country. . . . Together, we must acknowledge this truth, learn from our past, and walk the shared path of reconciliation, so we can build a better future. (paras. 11–12)

For activists working within the authenticated visible embodied frameworks provided by First Nations’ membership and official reconciliation goals within the Canadian government, a key step forward is formal recognition, and authentication of the “cultural genocide” that was carried out

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through these assimilationist facilities, and the institutionally sanctioned child neglect that the system created and encouraged. Current crises are highlighting the visibility of activist bodies as well as foregrounding the interconnectedness and intersectionality of selves. This heightening serves to reinforce the need for coalition and intersectional recognition among responding advocacies. The chronic stress brought on by the pandemic, for example, including a sense of exhaustion, depression, and burnout, particularly for frontline workers and caregivers, associated with survival and survivance will have long-term and semi-permanent impacts that need to be investigated, understood, and advocated. Both preexisting and post-pandemic embodiments must become actively studied and pursued through embodied activisms. Among these needed avenues for investigation are body-based issues of ability status, mental health, trafficking and slave labor victims, unpaid and underpaid labor, prisoners, refugees, and the undocumented. Embodied activism also needs further exploration in terms of efforts to make the movements more sustainable and interconnected across multiple borders, categories of embodiment, and lived experience. The layering of activist efforts at different levels of visibility enacted by indigenous peoples as a means of survivance is required for simultaneous advocacy and attainment of structural power. Marginalized bodies remain some of the most simultaneously visible and underrepresented in the world. The embodied activists of these movements therefore must enact overtly performative engagement with hegemonic institutions and general audiences. They must negotiate the identities they represent within a heritage victim, survivor, and pride. In this way, we see enacted authentically visible activist bodies in negotiation with hegemonic systems and strategic, embodied narratives. NOTES 1. François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (May 20, 1743 to April 7, 1803) led the only victorious revolt by enslaved people in contemporary history, resulting in the independence of what was then called Saint-Domingue in 1804. Toussaint Louverture also emancipated the enslaved people in Saint-Domingue and negotiated for the newly independent state to be governed by formerly enslaved Black people as a French protectorate. During the revolt he took on the name L’Ouverture, meaning “the opening” to emphasize his identity as a revolutionary (Blackburn, 2006). 2. Please see Mapping Police Violence (2021) for a comprehensive data on the number of women, men, and children killed by police in the United States who have been killed by police. Mapping Police Violence reports that, since George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, nearly 200 Black men and women have been killed by police. Data from organizations including, but not limited to, Mapping Police Violence

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provides evidence that Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the United States, despite being 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed than white Americans (Belli, 2020; Fung, 2021; Lett et al., 2020). 3. For discussions on why the term “Arab Spring” is not the preferred by those involved in the revolutionary activisms in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, please see Isaac Avery (2021), “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution: Four Reasons why the Term ‘Arab Spring’ is Still Problematic,” and Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui (2014), “The Vernacular Discourse of the ‘Arab Spring’: An Analysis of the Visual, the Embodied, and the Textual Rhetorics of the Karama Revolution.” 4. While dual citizenship was granted for indigenous Americans in the United States, many States actively barred indigenous voting rights, including “through poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation” (Catron, 2019, para. 22). Conflicts of Tribal identity and U.S. citizenship also remained active issues. For more information see Catron, 2019; Hsu, 2020; McCool et al., 2007.

Chapter 2

Police Accountability Activism as Feminist Ethics Theorizing Nonviolent Embodied Witnessing Mary Angela Bock

On May 25, 2020, a 17-year-old Darnella Frazier was walking to a convenience store in Minneapolis and happened upon an arrest in progress (BogelBurroughs & Arango, 2021). She saw a Black man on the ground, held down by a police officer, and raised her smartphone to video-record the scene. In her clip, officer Derek Chauvin can be seen with his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds (Bogel-Burroughs, 2021). Social media users who watched the video Frazier posted could hear Floyd cry out in anguish, that he cannot breathe, and then plaintively call out “Mama” to his late mother (Hill et al., 2020). This was not the first video to depict fatal police use of force in the United States, but it was the one that triggered a wave of demonstrations, uprisings, and riots worldwide, and may have changed the course of the U.S. presidential election. Smartphone video has changed the way Americans talk about police useof-force incidents and ushered in a new wave of police accountability activism (PAA). Some of this activism is part of sustained, organized practice, and other forms are contingent, fragmented, and spontaneous. No matter its organizational form, contemporary PAA, known colloquially as “cop-watching,” draws its discursive power from a combination of photographic empiricism and embodied witnessing. PAA existed decades before the smartphone era and has evolved with digitization. This chapter will examine PAA as an embodied practice through the lens of feminist philosophy. It argues that feminist epistemology and moral philosophy open a path to additional theorization beyond that of surveillance studies. The chapter draws from more than 5 years of observational and 37

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interview research with self-described “cop-watchers” described in tables 2.1 and 2.2.1 Research started in 2013 and included on-site observations in multiple cities, as activists patrolled a nightclub district, chased down police activity, and covered government meetings. Subjects were identified first through publicly available news coverage and then using a snowball sampling method. Interviews were conducted face-to-face when possible or by phone when not. Based on an analysis of the interviews and observational material, the chapter concludes by arguing that the feminist theory offers insight into the patriarchal foundation of police abuse and the discourse of PAA video, and provides a paradigm normative critique. POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY, PAST AND PRESENT Organized PAA must be distinguished from the spontaneous recording of police activity by bystanders. Organized PAA is, instead, the routinized embodied practice of visually documenting police activity for the purpose of public accountability. Two dimensions of this definition are particularly important, routinization and purpose. PAA groups schedule patrols for volunteers to observe police in specific areas where abuse has or might occur. In one southwestern city, for instance, LGBTQ activists patrolled the gay and lesbian nightclub district in response to harassment by police [“Amy,” February 12, 2016]. In another city, a cop-watching group formed after a financial planner was arrested (and later exonerated) after photographing what he considered to be a brutal DUI arrest [“Charles,” March 15, 2013]. PAA groups post their videos to social media and use websites to spread their message. Many hold workshops and “know your rights” trainings in Table 2.1  Interviews “Charles” “John” “Sean” “Don” “Bruce” “Roberto” “Janice” “Leonard” “Steve” “Officer A” “Nick”  “Chip”  “Clint”

3-15-13+ 4-13-13+ 6-25-14 10-27-14+ 4-12-13+ 7-24-13+ 10-17-13+ 1-6-15 1-18-15 4-30-13 1-16-15 5-14-15 2-12-16 +

“Laura” “Joe” “Amy” “Anne”  “Ron”  ABQ Officer UDPD Chief Philadelphia PIO “Zach”  Andrea Pritchett “Casey”  Berkeley PIO “Beverly”

+ indicates additional contacts during observations. Source/credit: Mary Bock.

2-13-16 2-13-16 2-13-16 2-13-16 2-13-16 2-12-16 6-10-16 6-10-16 6-10-16 7-11-18  5-8-17  5-8-17 8-1-18 

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Table 2.2  Observation Highlights Club Street Patrol Club Street Patrol  Vigil  Protest 7-11 Store Trial Meeting

3-16-13 3-30-13 9-20-14 12-13-14 10-22-14 10-23 to 10-29-14 4-11-13

Know Your Rights  Roving Patrol  Know Your Rights  Roving Patrol  Community Forum  Clint at City Council  Citizens Academy 

Conference  Worker March Acquittal Party

8-17-13 2-27-13 11-7-14

Berkeley Meeting Berkeley Patrol  Berkeley Meeting 

5-1-15 5-15-15 5-1-15 5-15-15 8-26-15  2-11-16 9-6-16 to 12-13-16 5-6-17 5-7-17 5-8-17

Source/credit: Mary Bock.

their communities, so that individuals who don’t have time to patrol might still engage in responsible documentation. Social media and smartphones have popularized PAA, but it started in the analog age (Toch, 2012). The Black Panthers carried guns as they “policed the police” in the 1960s (Bloom & Waldo, Jr, 2016). In 1990, before a bystander captured the beating of Rodney King on a handicam, three women in Berkeley started a group called “Copwatch” to monitor the policing of homeless people in their city (Berkeley Copwatch, 2016). The original conventions established by Berkeley Copwatch and the group’s commitment to nonviolent witnessing in service to activism continue to influence PAA organizations around the United States. Their guidebook (Berkeley Copwatch, 2021) has been adapted by groups in cities across the country, including Chicago, San Diego, and Saint Louis. Andrea Pritchett, one of the founders of Berkeley Copwatch who continues to lead the group, considers confrontational practices to be outside the PAA she endorses: Well, you know there’s a lot of groups around that call themselves Copwatch. Our criterion is basically, if you’re involved in direct observation of the police and you’re committed to non-violence and non-interfering, then we would classify that as a cop-watching activity. Some groups of people feel like they want to be able to intervene in moments of injustice or perceived injustice, and it’s not what we do. It’s not what we train people to do. (Pritchett, 2018)

Berkeley Copwatch has a full training manual for volunteers, many of whom sign up as part of a class on police accountability that Pritchett helps lead. Berkeley’s guidelines have been borrowed and adapted by groups across the country and emphasize nonviolence, fair documentation, and victim advocacy. Volunteers are warned not to patrol with weapons or while under the influence, and encouraged to teach others about solving problems

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without police, to educate citizens about their rights, and to follow cases through the legal system (Berkeley Copwatch, 2021). Spontaneous bystander video of police work has dominated discourse about new media police policy in the twenty-first century. Spontaneous filming might be inspired by organized PAA directly or indirectly to capture anything from bad behavior, an embarrassing event or, as in the case of George Floyd, a moment that sparks a movement. Because it is produced outside of an organization with standard processes, bystander video is more easily analyzed as a text, though it shares the authority of embodied practice with routinized cop-watching. Reacting to the moment to use a camera engages the body—and using that video in the course of testimony reflect a humanistic impulse, the sort that prompted Fraizier to raise her smartphone in Minneapolis. It is also what motivated George Holliday to record Rodney King’s on a California highway in 1991 (Ortiz, 2015). The spontaneous filming of King’s beating was foundational and has been widely studied for the way it popularized the video’s witnessing epistemology (Deitz, 1996; Gooding-Williams, 1993; Koon & Deitz, 1992; Lawrence, 2000). Many of those who viewed the tape were astounded that the officers were eventually acquitted, and the case still serves as a reminder that visual evidence can be both explosive and limited by its contextualization in the narrative (Gerland, 1994). More recently, Eric Garner’s 2014 death in New York city similarly illustrates the evidentiary power and limits of use-of-force video, as the lead officer involved was fired, but not criminally charged, for having used the chokehold in violation of department regulations (Southall, 2019). The tension between photographic and narrative authority remains relevant today as bystander video captures fatal incidents of police force and PAA groups proliferate. Today, most major U.S. cities can claim at least one PAA group, reflecting two important technological advances: small, portable, and relatively inexpensive video cameras and social media. One of the earliest websites PINAC, or “Photography Is Not a Crime,” was created by multimedia journalist Carlos Miller, who started blogging after he was arrested while photographing police in 2007. PINAC remains a national site and has inspired other sites, such as Cop Block, Honor–Your–Oath, Film–The– Police, and the Peaceful Streets Project. Most of these groups incorporate all or part of a model established by Berkeley Copwatch, which uses the principles of nonviolent witnessing in service of activism. Social media and the rapid spread of inexpensive and accessible video production tools have inspired other forms of police reform activism. Some are organized around American Libertarian principles, with the goal of defending the First and/or Second Amendments; other activists operate like citizen journalists to cover policing agencies more broadly (Bock, 2016).

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Indeed, one of the fascinating dimensions of the movement is the variety of political viewpoints represented, from left-leaning anarchist sympathizers to the Black Lives Matter movement to the right-wing antiauthoritarian participants. Members of the latter wing are more likely to engage in what they call “First Amendment Checks,” taking a camera to a government property to test whether or not they will be stopped by security, then post videos of any resulting confrontations to the web. Some groups are vocally anti-police and decry the very existence of police agencies in profane terms online. Theorizing Police Accountability Activism PAA groups all use the camera as an evidentiary tool, and this common thread has inspired surveillance theorists to consider the various flows of power wrought by the gaze (Brucato, 2015; Mann & Ferenbok, 2013; Schaefer & Steinmetz, 2014). Foucault’s panopticism has played a significant role in this line of study, for its contribution to understanding the disciplinary effect of being watched (Foucault, 1975/1977). While this line of inquiry is valuable, its focus on images neglects the role of the body in their construction. To fully understand the police accountability movement requires an examination of how video is collected and used by its activists. Evidentiary video lends indexical authority to discourses surrounding police accountability, yet the social practices surrounding that discourse are just as critical. Moreover, those social practices do not occur in a vacuum; they operate in cultural contexts steeped with hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Embodied Practice The videos of police use-of-force incidents that have made headlines are often made by accidental witnesses, not PAA activists, who plan patrols according to a schedule. Sometimes accidental witnesses become activists: Antonio Buehler founded a PAA group in Austin, Texas, after he was arrested while photographing a DUI arrest on New Year’s morning, 2012 (Bock & Schneider, 2016). Ramsey Orta (who was jailed and subsequently released on unrelated charges) became a member of a PAA group after he shot a clip of Eric Garner in an improper chokehold during his arrest in New York (Ehrlich, 2020; Southall, 2019; WeCopwatch​.or​g, 2020). For the most part, however, accidental witnessing and routinized PAA cop-watching are significantly different forms of practice. Recurring patrols with the purpose of monitoring police activity require planning and commitment in ways that accidental witnessing does not. Standard PAA groups hold training sessions on policies and procedures, though not all participants choose to join regular patrols. Planned and organized or not, however, documenting police activity

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effectively does not require a class; it requires a person to make an active decision to get involved. For routinized PAA, the camera is but one tool in the kit; embodied attendance is primary. During the night I observed Copwatch in Oakland in May of 2017. Andrea Pritchett did not deploy her own camera when she approached police who were interacting with homeless campers in People’s Park; a fellow volunteer used his from a distance. Instead, Pritchett carried a clipboard and asked the officers to not to dispose of the campers’ belongings. Nothing dramatic occurred as Pritchett advocated for the homeless campers and officers responded to her questions. Accountability activists say that watching is as much as part of their work as videotaping. In another mid-size southwestern city, a woman concerned about homophobic violence by police in the gay/lesbian nightclub district started her accountability activism with a fake camera [“Amy,” February 13, 2016]. Even that, she said, seemed to make a difference in the way officers interacted with the public. One of the founding members of another group is certain that their patrols have made a difference in the entertainment district. One of its volunteers considers a boring night with “nothing” on tape to be a victory. In the words of a Texas activist inspired by right-wing, libertarian politics, We like to think that it prevents abuses just having our presence there at a traffic stop or anywhere, we’d have some effect in preventing abuse, if a cop sees us on camera. Likewise for a citizen that may want to beat up a cop. He knows that we’re across the street filming everybody. It really holds everybody in check. [“Nick,” January 16, 2015]

The body, therefore, is the most essential element of routinized accountability activism. The work belongs to those who show up. Patrolling with activists usually takes place late at night, involves quite a bit of walking, and can be somewhat dull. After all, there is no guarantee anyone will misbehave on any given evening. To conduct ethnographic research with a police accountability group means starting a shift at around 11:00 p.m. and walking or circling neighborhoods in a car for several hours until the bars close and both police and the public call it a night. Embodiment in Discourse Police accountability video is powerful because of the indexicality wrought by photography’s recording perfection, yet the camera alone does not construct its authority. These clips are produced with a larger audience in mind, using a documentary aesthetic and presented in witnessing narratives. Videos are contextualized by people who were on the scene and their

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narrative authority is rooted in a blend of showing and telling. In the words of Berkeley’s Andrea Pritchett, We started Copwatch without video. It was about the relationships, it was about stopping police misconduct through the act of witnessing. And at the time that it started the main leverage we had was our ability to be present and observe and be willing to recount our observations if it was in a court of law, or to the press, or wherever. (Pritchett, 2018)

When the video is added to the work of witnessing, it becomes potent testimony (Peters, 2001). Witnesses who risk their own well-being to view events are especially credible in comparison with viewers who watch a scene from their sofa. In this way, PAA is not only an embodied practice for its recurrent patrolling; it produces texts that are authoritative because they blend photographic reality with most conscientious form of witnessing. Mediated witnessing, or watching events on TV or the Internet, lacks the moral authority of a viewer who has “been there,” though many scholars argue that such viewing still carries the weight of implied obligation (Ristovska, 2016; Tait, 2011). Police accountability routines produce videos with a specific and familiar point of view. PAA workshops emphasize how to shoot a scene to capture the full action, what filmmakers call a “master shot,” in which all the characters are visible as they act. For police accountability, this means making capturing as much of the scene as possible from a distance that presents the full action. During a 2013 workshop in Austin, Texas, PAA leaders discussed proper distancing and the advantages of triangulating a view. Aspiring activists were taught to keep their cameras steady, fill the frame with the full scene and work together to spread out in order to capture multiple angles. Workshop leaders stressed that “proper” distancing is a contested concept. Officers often tell activists to move away but backing up too far often makes it difficult to fully capture the faces of those involved. There is not a legal rule for what constitutes “proper distance” for noninterference, and the more tense a situation, the more space officers desire in case onlookers become violent. During patrol observations, activists and officers frequently had discussions, if not arguments, over where photographers could and should stand. Whether in workshops like these or in their online documentation, groups that advocate for nonviolent, passive witnessing encourage would-be copwatchers to explain their presence as a form of help for all involved, creating a neutral document for everyone’s protection. They focused on using the camera as a neutral tool for the purpose of social accountability, not for gathering shocking footage for YouTube hits, a frequent accusation from law enforcement supporters. After the Floyd case erupted into national

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demonstrations, accountability activists used their websites and social media to urge would-be police accountability activists to avoid identifying protesters who might be harmed by publicity, a doctrine that contradicts standard photojournalistic practice, which usually seeks to identify anyone engaging in public activity (Authority Collective, 2020). Berkeley Copwatch, in fact, does not automatically post every video it records from its patrols. One of its volunteers (Casey) explains, If we do use our footage or publish our footage or something like that, it’s always with consent of the people that are in the footage. And that’s often sometimes pretty difficult to get, because you don’t always get the contact info of the people. [“Casey,” May 8, 2017]

Most of the “ground rules” offered by PAA organizers, though, are similar to the ethics of professional photojournalists, who are taught to never interfere with a scene and to document reality in ways that are fair to all subjects. The “master shot” sought by standard PAA practice presents a visual perspective that helps onlookers understand who does what when. It is very different than the kind of video captured by police body or badge cams, which are highly subjective and move with the officer. Badge cam video is extremely valuable for seeing what an officer saw, but it is not even all that helpful for understanding what an officer does, because of its perspective and the way it moves. Badge cam video is also controlled by the very people it is supposed to hold accountable, and occasionally is unrecorded, goes missing, or remains out of public view. Standard PAA video, in contrast, records a public view of a public scene and quite literally works as the public’s eyes on its government in action. No matter who shoots the video, once it is played back it becomes part of a narrative. Fisher (1984; 1985) suggested that narratives move the human conscience more effectively than pure reason. More than simple chronologies, Fisher theorized that narratives always convey a cultural “lesson.” Consequently, images have limited value by themselves but are extremely powerful in the context of a story. Video is an especially strong form of evidence because it presents a timeline as well as photographic indexicality (Bock & Schneider, 2016). Raw tape contains a narrative within, with before, during, and after action, that may or may not make sense to the average viewer. A clip is rendered more meaningful when it is presented in a larger contextualizing narrative. For this reason, activists interviewed for this project argued that social media is as important as smartphones for their efforts, for it allows them to establish the video’s narrative context. As one PAA “early adopter” put it: “Video’s a really powerful tool, and social media is great for spreading that video. They’re like a one-two punch” [“Leonard,”

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January 6, 2015]. Documenting incidents does nothing if not one sees the video, or in the words of another activist: “By itself, somebody has to use the video, get people’s attention with it, get people to see it, things like that. It’s not the most important part, but it’s a part of the most important part” [“Don,” October 27, 2014]. Once the video is released to the public sphere, it cannot be unseen, and so law enforcement officers use a number of discursive strategies to explain away a problematic incident by reminding viewers that one cannot show what led up to an incident is a common response, along with critiques of the camera’s angle and framing (Bock, 2020). The King case strategy, which dissects scenes one at a time, constitutes an “awful but lawful” frame, which diverts attention away from the phenomenological narrative toward individual moments that can be explained by police procedure. When these strategies are not enough, police officers often just claim moral authority as guardians of law and order, not re-narrativizing the clip as much as saying it is irrelevant to the larger mission. Relationships with Strangers Interviews with PAA volunteers reveal a remarkable uniformity regarding motivation. Nearly all of the volunteers who participate in Berkeley-style nonviolent witnessing have had a negative encounter with police or were close to another person who’d had a negative encounter. Subjects who referred to Second Amendment or libertarian goals for their motivation tended to participate in additional, related practices such as “First Amendment” checks, in which a volunteer visits government property to exercise their right to photograph on property. Such checks invite confrontations with security guards and police which are then posted online. The point of such checks is a matter of principle: rights must be exercised to endure. Accountability activists who focus on police abuse, however, tend to describe their motivation in altruistic terms like “John,” who joined his city’s group after watching the video of a man pushed to the ground while filming a DUI scene. “I saw (the) video . . . and I knew immediately that I did not agree with what the police did. . . . I knew that I didn’t agree with it and that something could be done” [April 13, 2013]. “Don” joined the same group for the same reason: That was, I guess, just one of those enough is enough moments. I started paying attention then. When he and some of the others actually started forming [Group1] I was all for it but I didn’t think it would get off the ground. I didn’t think it would work. I went to the first summit in 2012 and on the way home I filmed a DWI stop with a bad cellphone camera that I had at the time. I haven’t stopped since then. [October 27, 2014]

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An activist who started in the Tea Party now says his views skew left after getting involved with the police accountability movement, “I started to see police harassing kids in the subway . . . That prompted me to create Know Your Rights cards and start handing them out to kids on the subway, basically admonishing them or encouraging them not to even speak to police” [“Leonard,” January 6, 2015]. Most of the activists who participate in Berkeley-style PAA either had a close relationship with a person who’d had violent encounter with police or had one themselves. This undergraduate from Berkeley joined Copwatch after participating in a protest in 2014 that was “kettled” by police: I guess the first time that I up close witnessed police abuse, I was kind of a victim of police abuse during those 2014 protests, of like being jabbed with those things by police. We were . . . corralled off of the highway, and we were being given dispersal orders, but then people were being beaten if they were trying to leave, and there was nowhere for us to disperse to, and the police just kept closing in on us ordering dispersal orders, and beating the shit out of people when they were trying to leave. And it was just like, “What the fuck is going on?” (“Casey,” May 8, 2017).

“Clint” was harassed by police as a teen, and the memory still drives his PAA video-blogging. “Vincent” had been involved in crime when he was young, started a ministry, and started a PAA blog after a negative encounter with police in his community: The final straw was a church service was interrupted in the middle of a christening because a cop didn’t like how one of our cars looked parked and I said enough. I left the church and went on a month trying to find what I wanted to do with my life, really. Because I knew I needed to do something. Something needed to change and I felt like I needed to speak. [“Zach,” June 10, 2016]

Standard PAA practice compounds this humanitarian impulse with an emphasis on conversation and community-building. In Berkeley, Pritchett leads Copwatch with an emphasis on cultivating relationships, The whole theory of accountability and this theory of justice philosophically from my point of view, from the Copwatch point of view, is that it’s about what goes on in the neighborhood and it’s about us watching each other’s backs. . . . It’s also the notion that relationships prevent abuse. [“Pritchett,” July 11, 2019]

Routinized PAA almost demands altruism because of its demands on volunteer time and energy. In contrast, bystander recordings do not require

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such a commitment, so their connection with the humanitarian impulse is more a matter of happenstance. Onlookers might be concerned about police practices, but they might also simply be alarmed by a dramatic moment, wish to shame public misbehavior, or seek something flashy for their social media account. Bystander video, by definition, does not cultivate relationships with police or citizens, even though it may become essential evidence, as with the George Floyd clip. The purposeful relationship-building of standard PAA, coupled with its embodied practice and witnessing discourses, presents a unique phenomenon that invites theorization beyond the surveillance gaze. PAA and Feminist Philosophy Feminist theory incorporates multiple perspectives, most of which ascribe to an axiology of emancipation. That is, whether they use a radical, postmodern, Marxist, or other approach, feminist scholars endeavor to undo oppression as much as explain it. Indeed, many contemporary feminist scholars go beyond gender alone to consider oppression’s intersectional dimensions. Introduced by Crenshaw (1989, 1991, 2012), intersectionality describes the way multiple vectors of oppression, such as race, sexual orientation, or class, connect with one another. Intersectionality confronts the racism of the early suffrage movement and calls attention to colonialist, white frames that persist in feminist activism today (Mohanty, 1988). Connecting these various strands of feminism is a concern for the body in society, discourse, and philosophy. Bodies are at the foundation of straight, white, patriarchal oppression, and so mainstream feminist theory demands attention to the body (discursively or materially), in opposition to the Platonic ethos that focuses on abstraction to the detriment of the material world (Orr, 2006).2 Feminist epistemology reveals the subjectivity of experience, and how that subjectivity produces multiple forms of knowledge rooted in individual bodies (Grosz, 1994; Tronto, 1989). The notion that knowledge is situational, sensed by the body and rooted in experience contrasts with the liberal/humanist view from the enlightenment, which posits that knowledge is objective, universal, and exists outside of independent bodies. Philosopher Michel Foucault similarly focused on the body’s centrality to power and knowledge, but he did not directly address the concerns of feminist scholars such as the oppression of women’s bodies. Consequently, feminist scholarship has had a complicated relationship with Foucauldian thought, particularly for his argument against the determined subject and the death of the author (McLaren, 2002). Foucault’s assertion that knowledge rises from discourse and not the individual seems to dismiss feminism’s concern with the oppression of bodies that are not white and male (Foucault, 1975/1977).

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McLaren (2002) argued for a more careful examination of Foucault’s rejection of the subject, noting that Foucault rejected a particular conception of the human subject, namely liberal philosophy’s determined subject, while proposing that subjects do play an active role in their own production. Indeed, Foucault’s arguments regarding the fractured nature of power and the relationship between discourse and discipline reflect, in many ways, the concerns of mainstream feminist thought. In her rehabilitation of Foucault for feminist philosophy, McLaren (2002) found a common concern for the way morality arises out of interconnectedness. In contrast with a deontological perspective on morality, in which an individual obeys an external authority or set of rules, both Foucault and feminist philosophers argue that morality arises out of our connections with others, or what Gilligan (1993) named an ethic of care: “This ethic, which reflects a cumulative knowledge of human relationships, evolves around a central insight, that self and other are interdependent” (p. 74). Gilligan’s ideas about moral philosophy resulted from her many interviews with women about abortion in the 1970s. The ethic of care suggests that morality is not a matter of living one’s life according to predetermined principles, but instead emphasizes interrelatedness—a shift from individual morality to mutual obligation (McLaren, 2002). As Gilligan (1993) described it, The ethic of care guides us in acting carefully in the human world and highlights the costs of carelessness. It is grounded less in moral precepts than in psychological wisdom, underscoring the costs of not paying attention, not listening, being absent rather than present, not responding with integrity and respect. (p. 103)

Tronto (1989) offered the shorthand, “caring about and caring for” as a way of differentiating the ethic of care from a traditional, masculinist ethic of justice. In patriarchy, men have had the privilege of caring about principles, laws, and an ethic of justice among separate equals—the lives of women were hardly considered in such a moral universe. Nurturing children, managing families, women’s caring for others has not only been missing from conceptions of morality, but emotional connectedness was absent in the enlightenment’s moral paradigm (Gilligan, 1993; Grosz, 1994; McLaren, 2002; Tronto, 1989). The feminist ethic of care considers morality to be contextual, interrelational, and embodied, to care for as opposed to care about. Feminist theory provides an ample toolkit for analyzing the police accountability movement and its different manifestations. Its epistemology highlights the particularly situated view offered by accountability video, which often contrasts with prosecutorial or police accounts. The feminist ethic of

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care—and its foil, the ethic of justice—offers a way to analyze the various strands of PAA volunteerism in the United States. In some instances, such as the libertarian “First Amendment Tests,” an ethic of justice is evident: volunteers test a principle through provocation. The Berkeley model of nonviolent witnessing and community-building is better exemplified by the feminist ethic of care. Feminist Theory’s Contribution to Understanding PAA Self-proclaimed cop-watchers might not consider themselves feminists and their processes are not fundamentally gendered. Yet PAA practice is embodied; the discourse it produces is contextualized and rendered authoritative by the body, and its participants share a sense of caring for others. To study PAA with a feminist lens does not negate the value of the surveillance paradigm; it instead enriches our understanding of the role of the body in the production of police accountability discourses. Feminist philosophy compels an examination of the way masculine power structures have legitimized violence and oppression and it offers a paradigm for interpreting the meaning of PAA video. Perhaps most importantly, it invites an ethical critique of the myriad forms of PAA practices. Patriarchal Patterns PAA answers long-standing complaints about law enforcement in the United States by people who are not white, male, or straight. Despite years of pressure from women’s groups, thousands of rape kits in the United States have been warehoused, untested, and research suggests many officers still make decisions based on false beliefs about sexual assault (Campbell & Fehler‐Cabral, 2018; Safronova & Halleck, 2019; Shaw et al., 2017). Members of the LBGTQ community routinely report harassment and even assault from officers during their encounters with police (Lambda Legal, 2015). Trans people have a higher risk of being murdered and but report encountering harassment, rather than assistance, from the police (Calhoun, 2017). In 2019, activists pushed back against allowing officers to participate in pride parades on grounds that police have too long been a “force of terror” (Levin, 2019). Black Americans are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned than white Americans for the same crime (Baumgartner et al., 2018; Gramlich, 2019). Non-white people are condemned to death at disproportionate rates (Death Penalty Information Center, 2020). While the variables that lead to police killing are numerous and complex, Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police and less likely than whites to be armed when it happens (Mapping Police Violence, 2019). For all Americans, the

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numbers are stark: nearly three people die at the hands of police a day in the United States, a rate far ahead of other industrialized democracies (Lopez, 2018). The marginalization of non-white, nonheterosexual men is predictable in light of police culture’s hypermasculine dimensions and—in the United States—white supremacist history (Barrie & Broomhall, 2012; Williams, 2015). Male police officers commit domestic violence at higher rates than the rest of the population, and their victims are often unable to get help (Ammons, 2004; National Center for Women and Policing, n.d.). Many American police departments started as slave-hunting organizations, and even today white supremacist organizations have infiltrated numerous departments in the United States (Johnson, 2019; Williams, 2015). The myths of hypermasculinity, which punish men for showing emotion, expect them to always be in control and sanctions “righteous” violence, which is harmful. Police officers are at higher risk of suicide than the general population and are less likely to seek help for emotional distress (Chae & Boyle, 2013). Women can be violent; they can be cruel and they can be murderers. This does not erase the fact that state violence is largely masculine territory. The institutions that enforce the state’s monopoly on violence are male bastions: the military, prisons, and police agencies. Interestingly, while alcohol use, PTSD, shift work, and relationship issues are cited as variables for police suicide, the root beliefs related to those variables—patriarchy—are often ignored. White, heteronormative patriarchy is the thread that runs through the inequities in contemporary law enforcement and the pathologies within police culture. Indeed, the state itself can be considered “masculine,” constituting a mythical, authoritarian father figure who has the right to use violence for the sake of discipline (Brown, 1992). As Brown (1992) explained, identifying the state as male is not the same thing as saying it serves men: The state can be masculinist without intentionally or overtly pursuing the “interests” of men precisely because the multiple dimensions of socially constructed masculinity have historically shaped the multiple modes of power circulating through the domain called the state—this is what it means to talk about masculinist power rather than the power of men. (pp. 192–193)

Feminist philosophy reveals the unifying strand of toxic masculinity in the problem of police abuse. No single policy change will bring real reform as long as a culture in which certain bodies are valued over others, and the valued bodies are not only allowed to but expected to be violent.

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Assessing PAA’s “Product” Feminist epistemology enables a nuanced interpretation of the surveillance offered by PAA, which may or may not be recorded. Recall the fact that Berkeley’s group started without cameras, and the woman in the southwest concerned about homophobic policing used a fake toy to patrol her city’s nightclub district. Surveillance without documentation recalls Foucauldian panopticism in which merely believing we are being watched changes our behavior (Foucault, 1975/1977). It explains why activists who follow the Berkeley model are unconcerned if they wrap up a patrol without any tape of police abuse, for their goal is to prevent it. By focusing on the disciplinary gaze, surveillance studies often overlook the embodied practices and social hierarchies that enable the view, treating images as facts instead of constructions. Feminist epistemology’s emphasis on the contingency, subjectivity, and corporeality of knowledge similarly offers remedy to naïve notions of the image as “objective.” Photographic images are made by people; even a robotic surveillance camera is installed by a human being for a particular purpose. PAA video is produced from the view of a detached citizen, which grants it the moral authority of embodied witnessing (Allan, 2013; Peters, 2001). Organized groups that teach volunteers to attempt a “master shot” and to work as a team for additional perspectives produce evidence that is useful for a viewer to assess the actions of each subject in the video. Unlike a stationary camera, PAA video can follow the action. Unlike an officer’s body cam, PAA video can see more than what the officer sees, it captures a public view. This shift from the police perspective to the citizen’s is well-illustrated by the public’s horror upon watching George Floyd’s death on tape. Considering the situated knowledge of PAA video also highlights the role of narrative in moral judgment. Yes, cameras perfectly record the scene in front of the lens, an “objective” rendering of light waves. The rest is a matter of context and narrative: situated knowledge, which is why it is possible for police to explain away an embarrassing video. Video becomes powerful proof not by itself, but when it is held up as testimony from a witness. Finally, even the act of “watching over” has a gendered dimension in patriarchy, for women traditionally have been pushed to the sidelines to watch, while men are encouraged to “fight in the arena.” Passive viewing is “women’s work,” in a patriarchal system that gains power when coupled with photographic evidence. In other words, PAA’s authority rests not in the camera alone, but in a camera operated by a purposeful body that produces accountability evidence. Establishing Best Practices Finally, studying PAA through the lens of feminist philosophy offers a foundation for a normative critique. Which practices best advance democratic

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goals? For example, open-carry activists who test the response of law enforcement while displaying a gun and a camera present a quintessential illustration of an ethic of justice. The volunteer is acting independently on principle to “force” a response by police, and the resulting confrontations inspire debates about the constitution. In contrast, detached monitoring of police activity without weapons proclaims nonviolent practice. Berkeley’s Andrea Pritchett assessed the division this way: “Cop-watchers who feel like the whole struggle happens on the street corner, I think, conduct themselves differently from people who see the Copwatch moment as part of a bigger strategy.” Activists who observe the Berkeley principles and cultivate relationships better illustrate the ethic of care. This is not to say that everyone who films police is virtuous, honest, and always ascribes to the principles of silent witnessing and nonviolence. During research observations, members of PAA organizations occasionally used confrontational language with officers and even yelled at them. At the end of one night, one activist who’d been pushed by police on horseback on previous patrols yelled “You’re the real criminal!” and “You’re a horrible person!” at a mounted officer he recognized. Occasionally activists were observed working their way into situations to be as close as possible, operating aggressively, but not violently, with their cameras. Even the leader of one group confessed to breaking his own rule by occasionally swearing at police. Feminist moral philosophy, with its identification of the ethics of care and justice, offers a framework for considering the ethics of such practices, and they might advance or impede the movement’s larger goals. Debates within the PAA community about how and whether to show the faces of participants in the uploaded videos might similarly be considered through the ethics of justice or care. Judicial rulings have granted photojournalists the right to make images of public activity in public spaces, and news routines dictate that subjects be identified whenever possible unless they might be harmed by publicity. Accountability activists who advocate are more concerned with the safety and comfort of subjects than this journalistic “rule.” Should tape always be shared? Or only shared with subjects? What about uploading tapes of individuals in conflict with police who are clearly under mental or emotional distress? It is legal to publish such a video as a matter of principle, but what human purpose might it serve? CONCLUSION On June 11, 2021, Darnella Frazier was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize for recording the video of George Floyd’s death that led to Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction (Izadi, 2021). When she testified in court during that trial,

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her words reflected the very essence of the ethic of care: “When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad. I look at my brother. I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black,” Frazier told the prosecutor. I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends. And I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them. . . . It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologized to George Floyd for not doing more.

This chapter has argued that feminist philosophy offers a useful framework for theorizing the police accountability movement beyond the paradigm established by surveillance studies. Feminist philosophy enables a more complex examination of the PAA movement’s practices and the images they produce, as it demands attention to the body’s role in practice, the valuation of the discourses produced, and the project’s larger social goals. Non-confrontational, detached police accountability observation, or “cop-watching,” reflects an ethic of care, while practices that “test” authorities through provocation are more illustrative of the ethic of justice. Tending to others and watching from the margins have traditionally been women’s work in patriarchy, and if the state is a man—well, watching “the man,” to keep the peace is, at heart, a feminist task. In this exploration of the philosophy underpinning PAA, this chapter has invoked the gender binary, though its aim is to ultimately undermine that binary. The mind-body binary, for instance, must be understood before it can be rejected for its contribution to structural oppression. The enlightenment’s moral subject has no relevant body, for it is imagined as the rational thought of independent individuals. Female bodies, Black bodies, and differently abled bodies could be “othered” apart from the purity of the Cartesian self. The body’s centrality and human interdependence are familiar in the feminine realm: women care for babies, children, the elderly. Traditionally women were the hands-on nurses while men were the detached doctors who diagnosed and prescribed. When men are called upon to use their bodies for service, it often is characterized in terms of sacrifice, as when soldiers are called upon to die for their country. Black bodies have been valued for their strength and endurance and usefulness to the interests of white society. The mind-body binary is reflected in the ethic of care. Yet while the ethic of care originated in feminist philosophy, it is not an essentially feminine domain; Darnella Frazier’s gender is coincidence; many other scenes of police violence have been captured by men. There is no biological basis for the proposal that an individual cannot be moral without caring for other people. The ethic of care is feminist for its opposition to the enlightenment-individualism, which has enabled historic hierarchies of oppression. It was articulated in feminist philosophy, but it is not a “female”

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philosophy, as Gilligan (2014) pointed out in an essay updating her groundbreaking work, A Different Voice: “the ‘different voice’ is,” she wrote, “simply, a human voice. We had been telling a false story about ourselves, falsely gendered and false in its representation of human nature” (p. 90). Gilligan (2014) argued that binary thinking is essentially patriarchal and antidemocratic, a justification for division and inequality. Binaries are useful for their manufacture of argumentative foils, but they are less useful for living. Routinized police accountability engages the body in practice, rests upon it for discursive authority, and is largely motivated by an ethic of care. Applying this feminist lens to PAA enables normative conversations about how it might best serve democratic goals and new ways for thinking about what individuals owe one another in civil society. NOTES 1. Pseudonyms have been assigned to all research participants except Andrea Pritchett, the leader of Berkley Copwatch. Subjects who were interviewed are designated with [square brackets]. 2. Postmodern feminists argue for a more discursive conception of the body, cf. Butler (2011a).

Chapter 3

Visual Disruptions as Embodied Activism Leisure Spectacle Demonstration Casey R. Schmitt

The great protest demonstrations of the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements—in some ways the most celebrated and recognized embodied activisms in the U.S. history—were enacted through mass gatherings and marches. Activists used their bodies as literal evidence for the civic support and righteousness of their causes. Through physical assembly, they put their bodies “on the line” to make their points (Butler, 2015, p. 18), at risk of physical harm, discomfort, or arrest. Individuals gathered to become a critical mass of commitment and support that, when broadcast via nascent visual media, were unlike anything the world or its legislators had ever seen. But with each new mass gathering and each new protest march, the mass media spectacle of mass demonstration lost impact and novelty. Activists and organizers had to look elsewhere to (1) ensure they would continue to gain public and media attention, and (2) ensure those individuals (and individual bodies) dedicated to the cause still found meaning and motivation in their acts of assembly. And, so, while embodied action continued as a crucial form of promoting public attention and conversation for causes that may not otherwise reach the halls of legislation, those embodied actions took novel forms: sit-ins, teachins, bed-ins, be-ins, love-ins, and laugh-ins. The late 1960s and early 1970s era, therefore, marked a rise not only in protest as spectacle demonstration but in protest and embodied activism as playful, satirical, ludic, and even fun. Solemn, impassioned marches and sermons were joined by rock concerts, cross-country relays, costumes, and chants. The playful aspects of public demonstration grew through the 1980s and 1990s with the development of visual and digital media, through image events (DeLuca, 1999) and culture jams (Harold, 2004), enacting vivid, 55

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widely circulated, visual disruptions of hegemonic power and status quo through merry pranks and simple expressions of peace and joy to challenge structures of destruction and oppression. By the rise of the Occupy Movement demonstrations sparked in 2011, activists and protestors were using their bodies not only through marches, sit-ins, and teach-ins but also through danceins, die-ins, fun runs, and zombie cosplays, with humorous protest signs and gatherings that resembled block parties. The embodied civic demonstration that served not only as civic spectacle but also as community leisure activity had begun to take form. Reflecting on the January 2017 Women’s March in resistance to the inauguration of Donald Trump, Bracewell and Wadsworth (2017) noted, “One important characteristic of protest has so far been overlooked: Protesting can be pleasurable” (para. 2). The rise in embodied protest through recreation and play, they argued, is a direct appeal to keep participants engaged in physical demonstrations without the risk or intimidation of other forms of embodied assembly. “Most people,” Bracewell and Wadsworth (2017) write, “Find street marches, demonstrations, confrontations with police or government officials and civil disobedience to be intimidating. So how do we account for the record-breaking and enthusiastic turnout for recent anti-Trump actions?” (para. 4). The “major factor” in getting participants to move “from the couch to the streets,” they argued, was not so much the imminent threats posed by the Trump administration as it was “the tangible pleasure people can feel from acting publicly and collectively to try to change something” (para. 5). This major factor and tangible pleasure are what Occupy Wall Street cocreator Micah White (n.d.; 2016) has championed as gamification of activism, rejecting the old embodied activisms of public demonstration and embracing physical action that is both disruptive of the status quo and fun for the enactor. It is the rise of flash mobs and swarms and guerilla volunteerism. It is a well-documented mobilizing force in current-day activism (Mair, 2002; Massung et al., 2013; Newmeyer, 2008; Thorson & Wang, 2020), by which simple acts of leisure are simultaneously acts of resistance and persistence. But it is also an embodied activism that contains an element of the ridiculous and lacks the visceral symbolism of activisms that literally put the actors’ bodies, livelihoods, and lives on the line. How does a “fun run” or “dance-in” compare to the 1960s Freedom Rides, the Birmingham Campaign, or the student anti-war demonstrations on the Kent State campus in 1970? In this chapter, I examine leisure spectacle demonstration (Schmitt, 2020) as an emergent subgenre of spectacle protest but also as a problematic form of embodied activism. In such demonstrations, participants gather in mass to recreate or “have fun” in the name of a cause. Such gatherings enact an

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embodied commitment but, in doing so through leisure and recreation, do so differently than embodied activisms that involve more personal physical risk and sacrifice. I apply critical/cultural analysis and rhetorical criticism to the material and image rhetorics of such events to explore whether the leisure-structured spectacle gatherings function as persuasive/disruptive culture jam or, rather, as spaces of constitutive identity performance (Charland, 1987) reaffirming an in-group sentiment for those who take part in the display/recreational activity. Ultimately, I argue that leisure spectacles are distinct from radical culture jamming (Harold, 2004), everyday acts of resistance (Senda-Cook & McHendry, 2018), and slacktivism (Arora, 2015). Despite their apparent growing popularity, such leisure demonstrations have significant rhetorical shortcomings in a broader public space and lend themselves uniquely to misinterpretation or failure compared to other forms of protest and advocacy. Yet, when assessed by their embodied elements and the physical actions of participants, such leisure spectacles do function rhetorically, as they perform and reify commitment and community for those who participate. In divided and partisan times, this can be a crucially important connective function, whereby individuals cement their personal identity with respect to broader social controversies. One-time participation in a leisure spectacle event creates an embodied, experiential performance of this commitment that creates coalition without the requirements of long-term shared interactions and is likely to guide actions and discourse with respect to the core cause when it appears in other spheres. In the following pages, I situate leisure spectacle demonstration as a particular form of embodied activism, defining it and identifying both its social/rhetorical affordances and limitations/drawbacks. I then illustrate these definitions, affordances, and limitations through case studies collected in field observations: communal dance-ins and yoga sessions for civic justice, ludic mass bike rides to raise environmental awareness, and canoe outings for industrial dam removal. I distinguish these from acts of leisure in explicit defiance of social interdiction, like the embodied activist demonstrations in protest of COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders or the #iRunwithMaud jogging campaign in response to racial violence and the 2020 killing of Amaud Arbery. Lastly, I explore the theoretical implication of such leisure spectacle demonstration as “protest-like” rather than as “protest” proper, arguing that its symbolic merits—like those of the fictional Forrest Gump’s run (Zemeckis, 1994)—are more about community and resilience than activist challenge and deliberative complaint, before identifying potential extensions and limitations for application of the concept in future critical work.

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DEFINITIONS AND AFFORDANCES Scholarship on activism in recent decades has granted increasing attention to physical acts and enactments, performed with and through the physical body, as legitimate and even transformative social actions. These physical actions are themselves inherently symbolic, as sensation and movement carry with them, always, potentially interpretable elements (Ratliff & Hall, 2014). These interpretable elements are all the more symbolic and even deliberative when they involve physical resistance to a status quo—that is, sitting or dining in a prohibited location, donning a provocative garment, or publicly committing a forbidden act for all to see, demonstrably challenging the legitimacy of interdictions and social orders. Beyond public symbolism, though, critics and theorists—especially feminist critics and theorists—have also attended more explicitly to the internal, sensorial, material, and personal aspects of embodied activism (Parkins, 2000). Butler (2011a; 2015), for instance, examines the performative elements of embodied action that express sentiment and motivation without or beyond language, and the role of personal risk and precarity in the use of the body to demonstrate or protest, physically putting one’s self in harm’s way to enact evidence of one’s own argument or to assert commitment to a cause. Alaimo (2010; 2017) examines this precarity as well, highlighting how the enactment of physical vulnerability and interdependence—through, for instance, demonstrations of public nudity or ingestion of polluted air and water—manifest a palpable and undeniable bond between individual body and broader social environment or space. These meditations on embodied activism have illuminated the crucial relationship between bodies—individually or in mass—and environment. The embodied action does not take place in a vacuum; rather, it is always already situated, and its situatedness determines its symbolism, its argument, and its affect. Alaimo writes of “trans-corporeality” as a means of conceptualizing this relationship. Such “trans-corporeality,” as Alaimo (2017) describes it, is “the time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (p. 238), accounting for the physical and intangible systems that move between and through human bodies and their lived environments. It is a means of conceptualizing public action in which the physical movements and acts of the public demonstrator are prefaced by the physical and social definitions of the space in which they manifest, in which the act itself involves the environment, and by which act, actor, and environment are ultimately involved, affected, and altered. Alaimo (2017) writes, “Crucial ethical and political possibilities emerge from this literal ‘contact zone’ between human corporeality and more-than-human

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nature” (p. 238). Such scholarship has articulated how embodied disruptions of lived physical spaces can enact and force disruptions of lived social spaces in ways that discursive and deliberative channels may not—or even cannot—always do. Kitis and Milani (2015), building from Christopher Stroud, write of “confrontational encounters” and embodied, physical disruptions of space as “turbulence,” through which bodies “speak” politically through their confrontational and frictive interaction with other bodies and material spaces. The turbulence is both physical and affective, with a lasting disquiet for those who experience it. Such material acts can “contest the very contours” of public presumption and social precedent (p. 269). This is similar to what Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) have identified as “place-as-rhetoric” which recognizes “material (physical and embodied) aspects of a place having meaning and consequence” (p. 265) and assuming “that the very place in which a protest occurs is a rhetorical performance that is part of the message of the movement” (pp. 258–259). Physically present activists disrupt the everyday flow of movement through spaces and places and, in doing so, make their appeals through place and placement. “(Re)constructing the meaning of place, even in temporary ways,” they write, “can be a tactical act of resistance along with the tactics we traditionally associate with protest” (p. 258). When successful, such “confrontational encounters” or “events” (Sewell, 2005) are ruptures in status quo modes of movement and interaction, changing perspectives for agency within a space forever thereafter. The powerful “confrontational encounters” of U.S. Civil Rights Movements—including civil disobedience enacted through lunch counter protests, mass gatherings in public spaces like the 1963 March on Washington, physical acts of movement and solidarity like the Freedom Rides, and disruptive inaction like bus boycotts—enacted trans-corporeality and challenged social presumptions of agency and space, all broadcast through mass media before the “public screen” (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002, p. 125) audience whose assumptions could be disrupted through sensory processing of the demonstrators’ remarkable embodied acts. But embodied activism is not always transformative. Cao (2017), for instance, notes that the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, was likewise physical, spectacular, confrontational, and turbulent, linked to and performed within a specific, bounded space, but that it did not ultimately alter its environment in traceable ways. The social and activist potential of embodied acts and confrontational encounters, Cao writes, inspired Micah White and others. Frustrated with economic inequality, white and others set up a ludic and disruptive encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, making it the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. White (n.d.) broadly championed playful and gamified acts of protest, envisioning not only costume, spectacle,

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and assembly, but even augmented reality games that incentivize anti-consumerist social disruption through digital media points and challenges. Cao argues that embodied action and playful disruption alone are not enough; a temporary turbulence can inspire short-term success, but not ultimately claim or reclaim a broader, more established physical or social space. This temporal aspect of enacted confrontation and environmental disruption raises a key question for the study of embodied activism: What good is a massive, enthusiastic, well-circulated, and/or uniquely memorable action if its physical and societal repercussions are negligible? Is a mass demonstration like Occupy Wall Street laudable in the same way as the Civil Rights Movement? Or are these distinct cultural and rhetorical phenomena, to be assessed distinctly and by different measures? These questions are all sharper when applied to embodied actions that are especially disconnected from their social-political causes and arguments, or especially negligible when tracing their ultimate repercussions on a space, society, or environment. In my previous work, I have argued that leisure spectacle demonstrations are a genre form of embodied activism distinct from other public acts of protest and assembly, and functioning differently than other modes of activist spectacle (Schmitt, 2020). A leisure spectacle demonstration is a mass gathering, ostensibly linked to a social/political cause or campaign, that takes the form of public leisure. It manifests as group dances, competitions, sporting events, and other recreational movements (or movements more frequently associated with recreation than with civic action). Such highly visible social/political demonstrations, disrupting status quo flows of space, discourse, and movement with visual displays of unusual size or incongruity are what DeLuca (1999) identifies as image events. The unusual event serves as spectacle, demanding attention and forcing conversation in spheres and in publics wherein attention to and conversations about specific topics of advocacy might not otherwise happen. The disruption draws media attention and coverage, and the coverage forces the conversation. They also function rhetorically as spectacle in the sense discussed by Farrell (1989), Procter (1990), and Halloran (2001). The sensory engagement of spectacle—that which is both spectacular and spectated—invites interpretation through direct experience that viscerally guides viewers to particular subject positions. Through circulation among the community of spectators, spectacular cases encourage communities to rally around collaborative interpretations, with judgments formed through shared, lived experience of the memorable event. (Schmitt, 2020)

It is difficult to pinpoint a specific origin for the recent rise in public mass demonstrations that make their case through performances of public

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recreation, but it seems to parallel the boom in popularity surrounding “run/ walks” for charitable causes in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Such events include, for instance, the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, the American Heart Association’s Heart Walk, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night Walk, among others (Filo et al., 2009; King, 2004; Klawiter, 1999). These participatory events invite attendees to run, walk, or otherwise exercise in support of a cause, personally enacting their commitment but also having a good time in a celebratory atmosphere. They have been especially linked to campaigns to raise awareness of medical conditions and funds to support hospitals providing treatment and researchers seeking cures, perhaps because the physical action of the spectacle event poetically underlines the tragedy inherent to physical disease and degradation. Klawiter (1999) and King (2004) document the particular mobilizing success of such events when linked to breast cancer, but “run/walks” are by no means constrained to a specific cause. In recent years, to attract new crowds and ensure originality, other organizations have sponsored not only run/walks but also bike rides, color runs, dance-a-thons, and sporting or gaming tournaments. Frequently, public leisure or recreation events that before had no explicit social or political commitments are linked to a cause of one kind of another. Such events are, of course, fundraisers, and participants either pay a fee to join (which is used to raise funds for the cause) or find sponsors who themselves agree to donate a certain amount for every lap, mile, and so on, completed by the participant recreator/activist. The recreation/leisure format is a way to motivate participants to join and participation fees ensure that the event is also a productive one, creating capital that can then promote more traditional forms of activism and advocacy. But not all public leisure events are fundraisers. Others are demonstrations of solidarity or protest, enacting free expression in creative ways but not explicitly tethered to a fundraising structure. Such others exist, seemingly, as mere playful, joyful disruption for disruption’s sake, articulated by Harold (2004) as “culture jamming.”1 Culture jams are “guerilla theater” meant to enact an agitative “rhetoric of confrontation” (Short, 1991, p. 172). They are designed to (1) draw attention and (2) push mainstream audiences to respond to controversial issues. Culture jams are inherently nonrational appeals. They are ludic, hyperbolic, ridiculous, and bizarre, and that’s the very point. They are meant to push boundaries and conversation. Thus, in effect, a leisure spectacle demonstration need not necessarily have a specific driving purpose, message, or end objective to be radical embodied activism. It need only to enact leisure, recreation, and/or play in an environment where such actions are, if not wholly prohibited, generally unaccepted or unexpected. The disruption and turbulence of the leisure spectacle itself

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challenge norms of movement, attention, and perspective, as “temporary tactical disruptions of normalized spatial practices” (Endres et al., 2014, p. 123), enacting “ephemeral fissures in the meaning of place” to transgress expectations “by positing an alternate vision” (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011, p. 268). And yet, qualities like “temporary” and “ephemeral” return us to the question of embodied action and temporality. Leisure spectacle demonstrations are certainly turbulent and confrontational. They are certainly spectacular and produce easily forwarded, easily circulated images and accounts for the public screen. Yet, despite their apparent growing popularity, they also have some significant rhetorical shortcomings in a broader public space and lend themselves uniquely to misinterpretation or failure compared to other forms of protest and advocacy, and these are worth considering, as well. LIMITATIONS AND NOVEL ANALYTICAL FRAMES A common critique of spectacle demonstrations—and especially of playful and leisurely demonstrations—is that they rarely achieve a deliberative end, or even a deliberative in-road. The temporary and playful nature of such demonstrations makes them seemingly easy to dismiss, to disregard, or even to not notice in the first place. That is to say, simply: “If a demonstration looks and sounds like simple play, leisure, and/or recreation, it’s possible that broader audiences may mistake it as simple play, leisure, and/or recreation and entirely miss the underlying social/political message” (Schmitt, 2020). This is similar to the critique of demonstrative protest rhetoric more broadly articulated by Lawrence Prelli (2009). When effective, Prelli argues, such rhetoric “is inventive; it shows, manifests, and exhibits something previously unseen or concealed” (p. 99) by forcing a conversation in the public attention; but he also argues that all too often such demonstrations fail to “demonstrate urgency through enacting proof of power that constrains both demonstrators’ subsequent words and deed and political leaders’ subsequent decisions to remain consistent with the cause’s leading moral and political presumptions” (p. 93). Playful demonstrations, he argues, can defuse the urgency of their cause or minimize their “gravity” (p. 96). Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) make a similar critique in their analysis of a Step It Up climate demonstration in Salt Lake City. The playful, celebratory atmosphere is appealing and attractive to engage those already committed to the cause, making the work of social protest invigorating and enjoyable, but also, they write, disorienting and not entirely coherent rhetorically. The event they analyze included, for instance, a yoga sun salutation in Liberty Park, “a typical city park with playgrounds, walking and running paths, [and] picnic

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areas,” frequently a site for leisure but rarely for protest (p. 273). The yoga acted on some level, they claim, as temporary fissure, but did not entirely disrupt the park as a leisure space, making the yoga act at once as both protest and as simple, quotidian park recreation. As the demonstration continued at another city park, Endres and Senda-Cook note a “disconnect between the stated purpose of a protest and the festival-like feel of the event” (p. 273). They call the experience “jarring” (p. 274), as the presence of children in a bounce house, hula hoops, stilt walkers, and festival foods failed to enact a protest atmosphere over a leisure one. They concluded that “the dominant meanings of some places may limit the potential of a protest to create a fissure in meaning” (p. 277). If leisure spectacle demonstrations perform more radical fissures, like leading bike rides through indoor or institutional spaces, or dance parties in government halls, there is greater potential for their culture jamming disruption to register. Yet even then, such demonstrations may not be fully accessible to the broader public who is not already participating in the spectacle. Moreover, the leisure spectacle demonstration plays into a mass media narrative of activists as informal and colloquial, and thus more casual and disorganized than the state and more formal institutions (Newlands, 2018, p. 63). This interpretation of activists as disorganized or less serious makes it easier for media and broader publics to dismiss activist causes as childish, reckless, or silly. It contributes to a broader media trend of framing activism as conflict or chaos instead of as caring or concerted action (Newlands, 2018, p. 64). And, under what Arora (2015) calls the “relaxed framing” of demonstration structures themselves (p. 4), such protests and events run the risk of being dismissed as slacktivism, requiring minimal personal risk and investment in a cause, for the way participants need only gather to recreate—often in leisure modes that they may enact for personal fulfillment completely separate from any broader social/political cause (p. 4). For these reasons—the potential for misinterpretation, the limits of fissuring space through recreation, and the current critiques of casual activism—leisure spectacle demonstrations do not function fully or successfully as radical activist culture jamming. Yet they do not entirely fail rhetorically, either. Their messages and enactments do achieve a rhetorical end and for that reason, I suggest we treat leisure spectacle demonstration as its own unique subgenre of culture jamming image event rhetoric. I argue (Schmitt, 2020) that while leisure spectacle demonstration (1) may not always engage policy-makers, (2) may sometimes fail to disrupt the thinking and experience of the broader public of passerby audiences, (3) may not enact a change in the everyday lived experiences of participants and/or places, and (4) may not require sacrifice or great investment of the participant, it does certainly perform one significant rhetorical function seen in other

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forms of spectacle and image event: it performs and reifies commitment and community for those who participate. In this way, by participating, individuals cement their personal identity and position with respect to a broader social controversy. One-time participation in a leisure spectacle event creates an embodied, experiential performance of this commitment and community that creates coalition without the requirements of long-term shared interactions and is likely to guide actions and discourse with respect to the core cause when it appears in other spheres. The leisure spectacle demonstration serves as a constitutive event (Charland, 1987), performing a shared community identity into being. Those sharing in the event as participants and witnesses become consubstantial and co-identify in the moment of performance and that shared community identity and commitment is established as personal, experiential memory thereafter. It allows such events to act as connective rhetorics, establishing community among widely varied participants. It serves as not only spectacle, then, but as what Procter (1990) calls dynamic spectacle: a shared experience/event that becomes a “nucleus of community identity” and “touchstone for community-building” (p. 119). It “works to build community by: 1) casting the material event into a symbol of a communal past, 2) converting the event into a rhetoric of the community’s ideology, and 3) transforming the event into a motive for community action” (p. 120). It serves, also, like Short’s (1991) agitative rhetoric and litmus test to group identity. Willingness to participate in the ludic, embodied, and highly visible event “serves as a touchstone for measuring their individual level of commitment to the movement and how far they will go to purify the system” (p. 175). And it serves, thirdly, as vernacular rhetoric, with performance that “is polyvocal, evades detection, interrogates authority, and performs power” (Hauser & McClellan, 2009, p. 26) in “mundane, often unnoticed ways” (p. 3). Hauser and McClellan write, “The ability of vernacular rhetoric to affect existing power structures with consequences for a diverse population of marginalized and oppressed peoples is undeniable.” Further, the authors argue, This rhetorical form, at once liberating and constraining, inclusive and exclusive, accepting and rejecting, defines those who participate in it as a community whose vernacular discourse expresses bonds of affiliation and aspiration. It also excludes those who do not understand from participating in the discourse community that defines their dissident social imaginary. (p. 33)

In this way, leisure spectacle demonstrations can be community and coalition-building moments. Participation allows an avenue for identification

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with the cause for those alienated by more confrontational and direct action, or “who do not see themselves as extreme” (Hall et al., 2009, p. 56). This perspective is supported in recent work by Milstein, McGaurr, and Lester (2020), who argue that “it can be challenging for individuals engaged in direct action to negotiate the identity terrain” between “the kind of radicalism that lends itself” to frames of militarism, piracy, and/or vigilantism, and “members’ own passionate, caring, moral, and/or spiritual” allegiances and motivations (p. 5). They suggest that “millions of potential supporters may be interested and willing to partake in the reconfigurative potential of nocompromise direct action framed as guardianship, interconnectedness, and nurturance more than in violent clashes” (p. 3). Embodied, direct activism in the current era may necessitate and even thrive with more communal and joyful practices than with the somber or militant activisms of past eras (Cook et al., 2019; Klas et al., 2019). FIELD OBSERVATIONS AND METHODOLOGY The concept of leisure spectacle demonstration, along with the affordances and limitations described earlier, was developed and reified through personal participant observation at a series of public demonstrations between 2011 and 2020. Following the “rhetorical field methods” as pioneered and championed by Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres (2011), I entered field encounters with guiding questions, but sought first and foremost to experience events in the same way that I might as a nonresearcher participant. While participating, I focused not only on my initial research questions but also on events, actions, sensations, words, conversations, and other elements of the experience as they happened. I did not take written or audio notes during the events themselves, rather immersing myself in the spatial, performative moment and reflecting on my experiences immediately afterward, upon returning from the field, recording observations in as much detail as I could attain, and drawing from digital photographs as memory prompts, when possible. These field journals became a primary object of analysis and meditation but were in each case below then also supported through surveys of local media coverage of each event. I applied close textual analysis and frame analysis to local media coverage to determine how the event was experienced and framed for nonparticipant outsiders who had not physically experienced each demonstration. Third, when reflecting on each event for the composition of the present chapter, I conducted a survey of secondary texts and critical analyses of each event from other communication, media, and critical/cultural scholars, to see where my experiences and interpretations aligned with and differed from others in these academic fields. I draw

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on all three stages of analysis—rhetorical field methods and analysis of field observations/sensations, frame analysis of media coverage, and scholarly/ critical literature survey—here in my interpretation of three demonstration events. The first case details embodied leisure activism on display during the protests spurred by Wisconsin’s Act 10 “Budget Repair Bill” between February and June 2011. The second case involves a series of ludic bike ride demonstration events, including Critical Mass and the World Naked Bike Ride, both held in various cities around the globe each month or year. The third case considers the Free the Snake Flotilla/Niimíipuu River Rendezvous, an annual canoe and kayak event aimed at removing the lower four dams of the Snake River. I follow these direct experiences with meditations on the implications of leisure spectacle for two other embodied activist events that gained international attention during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and for future consideration of leisure spectacle demonstrations more broadly. POLKA, TANGO, AND YOGA FOR COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND FAIR GOVERNANCE In February 2011, the newly elected governor of Wisconsin, Republican Scott Walker, unveiled the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, a legislative proposal that included, among other controversial measures, provisions that sharply curtailed the collective bargaining rights of state workers. These workers included school teachers, university employees, nurses, correctional officers, road maintenance crews, and others. Billed as a means of balancing the state budget, Walker’s plan also required public employees to cover more of their pension and healthcare costs. In the days, weeks, and months after Walker’s announcement, protestors flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, in 24-hour continuous demonstration. Though Walker’s political allies touted the bill as an answer to a projected budget deficit, opponents of the bill complained that Walker had not once spoken of such intentions on the campaign trail and that, as he had only taken office alongside a Republican-controlled House and Senate a month earlier, the bill was, instead, a partisan power grab aimed at busting unions. Union members and others opposing Walker’s proposals marched on the State Capitol Building and crowded its halls, waiting to give testimony against the bill’s passage. When, after 17 hours, Republican members of the Joint Finance committee shut down proceedings and declined to hear anymore, a 3-week continuous occupation of the Capitol rotunda began (predating the national Occupy movements that would develop later in the year).

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As Walker and his allies pushed to pass the bill as quickly as possible, Senate Democrats fled the state in a last-ditch effort to extend debate and delay the vote by preventing the quorum needed for voting on financial measures. On the night of March 9, after dark and with only 2 hours advance notice to the public, Senate Republicans convened to reassess quorum requirements, breaking off collective bargaining and union limitations from the financial aspects of the bill and passing the limitations without the Democrats present. Protestors pounded on the locked Capitol doors, chanting “Let us in!” and “Shame!” into the early morning hours. The following weekend, crowds swelled to enormous sizes, daily approaching estimates of 100,000 or more. In many ways, the Wisconsin protests resembled other, established forms of embodied activism and assembly. Demonstrators used the sheer number of their bodies as physical evidence of their argument: that they, the people of Wisconsin, opposed Walker’s bill in massive numbers. Their presence and vehemence, demonstrated through physical acts of marching and chanting and beating on doors, became a spectacle difficult to ignore. In extreme cases, demonstrators put their bodies at physical risk of arrest, setting up camp in the halls of the Capitol building, sleeping on marble floors, and daring Capitol police to arrest them for acts of peaceful assembly in a building paid for by taxpayer dollars. But as the days, weeks, and months of continuous physical demonstration dragged on, demonstrators sought novel, creative ways to enliven their protests with continued energy and enthusiasm, keeping the spectacle fresh for both the participants and for the media covering the event, to ensure continued attention and interest. Slosarski (2016) writes of the embodied acts of protest that followed as culture jamming, disrupting the flow of legislative action and day-to-day business in the Wisconsin state capital. I observed this “jamming” on the ground as demonstrators filled the city streets of Madison, Wisconsin—located on a narrow isthmus and thus already limited in avenues for free-flowing automotive traffic—with marching bodies, then union taxi cabs, then tractors and parade floats, and other playful displays, literally jamming the streets and sidewalks. Protestors arrived in costumes, including swimwear in singledigit Wisconsin winter temperatures. Ad hoc marching bands and a chorus of Raging Grannies (Kutz-Flamenbaum, 2007; Narushima, 2004), in costume, played and sang familiar songs with new lyrics protesting the budget bill. Improvised temporary public art displays mocked and derided Walker and his bill with sidewalk chalk, post-it notes, crocheted yarn coverings over public benches, and snow sculptures holding protest signs (Schmitt, 2013). Among these embodied acts, culture jams, and image events, I documented several other actions, though, that while embodied by demonstrators and playful made no explicit mention of Walker, the bill, or other civic or

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legislative issues. Rather, within the larger protest event, several leisure spectacle demonstrations were taking place to sustain the demonstrations and occupation but not necessarily present explicit argument or deliberation. One morning, for instance, I observed an impromptu jam session and dance party on the Capitol lawn. I can only assume those playing and dancing were part of the Budget Protest because of their location within the broader, ongoing demonstrations; they had no explicit protest messages or symbolic markings on their bodies, and their songs were popular rock songs, with no obvious link to the budget or union controversies. Days later, I observed a similar event, with crowds dancing polka (the Wisconsin state dance) on the Capitol steps to a live accordionist. Days later, another group outside the Capitol building gathered to dance an Argentine tango outside the Capitol, amid the protest crowd, with music piped in via a portable speaker and sidewalk chalk letters marking the act as part of the demonstrations. Such embodied acts make little to no explicit reference to the larger cause at play and, rather, enact an event that under only slightly different circumstances would resemble a leisure gathering, not an act of civic protest. Dance-ins, flash mob dance parties, and other dance protests couple song and dance with public mass demonstrations to add a playful, recreational element to heated social/political dissent. Kutz-Flamenbaum (2007) argues that such “performance activism” is “striving simultaneously to attract and hold attention and challenging the understandings and expectations of fellow protesters and the general public while, paradoxically, staying within the boundaries of these commonly held understandings and expectations” (p. 91). Meanwhile, inside the Capitol, I observed groups gathering for yoga practice, making no mention of the broader protests at play but contributing to the embodied occupation of the building simply through their presence, paradoxical, and yet potent like the Step It Up sun salutation documented by Endres and Senda-Cook. Here, too, the embodied act of group leisure, by virtue of its unusual location, enacted spectacle and community if not explicit protest. As the Wisconsin protests played out over weeks and months, these tactics did little traceably to engage or persuade policy-makers or the broader public. In reaction to the demonstrations, in fact, Walker and his allies doubled down on a refusal to negotiate with (or, in cases, to even acknowledge) union leaders, Democratic politicians, and other demonstrators. But, as they were examples of leisure spectacle demonstration, engaging the opposition or broader public was not necessarily the purpose or the function of such acts. Rather, they were community-building and maintaining acts. Despite mounting levels of anger and frustrations over Walker’s actions, the protests in Madison seemed to be an overwhelmingly positive experience for those who attended. Despite the cold, snow, and sleet, demonstrators continued to arrive; when Walker’s supporters repeated their initial arguments,

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dismissed the protests’ legitimacy, and questioned the protestors’ character, the demonstrations remained peaceful; and while crowds gathered to voice their discontent, they grew to serve as a kind of mutual support system, comforting one another through supportive action and attitudes. Protestors bonded on the Capitol steps, even, during the occupation, creating a selfsustaining community inside the rotunda, with caterers, cleaners, day-care providers, and volunteer crowd marshals working together in shifts. In this way, the leisure spectacle served a vital purpose in ensuring the sustained energy and dedication of those physically enacting the cause. BIKING FOR OPEN ROADWAYS AND ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS Some years later, while still living in Madison, Wisconsin, I witnessed another series of leisure spectacle events, in the form of celebratory mass bike rides through the isthmus’ city streets. These included Critical Mass, a onceper-month public bike ride through city streets in the name of raising awareness for bicyclists and reducing automobile pollution, and the World Naked Bike Ride (a nudist bike excursion held worldwide in cities each June and often campaigning loosely or explicitly for social causes, like opposition to war, body pride, LGBTQIA+ rights, and legalization of recreational drugs). These events are casually organized, and participants are invited via word-of-mouth, social media, or flyers in local bike stores, coffee shops, and counterculture hubs. Participants arrive at a given location at a given time and, together, ride at a leisurely pace along a collective and at least somewhat improvised route, often chatting or cheering, and generally disrupting, blocking, or “corking” traffic as they go (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011, p. 270; Johnson et al., 2018, p. 2). Of such events, Critical Mass has seen the widest global proliferation (Blickstein & Hanson, 2001; Furness, 2007). The movement has no official organizing structure but exists monthly in over 300 cities worldwide (Newlands, 2018). As Furness (2007) writes, “Critical Mass bicyclists use spontaneity, playfulness, and decentralized organization as ways to raise fundamental questions about the nature of automobility, the polemics of car culture, and the (mis)use of public space” (pp. 299–300). Generally speaking, it is a form of “biketivism,” a “multidimensional modern form of activism in which the bicycle is used as a powerful weapon against the automobile industry or ‘car culture’” (Johnson et al., 2018, p. 4). But different Critical Mass gatherings in different cities take on different forms and characters, giving the movement as a whole less coherent deliberative purpose. Johnson, Masucci, and Signer-Kroeker (2018) write,

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“People find it very difficult to truly define what a Critical Mass is as there are many different meanings and interpretations to this monthly occurrence. Some riders involved in this movement see this event as a rebellion against the automobile, others see it as a method of commute, and others see it as a party on bicycles with all of their friends. (pp. 5–6)

Blickstein and Hanson (2001) note that Critical Mass “has been referred to as a protest, a form of street theater, a method of commuting, a party, and a social space” and that, ultimately, it “is often easier to define by what it is not than by what it is” (p. 352). What it is not, they stress, is a formal advocacy organization (p. 352). Critical Mass has also received the most critical and scholarly attention of such biketivist events and gatherings, including extended ethnographic study (Williams, 2018), analysis of Critical Mass as disruptive and performative critique of motorized space (Furness, 2007), and survey analysis of participants on how the event alters (or fails to alter) perspectives and behaviors (Blickstein & Hanson, 2001). Furness (2007) comes closest to a critical focus on embodied activism, arguing that the mere act of collective biking, in mass, and corking the streets is a challenge to capitalist ideologies, like skateboarding in parking lots and walkways where skateboards are explicitly prohibited (304). But not all Critical Mass and biketivist gatherings are confrontational in such an explicit way. Often they are permitted, with careful steps to avoid heated conflict or confrontation. A more consistent observation in the existing literature is the centrality of joyfulness and fun in the assembled act. Williams (2018) argues that while Critical Mass “is often considered a chaotic, trouble-making” event, “its participants are motivated by the self-meaningful, cathartic, ecstatic experiences” and that “happiness,” not a specific social disruption or activist agenda, is its “core, driving force” (p. 590). This echoes Blickstein and Hanson (2001), who conclude that those active in Critical Mass may participate for any number of political reasons—to support global environmental policy change, to protest local and national transportation priorities or to politicize public spaces—but most participants also noted that Critical Mass is simply a good time. (p. 361)

These conclusions adhere to the model of leisure spectacle demonstration detailed earlier. Yes, there may be an ostensible organizing cause or principle, but the primary social and rhetorical function of gathering in mass to recreate is to enact a space of communal enjoyment, identity, and joyful solidarity, regardless of the cause. Williams (2018), who actually organized

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Critical Mass events while conducting a 10-year ethnography, suggests that the events enact a “temporary autonomous zone,” transcending physical and social limitations (Bey, 1991). The embodied acts, Williams (2018) writes, are “ludic events, providing opportunity to challenge authority and build politicised solidarity” and this is important because “Collective ‘strength’ created cannot be simply rationalised, nor does it merely result from ideology or social networks” (p. 592). Through play, then, “people lacking much social power” can “physically and collectively create spontaneous order that resists the state and other authorities” (p. 592). In this sense, community-building becomes the primary social and rhetorical force of the leisure spectacle. The “fun” and “joy” and “play” of the leisure event brings together individuals from different positions and with different initial motivations for participation to enact a singular, spectacular, embodied event/statement (Furness, 2007, p. 300). The gathering “attracts a diverse range of riders who bring varied interests, values, and intentions,” including “DIY enthusiasts, environmentalists, anti-war activists, anti-authoritarians, counter-culturalists, and urban quality-of-life advocates” (Williams, 2018, p. 591) but, through shared “experiences of happiness and ecstasy” (p. 592), community takes form. Williams writes, CM is many things to many people—its populist charm results from its adaptive and free nature, causing it to change appearance depending on vantage point and the moment of inquiry. But, from the perspective of riders, CM has been a place to find community, escape everyday life, to dream, act out, and be rebellious. (p. 599)

Participating, he suggests, “is often a transformative experience, especially for first-time riders,” as “For many urban-dwellers, these experiences create immediate joy and temporal happiness” (p. 599). This, he suggests, makes leisure demonstrations like Critical Mass especially noteworthy and potent for larger activist causes, since “unlike more politicised direct actions—e.g. blockading a corporate office building, pieing an unpopular politician, or joining a labour strike—CM’s ‘goals’ are more easily reached, with less severe risks, and with greater potential for ‘success’ and happiness” and “with lower risk and greater reward, more participants are likely to assemble” (p. 599). As more participants assemble, the embodied action enacts a more potent civic statement, and community can take shape. Others who have analyzed Critical Mass from other perspectives and with other methods come to similar conclusions. Furness (2007) writes that the Critical Mass as embodied, collective act, forges important bonds for activists who might not otherwise meet one another or understand the depth of their community. Through Critical Mass, activists

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share stories and common experiences, and use this as a basis in order to develop new activist networks and new modes of resistance. (p. 308)

Johnson, Masucci, and Signer-Kroeker (2018) note that, while recreating and biking together, in a playful, joyous manner, “people can share stories and common experiences, develop a wider sense of the political community, and rethink their relationships to each other and the environment” (p. 6), creating collective identity, since even if the individual participants “do not consciously develop a personal identity based on cycling, the act in itself carries social meaning” (pp. 6–7). Similar phenomena are traced through other mass bike ride events. The San José Bike Party, for instance, was created simply as a space for bikers to gather and develop community bonds, even if participants join and behave in wildly different manners (Johnson et al., 2018). The Full Cycle Supper, documented by Senda-Cook and McHendry (2018), is an experiential, ephemeral enactment of locavore food ethics, with community commitment to the cause manifested through the physical act of biking to local food producing locations. The World Naked Bike Ride is primarily a ludic and communal event. I have witnessed World Naked Rides in three different cities on four different occasions. Each was tied, loosely, to a different cause in advertising flyers: once for legalization of marijuana; once for LGBTQIA+ rights; once for opposition to the “War on Terror”; and once for general body positivity. The cause advertised alongside each event was rarely visible at the events themselves, but the physical enactment of the World Naked Rides was consistent: laughter, cheering, glow sticks, body paint, fairy wings, and joy. The World Naked Rides enact special communal openness and intimacy because participants, in various degrees of undress, are physically bare and exposed to one another, together, and often in explicit opposition to the communities through which they pass. That is to say, when a group parades naked through a city street or residential neighborhood of fully clothed onlookers, the us/them distinction of communities and potential for resulting co-identification and solidarity are difficult to ignore! In each case, the leisure spectacle demonstration is notable for its community-building elements, and often more explicitly than for its confrontational, resistive, or deliberative elements. As such, the leisure space can act as a forum for building “the networks necessary for sustaining local actions and planning periodic global coordination among rides for larger-scale impacts” (Blickstein & Hanson, 2001, p. 361). FLOATING ALONG THE RIVER TO REMOVE ITS DAMS In 2017, I moved to Eastern Washington State and came upon yet another leisure spectacle demonstration of note. The Free the Snake Flotilla, later

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renamed as the Niimíipuu River Rendezvous, is an annual embodied protest event focused on removing the lower four dams of the Snake River, thus promoting the resurgence of salmon and orca populations and indigenous tribal rights and sovereignty in the Pacific Northwest. The free event invites participants to paddle and float together in canoes, kayaks, and other self-powered watercraft along the Snake, overcoming individual differences to physically enact a shared movement, creating a visual and material spectacle raising awareness for a cause that struggles for attention from mainstream media and other influential organizations. Here, too, while organized around a cause, analysis suggests the primary function of the leisure spectacle is building and maintaining community solidarity through communal experience. Participants arrive separately from around the region, with different motivations for attending. Some are dedicated wildlife activists. Some are representatives from local nonprofit groups, like Save Our Wild Salmon. Some are college students attending for course credit. Some are there in support of the local tribes or tribal members themselves, especially focused on reasserting tribal sovereignty and fishing traditions. Some are present simply because the event flyers make the canoe and kayak event, held always on a weekend, look like a fun time. In 2018, the Flotilla was advertised with “outdoor activities, educational opportunities, and music” (Free the Snake, n.d.). Attendees and participants were urged to “stick around the whole weekend to camp out with fellow river soldiers and salmon advocates” (Free the Snake, n.d.), with assurance that “there will be plenty of room: more than 50 RV sites and plenty of tent camping” (Schmitt, 2020). Much of the event’s promotional materials focused on the spectacle as community-building event, putting tribal members and concerns in direct communion and conversation with non-tribal salmon advocates, outdoor recreation enthusiasts, and people from all walks of life. In examining the verbal, visual, material, and experiential rhetorics of the Free the Snake Flotilla, it’s clear that it is open to the same critiques as Endres and Senda-Cook’s Step It Up festival or to Prelli’s skepticism of image events in general. The emphasis on leisure spectacle and participation makes the deliberative aspects and policy arguments of the event obscure and even inaccessible to those who do not participate. To outsider audiences, the Flotilla and its events look remarkably like any other group of outdoor enthusiasts out for a good time—a large group, to be certain, but not an explicitly political and activist one. The emphasis on camping presented the event as festival and recreation. And the visuals of the event were not explicitly activist in nature, either. The vast majority of participants arrived in generic outdoor recreation gear, the same as they would don for any other weekend water excursion. While a few crafts within the Flotilla did contain protest signs, the majority did not and those that were visible were

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somewhat vague about their argument (reading, for example, “IT’S ABOUT DAM TIME,” and, simply, “FREE THE SNAKE!”). Of course, holding an oar or paddle makes it difficult to also carry a traditional protest sign, but the visual rhetorics of the event failed to disrupt perceptions of spectacle as simply a leisure event, like a fun run or kayak-enthusiast gathering. In recent years, inflatable orcas and handmade salmon have occasionally joined the Flotilla, but the display is not constructed for immediate audiences or passersby. It is intended for the participants themselves, who have the only ready access to the visceral, embodied, ephemeral, and experiential rhetorics of thrill and exhilaration as one joins hundreds of others in a ludic and unusual mass disrupting an open waterway. Outside audiences may perceive the Flotilla as casual, disorganized, juvenile, slacktivist, or silly, but the reading of the event as leisure spectacle demonstration instead of as deliberative protest, radical ecoactivist culture jam, or everyday practice still allows it to be a constructive form. What’s important in such leisure spectacle rhetorics is the ensuing sense of community and commitment to the cause experienced by those who take part in the event. In this respect, all that matters for a general audience is that the Flotilla look fun—that it seems like the kind of thing that you or others might want to try for yourselves next year. If it looks fun and appealing, the event can grow in size and, thus, so can the community and cause of dam removal. In 2019, I conducted field study through participant observation at the event, and the experience largely confirmed these initial interpretations. Notably, in 2019, the event changed its official public name from “Free the Snake Flotilla” to “Niimíipuu River Rendezvous.” The name change was part of a conscious decision to transform the event itself from the visual spectacle of its earlier years to a more intimate, communal event. As the Flotilla evolved into the Rendezvous—a literal shift from language of militaristic confrontation to communal coming together—the physical enactment of the event became less outward looking and more inward. Its performed elements directly focus on community sovereignty and solidarity in place of creating photo opportunities or image events—even when such image events have been crucial to raising public awareness at other indigenous-led ecological protests, like those at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation against the installation of the Dakota Access Pipeline (Moore, 2019). For instance, kayaks, rafts, and canoes gathered within a launch area, separated from and shielded from the current of the river by a stone breakwater. As the space filled, participants maneuvered among each other, sometimes clumsily, to avoid bumping into one another as they tested their crafts and waited for the event to officially start. They struck up conversations with other participants. Gathering behind the breakwater, these different players came together as a single mass, waiting for each other to begin movement.

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Meanwhile, the tribes symbolically launched separately, upriver, and the two groups literally came together as they paddled, starting in different physical locations but joining as one at the climax of the event. Then came the embodied leisure act. The collective performance of the act physically manifested a commitment for each individual on the water. That is, the participants’ action in physically using their bodies affirmed their part of the movement and the cause. Even attending as a researcher, I left with a personal relationship to the cause and concept. It is ingrained in my body and memory and, thus, in part, also in my identity. Participating physically in such an event changes the individual. Pushing through the discomfort and confusion performs a commitment—even if that commitment is as little as valuing participation in the cause just more than giving up, drying off, and going home. A primary takeaway from the experience was that participation in such an event does not necessarily signal a loyalty to the event’s cause. Using one’s body to paddle or march or bike or run for a cause does not require a person to deeply think about or even support the cause—and, conversely, not performing such actions when they are available does not prevent a person from engaging the cause deeply. The event is, rather, a kind of happy coincidence of leisure gathering and ideological campaigning. It is this coincidence that gives the event potential rhetorical potency more than the organization or reasoning behind the event itself. At such events, perhaps, keeping a movement alive is as simple as just showing up. The showing up gives credence to the cause whether or not those present engage the cause deeply, and their physical experience of the event marks that cause on their own bodies and consciousness. In this way, the leisure spectacle demonstration functions differently from other embodied protest and acts of performative assembly. LEISURE ACTS OF PERFORMATIVE DEFIANCE As I drafted this chapter for publication, two major social events rocked the public consciousness of the U.S. population, both with enacted forms of embodied leisure as public protest, and, thus, both worth addressing specifically, here, even if they are ongoing and thus not fully bounded events for thorough, conclusive analysis. First, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the everyday flow of American life to a shuddering stop, with shelter-in-place and stay-at-home directives ordered at the state, county, and local government levels. Under such orders—sometimes as legal directive, sometimes as vehement but not ultimately enforceable suggestion—businesses, schools, and places of public

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worship and leisure were closed to prevent person-to-person contact and spread of the remarkably virulent novel coronavirus. Within weeks, however, a notable resistive movement emerged, rejecting shelter-in-place and stay-at-home policies as overly restrictive and even tyrannical in their scope. While the origins of this movement have been debated and the numbers of those actually using their bodies to physically protest shelter-in-place (asserting the liberty to make individual decisions about health and transmission risk) are currently unclear, the embodied acts related with the movement were especially visible in American news and social media by April 2020. Demonstrators gathered on statehouse lawns and in public streets across the country, in embodied acts that blocked traffic and risked physical arrest. Some of these demonstrations were enacted through public acts of leisure. In Virginia (Vozzella & Schneider, 2020) and Connecticut (NBC Connecticut, 2020), for instance, dozens of protestors demonstrated by gathering for leisurely picnics on the lawns outside the Executive Mansion and State Capitol, respectively. In Clearwater, Florida, demonstrators outside the Pinellas County Courthouse exercised in protest, performing squats and pushups on the sidewalk to demand that gyms reopen for business and public use (Nexstar Media Wire, 2020). At roughly the same time, American news and social media flared with attention to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man pursued and shot by two white men while jogging along a road in Glynn County, Georgia. Outrage around the unprovoked killing and the fact that charges were not filed until video of the shooting was released over a month later was channeled through multiple forums but primarily through social media, as Georgia and the rest of the country sheltered in place from the spread of COVID-19. Unable to hold mass demonstrations in protest of the killing and the social and legal systems that allowed/facilitated it, activism required innovation through digital and physical constraints. One innovative response that managed to still enact embodied protest was the #iRunwithMaud campaign. The campaign honored Arbery’s life and asserted the fundamental right to recreate in public without racial prejudice or physical violence by asking participants to separately jog/run 2.23 miles (referring to the February 23 date of Arbery’s death), either outside alone or on a home treadmill, to digitally log the distance physically covered on a distance tracking device, and to post evidence of the act on social media, accompanied by the hashtag (Fortin, 2020). These are both extremely rich cases of embodied activism of incredible and crucial social relevance at the current time, and, at first glance, both might be construed as leisure spectacle demonstrations, as both involve acts generally performed for recreation and leisure as media spectacle and demonstration for a socio-political cause. However, both differ from the definitions and cases detailed

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earlier in this chapter and are therefore also worth specifically mentioning for the way they highlight an important caveat when distinguishing events as leisure spectacle, specifically. That is, in both the shelter-in-place protest gatherings and the #iRunwithMaud campaign, demonstrators are enacting leisure in direct defiance of prohibitions and interdictions. In each case, those demonstrating are enacting a perceived right to leisure that has been denied, constrained, or dishonored. These differ from leisure spectacle demonstration as defined in this chapter in that the leisure acts they perform are explicitly linked to policies and circumstances at issue. The act of leisure here is an act of explicit resistance and performative defiance, like Furness’ example of skateboarding in front of a no skateboarding sign. In the leisure spectacle demonstration model, the leisure act is only loosely related to the cause, if related at all. It is leisure for the sake of leisure gathering, not for the sake of explicit commentary or defiance of a specific interdiction or specific social constraint. This is perhaps a subtle difference. Leisure spectacle demonstrations and leisure acts of performative defiance are certainly related, but while one involves the physical risk and precarity described by Butler in her discussion as performative assembly, the other runs relatively little risk. This makes one (Leisure Acts of Performative Defianace) perhaps more stunning and affective publicly, while the other (Leisure Spectacle Demonstration) more popularly accessible; one engages in aggressive and confrontational tactics, while the other more lightly affirms/fosters a community. There are elements of confrontation and co-identification in both, but their situations, inspirations, designs, executions, and effects all differ. CONCLUDING REMARKS The rise in popularity, accessibility, and visibility of leisure spectacle demonstration allows a novel avenue for public participation in social and political causes—one that involves the visceral investment of the physical body, but also one that requires relatively little personal risk, knowledge of circumstances, or extended investment in a cause. The obligations of other forms of embodied activism are replaced by appeals to happiness, experience, and joy. The leisure spectacle demonstration is not likely the most effective deliberative tool or the most rhetorically sharp public appeal, but it does allow for participation by varied individuals, with varied personal connections to and investments in a cause, to come together and act together, if only temporarily. It is a low-risk, high-reward physical extension of subjectivity with the bodies that may be or are in actual peril (Hoyt, 2016). In some manifestations, leisure spectacle will be more confrontational and resistant to a status quo than in others. A spontaneous dance party or yoga

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practice in a public park, for instance, is less confrontational and resistant than the same spontaneous dance party or yoga practice in a courtroom or stockholders’ luncheon. The context of the act certainly alters the meaning and potential social impact/implications, and therefore ought always to be considered when analyzing any case (Khrebtan-Hörhager, 2015). Still, in any context, the leisure spectacle demonstration is an embodied act of community and solidarity more than a resistive or persuasive action. Such embodied, playful acts disrupt the spaces in which they occur, if only temporarily, manifesting an alternative space where resistance, reimagining, and revolution can occur—a heterotopia (Foucault, 1967/1986), a temporary autonomous zone (Bey, 1991), or a liminoid (Turner, 1992, pp. 56–57). This is not news. And neither is the critique of such acts and the spaces they manifest: that any such embodied action is but “a passing event, a momentary orgasm, a fleeting expression,” or a “kind of narcissistic anarchism” that is, in many ways, “socially innocuous” (Bookchin, 1995). The reclamations of space they perform are temporary, not permanent (Cao, 2017). They do not require participants to put their bodies “on the line” (Butler, 2015, p. 18) and are thus partially invested in but also safely removed from the repercussions and confrontations of social and political life. Amid the playfulness, joy, and optimism, such events lack political teeth, prioritizing optimism over action and potentially over-simplifying the scale and complexity of both challenges before us and the work that is required to resolve them (King, 2004). What I’ve tried to show in this chapter, however, is that in spite of their political, deliberative, and rhetorical shortcomings, such acts can and do serve a social purpose worth attending to and helping to distinguish them from other forms of embodied activism. Perhaps they are not truly acts of “protest” as they are often described in news and social media coverage but rather “protest-like” (Williams, 2018, p. 599). They appear similar to confrontational acts of assembly in form and context but differ in the subjective risk they hold for participants and in their ultimate social function. They are forms of embodied activism, to be sure, but not necessarily explicit protest against any one thing. They are supporting actions, alongside protest and other forms of activism, buttressing and sustaining the communities and networks necessary for more sustained and less temporary, more agonistic and less playful civic action. It is this importance of personal invigoration and fulfillment that inspired the Occupy movement and Micah White’s (n.d.) enthusiasm for culture jamming and “gamification” of protest, noted early in this chapter. Early studies on gamifying civic action (Aguiar-Castillo et al., 2019) and ethnographic field study of leisure activism (Lamond et al., 2021) have suggested that individual pleasure and satisfaction can be effective mobilizing tools. It is this character of public assembly in the current era that can sustain community

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and commitment in times of overwhelming odds and throes of despair and impotence. And it doesn’t necessarily matter how leisure participants act publicly or whether their actions actually succeed in promoting a change. The act of participation is enough to keep the movement moving. Bracewell and Wadsworth (2017), in their essay on the 2017 Women’s March noted in this chapter’s introduction, for instance, argue that with “pussy hats” and humorous signs participants enacted a “pleasure of protest.” The phenomenon, they argued, was also traceable for those gathering for target shoots in support of Second Amendment rights or barbecues bedecked in MAGA hats. Such acts and demonstrations, Bracewell and Wadsworth (2017) write, are fueled by more than fear and righteous indignation. They bring together like-minded comrades and give them a chance to show off their creativity, express emotions, share a singular and powerful experience, and push back together against a resisting but malleable world. Protests can be enlivening, empowering and even fun. They can forge solidarities, communities and friendships that make the more arduous and tedious aspects of political activism bearable. (para. 12)

Simply put, a little leisure activity can give a person a direction for movement and inspiration for action when no other direction or inspiration seems apparent. It may not explicitly move a group in any particular direction, but it does ensure that a group may form. In a simple and playful yet physical, embodied act, it creates company and, in doing so, provides a source for that essential fuel in any social movement: hope. NOTE 1. “‘Culture jamming’ is subversive cultural expression, mixing and remixing cultural symbols and practices to disrupt the status quo, question mainstream assumptions, and challenge institutional power structures. It is often anti-consumerist and satirical, and culture jamming ‘pranksters’ use cultural disruption and incongruent action to critique the very structures in which they perform” (Schmitt, 2020).

Chapter 4

The (De)meaning of Incorruptible Flesh Marginalized Bodies and the Performance of Desire Billy Huff and Margaret Cavin Hambrick

Amid the backdrop of increasing publicity of the police murders of Black bodies, a ravaging global pandemic that disproportionately affects those who have the most to lose, and rising incidences of xenophobic attacks, marginalized bodies (and supporters) are filling the streets in protest. We find traditional protest marches, rallies, and public deliberative discourse. We also find riots. In Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties, Lisa Corrigan (2020), following Martin Luther King Jr., characterizes riots as “a speech act” that is “like any other language” containing “symbols that mark identity and emotions” (p. 82). While we do not agree that rioting bodies are speaking a language like any other language, we do agree with Corrigan that there is a failure on the part of auditors to understand these bodies. In this chapter, we aim to highlight the nonsymbolic dimension of marginalized bodies struggling to be heard in the context of incoherent, nonrational, and conspiratorial discourse. Judith Butler’s (1990/2011b; 1993) theory of performativity, especially as it relates to gender, has become a particularly salient lens through which to think about bodies and performance. Combating essentialism and theories of biological necessity, Butler offers a subject that is wholly discursively constructed even while the subject is active in her own construction through the reiterative citation of norms. In “Bodies that Mutter: Rhetoric and Sexuality,” Tim Dean (2000), invoking Lacanian psychoanalysis, characterizes Butler’s poststructuralist account of the subject as so rhetorical that it overlooks the dimension of desire. 81

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Directly confronting purely social constructionist perspectives, Dean (2000) writes, “In their failure to consider what in rhetoric or discourse exceeds language . . . rhetoricalist theories of sexuality effectively evacuate the category of desire from their accounts. Without desire there can be neither rhetoric nor sexuality” (p. 178). In other words, while Lacan’s statement that the unconscious is structured like a language can be taken to signify that the unconscious is purely tropological, what is missed in this interpretation is that “although desire is in language, desire is not itself linguistic” (p. 178). Instead, desire is produced by failures in symbolization that are often experienced as traumatic moments of division and alienation. As desire is central to our argument, we will quote Lacan (1977) at length on this point: In the interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what, in other registers of my exposition, I have called metyonymy. It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret. The desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the lacks of the discourse of the Other, and all the child’s whys reveal not so much an avidity for the reason of things, as a testing of the adult, a Why are you telling me this? ever-resuscitated from its base, which is the enigma of the adult’s desire. (p. 214)

Desire emerges and reveals itself precisely when identification fails to be made and the divisions between self and other and between language and the body are most pronounced. Dean argues that because many poststructuralist accounts of the body, like Butler’s, theorize the subject in strictly imaginary and symbolic terms, these accounts produce undersubjectivized bodies, in Dean’s words, “so completely rhetoricalized that paradoxically they are devoid of desire” (p. 187). According to Dean, the difference between “rhetoricalism” and psychoanalysis is that while they both recognize the power of language, psychoanalysis recognizes “the constitutive inability of language to say everything” (p. 210). Without the notion of a limit to language, symbolization, and identification that can never be overcome (Lacan’s category he calls the Real), attempts at social change, like Butler’s performativity, conclude that the Real can be overcome. In Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993), she declares, “The rallying force of politics is its implicit promise of the possibility of a livable and speakable psychosis. Politics holds out the promise of the manageability of unspeakable loss” (p. 209). In contrast, Dean asserts that it is precisely the “unspeakable loss” that cannot be overcome. In response to Butler’s “bodies that matter,” Dean proposes attention to “bodies that mutter.” Resisting the confusion of needs with desires, Dean’s

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“bodies that mutter” exist because the speaking subject, in psychoanalysis, is always a disembodied subject. According to Dean (2000), Whereas rhetoricalism pays attention merely to egos (bodies that matter through imaginary morphogenesis), psychoanalysis pays attention to bodies that mutter, recognizing in the ego a dangerously aggressive façade (“the project of a surface”) that obscures the subject of desire and his or her suffering. Thus we might say that while the ego matters, the body mutters. (p. 102)

Hence while Butler’s theory of performativity remains bound to the speaking ego, psychoanalysis allows us to focus attention on the meaningless raw substance of the body. “Bodies that mutter” are central to the form of performance we characterize in this chapter because they reveal a relationship between the use of language, the body, and desire. Dean’s model of desire involves more than the effect of signification through a chain of signifiers, but instead, it elaborates a theory of discourse that is always rendered fractured and inconsistent by desire. Like Dean, Andrew C. Culp (2013) critiques “rhetoricalist” political strategies that fail to recognize the inability for subjects, in his case queer subjects, to respond rhetorically to dominant messages marked by incoherence, such as homophobic discourses. Also following Dean, Culp (2013) “focuses on bodies that are not analyzed according to their ‘suasive’ power but their disruptive potential—a power that is expressed at the limits of discourse through failed discourses and inarticulate muttering” (p. 17). Also, much like our project, Culp’s interest lies in developing “bodies that mutter into a fully formed queer politics of direct action” (p. 17). Culp offers an instructive example of Dean’s muttering bodies in political public performance. In September 2008, members of radical activist organization, Code Pink, disrupted John McCain’s acceptance speech. Every time a Code Pink protestor attempted to speak, she was drowned out by the Republican attendees who began screaming “USA! USA!” The protestors were not allowed coherent speech, but instead, it was their bodies that created a rupture opening the space of undecidability in which anything could happen. According to Culp (2013), Although the Code Pink interruption provoked a massive outburst from the republican crowd, they showed how bodies could jam political discourse, demonstrating a subversion of the usual politics of identity. The Code Pink interruption elucidates how resistant bodies can cause unspeakable irruptions of the Real and thus makes language sputter. (p. 29)

In fact, John McCain did sputter and was forced off his script by the interruption. Code Pink has continued a similar politics of disruption as evidenced

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by the arrest and conviction of a Code Pink protestor for disrupting Jeff Sessions’ 2017 confirmation hearing with a giggle. Culp defines muttering bodies as an effect of the division between the substance of the body and the subject. It is vitally important here to understand that desire is conceived as that which erupts only in division and the failure of identification. It is this failure that generates the desire for wholeness and closure achieved at least partially through rhetoric. Narrative recuperation compensates for the fundamental division inaugurated through our use of symbols. Again, Culp (2013) is instructive: For while the body and the symbols that intersect it never really match up, it is those mismatches that generate desire. Good and bad fits between bodies and language abound. Especially bad fits cause striking ruptures, and intense, often uncontrollable flows of desire. (p. 28)

In our current political context, discourses marked by incoherence abound (i.e., Q-Anon conspiracy theories). Those who have the most to lose are also those who lack the rhetorical resources to respond to the incoherence. For example, those who experience “especially bad fits” between their bodies and the language used to address them (i.e., Black folks struggling against racism amid rhetoric that denies the existence of structural and systemic racism) are limited in their ability to respond rhetorically. After all, how does one (or why should one) respond to such an irrational claim? We can bear witness, however, to the “uncontrollable flows of desire” that are bound to erupt. But how are we as rhetoricians, scholars, and activists attend to these eruptions of desire? What is missing from many traditional rhetorical analyses of social dissent is critical attention to Dean’s “muttering bodies.” Dean (2000) describes these bodies as “bodies whose desire, enmeshed in the symbolic order, is struggling to be heard” (p. 203). Muttering bodies speak “almost inaudibly, unintelligibly,” and produce signs “that are not immediately legible even as something requiring reading” (p. 202). Muttering bodies do not produce speech that can be read or understood, and it is an error to attempt to assign meaning to their actions. Instead, these bodies signify only that “desire has not been heard, has not found its signifier” (p. 203). Further, Dean adds that these bodies are in pain, and “their muttering is an index of that pain” (p. 203). What does it mean to perform desire, and why should the performance of desire matter to rhetoricians and those interested in social dissent? In this chapter, we are particularly interested in the ways that marginalized bodies can be staged in public performance to call attention to the paradoxical lacks and excesses that communicate desire. Further, we are interested in how we as critics ought to “read” these types of performances. In today’s increasingly

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polarized political context, common ground seems to be disappearing from beneath our feet, and in its wake, we find suffering marginalized bodies. Focusing our critical attention on the voiceless and the excesses of their pain and pleasure beyond intelligibility points us toward the limits of rational discourse and leads us to consider that perhaps we should learn to listen to the (de)meaned. Desire has historically been a central trope for thinking about performance, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, but according to Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf (2014), desire has lost its critical edge in the discipline of performance studies. In their special issue of The Drama Review devoted to the recuperation of desire as an analytical concept for performance studies, Dolan, Wolf, and their contributors define desire in a myriad of ways and locate its aim in diverse objects and practices ranging from consumerism to gay dolls. In contrast, we treat desire as a productive failure of symbolization. Our conception of desire has no particular object. Instead, it points to the centrality of the suffering body in performance (and social dissent) and the limits to meaning and rational argument that this suffering body can present. We define the performance of desire through engagement between Tim Dean’s psychoanalytic conception of desirous “muttering bodies” and controversial queer performance artist Ron Athey. Dean’s psychoanalytic definition of desire as that which is paradoxically produced through symbolization while it simultaneously marks the limits of meaning provides much explanatory power when we consider the disruptiveness of performances of dissent like those of Ron Athey. Psychoanalysis offers a theory of communication that takes desire seriously and complicates the primacy of the message. In fact, our analysis will complicate the unity of the performer, the message, and the audience in ways that confound rational explanation. We hope to make clear that the message, subject, and audience of performances of desire are only present in their (de)meaning absence. RON ATHEY: A HARSH LIFE Ron Athey was born into a Pentecostal family who raised him to believe he was ordained by God to become a prophet. In the years after his tumultuous childhood, Athey identified as gay, contracted HIV, and survived a 10-year heroin addiction. He was drawn to the underground performance art culture that was developing along with the punk and gay SM (sadomasochism) scenes in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Athey is probably best known for a controversial performance of Four Scenes in a Harsh Life curated by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1994. In a scene from his now infamous performance art piece, Athey makes 12 small incisions in the shape of an

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African tribal symbol and a queer triangle in the back of performer Darryl Carlton. Carlton becomes a “human printing press” as prints are made with his blood on individual pieces of paper. The pieces of paper are then clipped to a washing line pulley rigged above the heads of audience members by Athey’s assistants. A writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune erroneously reported that “spectators were stampeding out of the theater to avoid being contaminated by HIV positive blood dripping from bloody towels that were sent winging above the audience on revolving clotheslines” (cited in Hart, 1998, p. 130). Not only was the reporter not in attendance at the Walker Art Center performance, but also the events reported never occurred. Carlton’s blood was also not infected with HIV. The invalidity of the report, however, did not prevent it from being picked up by media outlets all over the country. When it was discovered that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) contributed a small (US$150.00) amount of money to Athey’s performance venue, Athey became the poster child for freedom of expression on one side and the moral limits to publicity and citizenship on the other. Public discourse following Athey’s performance was reduced to questions that centered the First Amendment and freedom of expression and further marginalized Athey’s suffering body. He was blacklisted from performing in publicly funded venues in the United States. He was also a target of congressional hearings led by congressman Jesse Helms who succeeded in securing massive budget cuts to the NEA. Athey made his way back to the performance stage in the United States in 2014. We attended and participated in his first performance back in the United States, “Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociative Sparkle),” conducted an inperson interview with him, and attended a panel discussion including Athey at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago between February 2 and February 4, 2014. We focus specifically on Athey for several reasons. First, we are drawn to the centrality of self-inflicted pain and suffering in Athey’s work, which we argue is an integral characteristic of the performance of desire. Despite his pain, we are paradoxically interested in Athey’s rejection of victimhood and the agentic pleasure he derives from his own postured body. Finally, we look to Athey’s work because of his self-conscious antagonistic relationship with markers of identity and identification with his auditors. After all these years, as we will show, Athey’s body is still actively “muttering” in performance, and he can teach us all something about how to attend to the desiring bodies that increasingly attempt to demand our critical attention. Through our own primary research with Athey, as well as other critical accounts of his work, and engagement with Dean’s theoretical work on desire, we characterize the performance of desire and point to its significance

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in rhetorical studies in general and theoretical work in social dissent in particular. We now turn to our analysis of Athey’s performance of desire. We conclude by suggesting why it is important for rhetoricians, scholars of social dissent, and activists to pay particular attention to the desiring excess of performances like Athey’s. For some subjects, the performance of desire is the only means to communicate a position that exists outside rational, normative explanation. To ignore these desiring bodies is to overlook a productive site of power, pleasure, and possibility. INCORRUPTIBLE FLESH (DISSOCIATIVE SPARKLE) We arrived at Ron Athey’s performance location in the South side of Chicago on a blustery winter evening. Mana Contemporary was located in an unassuming warehouse. We found our way to the back of the building and were confronted with a single gray door with a small sheet of paper displaying the name of the gallery. We had to ring a doorbell to gain entrance. The gallery space was large, white, and bare. It was rather sophisticated despite the rundown appearance of the building outside. The space was dotted with large pillars that gestured toward a cathedral architecture. We waited behind an electrical tape barrier until Athey and his attendants were ready to receive the audience. We would estimate about 200 people in attendance. Music began playing that was comprised of dark and deep tones that vibrated the floor on which we stood. We followed the crowd to the other side of the barrier and witnessed Athey for the first time. Athey was lying horizontally on a metal ladder precariously arranged atop two wooden sawhorses. With the exception of the tattoos that covered his body, he was naked. Athey was well-lit with stage lighting so that no detail would be missed. There were hooks inserted into his face that were attached with fishing line to the wall behind him. His face was held awake and captive by the apparatus. His eyelids were held open, and his face was contorted into a forced smile. Pierced to his chin was a beard reminiscent of King Tut’s beard of the pharaoh. Barely perceptible was a baseball bat inserted barrel end first into Athey’s rectum. Only the end of the baseball bat remained visible. Athey’s penis and testicles were inflated with some sort of liquid, seemingly swollen to the limits of barely maintaining his bodily integrity. Alongside Athey were two male attendants wearing nothing but loincloths. The attendants were marked with scars and bodily modifications. Their bodies were haunted by past performances. The attendants were each holding metal pails. They began offering latex gloves to the members of the audience. It began slowly. First, one woman approached the attendants, slid on her glove, and dipped her hand into the pail. Her hand emerged glistening with

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a petroleum-jelly-like substance. The woman made her way to Athey and slowly and gently began to stroke his leg. The pace quickened as more and more audience members took advantage of the opportunity to caress a captive Athey. From up close, Athey’s simultaneous suffering and focus were palpable in the quivering of the muscles of his face and his measured but labored breaths. The mood in the room seemed solemn and reverential. This segment of the performance continued for about 20 minutes. The audience members began to retreat, and the room was still in wait. Athey slowly removed the hooks from his face. Once free from the wall, he carefully removed the baseball bat, seemingly disemboweling himself. Blood dripped down his face. He stood from the ladder and faced the audience. He was trembling and appeared inwardly focused. It was as if the audience that constructed itself as a means of comfort for Athey momentarily no longer existed. The attendants put a large priest-like cape over his shoulders. RON ATHEY’S DESIRING BODY The specific type of bodily performance art we engage in this chapter began in earnest in the sixties as a result of the rise of public political protest. The body was used as a canvas that could make otherwise invisible oppressions visible. This type of art involves the confrontation of the live audience with the suffering body of the artist. While some of these early artists turned to the body, according to Lois Keidan (Vason et al., 2002), “Often by performing extreme acts upon their bodies—to contest political readings of ‘the body’ or signify ‘the body politic’ itself” (p. 1). Athey’s type of performance art represents something different. Keidan (cited in Vason et al., 2002) explains, While earlier artists used their bodies more as “the body” or “the body politic,” many contemporary artists are just as concerned with “this body,” “my body” and all it can be and do in the new world order of the twenty-first century. (pp. 1–2)

There is an enormous difference between performances that use the body as a signifier to create identification with audiences and performances like Athey’s that use the body to present absolute singularity. There are several characteristics of this type of performance that comprise the performance of desire. The first is the centrality of the divided body in pain that disrupts discourses of power and narrative fantasies that are articulated precisely in order to evade the desiring body that is permeated with pain and pleasure. When postured within a performance of desire, the (de)meaned body does not offer an argument, but instead, it offers disruption between self

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and other, as well as between language and the body. Exposing the boundaries that we understand to determine our individual subjectivities as fictions by blurring the limits between male and female, pleasure and pain, gay and straight, subject and object, and audience and performer, Athey disrupts the binary identifications that sustain our social realities. In our interview with Athey following his performance, we asked him about his intended relationship with his audience. We wondered what he hoped his audience would take from the performance we witnessed the night before. Athey answered that he did not care about the audience. Athey uses the audience members as, according to him, “witness” to his acts. When we approached Athey with gloved hands and stroked him, we both admit we were seeking identification with Athey through empathy. Our attempts at identification were thwarted through all our senses. Athey’s entire countenance was focused. Although his eyes were held open through his hooked apparatus, he did not make eye contact. He seemed not to be present. His breathing was rhythmic and controlled, and it signaled his acceptance of his own suffering, a suffering with which we could never identify. There were no words that could make sense of what we witnessed. We certainly cannot account for the perceptions of other witnesses, but it was interesting that everyone responded with the same type of comforting reaction. In our interview with Athey, we asked him about the role of the audience in his performances, particularly this type of participatory performance. He laughed and wondered at the witnesses’ need to create an impossible identification with him. He mused, “Where were all the perverts?” He did not understand why no one tried to cause him pain. Why didn’t anyone touch his exposed genitals? When we returned from our time with Athey, we both felt compelled to testify to what we witnessed. It was clear to us, as Patrick Califia (2002) notes after attending Athey’s performance of Solar Anus, “When you confront such a spectacle, you are no innocent bystander. You are culpable, a co-conspirator” (p. 364). Athey’s effects on us only became clear as we tried to recount what we witnessed to others, including colleagues, friends, and students. The sheer impossibility of putting Athey’s impact into discourse is precisely what we mean by the performance of desire. As witnesses, we returned with an uncontrollable desire to talk about Athey, to attempt to describe our experience in language. Those with whom we discussed his performance demanded to know what it meant and why he would do such a thing to himself. The desire for meaning, the desire to communicate that which is impossible, is frustratingly difficult to argue here—to be so profoundly moved by something you cannot explain. Ron Athey’s complex combination of sadomasochistic practices within the medium of performance art comprises a performance of desire. While Athey

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certainly made use of symbolism in the performance we witnessed, such as the Pharoah’s beard and the baseball bat, these symbols do not correspond unproblematically to any given signified. The symbols themselves do not communicate shared meaning. For example, the baseball bat, a common symbol that can evoke American values, is deprived of a referent when it is used to impale Athey’s anus. Even the straightforward signification of nonverbal signs is betrayed by Athey’s performance. He is clearly suffering, however, the piercings attached to his face contort it into a smile that appears grotesque in its artificiality. While we commonly assign meaning to nonverbal signifiers, Athey deprives us of access to his subjective experience. Further, the use of pain in Athey’s performance creates subjective division instead of allowing identification. Athey materializes his desire through the trope of pain. Dean (2000) tells us that muttering bodies are in pain and their muttering is an “index of that pain” (p. 203). According to Elaine Scarry (1987), “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it” (p. 4). Scarry points to the difference between the emotion of pain and all other emotions. Put simply, the pain has no object. “It is not of or for anything” (p. 5). When we witnessed Athey’s performance, it was clear that he was suffering, but it was also clear that we could never feel his pain, nor could he communicate it to us. Almost all who have published about Ron Athey’s art have commented on his use of pain. In “The Winking Eye of Ron Athey,” for example, Patrick Califia (2002) recounts, And I thought about pain—how feeling it is an inevitable part of living, but how we rarely get to control when it happens, or how much of it washes over us. . . . When you have decided why you will hurt, and for what purpose, and for how long, you are no longer a passive victim; you become a hero completing an ordeal. (p. 361)

Not only is pain central to Athey’s work, but it is also a self-inflicted, masochistic pain that paradoxically produces pleasure. Athey is no victim. While Athey’s performance of non-representable pain speaks to his division and singularity, the publicity of his pain has enormous political implications. Scarry (1987) remarks that there is no language for pain, and the “relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon comes to be politically represented” (p. 12, author’s emphasis). Athey’s queer, HIV-positive body cannot make political claims through rational discourse. Unlike overdetermined rhetorical responses to exigencies, Athey’s response complicates unproblematic representation. The AIDS virus

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(like COVID-19) itself is meaningless. It does not discriminate. The anxiety provoked by the rapid spread and tragic death of those who were infected in the eighties was constructed as an exigency that invited a rhetorical response. The most homophobic and racist response from the Right was that those, especially gay subjects, who contracted the virus deserved to die and were not worthy of attention or redemption. This argument was countered by a defensive rhetoric that argued for the social value of all bodies, including those bodies that happened to be gay and/or bodies of color. This defensive response was caught up in the politics of identification. Athey’s response, in contrast, insists upon the meaninglessness of the disease. His bleeding, HIV-positive body opposes the logic of a redemption that can only ever be achieved through identification. He refuses to compromise or assimilate to any notion of a “common good.” In a published conversation with Martin O’Brien (2014), Athey speaks of his perception of the difference between his work and the work of other AIDS activists/artists. He notes, “I think body art to feminist to ACTUP era activism is a line, yet I am not an activist in the sense of message” (p. 167). Athey’s performances figure a novel response to the rhetorical obstacles faced by other AIDS activists. Instead of message and identification, Athey confronts his audiences with desire, which is related to an experience in which signifiers fail to signify, and identification is shattered. Amelia Jones (2009) maintains that Athey’s performances stage “a pain that calls out to be acknowledged and demands that its political implications be grappled with” (p. 54). Attention to the body is certainly nothing new in studies of dissent and rhetorical studies, but we insist that there is a lack of attention to performances of desire as we have characterized them here. One exception is Debra Hawhee’s Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, which focuses specifically on the place of the desiring body in Burke’s corpus and the ways in which his thoughts on the body give rise to his theories about rhetoric. Hawhee (2009) remarks, “Burke’s engagement with bodies from a variety of disciplinary vantage points foregrounds the body as a vital, connective, mobile, and transformational force, a force that exceeds—even as it bends and bends with—discourse” (p. 7). Hawhee locates the transformational force of the body in the excesses of language, which we call desire. It is the excess of desire that frustrates, in Culp’s (2013) words, “rhetorical attempts to contain the desiring force of bodies through the politics of identification” (p. 32). Attention to desiring bodies in rhetorical studies of dissent is vital today. Athey teaches us that in a time in which our bodies are so often given over to institutional regimes of power, the masochistic act of striking at our own bodies holds enormous liberatory potential. In the words of Slavoj Žižek (2003):

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When we are subjected to a power mechanism, this subjection is always by definition sustained by some libidinal investment: the subjection itself generates a surplus enjoyment of its own. This subjection is embodied in a network of “material” bodily practices, and, for this reason, we cannot get rid of our subjection through a merely intellectual reflection—our liberation has to be staged in some kind of bodily performance, and, furthermore, this performance has to be of an apparently “masochistic” nature, it has to stage the painful process of hitting back at oneself. (p. 118)

Confounded by rhetorical obstacles, Athey stages his suffering body for us, he masochistically strikes at himself, and he reminds us of our division. What else could he do? Purely discursive rhetorical responses that aim to create identification might compensate for perceived symbolic division, but in overlooking the gaping abyss of desire and pain, we leave the (de)meaned behind. BEARING WITNESS Instead of message, Athey confronts his witnesses with desire, which is related to an experience in which signifiers fail to signify and identification is shattered. We locate desire in this type of response that amplifies the division between signifier and signified, self and other, and that ruptures the order of symbolic identification. In our conception, desire can never offer redemption or inclusion to the disenfranchised subject. In fact, the subject itself is subverted. The meaning paradoxically only exists as a (de)meaning. We offer that Athey’s performances subvert the politics of identification, and they bring attention to the limits of rational discourse and the centrality of the suffering, desiring body. Athey’s body defies rational explanation. His bleeding, HIV-positive body exposed the wounds of lack and loss during the AIDS panic. When people living with AIDS were only represented as dying victims, Athey responded by spilling his own infected blood in a theater of ecstasy and pain that refused to denounce sexuality and sin, and he left his witnesses with nothing more than a desire to testify to a pain we could never share. Like a scar, Athey’s mark will always remain with us. We offer here a theory of rhetoric that takes seriously the place of the desiring body in dissent, a body that conveys only a message of pain and desire, and our purpose was to argue for the importance of attending to the desiring bodies that are increasingly produced by today’s virulent public discourse. As Culp (2013) reminds us, Regardless of all of the new and innovative forms of protest that have followed the boom in social and media technologies of the twentieth century, the body

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remains the basic tool of protest—especially when [it] is not reduced to its suasive power. Even when discourse breaks down, the body continues to exert force. (p. 29)

Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of racist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric that is accompanied by a seemingly never-ending parade of desiring, suffering bodies. Our television screens confront us with images of Black bodies murdered by police, brown bodies too dangerous to allow into our borders, and transgender bodies that are lurking in public restrooms. The failure of rhetoric to create identification for those who have the most to lose leads us to search for another kind of response. Political performance has historically existed on the margins and served to provide a cutting-edge critique of the cultural moment. Protest, like art, can provoke us to question our habitual modes of perceiving and knowing. The performance of desire can transform suffering bodies that are only victims into ecstatic, disruptive weapons aimed at shattering our present circumstances. It is our responsibility to bear witness.

Chapter 5

Lay Down Your “Body Burdens” and Write (Re)Forming Environmental Science through Narratives of Toxicity and Healing Arlene Plevin

Since Silent Spring, when Rachel Carson wrote the damage of unquestioned science onto the pastoral body of the world, women writers have more overtly intertwined the narrative of their injuries with the environment. They have looked at the wombs where they grew, the places they lived, and the chemicals they believed caused their bodies to become diseased, making visible a linkage that heretofore had not been acknowledged or acted upon by the scientific community as a whole. Take, for example, the words of Susanne Antonetta (2001) in her Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, “I can’t look into the novel of my body and go to the end, where it tells what happened.” Terry Tempest Williams (1991) in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (hereafter, Refuge) speaks of “rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth have been mined” (p. 10). Similarly, the words of Sandra Steingraber (1997/1998), in Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (hereafter, Living Downstream), highlight the relationship between bodies and environmental damage: An individual tree carries within its own body an ecological chronicle of the entire community. In this, people are not so different. Our bodies, too, are living scrolls of sorts. What is written there—inside the fibers of our cells and chromosomes—is a record of our exposure to environmental contaminants. Like the rings of trees, our tissues are historical documents that can be read by those who know how to decipher the code. (pp. 239–240) 95

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For these writers, the environment begins in their body or the bodies of their loved ones. Recording poisonings, their bodies speak through their books, using narrative to invite others in, while alerting them to what has dangerously been overlooked, even marginalized. Theirs is not a disembodied story, and their bodies and writings speak to the condition of the land. Home communities and other dwelling places are represented as sympathetic with or symptomatic of their own damaged (but sometimes healing) bodies. Seeking to have scientists speak out and articulate the linkages, Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams can be seen to view most science as that which ignores the ramifications of its creations, its discoveries about toxicity. Whether they have been injured in the first home—the womb—or realized their body tissues were affected by the presence of tumors, all of these writers decry a seeming passivity of science and by example argue for science to be read through their work, a narrative of injury and healing. Science for Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams must have “teeth,” must take the words from their bodies, and announce—through actions—the connection between science and embodied activism. Indeed, throughout their work, these writers argue for a science that is accountable, inseparable from public presence—a new science, if you will. Congruently, they urge a respect for the land—one supported by a science that advocates on behalf of female bodies and, by extension, all bodies. Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams’s works articulate a concept of selfhood that negotiates science and a deep understanding of the intrinsic interconnectedness humans have with places where they and nonhumans live. This works against, as Kamala Platt (1997) writes, the “Western scientific worldview that privileges expert universal knowledge against the traditional, place-bound, local knowledge” (p. 184; See, also, Peña, 1999; Plevin, 2004). Based on the ethical treatment of the land and people, this interconnectedness can be considered a tenet of ecocriticism. Here human stories are of the land; the land is of us. In fact, Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams look to the origins of their family in place for their stories of toxicity and their source of history, support, and healing. However, by uncovering the sites of people injured by environmental degradation, these writers critique an ecocriticism that does not include environmental justice. Theirs is the story of bodies and places that have been historically ignored, if considered at all. Importantly, Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams’s narrated bodies work to close, as C. P. Snow notes, the gap between literary critics and scientists. Snow (1959/1961) argues, I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. . . . Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists.

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Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. (p. 4)

Writer/activists bump against the so-called neutrality of science. As they critique non-activist science, they call for examining science’s accountability in a world of global toxins. They call for a different kind of science, one that would enfold many of the principles of the Union of Concerned Scientists, making archaic that distinct modifier—concerned. Since its inception in 1969, the Union of Concerned Scientists has been activist-oriented. It is not sufficient for its members to do research and publish. As a letter to the public declares, “[w]e combine unbiased scientific research with citizen action to protect the world you live in” (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008, p. 1). Indeed, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ founding document—a December 1968 Faculty Statement written at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which came to be signed by 50 senior faculty members—illustrates its origins. It is a document not meant just for peer-reviewed texts. Prompted by the U.S. government’s “actions in Vietnam,” the Union of Concerned Scientists called on “scientists and engineers at MIT, and throughout the country, to unite for concerted action and leadership” (Union of Concerned Scientists, n.d., para. 4). At that time, the group felt that other scientists were not offering a necessary and effective response. Articulating that the “[m]isuse of scientific and technological knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind,” the 50 senior faculty (heads of the biology, chemistry, and physics departments) sent the letter to the entire MIT faculty. Paragraph two emphatically stated they were climbing out of the proverbial ivory tower and so-called objective disengagement with public issues. For them, “[t]he response of the scientific community to these developments has been hopelessly fragmented. . . . The concerned majority has been on the sidelines and ineffective. We feel that it is no longer possible to remain uninvolved” (Union of Concerned Scientists, n.d., paras. 2–3). While prompted by the belief that the government was using scientific knowledge poorly, the Faculty Statement proposed what must have seemed radical then and even still today. “We therefore call on scientists and engineers at MIT, and throughout the country, to unite for concerted action and leadership” (para. 4). One of their five objectives included: “To explore the feasibility of organizing scientists and engineers so that their desire for a more humane and civilized world can be translated into effective political action” (para. 10). In the language of much of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ proclamations and letters is that of the body of others—the “civilized world” (para. 10). It is the language and voices of those who live in the world and

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are affected by, for example, the use of Agent Orange, which is believed to be that which prompted the 1968 Faculty Statement that begat their union. But why exactly might scientists need urging to move their knowledge into action and leadership, especially political action? What ideological or disciplinary constraints discipline this possibility? What might need legitimation or transformation to accomplish this to create a scientific community where concerned is unnecessary, repetitive? Certainly, the image of an activist scientist can suggest to other scientists and those who embrace the belief that scientific research is pure, unbiased, reasoned, and uncontaminated by emotion or perspective that science can no longer be relied upon to patrol the boundaries of objectivity and subjectivity. There is an almost mythic (and often unexamined) reliance on science as that which knows: a belief it is a knowledge system based on rigorous, verifiable observation and tests, conducted by dispassionate individuals whose loyalty is to the discipline’s rigor and reason. As Richard Harvey Brown (1998/2014) describes, in Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication (hereafter, Toward a Democratic Science), “[s]cience guarantees that we live in a shared external world that can be known through reason. It provides an apparently neutral discourse through which peoples of different interests or values can speak” (p. 1). However, it is not only that deeply held belief in a so-called neutral discourse that prevails but also a valorizing of those who create that discourse, who participate in research. Brown explains, “The privileged status of scientific and technical knowledge gives privileged status to the experts who possess it” (pp. 2–3). Consequently, those without the status of scientists do not possess a voice, an entry into the discourse of science. Whatever might be contributed by their belief system is usually misplaced or not heard in this rigid dichotomy. It is, to some degree, experts against citizens, where values do not enter the discussion, or at least in many scientific organizations other than the Union of Concerned Scientists. Discussing this division, Brown (1998/2014) emphasizes: Experts’ knowledge comes to oppose citizens’ actions and vice-versa. Persons may assert their own needs or interests, but any claim on public credence in the name of collective values is seen as either fundamentalist dogma or elitist manipulation. Value positions that infuse one’s world with meaning and elicit committed action are devalued because they cannot have a basis in public (that is, scientific) rationality.  Values are thought to be either self-evident or posited arbitrarily or manipulatively, rather than arrived at through reasoning and evidence. (p. 3)

This positionality strongly suggests that those who are bonafide members of the scientific community depreciate the “messy” world of the nonscientific.

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Morals, beliefs, and any form of so-called nonscientific knowledge are emphatically devalued. It is, as Toward a Democratic Science explains, a place where “moral traditions are rendered private or nonrational and the shared public reality appears in scientistic, ethically neutral garb” (p. 3). However, neutrality is not the concern of the story, the narrative of how we and others live in the world. Sandra Steingraber (1997/2010) is well aware of the scientist’s tendency to avoid stories, to focus on and value data only, evidence derived from a particular type of research. Acknowledging that “Living Downstream was written not only to scrutinize evidence with a scientist's disinterested objectivity, but also to remind us all—scientists and non-scientists alike—that behind every data point is a human life,” she employs the elements of narrative to fashion what might be called a toxic memoir, one which urges science to value, consider, and authenticate the story of those chemicals in place and in the place of the body (p. xvi). To look at cancer and its relation to the environment is to look with new eyes, to see differently. Beginning with attention to the land around her—initially, the Illinois farmland where she was raised—Steingraber’s Living Downstream invites readers into her life and her story. In the “Prologue,” we are introduced to a familiar vignette—a new wife taking her husband back to where she grew up. There is the expected road trip and the expected observation of the spouse’s reactions to this previously unexperienced landscape. However, the “Prologue” undermines this comfortable domestic theme immediately: in the first three pages, Steingraber’s husband and readers are prodded to go beyond their usual way of perceiving. For Steingraber’s new husband (a sculptor from Boston), Illinois makes “him look at space from a different part of his eye” (p. xx). Covertly, Steingraber sets up this new way of beholding the land, her beginnings. Her story will show what her husband and many others have not seen, prodding a new vision. And yet immediately following this opening up of her husband’s and—by extension—our gaze, Steingraber emphasizes that central Illinois will prove to be “unexceptional” (p. xx). It is a land and place like any other, with a dense story of contamination sadly similar to other regions. It is, as Steingraber writes, a place that receives my scientific attention not because its history is so unusual but because it is so typical. It receives my devotional attention because central Illinois is the source of my ecological roots, and my search for these roots is part of the story. (p. xxi)

Consequently, while Steingraber explores her origins and the origins of her bladder cancer, she will share it with her new spouse and the world at large.

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This weaving together of personal story and science—of attention to humans and the sullying of buildings, aquifers, rivers, swamps, and other elements of the environment and domesticity—marks Living Downstream as it will Susan Antonetta’s Body Toxic and Terry Tempest William’s Refuge. With  Living Downstream’s title echoing the term given those who lived downwind of nuclear test blasts in 1940s Utah—downwinders—the book’s narrative structure consistently juxtaposes the intimate and personal with scientific research and global concerns. One’s roots are in the ground, in the story of living downstream, and in the structure of growing, being exposed to agricultural methods and practices. In “Time,” the fourth chapter of Living Downstream, Steingraber (1997/2010) traces elements of the generation born before her, noting the kind of “dire predictions” the adults of that time made for those individuals, then part of the baby boomer generation (p. 46). Steingraber invites us to go back to the period when there were fears about Elvis and his seductive, perceived as immoral hip movement. Following from that, in addition to the usual mishaps adults at that time could envision their youngsters having, some included “perhaps they would all be felled by police truncheons or end up crazed and deafened from rock and roll” (p. 46). Here Steingraber (1997/2010) refers to the story of many readers’ lives: growing up in the sixties or seventies, one could indeed wear “metal bracelets engraved with the names of those officially missing in action in Vietnam” or have a lifestyle represented by the above worries of adults (p. 45). Steingraber’s chapter “Time” both reinvigorates that pivotal period for many while creating a sense of foreboding. Listening to the chorus of concerned adults and others, Steingraber remarks: “I never heard anyone’s grandmother predict that those born in the 1940s would surely undergo chemotherapy regimes in record numbers or that a cancer diagnosis would become as significant a generational marker as patchouli oil” (p. 46). Cancer becomes as prevalent as the overly sweet and somewhat spicy, seemingly omnipresent scent of patchouli in the 1970s and 1980s. Usually associated with women of all types in long skirts with long, swaying hair and earrings, patchouli—a pungent but harmless fragrance—is paired with cancer diagnosis. This joining of the usual, indeed irreproachable, marker of a generation with cancer highlights the narrative transformation Living Downstream achieves. One commonality begets another, albeit less innocent, while the use of prediction introduces elements of suspense: Who could have predicted these events? And what will derive from record amounts of cancer necessitating record amounts of chemotherapy? In Living Downstream, these questions are present in many forms, including additional linkages of the common—and often vulnerable—with the ever-increasing commonality of chemicals in daily lives. Stages of growth, from womb to adulthood, are aligned with the origins of chemicals of all

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sorts. However, they are not only aligned; they are taken in, beginning this new story of lives affected by environmental toxins. Steingraber (1997/2010) writes: To those of us born in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, the time between the widespread dissemination of these pesticides [chlordane, heptacholor, lindane, dieldrin, and aldrin] and their subsequent prohibition represents our prenatal periods, infancies, childhoods, and teenage years. We were certainly the first generation to eat synthetic pesticides in our pureed vegetables. By 1950, residue-free produce was so scarce that Beech-Nut Packing Company began allowing detectable levels of residue in our pureed vegetables. (p. 10)

Pureed vegetables, one of a toddler’s first solid foods, contain what can certainly be considered the snake in the so-called wholesome garden of agriculture. Here, instead of the narrative of healthy food building healthy bodies, we see what is truly in the jar: “Most agricultural uses of chlordane in the United States were ended in 1980 and heptacholor in 1983. Both have been linked to leukemia and certain childhood cancers” (p. 10). The pudgycheeked ubiquitous Gerber baby and the happy Beech-Nut infant were, in some respects, merely fictions on a label. Worming its way into our food supply, our breasts, our tissues, the Midwest breadbasket, and source of most American foodstuffs at that time, pesticides—banned or legal—control this stage of Steingraber’s life story and that of many in the United States. Steingraber’s observations and language undermine the notion that science and its creations are separate from the world. Banned pesticides, like fugitives from justice, have not entirely disappeared. We have forgotten about them, but they are still among us. . . . They languish underground. But they are beginning to surface again in the tissues of women with breast cancer; sometimes under different names—DDT is metabolized in the human body into other chemicals, including one called DDE—and sometimes along with banned industrial chemicals belonging to the same clan. (p. 10)

The comparison of pesticides to escapees from lawful prosecution continues  Living Downstream’s buildup of foreboding, as well as tying pesticides to needing to be “caught,” held accountable. Whether it is by writers or scientists or both, whether we see them or not, the pesticides are in our vulnerable body tissues: they continue to live on. The narration of our slow poisoning, the bio-accumulation of toxins in the most mundane of circumstances, unfolds beyond the story of daily lives. There are, of course, no opportunities for prevention: “Beech-Nut . . . [allows] detectable levels of residue in our pureed vegetables” (p. 10, emphasis added). And, continuing

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the merging of banned and toxic chemicals, Steingraber (1997/2010) identifies those in the breasts of women with breast cancer as being part of a family, “belonging to the same clan” (emphasis added). While the use of clan inscribes Terry Tempest Williams’ “Clan of the One-Breasted Woman” from her 1991 book Refuge, here Steingraber’s use enforces a deadly familiarity, integral to Living Downstream’s many stories which bring cancer into the environment, the family of the nonhuman and human. It is this indiscriminant nonhuman and wholly human belonging that infuses Steingraber’s call for a more responsible science. For Steingraber, we are all downstream and we are all intrinsically, unmistakably interconnected. Our skin is permeable, the soils and lakes are too. As Steingraber argues, the scientific explanation of water circulation throughout the planet and bodies are joined. Detailing how chemicals can be almost everywhere and in everything, Steingraber writes: The rising and falling movements of global distillation explain not only why chemicals used in rice paddies and cotton fields eventually end up in the skin of Arctic trees but also why the bodies of seals in Siberia’s Lake Baikal—the world's oldest and deepest lake—contain the same two contaminants as the alpine soils of New Hampshire’s Mount Moosilauke. (p. 177)

This tale of chemicals, perhaps residual Agent Orange in South and North Vietnam, can also be found written on the bodies of seals in Siberia. And lest there is any inclination to believe there's little relevance to the United States, Steingraber shows those same contaminants are high up on the slopes of the isolated 4,802-foot Mount Moosilauke, near North Woodstock, New Hampshire. Other areas also share a similar fate, preserving in their molecules and cells how chemicals are spread. Explains Steingraber (1997/2010), “[s]tudies conducted in rain-fed bogs across eastern North America support this possibility [that chemicals are brought in by global air currents]” and “these peculiar habitats . . . function as a living map” (p. 175). It is a map that is not static, but a living document, one that is unfortunately lodged in the environment and the bodies of humans and nonhumans alike. Living Downstream’s language and sentence structure highlight this terse connection, reminding readers of certain scientific terms and overall scientific approaches to information. In the ninth chapter “Water,” Steingraber details how drinking water is regulated, noting “most revealing of all is the fact that regulation for some contaminants is based on the annual average of four quarterly measurements” (p. 195). Explaining that “[o]ur bodies do not respond to contaminants on the basis of averages; they must cope the best they can with the load of contaminants already received as well as with those streaming in at any given moment,” Steingraber makes more visible

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that abstraction (p. 196). Echoing her own musings about how she, herself, got bladder cancer in her twenties, Steingraber creates a bundled-into-onesentence, plausible story of an unnamed woman. She details: If during the period of April through June, a woman living in rural Illinois drinks enough weed killer to overwhelm her body’s ability to detoxify it, and if, as some animal evidence suggests, these chemicals are capable of initiating and/or promoting genetic lesions in her breast tissue, then the damage has been done, regardless of what happens during the months of August, October, or January. (p. 196)

The sentence’s two “ifs,” which act to suspend the action (damage to the woman’s breast tissue), both delay and connect the drinking of the weed killer with the genetic lesions. Beginning with time—the time of early spring and summer—and concluding with late summer, fall, and winter, the sentence prolongs the poisoning event over a year of seasons. All elements are tightly juxtaposed in one sentence: time, the woman’s embodied location, the toxin, the cause of the poisoning, the damage, and the futility of averaging damage to bodies. Contrast that lengthy sentence with the following three: “The issue of whether pesticide residues in milk or asparagus or animal crackers eventually settle into an acceptable average over time is not considered relevant. Nor should it be. Biologically speaking, we live only in the present” (p. 196). Here the innocuous list of foodstuffs includes milk and animal crackers, two of which can be identified immediately as probable components of children’s diets. The terse four words “nor should it be” accuse simply. There is no getting away from how that sentence pauses the paragraph, highlighting its nonnegotiable claim, its sense of immovability, and inescapability. Averaging, at the time of Living Downstream’s publication, is an acceptable scientific way of viewing chemicals in the water supply and elsewhere, but it is not here—not for the scientist writing this or any of the book’s readers. It is, as Steingraber succinctly realizes, “a battle of narrative” (p. 23). Paradoxically, it is narrative that identifies the previously unmentioned names of scientists who explore cancer, the unidentified bodies affected by it, and even the cells that cancers are tested upon. MCF-7, a breast cancer cell line that Steingraber asserts, “is among the oldest and is also considered the most reliable,” and MCF stands for Michigan Cancer Foundation and “the number of attempts that were required to establish a self-perpetuating stock of cells from the body of this particular woman patient who consented to this effort” (p. 121). While detailing how Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, two Boston-based cell biologists, used MCF-7 cells “to probe the phenomenon of estrogen mimicry and its implications for breast cancer,” Steingraber returns

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to the microscope, asking critical questions (p. 120). She understands MCF-7 came from a woman who died, who submitted seven times to biopsies to create that line. Yet this woman’s identity, her history, has been erased by how science can name cell lines. In this case, Michigan Cancer Foundation is the first part, a proper noun, and the total number of times the woman donor helped out is “7.” However, in Living Downstream, she comes alive, standing for a long moment as Frances Mallon, who later became Sister Catherine Frances at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Convent. Importantly, Steingraber’s research is to recover her ties with Sister Catherine Frances to exactly where she lived and when she died. She resided in Monroe, Michigan, “a small town midway between Detroit and Toledo on the wet bank of Lake Erie” and died in 1970, described as “a slightly built woman of medium height, with auburn hair, gray eyes and hands that were remarkable for their delicate beauty” (p. 122). Here, in place and in science, we are called to know and admire the origins of the MCF-7 cell line, the person behind that number. We are called to resee Sister Catherine Frances’s body as Steingraber humorously suggests a “rechristening of MCF-7 . . . [to] . . . IBFM-7, the Immortal Breasts of Frances Mallon, attempt number seven” (pp. 122–123). The religiosity about this renaming—this reclaiming of Frances Mallon’s story and body—suggests the resurrection of Christ. No longer a nun but a person with a past and a future as a cell line, Francis Mallon and her breasts are imagined by Steingraber as being “known as a sacrament: This is my body, which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me” (p. 123). Echoing what many Christians worldwide say when they make confession and take the wafer symbolizing Christ’s body, this sacrament, this sacred act, is the voice of MCF-7 announcing the existence of Francis Mallon. If the scenario happens as Steingraber imagines, this “very well-described line” could bear the name of the body from which it came and rise again, but with the story of Francis Mallon (p. 122). Other stories circulate and approach articulation. From analyzing tree rings, with their records of “insect plagues, drought, flood, or fire,” Steingraber joins the lives of trees with those of humans (p. 236). We are both written on in similar fashions—we are both joined by a lifetime of exposure to similar elements. “An individual tree carries within its own body an ecological chronicle of the entire community . . . [o]ur bodies, too, are living scrolls of sorts” (p. 236). Both the nonhuman and the human have bodies and are records of life upon the earth; both are part of the entire community. With what could be considered a gentle poke at science, which commonly evaluates exposures one at a time, Steingraber ends the chapter with “[l]ike the rings of trees, our tissues are historical documents that can be read by those who know how to decipher the code” (p. 236). And “those who know” are

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obviously not those who do not hear the stories, who do not consider them valid. So who are those who can read this code? For Steingraber, as her foreword to the 1998 reprint of Living Downstream explains, the question “is about the connection between human cancer and environmental contamination. How much evidence do we have for such a link?” (p. xv). It is in the body and its struggles that Steingraber finds many answers and a way to have others hear. Those who know how to decipher the code look to body burdens, “the sum total of these exposures” (p. 236). Reading what these burdens mean is not just the domain of the scientist, and the message of the codes is not necessarily found in that discipline as well. For, as Steingraber notes, “[s]cience loves order, simplicity, the manipulation of a single variable against a background of constancy. The tools of science do not work well when everything is changing at once” (p. 29). Living Downstream clearly documents through stories and research how complicated and constantly changing chemical exposure is. Consequently, there is little that’s constant about body burdens, which represent many variables, including the multisyllabic chemicals that have reinscribed human and nonhuman bodies alike. Steingraber details, Sampling urine, researchers have estimated that the bodies of most members of the U.S. population contain detectable levels of the insecticide chlorpyrifos, a common ingredient in flea collars, lawn and garden pest control products, indoor foggers, and roach, ant, and wasp poisons. (p. 237)

Clorphyrifos (Clor-phy-ri-fos) is inside and out—of homes, gardens, people, animals, and insects. And so Living Downstream represents Steingraber’s “best attempt as a biologist to provide answers,” to make stories count, in the discussion of cancer and the environment (p. x). The stories individually give voice to the person and become powerful as they accumulate. It is, as Living Downstream argues, “our collective stories, along with the scientific evidence we amass, that form the beginning of a human rights movement” (p. xvi). It is in the stories of all where the weight, power, and names of those who have body burdens can be heard and felt. But, these are not just stories but the right to be heard, to justice. This claim to be heard, this right, is intrinsic to story’s power and insistence. Deriving, in part, from its universality and the desire to be heard, story provides oral and written voice to the individuals sharing their accounts and moves within and across regions, countries, cultures. Steingraber’s  Living Downstream  began in Illinois, detailed her origins and experience with bladder cancer, then the stories of others, including Sister Catherine Frances/Francis Mallon. Steingraber’s understanding of story echoes Susan Keen’s (2006) assertions in “A Theory of Narrative Empathy” that “we are

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story-sharing creatures” (p. 209). Yet, what are some of the elements that move us from hearing another’s experience to considering it a story? In The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (hereafter, The Triumph of Narrative), Robert Fulford (1999) details a narrative that moved him, “It touched me mainly as a story rather than an experience. There’s a difference. A story has shape, outlines, limits; an experience blurs at the edges and tends to merge imperceptibly with related experiences. In many cases, experiences are what happen to us, whereas stories happen to other people” (p. 4).

What happens to other people has the power to shape, becoming more than a fleeting experiential moment. It provides a boundary, a way of assessing experience, but it is more than that. Fulford evaluates story’s potency and weight, writing “there is no such thing as just a story. A story is always charged with meaning; otherwise it is not a story, merely a sequence of events” (p. 6).  It is this meaning, this opportunity to evaluate one’s own stories and hear, in the story of others, your own universality that can affect all types of readers: story is a carrier of emotion, other information. Although he is writing of story in the context of mass media, Fulford believes it is crucial—story is not only a part of being human—it is, in some respects, a life raft. Explains Fulford, “Humanity clings to narrative” (p. 7). Patrick Colm Hogan (2003), writing in The Mind and Its Stories (The Mind and Its Stories), believes as well in the prevalence of narrative, noting “we tell and write stories every day” (p. 6). Akin to how Fulford defines stories as being charged with meaning, Hogan distinguishes between paradigmatic and prototypical stories, Any coherent sequence of events might constitute a story. But the stories that engage us, the stories we celebrate and repeat—“paradigm” stories—are precisely stories that move us, most often by portraying emotions or emotionally consequential events . . . even real life emotion is bound up in narrative. (p. 5)

Yet Hogan, Keen, and Freeman clearly articulate their understanding of the social sciences and the sciences’ undervaluing story. Writing in The Mind and Its Stories, Patrick Colm Hogan (2003) opens with a description of how those in the social sciences study and what is considered valid data. When empirical researchers in the social sciences consider the nature of emotions and emotion concepts, they most often conduct anthropological interviews, send out surveys, analyze linguistic idioms, test stimulus response times and so on. They may move toward medical and biological study as well, giving

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injections to test subjects, engaging in neuroimaging, and the like in order to gather as much relevant data as possible. But, with only a few exceptions, they almost entirely ignore a vast body of exiting data that bears directly on feelings and ideas about feelings—literature, especially literary narrative. (p. 1)

While Hogan confines his exploration to literary narrative, his comments are relevant to narrative per se. Ironically, of course, as Hogan represents them the empirical researchers are ignoring a body of data which is, overall, about the body of feelings—indeed bodies and their presence. However, other writers, working outside literary narrative, greatly value narrative and the many forms it can take. In “Psychoanalysis, Narrative Psychology, and the Meaning of ‘Science,’” Mark Freeman (2007) works with case reports, arguing that they “can, and should, be written for scientific use” (p. 583). His essay seeks to value the very nature of certain reports as containers of truth, as valuable scientific information. Defining narrative psychology as “taken to refer to the attempt to use the in-depth study of human lives for the sake of formulating a meaningful science” (p. 594), Freeman builds on Heidegger who, in his work, “Science and Reflection” (1955/1977), notes that “Theory,” in turn, becomes “the viewing, the observation, of the real” (p. 166). It is this observation of the real which invites in human lives and their attendant stories. Writes Freeman (2007): It follows that the meaning of “science,” as it is customarily conceived, is problematically restrictive and that it ought to be reconceived in such a ways as to include, rather than exclude, the type of literary pursuits that psychoanalysts and narrative psychologists more generally have found to be so central to their efforts to understand and explain the movement of human lives. (p. 583)

While Freeman discusses narrative and its validity in evaluating patients, he recognizes that science itself needs to be “reconceived,” made more inclusionary. From Freud’s stories of Dora to other famous stories and case studies in the psychoanalytic sciences, narrative has carried immensely useful and valued knowledge, along with intangibles, immeasurables. As Brown (1998/2014) notes in Toward a Democratic Science, Science also offers a language for communication between differing cultural groups, and it is a crucial factor in advanced economic production. Despite this centrality, however, science does not adequately provide value and dignity to our existence. Instead, it is through public narrations that we give meaning to our world and to our lives. (p. ix)

So while science itself can travel between groups, cultures, nations, and is, in Brown’s (1998/2014) view, central, it cannot offer the intangibles

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that which “give meaning to our world and our lives.” Here science is immeasurably valuable—as a communicable and economic tool—but it is insufficient, inadequate. It is this separation that Brown decries, believing the knowledge both science and narration offer is set at odds. It does, indeed, engender a kind of violence, making a kind of wholeness and action problematic. Writes Brown (1998/2014), Thus science and narration seem to exclude each other. In this separation we are forced to choose between the amoral rationality of science and the seemingly irrational moralism of storytelling, with little confluence of the two in reasoned public moral action. (p. ix)

It is this forcing, this current schism between what both science and narration offer that Living Downstream, Body Toxic, and Refuge seek to bridge. For Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams narrative brings in rational storytelling, the voices of all, and begins action. Because we are a storytelling species—“we tell and write stories every day”—story is not only a very human activity, it can be what it means to act (Brown, 1998/2014, p. 6). Their work echoes and supports Brown’s assertion, “To be a citizen means to act publicly as a whole person, that is, as a rational moral agent” (p. ix). In  Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, Susanne Antonetta (2001) begins not with her life but her grandfather’s immigration—and a prescient series of question marks. The initial chapter, “First Words,” features Antonetta’s family origins. Her grandfather, who “existed in silence,” does not even share the year he arrived: “[i]n nineteen question-mark questionmark my silent grandfather came to the United States” (p. 3). This lack of detail and information foreshadows Antonetta’s childhood exposure to mysterious chemicals and the uncertainty of what her grandfather experiences. Coming to the United States from Barbados, Antonetta’s grandfather finds “an America that seemed less a place than an anti-place, a not-Barbados, not-Europe, not Asia or Africa, not meals of boiled monkey and coocoo or potatoes rotted bitter and Argus-eyed in the ground. Not this, not that” (p. 3). What this America is, however, is a source of stories for his granddaughter, who intertwines her coming of age with an awareness of what happened around them. Oddly, in her grandfather’s anti-place, where some poisoning of the land and water were purposeful, some ignorant, the hazards were ignored as they seeped into the land and lives of everyone around them. For example, in 1960 in New Egypt, New Jersey, a fire left “a pound of plutonium . . . too radioactive to move”; however, instead of acting immediately, in 1972— more than 10 years later—the government “installed a chainlink fence to protect civilians” (p. 15).

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This anecdote, appearing as it does within pages of her grandfather’s first impression of America, suggests a new kind of place—that which is given its own body burdens—and becomes the true anti-place. It is not a place which is gone to knowingly, and as Antonetta’s memoir comes to uncover other elements of New Jersey, this type of location, this anti-place, is the source of memories which reveal toxic underpinnings. First, there is Antonetta’s childhood, tied to the development and initially unquestioned use of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) (Plevin, 2004a). Antonetta shows the chemical poisonings happening in a fabled type of “heartland,” a pastoral ideal similar to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In Carson’s (1962) opening chapter, there appears a kind of domestic heaven in “the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields” (p. 1). Yet, the DDT is an “evil spell [which] had settled on the community” and is anything but ephemeral or heavenly (p. 2). As an adult, Antonetta wakes from that spell, but as a child, her family picked berries, went swimming, and walked freely along the water that seemed pristine, healthy. However, in hindsight, southern New Jersey—even in the 1940s and 1950s—was few people’s notion of an agricultural paradise, and Antonetta’s memories spur evidences of its transformation into anti-place. Antonetta (2001) writes, “DDT arrived commercially in 1942, making my mother at least twenty-two . . . I feel like those trucks powdered me in the womb” (p. 17). Like Terry Tempest William will suggest, there is no home—not even the womb—where a child is safe. Inside the body of her mother, growing in supposed safety and protection, Antonetta cannot escape DDT and other poisons. “I’m the product of my mother and father’s DNA and of their DDE [the major metabolite and breakdown product of DDT]: These lay down with them in their nuptial chamber. A mouthful of breastmilk and DDE formed my first human meal” (p. 138). From its inception, her life equals exposure to chemicals and her memoir makes clear all those connective stories, so that she can hear them, others can hear them, and hear the danger. Ironically, even the chemicals have stories, or are derived from actually creating images, the elements of photographic narratives. Antonetta (2001) writes of Denzer & Schafer X-Ray (D&S), a silver reclaiming company perilously close to her family and local water sources. D&S was [a] mile or so north of us . . . [and] operated a site that made money by reclaiming the silver found in old negatives, painstakingly dissolving strips of images. Chemical stripping solutions leached the metal out. The company used its septic system, illegally, to dispose of the stripping solutions . . . filling our aquifer with lead . . . arsenic, chromium and mercury. (pp. 18–19)

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This meticulous work with silver-infused negatives leaves the nearby aquifer full of that residue. The aquifer touches on Potte’s Creek, a place of nourishment and childhood memories “where we crabbed and fished . . . where we walked to pick berries and sassafras roots, and just to walk” (p. 19). So even nostalgia is interrupted; the creek is now an anti-place, a story of poisonings powerfully disrupting childhood reverie. Antonetta’s memoir now sees where she was raised as a “sacrifice community,” a story of the “seventies, eighties and nineties [when] the Toms River/Beachwood area has been wracked by childhood cancers” (p. 27). But rather than let the sacrifice turn into silent martyrdom, Antonetta publishes, “Body Toxic connects these stories of childhood interrupted, of adult disease, of wombs inhospitable for fetuses, to the local land, to people, to corporations. For every poisoning, there is a reaction . . . local, global, and personal.” Writes Antonetta (2001): [h]ere are tales of cause and effect: After low-level radioactive releases in Hanford, Washington, exposed women developed double the rate of thyroid disease and spontaneous abortion (miscarriage). . . . Women in Taiwan, exposed to PCBs in their cooking oil, saw a sharp rise in birth defects. . . . Liver tumors like mine can be induced by too many industrial chemicals to list. (p. 28)

Like Steingraber, Antonetta places these stories all over the world; they are local, like her liver tumor. They are across the country in the Pacific Northwest, and in Taiwan, where women are preparing food for their families and themselves, this simple domestic act increases birth defects. Once again, the womb is not a safe home. Conceived there, one is both made of natural, human-sited materials and nonnatural, human-created chemicals. Recall Antonetta (2001) who wrote, “I’m the product of my mother and father’s DNA and of their DDE: These lay down with them in their nuptial chamber. A mouthful of breastmilk and DDE formed my first human meal” (p. 138). The womb, our first place, becomes a bit of an anti-place, site of DDT and DDE (described as DDT, which “metamorphoses and nests in fatty tissue as its alter ego DDE” [p. 137]). Here Antonetta suggests we are born with our body burdens, but they do not belong to just us. In the oceans, one of the largest mammals, orca whales, take in chemicals of all kinds. Their stories become intertwined with human poisonings, which continue as Antonetta (2001) narrates feeding her child Jin in  Body Toxic’s “Epilogue.” Taking great care, she “filters his water, even to cook rice” and has him eat “organic vegetables, freerange chemicalfree meats, everything made in our kitchen, maybe grown in our compost heavy yard” (pp. 240–241). But she and her son are inseparable from place. Living in the Northwest, they eat “at the edge of the water, or on the crux of Mt. Baker, and . . . [she feeds] . . . him strips of the orcas with their body burdens”

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(p. 241). It is an age-old story of living in place, reemphasizing Antonetta’s childhood berry-picking in chemical-saturated landscapes and aquifers. It is, as she writes, literally feeding him what he lives: “I feed Jin this place” (p. 241). Despite her precautions, Antonetta knows what is around him will be with him, be him. This metaphorical event made literal echoes how entrenched her upbringing is in her cells, how entrenched some human activities and their consequences are in where we live. Imagining a well-known scientific test and equipment, Antonetta emphasizes the testability and knowability of toxics. She conjures up such a test in the context of reproduction, showing how place itself—and what has been done to it—affects basic human functions. Of Ocean County, New Jersey, she writes, “If there were blood tests for place . . . all I can see is a brackish test tube with a kelp strand, moss bunkers like fat minnows on their sides, and frogs with ova and testes, both useless” (p. 30). Like other damaged creatures, the frogs have useless body parts, rendering them unable to reproduce. It’s a kind of impotence that will end the story of their lives. For Antonetta, it’s only part of what else has gone awry and what she fears: “[w]e grow superbacteria, retroviruses, breastless women” (p. 209). The oddity of growing women without breasts notwithstanding, Antonetta presents a vision of women who are alive but altered. Their bodies’ vulnerability is visible, their fertility—like the frog’s—less likely, suggesting the end of a certain kind of story. Animals, people, and place experience the closing down or end of stories, especially if they are not heard and heeded. The need for story, its insistence, opens Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Refuge) (1991).  Charting the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake alongside the death of women in her family, Refuge suggests attentiveness to story and the land is a path toward health and hope. Illustrating the inseparability of place and people, Refuge recounts the settling of Utah, the Mormons who came to that hard land around the Great Salt Lake and flourished, shaped by it forever. Williams (1991) writes, “Genealogy is in our blood. As a people and as a family, we have a sense of history. And our history is tied to the land” (p. 14). Williams, herself, is connected to the Great Salt Lake, exploring its boundaries and waters as a native to Utah, naturalist, and seeker of stories. Believing nuclear testing has gravely affected women, she shares, “Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At 34, I became the matriarch of my family. The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped me to face the losses within my family” (pp. 3–4). In one world, Williams mourns the loss of birdlife—the burrowing owls, whimbrels, and snowy egrets—and their habitat, along with the death of her mother and grandmother. Yet, the birds are about intimacy and connection, being of the ground and sky and illustrative of Williams’s (1991) belief that

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they “mediate between heaven and earth” (p. 95). Living in place—and able to go around and above elements of their environment—the birds know better than humans the true size of the Great Salt Lake. In part, they stand for being there, being present, as well as representing nonhuman voices, other lives. Speaking of the healing solitude her mother seeks, Williams (1991) notes, I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. (p. 29)

The other languages—the stories of other lives—represent collaboration and intimacy. Williams’s very body is permeable: she is all that is around her. Seemingly boundaryless, Williams finds there is minimal separation between human and nonhumans’ stories, a belief which shapes environmental historian Richard White’s The Organic Machine (1995), which declares that “we cannot understand natural history without human history” and “we cannot understand human history without natural history” (p. ix). One cannot be unlinked from the other: for Williams (1991), “[t]he birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse” (p. 21). Here the knowledge of body, of place, of body in place, is history—a natural one where the mind, conceivably the site of scientific knowing (a kind of old duality of body and mind), is indissoluble. Living inside a place means, in Williams’s work, truly living. There is no outside, no inside. In Refuge itself both worlds merge and align, for it is in recreating story that there is the possibility of health, of peace from being fully in place, and of being heard. In the Prologue, Williams (1991) acknowledges some of Refuge’s reasons for existence: Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do not know, to create a path for myself with the idea that “memory is the only way home.” I have been in retreat. This story is my return. (p. 4)

While Williams does not seek to return to the womb, “the first landscape we inhabit,” she seeks a place of original knowing, a return to the self, to the healing power of story and its potential to claim a space of knowing in the scientific realm (p. 50). Here, story created by the self enables a path to home, perhaps to the innermost self temporarily separated from place and body. Story itself marks restoration, marks human events being heard in place. For Williams, place is inextricably bound up in human events. Waiting in the hospital for the results of her mother’s second cancer surgery, Williams

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(1991) observes that “[e]ach tragedy has its own territory” (p. 35). As other families walk the hospital’s halls, she sees the private nature of pain and loss knows its familiar landscape. The territory of tragedy is its place in human existence; it is also tragic when there is no place one knows well, no stories to know in that place. After her mother’s death, Williams (1991) grants story its preservative power, its ability to link individuals and realms beyond them. “I think of my family stories—Mother’s in particular—how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them” (p. 175). Refuge becomes the site where stories do not die, where Williams’s immersion in place enables a kind of prescience. Williams’s knowledge of her worlds, both of bird, people, and place, makes possible a kind of animalistic understanding, one that seems to privilege nonhuman wisdom. Williams can sense what will be there before it is. The “Bird Refuge has remained a constant. It is a landscape so familiar to me, there have been times I have felt a species long before I saw it” (p. 21). This unfixed, supportive connection that evolves over time and space informs Williams’s embodied relationship with the Bird Refuge, making it the opposite of Antonetta’s anti-place. In Refuge, it is a place that Williams (1991) returns to again and again, as she rediscovers herself and her stories, writing them into the world. In a time of transition, of losses, the “landscapes we know and return to become places of solace. We are drawn to them because of the stories they tell, because of the memories they hold” (p. 244). Solace and landscape, story and memory are inseparable, as is human and natural history. To not tell one’s story, to not enable it to be heard, is to deny the self in its totality. Refuge explores the dissonance and damage caused by not telling one’s story, of not having it heard. In “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” the ending chapter of Refuge and the part that’s anthologized the most, Williams breaks the silence she’s been brought up to keep. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. . . . I’ve had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small tumor between my ribs diagnosed as a “borderline malignancy.” (p. 281)

Able to trace her Mormon family roots to 1847, Williams knows that such a high rate of cancer is unusual. It is over dinner with her father, after the death of her mother, that Williams hears the account of what she had long thought was merely a dream—“a flash of light in the night in the desert . . . [an] image [that] had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas” (pp.

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282–283). Hearing the truth of this story—that Williams and her family had, indeed, seen a bomb testing and experienced “a light ash . . . raining on the car”—startles her (p. 283). In “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” the only chapter of Refuge not named for birds, she acknowledges, “I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother—members, years later, of the Clan of One-Breasted Women” (p. 283). Breaking and thwarting the circle of silence, not keeping in line with Mormon culture where “authority is respected, obedience is revered, and independent thinking is not,” Williams (1991) writes the stories of her women relatives. In a one-sentence paragraph, she emphasizes “[t]he price of obedience has become too high” (p. 286). To not tell these stories is to court death, to acquiesce to the death of others. Unable to sit quietly and, as her mother requests, “[j]ust let it go,” Williams makes the women in her family speak out—and, perhaps, in a way that science can hear (p. 285). But one by one, I have watched the women in my family die common, heroic deaths . . . I cared for them, bathed their scarred bodies, and kept their secrets. I watched beautiful women become bald as Cytoxan, cisplatin, and Adriamycin were injected into their veins. (pp. 285–286)

And, so, rooted in the land, knowing that data to substantiate her beliefs to others does not exist, she will be silent. As a woman “rewriting her geneology,” she will write and tell her stories, the account of radiation unleashed, unquestioned (p. 144). The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons is the same fear I saw in my mother’s body. . . I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers, Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest, along with my aunts developed cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I can’t prove they didn’t. (p. 286)

Being unable to prove that being downwind killed her family’s matriarchs is not important. The lack of cancer in Mormon history up to 1960, their stories, suggest otherwise, for story is a way of finding the body, the self, the land, and other knowledge. Story, as Refuge suggests, rises from breathe, writing, ashes. Admiring the beauty of American flamingos in Rio Lagartos, Mexico, Williams describes them as “a pink brushstroke against the dark green mangroves. . . Pure exotica . . . [that] in the afternoon light . . . become flames against a cloudless blue sky” (p. 237). This momentary

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visibility prompts her to assert that “[e]arly taxonomists must have had the same impression: the Latin name of flamingos—Phoenicopteridae, derived from the phoenix, which rose from its ashes to live again” (p. 237).  In the telling of this story, the voices of the dead return, the land returns, the self returns: story itself is counted. That is what Steingraber, Antonetta, and Williams want: for story to be counted, to rupture unexamined and uncalled for divisions between scientific knowledge and knowledge from story. Fear for Williams (1991) is the absence of story, a silence that doesn’t reach out to be represented. Writes Williams, “[m]aybe it is not the darkness we fear most, but the silences contained within the darkness. Maybe it is not the absence of the moon that frightens us, but the absence of what we expect to be there” (p. 146).  And, for Williams, Steingraber, and Antonetta that absence can be remedied. Steingraber herself knew the need for being heard and counted. Reflecting on how as a living person she could not be heard, she explains, “The Illinois State Cancer Registry was created in 1985. My own diagnosis, which took place in 1979, is therefore not part of the collective story of cancer in Illinois. Unless I die” (p. 36). Before human death, before the silence of nonhumans is taken for granted, story carries their voices. It enables the voices of the dead to return and conveys the idea that the sound of peace is the body in the place. In this respect, story becomes our skin, linking human and animal health with the land.

Section II

WITNESSING, REMEMBERING

Chapter 6

Palestinian Dedications, Commitments, and Persistence Decolonial Memory-Work during the 70th Anniversary of the Nakba Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik

As the water dripped down my face and the acrid taste of salt touched my lips, I sat and stared at the mountains from afar. Being on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea was the closest I have ever been to home, to Palestine. Nine miles was all that separated me from home, but those are the most difficult 9 miles to traverse. All I wanted to do was to dive into the water and push myself to the other side, even if the salt stung my eyes. To climb out of the water and touch the land that my ancestors played, cried, and laughed on. But all I have is a memory of seeing Palestine’s majestic mountains from afar, only yearning to be one with them (Sarah Dweik, autoethnographic writing, 2019). As a Palestinian, the Nakba is a sorrowful day that reminds me of my family’s restricted status. My great-grandfather refused to change his Palestinian citizenship after migrating to Saudi Arabia after the Nakba, with only a hope that he would be able to return to Hebron, which he was able to do 2 years before his death. No one else in my family has been able to return since. Through remembering my great-grandfather, my family is reminded of our ultimate goal of Returning back to Hebron. The Nakba for my family, like many other Palestinians, reminds us of one of the many starting points of Palestinian politicide. On May 15, 1948, as the jubilation of Israel’s birth died down, the life of Palestinians changed forever. Slaughtered in their homes and viciously ejected from their villages, Palestinians later gave this day a name—‫نكبة‬ (Nakba). Arabic for catastrophe, the Nakba historically recognizes the forced demotion of Palestinians from citizens of a country to refugees of land they 119

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no longer own (Gelvin, 2014). After Britain, the United States, and other Western nations bargained to give away Palestine to create Israel, many Palestinians now rely on their ancestor’s memories to continue engaging in their culture, society, and history. Starting as a day of remembrance of when life changed for Palestinians, the Nakba in more recent years includes protests, demonstrations, and vigils for those who have died since 1948. In 2018 and 2019, the Nakba protests merged old customs of remembrance with new approaches to resistance (Moushabeck, 2019), including protesting entities like Puma, Eurovision, and AirBnB for their support of Israel (Al Jazeera, 2019). Recent Nakba day demonstrations mirror daily activities for Palestinians who advocate for their right to Return, the end of illegal human rights violations, and forging a space to preserve their people and culture. Although these themes of protest are not new, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba in 2018 was a critical moment where Palestinians and allies determined that the Nakba stood for much more than a day of memorialization. The Nakba transformed into a day to recognize the subjugation of an ongoing catastrophe for 70 years and a symbol of hope for Palestinian Return. Since the day of the Nakba morphed into a diffuse event for Palestinians and allies, understanding the discourse surrounding the Nakba is critical for acknowledging Palestinians as a diasporic and indigenous community. After the Nakba, the connections that Palestinians had with their identity, land, and culture ultimately changed to accommodate living under apartheid. Therefore, the Nakba is earmarked as the beginning of a new era of what it means to be Palestinian in its totality. Because of this, Al-Hardan (2015) argues that analyzing the Nakba’s universe of discourse in the context of historical and political changes is how one can begin to conceptualize Palestinians. Alshaer (2019) contends that “literature [for Palestinians] has been a source of national rebirth, documentation and emancipation, engaging with a burdened reality and an ongoing tragedy” (p. ix), and my hope is that the work I do functions similarly—to participate in the procession of the Palestinian story. To facilitate this goal, I explore the discourse surrounding the mourning, resistance, and imagination embodied within the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. This anniversary was monumental due to its evolution from a moment of remembrance to including messages of resistance and engaging in an imagination of Palestinian futures. In this chapter, I argue that the 70th anniversary of the 2018 Nakba day protests reimagines the future of the fight for Palestinian freedom. This rhetorically powerful moment exemplifies itself through three interlocking mechanisms: remembering the shared trauma that Palestinians experienced since 1948, creating a collective identity, and accepting the responsibility to continue commemorating the day of the Nakba until Palestinians can Return.

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This chapter proceeds in four sections. I, first, explain the events that unfolded during the 2018 Nakba. Second, I unpack the historical context that led to the 1948 Nakba. Third, I explore the Palestinian memory-work during the 2018 Nakba protests. Fourth, I provide concluding thoughts on evaluating the memory-work of the past, present, and future. SPEAKING TO THE WORLD WITH BODIES AND BLOOD The 70th anniversary of Nakba day protests proceeded unlike any other. Not only was it a substantial anniversary of the culminated violence since 1948, but it also merged with another ongoing protest beginning 6 weeks earlier: ‫مسيرة العودة الكبرى‬‎ (Masīra al-ʿawda al-kubrā | The Great March to Return). Palestinians planted tents on the border between Gaza and Israel in a nonviolent protest of the Israeli government’s occupation and siege of Palestinian property (Fayyad, 2019). By creating tent cities on the border between Gaza and Israel, the Great March shed light on Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) violence. The Great March continued until the Nakba day protests, creating a need for the Nakba day protests to address the recent violence that occurred at the Great March. As the sun rose on May 15, 2018, Palestinians near and far awaited the alarm to ring at noon, signaling the start of activities, protests, demonstrations, and gatherings. Protestors packed up their tents from the Great March and dressed for funerals honoring those killed the day before (Ben Zikri et al., 2018). A community organizer, Ayed Morrar, commented that the purpose of the protests was to show support for those who died that week, protest the decision of the United States to move their embassy to Jerusalem, and advocate for the right to Return (Paq, 2018). Throughout the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, thousands of Palestinians joined together to commemorate those who had recently died, closed shops to strike, and organized marches within the streets (Web Editor, 2018). As the alarms rang, Palestinians held signs and chanted while marching toward the apartheid wall (Holpuch & Weaver, 2018). Citizens of communities and villages across Palestine walked side by side to physical and artificial borders to showcase their might to their oppressors (Paq, 2018). Photos taken of the 2018 Nakba displayed different posters, with one of the most common being an image of a grandmother holding her grandchild in the air. One of the child’s hands grasps a key, and the other displays the peace sign with their fingers, signifying the right to Return. With Palestinian flags flying high, a sea of black, red, white, and green shielded protestors as they approached the apartheid wall. Keffiyahs (traditional Palestinian scarves) and surgical masks covered protestors’ faces to protect themselves from tear gas.

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To ward off the barrage of IOF snipers and airstrikes, demonstrators started tire fires that created a thick smokescreen (Osborne et al., 2018). As plumes of black smoke rose, IOF shot rubber bullets and live ammunition at protestors. In response, Palestinians threw rocks at the soldiers. Photos displayed on Shutterstock (2018) showcased many protestors carried away due to their injuries and placed into ambulances. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that over 2,700 were injured by gunfire and, unfortunately, some passed away (The Guardian, 2018). For example, Laila al-Ghandour, an 8-month-old child, died due to tear gas inhalation on the morning of the Nakba. A Reuters photographer, Ibraheem Abu Mustafa, reported that he greeted Fadi Abu Saleh, a Palestinian protestor, in the morning and attended his funeral that evening (Holpuch & Weaver, 2018). These are just 2 of the 59 killed during the 2018 Nakba. On the Gaza Strip border alone, over 30,000 Palestinians peacefully gathered to advocate for their right to Return and spotlight the brutal oppression of Israeli occupation (Bellezza-Smull, 2018). Although not all messages directly advocated for the right to Return, they all participated in embodying the essence of how Return could be achieved. In parallel with the Great March to Return, protestors boycotted Eurovision on social media and on the border during the 2018 Nakba day protests. Tel Aviv was the chosen host city of the 2019 Eurovision, so Palestinians advocated for individuals not to travel to Israel nor support Eurovision. The Israeli activist group Standing Together organized protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with more than 600 protestors blocking roads in the city (RuizGrossman, 2018). In front of the U.S. embassy, Palestinians and allies stood shoulder to shoulder, displaying signs stating “Free Palestine” and “Mexico and Palestine: Segregation is a crime” (Kubovich et al., 2018). The diverse array of messages present throughout the Nakba day protests were not only spotted within 1948 Palestine but across the globe as well. Palestinians in Lebanon traversed cliffs to reach the border dividing Israel and Lebanon. Within South Africa, Canada, Belgium, Turkey, and India, Palestinians and allies alike gathered to protest Israel and the United Nations while holding posters that read “Free Palestine.” In the United Kingdom, protestors held posters advocating “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Siege” (Ruiz-Grossman, 2018). As the 2018 Nakba day protests died down, international leaders released statements about the recent violence, either condemning or voicing support for Palestinians. The 2018 Nakba day protests invited every country and global citizen to witness Palestinian memory-work, focusing on the past, present, and future. The 70th anniversary changed tides because of the tactics utilized to create a foundation for this collective past to imagine a future and resist. Following Al-Hardan’s (2015) call on how to situate the Nakba and its discourse,

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contextualizing the events that led up to May 15, 1948, is necessary to provide context for the 2018 Nakba. THE NAKBA, MEMORY-WORK, AND RESISTANCE Historically, Palestine was always a contested land and, thus, never immune to catastrophes. Although the Nakba reached its height in 1948, the catastrophe began at the end of the nineteenth century. Zionism created a framework for establishing a Jewish home on Palestinian land, first advocating for Jews to migrate to Palestine and purchase land. In the 1880s, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased, with over 30 Jewish settlements built during that time. The History of Palestine until the First Nakba After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain established the Palestine mandate after conquering the land. Though Israel was not officially created until 1948, Britain began its colonial rule of Palestine by attempting to inculcate the idea of a Jewish state. The first step for this plan was signing the Balfour Declaration in 1917, signifying a promise from Britain to Zionists that they would have the empire’s support for their land claims (Gelvin, 2014). Symbolically, signing the Balfour Declaration became a green light for Zionists to spread their ideology throughout Western Europe, which eventually traveled southeast to Palestine. This resulted in massive land purchases by Zionist leaders within Palestine as the first material move to evict Palestinians from the land. This strategy did not have its beginnings with Zionist leaders, but rather, as Chomsky and Pappé (2013) argue, the success of taking land relied on the historical image of European colonialism, which functioned as an inspiration for the attainment of Palestine. Many Zionists lobbied the League of Nations to support their migration to Palestine and formally recognize Zionist ownership of the land. In response to these flagrant actions, Palestinians went on strike in 1936 to protest the mass immigration of Jews to the land and the colonial rule of Britain, resulting in almost a thousand Palestinians being killed or wounded. The Zionist goal to colonize more land became easier with the growing number of Jews migrating to Palestine during the beginning of the 1930s. Propaganda spread, designating Palestine as a desert, and only newly emigrated Jews could reconstruct the land to be covered in settlements and vegetation (Gelvin, 2014). In 1946, a mass migration of 100,000 Jewish immigrants came to Palestine, which put substantial pressure upon Britain’s ability to rule the land. As discussions for allocating land to incoming Jewish migrants continued, more violence broke out, setting the stage for the Nakba.

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In 1948, Britain finally announced their plan to leave Palestine. In light of this decision, Zionists and Palestinians emboldened their fights to maintain ownership of their land (Gelvin, 2014). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians started fleeing from cities and towns under contestation with Zionsts and as April approached, Jewish forces executed more strategic missions. On April 9, 1948, the Deir Yassin massacre resulted in the slaughtering of about one hundred Palestinians and thus heightened fear throughout the nation. As May 15, 1948, approached, some cities were strewn with the bodies of Palestinians as the process of their displacement grew. Roughly 800,000 Palestinians either fled or were expelled from Palestine on May 15, 1948, and after 1967, the day was designated as the Nakba. Those without the means to leave to neighboring countries were left to live under martial law, with their surroundings bulldozed or renamed (Gelvin, 2014). As Ibish (2018) states, This, in brief, is the Palestinian Nakba, the collapse and disappearance of an entire society that was politically, militarily, and culturally unprepared for the collision with Zionism, colonialism, and war. But the Nakba defined, and continues to define, Palestinian national identity. (para. 12)

The Nakba itself became a nexus of history that sought to eliminate the land, its indigenous people, and culture for the establishment of another Western colony. It defines the ways that Palestinians situate themselves to their surroundings and stands as a moment in time that defines Palestinians, past, present, and future. The meaning of a Palestinian ultimately changed the day that a Zionist government slated them for elimination. Resistant Bodies and Protests as Rhetoric Resistance for Palestinians is the main facet of who they are as a people. For them, resistance motivates their actions and gives them the hope to fight another day. The tactics in which Palestinians resist rightfully showcase how resistance itself is a rhetorical act, “both a heuristic and episodic endeavor” (Cox & Foust, 2009, p. 605). Resistance as an approach to understanding Palestinians and their rhetoric is rooted in an anticolonial attitude, following Lechuga’s (2020) call to look at activism as a guide for writing alongside indigenous peoples. The notion of bodies joining together to engage in resistance is not new for Palestinians but nonetheless is critical in understanding the 2018 Nakba day protests. The tactics of resistance movements continuously shed light on the rhetorical nature that not only these movements embody but also how bodies function within those protests. DeLuca (1999) found that the ways that bodies move together create meaning, allowing for new significations of identity

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to come to fruition. It is for this reason that DeLuca delineates that within resistance the body is “a sublime and contested site” (p. 17). The functionality that bodies have within resistance movements of any type is seen as fluid, sending symbolic and extra-symbolic messages that illustrate functionality to their audiences. With post-modern approaches to evaluate protests, DeLuca contends that bodies present within resistance movements inform individuals at all levels about identity and lived experience while using unconventional approaches to spread their message. Identifying protests as such provides a holistic framework to evaluate methods of engagement, advocacy, and an oppositional voice to hegemonic powers. Dabashi (2018) states that “Palestinians have been staging a spectacular act of nonviolent civil disobedience” (para. 15) regarding the 2018 Nakba protests. This becomes more contextualized when Pason, Foust, and Rogness (2017) contend that nonviolent civil disobedience involves a “playground morality” (p. 17), where protestors appear to be bullied and beaten by the powers that they are protesting. They continue to identify this approach, it calls witnesses of this violence to intervene directly or indirectly. Additionally, Pezzullo (2001) identifies that this type of resistance speaks to a global audience to bear witness to the violence happening. Calling a global audience to witness Palestinian oppression through a day like the 2018 Nakba protests is unique in the context of nonviolent civil disobedience regarding human rights violations, injustices, and occupation. To that end, the bodies, messages, and protest themselves is deeply rhetorical and necessitate scholarly attention. Palestinian Memory-Work: Past, Present, and Future Although history itself is saturated with the sidelining of facts, perspectives, and stories, memory stands strong as it engages individuals in the remembrance of a litany of historical perspectives. As a “technology of the self,” memory-work for Palestinians is an assertion of how the past is a preparation for the future of Return (Jayyusi, 2007, p. 129). Jayyusi identifies that Palestinian memory-work encompasses four aspects: (1) documentation and indexation of time, (2) involves the work of others, (3) indexes the present and agency of the historical subject, and (4) is dually concerned with the past and present. These four aspects culminate together in stitching the past, present, and future together in a cohesive story of Palestine and Palestinians in the hope for Return. With memory-work maintaining itself as a resistive act for Palestinians to document and recall the past, it nonetheless informs what is to come in the future. As Jayyusi notes, Palestinians exist in a double-present, where one finds connections between past events and present conditions to unveil the insidious nature of Israel’s strategies of settler colonialism. Furthermore,

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Palestinian memory-work demonstrates urgency in the work and activism that happens at every protest, petition, and strike to establish a collective voice and perspective that is represented within resistance practices. Castillo (forthcoming) articulates decolonial memory-work as an analysis of the past, present, and future concurrently within resistance movements, establishing a reexistence of subjects within their messages. Not only does Castillo’s framework ensure that writing about the 70th anniversary of the Nakba is analyzed from all-time orientations, but it additionally intersects along with Jayyusi’s (2007) arguments regarding Palestinian memory-work. Following Tawil-Souri’s (2009) call to explore Palestinians in their totality, rather than only highlighting their experienced systemic oppression, necessitates utilizing a decolonial lens in evaluating the 70th anniversary of the Nakba protests. It is for this purpose that the proceeding section analyzes the past, present, and future to understand the embodied activism present within the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. More specifically, I argue that Palestinians’ focus on a dedication to the past, a commitment to the present, and persistence to imagine a future utilizes resistance to establish Palestinian memory-work. Below, I analyze how these mechanisms function through a lens of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba by focusing on how trauma is collectively remembered by Palestinians within the Nakba itself. Then, I discuss the creation of a collective identity to resist oppression. Finally, I explore how Palestinians accepted the responsibility for the maintenance of the Nakba, future and past. These three elements accumulate together to showcase that the 70th anniversary of the Nakba became the stage that reimagined the future of the fight for Palestinian freedom. Remembering, Resisting, and Imagining During the 2018 Nakba, protestors on the Gaza Strip gathered to remember the deaths of Palestinians the previous day, year, and decades. The 2018 Nakba situated itself as a culmination of 70 years of violence and thus established a new era for Palestinians to gather. The protests showcased the resilience that Palestinians possess in advocating for rights to self-determination and Return but additionally acted as a moment to remember previously experienced violence. Mourning the trauma and death of Palestinians during Nakbas past and present was an act of community-building. Butler (2003) articulates that grief creates a political community, establishing collective engagement between Palestinians in remembering martyrs. The beginning of the 2018 Nakba day protests started off with funerals for the 60 victims who had died the day before. In a video originally posted by Ruptly and then reposted by Holpuch and Weaver (2018), people gathered to cry and perform religious ceremonies for the dead. Bodies were wrapped in

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green cloth and carried throughout towns. In crowded streets, with guns firing in the distance, people carried green flags and chanted ‫( هللا أكبر‬Allāhu ‘Akbar; َّ ٰ ‫( َل ِإ ٰلَهَ ِإ َّل‬la alh ‘iilaa Allah; there is no one but God). Other God is great) and ُ‫ٱلل‬ photos taken of funerals displayed mourners close together, linking arms, crying, shouting, and holding hands. Public funerals engaged in memory-work by allowing dead protestors to participate in the larger shared sense of the past regarding violence and trauma. The double-present for Palestinians at that moment correlated and connected recent moments of violence to historic violence experienced by ancestors. The past is only framed in how the present is understood, so the funerals of recently dead protestors fed into the collective understanding of the trauma that Palestinians experience by publicly displaying bodies afflicted by past violence. Remembering the Trauma—A Dedication to the Past Al-Krenawi et al. (2004) discovered that trauma for Palestinians is an “experience that is emotionally painful, distressing, or shocking” (p. 194). Ibish (2018) further asserts that the trauma that Palestinians experience is what brings them together as a population and defines their existence. Samah Jabr, chair of the mental health unit at the Palestine Ministry of Health, states that in Palestine, trauma is so prevalent for Palestinians that they are never afforded time to move past it (Goldhill, 2019). Due to unending trauma, a “post” aspect of trauma is not achieved for many Palestinians living within 1948 Palestine, further reaffirming the double-present existence for Palestinians. As the protests commenced on the border, protestors further engaged in the remembering of historic shared trauma experienced by Palestinians. A photo taken by the American Friends Service Committee illustrated a line of protestors snaking through roads as they reach the border wall (MerrymanLotze, 2018). Those marching toward the Gaza border carried posters of their loved ones afflicted by Israeli violence, while others carried maps depicting historic Palestine. The images of 1948 Palestine called audiences to visually compare the borders that Palestinians lost but also to demonstrate the shared understanding of the past that Palestinians have regarding their land. Utilizing the 2018 Nakba day protests as a moment for Palestinians to congregate together created space to reflect upon the violence stemming from 1948. Through acts of recollection, whether imprinted within funeral rituals, posters, objects, or movement of bodies, Palestinians established a shared understanding of what the past was like for their ancestors. The trauma of losing loved ones, shelter, jobs, electricity, and clean water is not unique to the current generation of Palestinians but sharing those experiences and engaging in memory-work is what invited the global community to understand their past. Hartelius (2010) explains that “bearing witness is central to

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memorializing trauma” (p. 76). This notion of bearing witness allows audiences not physically present at a site of violence to understand, empathize, and create epistemic connections to the event. Hartelius continues to identify that witnessing violence is a rhetorical act that moves from being private to public. Jayyusi (2007) reaffirms this notion by explaining that bereavement of loved ones with the Palestinian community extends connections in memorywork of Palestinians further and contributes toward the national narrative for others to witness. The ways protestors and global audience members alike bore witness to the violence and the recollection of trauma that Palestinians experienced during the 70th anniversary of the Nakba is what established a shared sense of the past of continued violence against Palestinians in their quest for Return. The propulsion of protests happening across the nation and around the globe on the 2018 day of the Nakba stemmed from remembering the Palestinians expelled in 1948 until the present. The 2018 Nakba day protests created a space that engaged in mending a shared sense of the past regarding Palestinian trauma and violence and its connection with the present. These shared experiences inspired Palestinians to publicly gather support for their communities and collectively identify that the violence and trauma need to end. Abo el-Fetouh (2018) revealed that the Nakba protests would continue as long as Israel propagates their atrocities against Palestinians. The 70th anniversary of the Nakba mirrors this assertion because it was a crucial moment where Palestinians came together to have funeral processions, to protest the Israeli police state, and to remember the starting point of displacement that continues until today. The shared trauma from violence, beginning in 1948, trickles across generations, providing Palestinians the ability to reimagine the future of the fight for freedom. The act of commemorating the Nakba on the same day as the first Nakba in 1948 then becomes a decisive moment for Palestinians to expand their connections and experiences outward between others in the present and past to the future. Creating a Collective Identity—A Commitment to the Present Although the Nakba day does interact heavily with remembering a shared sense of the past, focused upon historical violence against Palestinians, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba did not differ much from the 1948 Nakba in terms of experienced violence. Palestinians continue to endure high levels of poverty, lack of healthcare systems and are controlled by segregated roads, demolitions, beatings, and military incursions. Until now, Palestinians experience air and artillery strikes, torture and ill-treatment, restricted movement, home demolition, limited access to electricity and water, and lethal force (Human Rights Watch, 2021; UNRWA, 2021). The May 2021 bombings

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of Gaza, substantially exacerbated an already dire situation for Palestinians (Abujeweila, et al., 2021; Makdisi, 2021; Sprusansky, 2021; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2021; United Nations Population Fund, 2021). The engagement in the past to highlight the similarities of settler-colonial violence that Palestinians experienced between 1948 to the present is why resisting their oppression is critical to asserting a Palestinian-centered history and creating a collective identity focalized by a message of Palestinian freedom. Jayyusi (2007) articulates that the Nakba is spoken about as an active present, a catastrophe that continues until the achievement of Return and self-determination for all Palestinians. During the 2018 Nakba day protests, this active present was highlighted throughout the day, creating a collective identity across demonstrations and protests. Polletta and Jasper (2001) identify that a collective identity within social movements makes a cultural attitude toward resistance. Thus, they defined “collective identity as an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. . . . Collective identities are expressed in cultural materials—names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing” (p. 285). A collective identity is crucial for the maintenance of resistance, especially within the context of embodied activism. Embodied activism is innate, exists within, and involves the risk of bodies experiencing harm when protesting, so bridging individual and experienced collective violence creates a sense of community and a unified message. This notion of collective identity then publicizes the beliefs, values, and practices of resistance that Palestinians and allies alike embodied within the 2018 Nakba day protests. Especially in resisting oppression, the protests existed to create connections between past–present violence and resistance strategies regarding the present. Through the gathering of Palestinians and allies across the globe, the powerful message of Palestinian resistance reverberated itself on the 2018 day of the Nakba. Similar artifacts such as posters, Palestinian flags, and keffiyehs established a collective identity throughout the transnational protests. Signs such as the official poster created by Wael Rabei, commissioned by the Palestinian Liberation Organization Department of Refugee Affairs and National Committee for the Commemoration of the Nakba, flew high across the globe, whether near the apartheid wall, embassies, or offices. Other posters stated succinctly to “free Palestine,” displayed the original borders of Palestine, or provided solidarity toward the Palestinian protestors sacrificing their safety on the border. These messages asserted a unified statement, establishing a collective identity regarding Palestinian freedom in the context of the past 70 years of violence. Benson (2015) explains that posters possess great power by inviting audiences into civic persuasion. In the context of the

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global audience, posters contributed to the rhetorical construction of a collective identity. Another vital artifact seen across global protests was Palestinian flags. Through a unified use of a flag to coalesce people together, a collective identity of Palestinian freedom and inspiration created the fight for the future. Across the Palestinian–Israeli border, red, black, white, and green flags blanketed the area, protected protestors, and advocated for Palestinian freedom. Historically, the Palestinian flag was created to unite the Arab world from Western colonization. After the land was renamed “Israel,” the Palestinian Liberation Organization reframed the flag to represent the fight for independence and statehood (Smith, 2013). Gaffey (2015) posits that flags invite audiences into identifying collectively with virtues instilled in a flag and, thus, are understood through collective remembrance. The utilization of a symbol like the Palestinian flag rhetorically recommits not only to a shared sense of the past in understanding 70 years of struggle and resistance but also creates a recommitment to the present, instating a collective identity of protestors. Just as the Palestinian flag represents a nationalistic approach to Palestinian liberation, another artifact similarly existed across protests. Looking at photos taken by professionals documenting the 2018 Nakba day, the last common theme that created a collective identity was protestors wearing keffiyehs. The Guardian’s (2018) photo gallery of the protests first displayed a man covering his head and face with a keffiyeh, a Palestinian flag as a cape, and holding a slingshot. The photo compilation from Shutterstock (2018) also illustrates many protestors wearing keffiyehs in the traditional black and white pattern, as they held Palestinian flags and posters. Initially, farmers wore keffiyehs to protect themselves from the heat (Habash, 2018). Later, keffiyehs became a popularized symbol of resistance after the 1936 revolt when Palestinian rebels wore keffiyehs to hide their identities and avoid arrest. This method of unintelligibility continued during the first and second Intifadas (Palestinian uprisings in the late 1980s and again in the early 2000s) and is now utilized today to shield protestors from deadly tear gas inhalation and hide their identities. Keffiyehs maintain themselves as symbols of resistance, but the continuation of its use connects the echoes of past efforts of revolutionaries toward the present. Additionally, allies across the globe wore keffiyehs, which unified protestors into a collective identity and furthered the reinforcement of the keffiyeh as a symbol of resistance. Through the deployment of symbols like posters, the Palestinian flag, and keffiyehs, protestors rhetorically constructed a collective identity against oppression and thus reimagining the future of the fight for Palestinian freedom. Pason, Foust, and Rogness (2017) state that identity as a fluid performance in social movements is rhetorical, and the rhetoricity of the 2018 Nakba day

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protests rightfully coalesced protestors to gain the attention of a global audience through a unified identity. Not only this, but the utilization of common symbols across protests globally created a collective identity that is deeply rooted in previous resistance methods and memory-work. Aden et al. (2009) explain that part of establishing collective memory is the rhetorical practice of utilizing symbols that are negotiated publicly and collectively. Thus, the unique negotiation between the present, the past, resistance, and collective identity merged through the utilization of historical symbols that stand for Palestinian resistance and freedom. Additionally, rhetorically constructing a collective identity invites the global community to understand protestors’ shared sense of past Palestinian violence. For example, posters documented by the Palestine Poster Project Archives of the 2018 Nakba day protests show a commonality between the usage of keffiyehs, colors of the Palestinian flag, and text advocating for the right to Return on posters. Jayyusi (2007) asserts that Palestinians construct a living narrative of their struggle, relying on similar/different moments of violence that create a larger, national record. Through these individual messages, depicting the “re-engendered condition” of Palestinians, the indexation of violence that culminated in the present was remembered and created a legible identity for everyone present at the protests to form around. This notion of collectivity not only includes symbolic constructions but is also created through affective means. Jasper (2011) states succinctly that “affective loyalties and moral emotions also interact with each other, as collective identities are frequently defined by shared morals” (p. 297). Furthermore, Roelvink (2010) identifies that affect within protests happens collectively through language and bodies. Although this analysis does not deeply delve into how bodies coalescing together create affects, they come as byproducts of symbolic means. The production of presence itself communicates to audiences the unity of their actions through symbolic and affectual avenues (Gumbrecht, 2004). The coalescing of bodies and messages throughout protests across the world during the 2018 Nakba day then established a collective identity through affectual means and utilized affect to establish a collective identity to showcase to the global audience. Accepting the Responsibility— Persistence to Imagine the Future For Palestinians, accepting responsibility for Return is a trait passed down for generations because they are hopeful for a new future absent of violence. Palestinians marched from March 30, 2018, until the Nakba day on May 15, 2018, showcasing their persistence to fight for a new future: a Return to 1948 Palestine. As Jayyusi (2007) reminds us, Palestinian memory and history

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culminate in preparation for a future of Return. Though the first Nakba happened 70 years ago, the continuing ritual to memorialize that specific day is imperative for Palestinians. Since the Nakba has no end, Palestinians accepted the responsibility for maintaining memory-work surrounding the Nakba until they can achieve the right to Return. Said (2000) explained that for colonized peoples, remembering the past serves the purpose of imagining a future free of colonization. Hawari (2018) formulates Palestinian time as breakage of a linear time structure through a colonized lens. Palestinian time intersperses past and present memories together, merging into a deep and rich story of settler colonialism within Palestine. Hawari continues, “memory of the past is important in the formulation and imagination of the future, but memory of the past is dictated by its articulation in the present. In this way, past, present, and future are entangled” (p. 171). This imagination then is a political project focused on liberation and freedom. Thus, memory-work of the past and present are foundationary to how Palestinians imagine their future through a lens of hope. As daydreams actualize into hope, hope exists as an emotion that allows individuals to constantly imagine who they will be and how they belong in the world. On a broader front, hope exists as recognition of possible futures to come (Stewart-Harawira, 2005). Although hope exists in a multitude of ways (due to specific contexts of colonization, culture, ethnicity, and futures created by the colonized), hope as a heuristic for understanding futurity/ imagination means that one can turn to understand the resistance of those fighting colonialism. For Palestinians, their ‫صمود‬‎(sumud; steadfastness) is a central tenant in their opposition. Rooted in hope, Palestinian ‫صمود‬‎ mirrors the resilience of the olive tree: sturdy, withstanding of tragedy, and aging with wisdom. Joronen and Griffiths (2019) analyze Palestinian hope as an epiphenomenal practice within colonized spaces that relies on a moment of transformation to break through colonial time and engage in anti-colonial imaginations. They continue to state that the proximity to hyperprecarious situations (which for Palestinians living in 1948 Palestine is almost neverending) means that hope as an active condition is present at all sites of existence. Hope becomes the primary fuel that Palestinians utilize to break free of their oppression, constantly imagine new worlds, and then actively attempt to make their imaginations a reality. By defining the 2018 Nakba day protests as a hyperprecarious site, discussions of hope were prevalent throughout the day through protest framing and advocacy for the right to Return. Statements of hope permeated Palestinian messages during the 2018 Nakba day protests. Ahmed Abu Artema, creator of the Great March to Return, stated that he yearned to fly free like the birds over the Gaza fence (IMEU, 2018). Other protestors like Hadad Gamry stated that he protests because he wants to see governmental change, and Asma Abu Daqa said that she protests

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to create a future for her children (Bruton & Abu Zarifa, 2018). Despite being met with a sniper in the face, arrest, loss of limbs, and death of family and friends, Palestinians show up the next day to continue to resist, especially in the context of the 2018 Nakba day protests. As Noura Erakat (2018), a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, stated in the context of the 2018 Nakba day protests, “the resistance is not about returning to the 1947 borders or some notion of the past, but about laying claim to a better future in which Palestinians and their children can live in freedom and equality, rather than being subjugated as second-class citizens or worse” (para. 10).

Hope is foundationary for Palestinians and, with that, they understand what is required of them to create a world and space for themselves outside of violence. Soussi (2018) identifies that hope itself is injected into Palestinians every time they protest and resist, which interlocks an engagement of hope within resistance. When Palestinians gather, hope as a concept rhetorically signifies itself as a focus on the future and changing the trajectory of what that future holds. Hope is a rhetorical engagement with an assortment of futures to come, focused on the potentiality for change. Allan (2007) illustrates that Palestinians require imagination to forge a national identity that is coherent and recognizes the past–present violence experienced. Therefore, Palestinians took the responsibility upon themselves to protest throughout the West Bank, including Bethlehem, Hebron, Al-Bireh, and Nablus (Xinhua, 2018), acting upon their imaginations of the future and thus, accepting the responsibility to continue to commemorate future Nakba days, focused on advocating for the right to Return. Individuals’ conceptions of the future are rooted in their understandings of the past and the present. If the 2018 Nakba day protests engaged in remembering the shared trauma of the past and created a collective identity in the present, then established a foundation as to how Palestinians imagine the future. Castillo (forthcoming) argues that one must understand imagination because it influences the propulsion of resistance forward to create change. Especially with Rabei’s poster utilized during protests across the nation, depicting a child holding a key signifies a right to Return. As the Museum of the Palestinian People (2017) explains, “The key is a widely used symbol of the Nakba, as many Palestinians kept the keys to their homes when they were forced to exile in 1948” (para. 1). Rooted in the notion of the right to Return, Fisk (2018) spoke with families that kept the keys to their ancestral homes. Each family believed that they would Return home in mere weeks, not over 70 years.

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Scattered throughout protests across the globe, images of individuals holding physical keys or cutouts of keys broke through the sea of Palestinian flags. Brennan (2018) articulates that part of the 2018 Nakba day protests was to call upon Israel to respect Palestinian’s right to Return. This invited individuals together throughout all the demonstrations on May 15 to recognize that one of the purposes of commemorating the past violence and creating a collective identity against oppression was to frame a future, focused upon the right to Return. Furthermore, Boxman-Shabtai and Shifman (2014) argue that audiences first understand texts with multiple meanings through chronological order, which means that the propensity to process symbols from the past is necessary to understand the future. This would suggest that the shared sense of the past established through the above interlocking mechanisms were required to rhetorically construct futures that Palestinians yearn for using symbols such as the key and posters illustrating the right to Return. The framing of the 2018 Nakba day protests through the rhetoric of the right to Return and hope is how Palestinians accepted the responsibility for maintaining their shared sense of the past. Mohamed (2016) explains that the right to Return is focused on the Palestinians’ ability to Return to their homeland, which includes those displaced by the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa. Although resolutions passed by the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council affirmed this notion, neither entity has enforced it. Rhetorically, these frameworks exist to demand the ability for Palestinians to Return in a legalistic framework. However, due to its lack of enforcement, it actually invited Palestinians and protestors to call for the defense and enforcement of these resolutions to protect them against violence. These messages then not only used memory-work as a vessel to assert a remembering of the past violence and lack of accountability from Western powers but then also created a foundation of how to engage in an imagined future specifically. This future is not singular or objective, but like memory-work, it is still partial, contested, and selective. This imagination of Palestinian futures is then rhetorically constructed based on the materiality and symbolicity of the past and present to conceptualize what a Palestinian future could manifest. Rhetorically, the engagement with imaginative futures, reliant on symbols of the past and present merged with the rhetoric of the right to Return, recognizes the fluidity of Palestinian memory-work. Many times, the rhetoric of the right to Return and futures are illustrated through a nostalgic lens, which for Hawari (2018) argues is embedded within a settler-colonial conception of time. Nonetheless, the 2018 Nakba day protests’ engagement with the future focused on Palestinian rhetorical sovereignty, reaffirming the web of relations between the past, present, and future in an attempt of the invention of worlds where one could achieve Return. Overall, the rhetorical creation of the future rooted in

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how protestors and Palestinians understand the past invited their global audience into their conceptions of a future absent of violence and displacement. THE CATASTROPHE DOES NOT END ON MAY 16 The 2018 Nakba was a turning point within Palestinian history due to the pervasiveness of memory-work and embodied activism present at protests across the globe. Palestinians engaged in the remembrance of the shared trauma experienced since 1948, created a collective identity, and accepted the responsibility to continue commemorating the day of the Nakba until Palestinians can Return home. Through a pluriversal focus on the past, present, and future, Palestinians reimagined the future of the fight for Palestinian freedom. As efforts stemmed from Palestinians and allies everywhere on May 15, the culmination of 70 years of Zionist, colonialist violence never stopped Palestinians from continuing the fight for their self-determination during every other day of the year. The 2018 Nakba marked itself as the deadliest protest since 2014 (BBC, 2018), but also was a moment where Palestinians established themselves as the purveyors of Palestinian memory and imagination. Although the 2018 Nakba is just a snapshot of the daily lives of Palestinians, it stands on its own as a renowned occasion of resistance efforts rooted within Palestinian collective memory. Due to the Nakba situating itself at the juncture of historical apartheid and modern human rights violations (Bloomfield, 2013), exploring its rhetoricity as a dedication to the past, a commitment to the present, and a persistence to imagine a future illustrates the necessity for a decolonial approach to memory-work. As Said (2019) commented, the Nakba is emblematic of the larger story of loss and dispossession which continues today . . . it [the Nakba] derives from a human tragedy so profound, so extraordinary and suturing, both the formal as well as the informal life of its people, down to the smallest detail has been and will continue to be recalled, testified, remedied. (p. 37)

Flipping the script and understanding the memories of Palestinians past and present is how one can understand them as a people whose lives ultimately changed in 1948 and invite audiences to engage in a Palestinian imagination of a future. Collective creations of the future are rooted in specific understandings and perspectives of the past; thus, Palestinian imagination is only conceived due to their high reliance on memory-work. As Palestinians regularly participate in merging of the past, present, and future, their memories of Israel demolishing their homes, killing their neighbors, and torturing children maintain

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their existence as Palestinians. As Gertz and Khleifi (2008) argue, the trauma Palestinians experience cannot be restricted to specific time orientations, because of its continuance in the everyday. As a people, their constant engagement with memory-work is what continues to sustain their fight. The Nakba itself does not have a start or end but rather proceeds forward and backward to document the struggle that Palestinians experience and will continue to share until they can Return. As scholars (Al-Hardan, 2015; Barakat, 2018a, 2018b; Hawari, 2018) argue that the Nakba is continuous until self-determination and Return are achieved, it means that evaluating the anniversary of the Nakba is only a minuscule moment of the larger structure of settler colonialism that plagues daily Palestinian life. Writing about the ongoing Nakba then becomes pertinent to understanding the Palestinian body, activism, resistance, and people. It brings to light their history and experiences that have ultimately shaped who they are as a community through their shared sense of the past, present, and future. Bhambra (2014) articulates the importance of calling audiences to bear witness to decolonial movements, turning spectators from passive to active observers of new dialogues. I want to highlight this point further and articulate that writing about decolonial movements additionally means that readers can actively engage new perspectives that, as Lechuga (2020) highlights, are grounded within activism rather than the settler imaginary. This invites new futures and establishes a necessary perspective, as Hill and Plitnick (2021) articulate, that is missing from most contemporary Western conversations about Palestine. In the expansion of Castillo’s (forthcoming) memory-work frame, looking at the multifaceted nature of Palestinian resistance in the issues that they protest and their approaches is critical to understand modern Palestinians and their resistance tactics. The 70th anniversary of the Nakba as a dedication to the past, a commitment to the present, and persistence to imagine futures is now more widely used across resistance movements that Palestinians engage within, whether it be the most recent 2021 Nakba day protests, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the Great March to Return, #SaveSheikhJarrah, and Palestine Economic Week. This public engagement in consciousness-raising is critical to socialization and the creation of a future homeland. Calling a global audience to witness the Palestinian constructions of the past, present, and future is how one further fosters resistance. Engaging memory-work within the past, present, and future affirms a totality of Palestinian rhetorical sovereignty, assessing their perspective of the Israeli state and the West, which both seek to extinguish a Palestinian future silently. The continuation of Palestinian resistance is instilled by explaining their ancestral history and witnessing violence. Hawari (2018) argues that sharing cross-generational collective narratives is a form of indigenous resistance, and I would add, as Vizenor (2008) states, survivance.

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I want to conclude this chapter with a reflection upon the current moment. As I wrote this chapter, I witnessed the Intifada of Unity across 1948 Palestine, the diaspora, and exiled as it unfolded. As Hawari (2021) identifies, this Intifada brought Palestinians together in resistance to the multiplicities of settler colonialism, including forced expulsions, air attacks in Gaza, mass arrests of activists, and the killing of children and connecting those struggles to transnational contexts. During the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, 2 Palestinians were killed and 450 were wounded (Frykberg, 2021). During this Nakba protest, Palestinians, just like in 2018, merged messages such as Save Sheikh Jarrah, Stop Bombing Gaza, and protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque, highlighting multiple instances of settler violence happening in and across temporal moments. Additionally, emergency protests and teach-ins across universities and organizations gathered in mourning, reflecting, and learning together. In the new era of resistance in Palestine, among its allies, and across other colonized peoples, transnational solidarity and activism highlighted how the past, present, and future all merge, intertwine, and remind global audiences of the intricacies of settler colonialism as a structure and web of oppression. As activists remind and highlight ties between companies, countries, and settler colonialism to the international community, scholars should be sure to do the same. By only evaluating a single time orientation, especially when writing about colonized peoples, their story is torn apart, creating a risk of singular conceptions rooted in binary. Instead, we have a duty to present the totality of these moments the best that we can. For instance, without tracing the structure back to its starting points, Palestinians continue to be cut apart into pieces, with some sections of their lives privileged over others. This draws back to the power of memory-work and its function within the Palestinian struggle. Palestinian memory-work (and I would argue anti-colonial resistance movements) connects the past with the future by bringing individuals and their stories together, dictating a pluriversal approach to resistance and identity. This is how we honor their activism and ensure that we contribute to their freedom rather than place them into the perspectives of the settler. My heart is full of hope. I see the activism and resistance coming from organizations such as the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Palestinian Youth Movement, Aswat, alQaws, and so many others fighting for the freedom of all colonized peoples and privileging our voices. Although it seems like the world is against us, our ‫ صمود‬fuels our path forward. Palestinians are a strong people, as my father reminds me. We descend from giants. We all believe we can Return and we will. I no longer want to stand gazing at my homeland on fire across borders and through screens. I do not wish to continue to witness the tragedy. ‫بكفي‬

Chapter 7

Embodied Witnessing and the Struggle for Memory in Budapest’s Szabadságszínpad Protests Natalie Bennie

Amid a wave of global populism, the current Hungarian government under Viktor Orbán has shifted the country’s narrative regarding its involvement with the Holocaust to one of national innocence. The right-wing Fidesz Party’s revisionist politics of memory shows itself in public statements from government officials, new curriculum standards in public schools, and the gutting of public funds directed toward the state-run Holocaust museum. The shift can also be seen in the country’s state-sponsored memorial culture, such as the 2014 A német megszállás áldozatainak emlékműve (Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation) in central Budapest (Benazzo, 2017). In the face of these actions, a number of activists and concerned citizens groups have protested the state’s attempt to reshape memory. This chapter focuses on the Szabadságszínpad (Liberty Stage) protests to the state-sponsored Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation and seeks to examine the rhetorical dimensions of the embodied presence of protesters at contested sites of memory. Through a methodology of rhetorical fieldwork, following the work of Endres, Hess, Senda-Cook, and Middleton (2016), I argue that the Szabadságszínpad activists become embodied witnesses to the events of 1943 and 1944 in Hungary, and the performance of their witness places an ethical urgency on the audience to address contemporary instances of violence. I will first briefly illuminate the historical context of the Holocaust in Hungary, the construction of the 2014 monument, and the Szabadságszínpad activist demonstrations in response to the 2014 monument. Prior to World War II, Hungary’s relationship with its Jewish population was fraught. Foreshadowing a new wave of anti-Semitism in Europe, Hungary produced the first anti-Semitic regulations in Europe in the twentieth century, years before Germany’s Nazi takeover of the country. At the beginning of World 139

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War II, Hungarian leadership was quick to ally with the Axis Powers and were fervent supporters of the war effort. However, after suffering extensive military losses in 1943, Hungary began to seek out secret peace negotiations with the Allies, leading to Hitler’s invasion of Hungary in the spring of 1944. As part of the Nazi occupation, the Final Solution was brought to Hungary. However, only 150 Nazi Germans were ever involved in the Hungarian deportation efforts (Mansky, 2017). The lion’s share of deportation and execution activities was left to be carried out by the Hungarian civil police force and the Interior Ministry of the fascist Nyilaskeresztes Párt (Arrow Cross Party). Over the course of the next year, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported and murdered in ghettos, concentration camps, and mass executions. With this history in mind, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán looked to Szabadság tér (Liberty Square), a public park in the heart of Budapest, as the home for a new memory space. With much controversy, the government constructed A német megszállás áldozatainak emlékműve (inscription: Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation) whose main figures were erected under the cover of a single night in the summer of 2014. Surrounded by stone columns stands the virtuous figure of the Archangel Gabriel, a symbol of Hungary, draped in robes and flanked by wings. His expression is serene, almost innocent, as he gazes at the orb and crosses to his right. He is wholly unaware of the German imperial eagle in position to attack above his head. It is an altogether terrifying figure, not lessened by the emblazoned “1944” carved into a cuff around its right leg. Carved into the memorial is a Hungarian phrase, translated elsewhere into English, Hebrew, German, and Russian: A német megszállás áldozatainak emlékműve (In Memory of the Victims). This raises a central question—who are the victims to whom this memorial is dedicated? There are several clues that support an answer to this question that Hungary as a whole—not any specific population like the Jewish, Roma, or Sinti populations—are the victims of a crime perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The historical record suggests that the victims of the occupation are the 400,000 Jews that were murdered as a result of Nazi occupation, as well as thousands of others. The nation’s Jewish population was relatively safe during the early years of the war, compared to neighboring Axis-aligned countries. It was not until after Nazi occupation that many Hungarians cooperated seemingly fully and enthusiastically with the Final Solution. Yet, the memorial is not dedicated to Jewish victims. Instead, the central figure of the memorial is Gabriel, the Roman Catholic embodiment of Hungary. In its angelic innocence, Hungary is framed as the unwitting victim of Nazi invasion and control. This shifts the narrative away from the true victims of Final Solution to a conception of Hungary the country as a victim, which in turn collapses the distinctions surrounding Hungary’s own complicity with the

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Holocaust and the Final Solution. This is not to say that the non-Jewish citizens of Hungary were not affected by the war or, particularly, by the violent siege of Budapest that occurred by the Soviet army. However, the particularity and scope of the trauma of the Holocaust are worth commemorating, and there is a categorical difference between the victimhood of otherwise unaffected Hungarian citizens and the victimhood of the country’s Jewish, Roma, and Sinti populations. To posit all of Hungary experiencing a common level of victimhood at the hands of the Nazi army is unequivocal Holocaust revisionism. Hungary is inarguably responsible for the hundreds of thousands of murders that occurred in 1944. It was not the German Nazis that carried out the most rapid deportation schedule of the Holocaust—that particular dishonor belongs to the Hungarian fascists. As Benazzo (2017) notes, the construction of this monument is illustrative of Fidesz’s overall politics of memory, in which a narrative of national innocence must supplant any historical or moral complicity. The Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation is both the backdrop for and the object of protest for a grassroots activist group, Szabadságszínpad, whose members meet daily to protest the monument and the narrative of Hungarian innocence in the Holocaust. Comprised mainly of second-generation Holocaust survivors, their protest began the night of the construction of the monument, and they maintain a daily presence at Szabadság tér, always less than 50 feet away from the memorial itself. Each day, activists bring the Szabadságszínpad, a small wooden podium from which they speak, perform, or lead discussion. The activists also maintain a collection of personal artifacts such as suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, and photographs that belonged to victims of the Hungarian Holocaust. This collection of artifacts and images is lined up across the sidewalk from the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation, about 15 feet away. While the ever-changing collection of artifacts has been referred to as a “living memorial” and a countermonument, I am particularly interested in the presence of the bodies of the Szabadságszínpad activists as memorials themselves. Rhetorically, their embodied presence at this contested site of memory sutures a level of authenticity to the counter-memory espoused by the counter-monument and destabilizes the narrative of Hungarian innocence posited by the official monument. THEORIZING WITNESSING To explicate the rhetorical workings of the Szabadságszínpad protest, I draw on previous analyses of this site and theories of witnessing. There have been a number of analyses of the A német megszállás áldozatainak emlékműve

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and of the physical counter-monument that the Szabadságszínpad activists maintain. Most of the research is enclaved within disciplines of geography and urban studies, and, despite their interdisciplinarity, such research does not involve rhetorical criticism of the site. For instance, Rév (2018) examines the official monument as constitutive of a broad narrative of Hungarian Holocaust revisionism, looking at its architecture and placement in the broader square. While he mentions the counter-monument and the presence of the Szabadságszínpad activists in passing, they are not a focus of the analysis. Similarly, Sumartojo (2018) examines the debates surrounding the construction of the official memorial, mentioning the activist reaction as historical context. Academic studies and popular media analyses of the site seem united in their conclusions that the state-sponsored monument is “revisionism unbound” (Rév, 2018, p. 616). Notably, Erőss (2016) provides a thorough analysis of how the countermonument challenges this revisionist state narrative through aesthetics and dynamism. The counter-monument has the capacity to change every day, as flowers grow, visitors leave messages, or items are stolen by vandals. She concludes that the counter-monument “is in an intensive, dialectic relationship with the official one: the mixture of personal relics, the presence of activists, the regular events embody what is missing from the monument: it is visible, accessible, tangible, alive and ever-changing” (p. 252). In her view, the presence of the activists and their acts of protest are just one element of the physical landscape, and her geographical analysis of the site focuses overwhelmingly on the physical counter-monument itself. I challenge this view and direct my analysis toward questions of embodiment as central to the rhetorical work being done. Erőss’s (2018) later work on the site introduces the idea of social practice in commemoration. Drawing heavily on De Certeau (1980/1984), Erőss draws attention to the rituals of commemorative practice that occur at the official monument and at the counter-monument. For instance, flowers are watered, candles are lit, and damaged signs are repaired. Reading social practice into commemorative spaces is a helpful contribution to memory studies, as it combines questions of place, ritual, and bodily performance. I would like to extend Erőss’s work here, to ask, who is lighting the candles? Who waters the flowers? Who repairs the damage? Instead of focusing further on the commemorative practices, I suggest a need to draw our attention to the individuals engaging in such practices and how they function rhetorically as memory. In addition to analyses of the physical site, I want to extend the work of scholars that seek to examine the embodied nature of rhetoric. Namely, embodiment and conceptions of the body are fundamentally about power. To examine embodiment is to ask, who and which bodies matter? I argue, in the case of Hungarian Jewish activist performances at Szabadságszínpad, the

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embodiment of the activists as Jewish and as second-generation Holocaust survivors allows them to authentically act as moral witnesses to the atrocities of the Holocaust and of contemporary Hungary. Questions of embodiment, such as the expression of emotion and trauma, are inherent to analyses of witnessing. Oliver’s (2015) substantial work on the philosophy of witnessing is useful here. For Oliver, witnessing is an avowal of the suffering of others that “takes us beyond recognition to the affective and imaginative dimensions of experience” (p. 475). This affective dimension of experience in turn suggests how subjectivity is dependent on social relations and is thus contingent. Understanding witnessing as affective and performative thus entails an understanding of subjectivity as constructed and of objective autonomy as a (white) liberal fantasy. When considered beyond the scope of legal testimony, such as the case for Szabadságszínpad, witnessing produces an ethical dimension and a requirement of the audience to consider the vulnerable and to “act in ways that open up the possibility of response” (p. 490). Thus, the power of witnessing is not about the subject who witnesses but rather the audience that is privy to the act of witnessing. With a background in psychoanalysis and performance theory, Felman (2002) broadly examines how witness testimony shaped discourses of collective memory in the context of the Holocaust. Elaborating on Felman’s argument, Hirsch and Spitzer (2009) suggest that “witness testimony locates the possibility of grasping the Holocaust in ‘the slippage between law and art’—between the closure brought by legal judgment, and the open-ended immediacy and presence preserved in a work of art” (p. 152). However, it is not the words of the testimonies that wield power, but rather it is the embodied performance of testimony and “the concentrated attention to the deep memory lodged in the body and to the unspoken and unspeakable dimensions of traumatic recall” that possesses such affective potential (p. 158). This conception of the unspeakable testimony is seen only when examining the witnessing from a performative lens, asking not what the testimony communicates but how the witnesses perform their testimony and communicate embodied trauma. Within the field of communication, Choi’s (2016) thoughtful work on memory sites in South Korea combines the discussion of embodied witnessing with traditional memorial spaces. Choi suggests that, while the bodies of survivors are themselves monumental in their embodiment of trauma, physical monuments can in fact communicate such embodied trauma via the transference of unarticulated “emotions, imagination, and empathy” (p. 485). This suggestion provides critical insight for the case of modern Holocaust memory, in which increasingly the absence of the lived body necessarily precludes the potential for survivors to embody their witnessing.

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EMBODIED PERFORMANCE AND SZABADSÁGSZÍNPAD There are a few implications attendant with a conception of a performed “embodied witnessing.” Namely, the goal of embodied witnessing is not to ascertain any objective truth or accounting of the events in the past. Rather, it is an articulation of an incomplete and socially constructed perspective that projects an ethical duty onto the audience. Epistemologically, the truth of a past event is mediated through subjective and embodied ways of knowing. These truths are communicated through embodied performances, in which affect, emotion, silence, absence, and other embodied performative elements are all valid and fruitful epistemological sources of knowledge. With the exception of the aforementioned intervention by Choi, most theoretical discussions engage witnesses who directly experienced an event. With the case study of the Hungarian Szabadságszínpad activists, I push these theoretical boundaries temporally, suggesting that the second generation of witnesses still possess the ability to perform embodied witnessing though they might not have witnessed the event directly. Mostly, they repeat the stories that have been told to them by their family members and loved ones. In this regard, while they were once the audience to embodied witness testimony, they have now internalized the ethical mandate and have become embodied witnesses in their own right. In addition, their familial ties afford the Szabadságszínpad activists a sense of proximity to the event that perhaps can transcend temporal distance. With this background in mind, I now turn to my analysis of the counter-monument site and the embodied activist performance of Szabadságszínpad, focusing on the language choices of the counter-monument’s written materials, the intimate and familial nature of the gathered objects, and the function of ritual in the daily protests. Before the analysis, I wish to provide a brief note on the methodological considerations of this study. The rhetorical fieldwork informing my observations stems from a month-long stay in Budapest in 2018, in which I was able to observe the memorial site and daily protests with field notes, interview activist leaders, and participate in several discussion events hosted by the leaders of Szabadságszínpad. Endres et al. (2016) define rhetorical fieldwork as “a set of approaches that integrates rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field” (p. 516). By viewing bodies, performances, and material sites as generative rhetorical texts, scholarly presence in situ is warranted. I now turn to examine the physical counter-monument maintained by Szabadságszínpad, as it is both a construction and backdrop of the embodied activist performance. I highlight three major functions of the counter-monument, each of which suggests dimensions to the capacity of the activists to act

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Figure 7.1  Section of the Physical Counter-Monument Maintained by Szabadságszínpad Activists, Budapest. Source: Natalie Bennie.

as embodied, performative witnesses. One glimpse of the counter-monument can be found in figure 7.1. The eclectic counter-monument, seen in part here, displays a wide variety of flyers, photographs, and physical items. The first notable rhetorical feature of the counter-monument is its evocation of an English-speaking and/or tourist audience. Hungarian is the only official language in Hungary and is overwhelmingly the most popular language spoken by Hungarian citizens. However, the counter-monument displays information sheets and photo captions in 15 different languages, most commonly in English. The multilingual nature of the counter-monument suggests that the primary audience is not just the Hungarians who live, work, and travel to Budapest. The litany of languages instead suggests a global audience, one who has no prior knowledge of Hungarian history and is therefore open to the Holocaust revisionism of what the counter-monument posters term a “phony monument.” In addition to the placement of the monument in Szabadság tér—a popular tourist destination flanked by the U.S. Embassy, historical sites, and merely a stone’s throw away from the National Parliament—foreign tourists thus constitute the audience of the monument. The significance of this audience construction is two-fold and complicated. On the one hand, expanding the number of languages on the

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counter-monument makes its message more accessible and widens the number of people to whom the activist survivors can then bear witness. This ability to witness to an enlarged audience of tourists allows the activists of Szabadságszínpad to fulfill one moral imperative: to testify to the horrors of the Holocaust so that people cannot claim ignorance to genocide. If the imperative is to share stories as widely as possible, then this must include tourists who then travel back to their homes with new knowledge and vigilance. For some tourists, the message of the Szabadságszínpad activism does in fact extend beyond the encounter. One U.S. tourist writes on Trip Advisor (“This square touched my heart,” 2019): I give this monument only 1 star for the same reason some people have given it 5 stars. The discussion that has been created by this misfired propaganda exercise is certainly worthwhile. Congratulations to the people who maintain a vigil to this monument every afternoon challenging onlookers to think about history and the deliberate misuse of history by politicians and others. Anyone visiting Budapest should see this—hopefully one day an enlightened Hungarian government will dismantle it. (paras. 1–2)

However, the use of English (or languages other than Hungarian) alone does not ensure that the message of the activists gets communicated to visiting tourists. It is therefore a necessary but insufficient prerequisite to the witnessing of the activists. Another U.S. tourist’s review of the site shows just how incorrect some tourists’ impressions of the monument and countermonument can be (“Congratulations to the people protesting this gross historical distortion,” 2017): But the most memorable part of this park is the monument to the Hungarian victims of the Nazis. This is a rather large area covered with variable pop-up fountains, where adults and children enjoy life and nice weather getting joy of the water and take pictures. Behind the fountains is an obelisk with a proud eagle and photographs of the victims of the Nazis. This is a very touching place. It’s nice to just sit here keeping silence and respect. (para. 1)

Here, questions of authorship have clearly been muddled for the tourist, who views the “proud eagle” of the government’s monument as the same memorial with “photographs of the victims of the Nazis.” Even the blame of the Nazis indicates that the entire messaging of the counter-monument and of the activists fell on unhearing ears. Effective or not, by including so many languages at a popular tourist site, the audience is expanded to target foreign tourists, increasing the number of people who might bear witness to the performance of the Szabadságszínpad activists.

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On the other hand, by suggesting that the intended audience are the tourists, the counter-monument risks undermining its intended message: Hungarian civilians are in large part responsible for the genocide of Hungarian Jews and should reckon with that complicity. This message comes from informational posters attached to the counter-monument that directly detail the history and goals of the Szabadságszínpad activists. This informational poster lays out a history of the “civilian protest,” ranging from the declaration of the government monument’s construction in 2013 to the various steps taken by protesters over the years. The information ends with the following, which details the mission of the group of activists: survivors, their descendants and sympathizing citizens have brought here their personal objects, pebbles, photos, documents, candles as a Living Memorial of Remembrance. For the past 4 years, every afternoon between 17.30 and 18.30 we have been protesting with live [chants], speeches and songs. From 18.30 until 20.00 there is a Living Memorial discussion here, with the motto: Let us make the living memorial of Hungarians from ourselves and our discussion.

In some regards, the counter-monument does address this stated goal. For example, one photo (captioned in Hungarian and English) depicts the civilians in Tata, Hungary standing idly by while Hungarian gendarmes deport their Jewish neighbors. There is certainly an attempt to focus a critique on Hungarian civilian collective guilt. Yet, by directing the criticism to tourists instead of to the Hungarian population themselves, the message becomes muddled. Are the tourists supposed to hold the Hungarian populace accountable? If the power of witnessing comes from the ethical requirements placed upon the audience, who holds the power in this situation? These questions are left largely unanswered by both the counter-monument and the activist performances, which are largely communicated in Hungarian. A second major feature of the protest is the intimate nature of the physical counter-monument, a collection of notes, photographs, and objects that radiate memory. A number of photographs and signs directly refer to the activists who constructed and continue to maintain the counter-monument. For example, the English caption to one photograph of a young woman reads, “My mom, some weeks before Auschwitz.” Another displays a picture of a man and his young daughter with the caption, “My father, Wieder Henrik was sent in 1942 to the copper mine in Bor, Serbia as forced labor serviceman. He perished there in 1944, due [to] the brutalities of Hungarian guards. He was 33 years old.” In addition to the photographs, the artifacts that comprise the counter-monument are largely of an intimate nature, such as eyeglasses, shoes, and luggage. One particularly intimate item in the counter-monument,

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Figure 7.2  Pair of Young Children’s Shoes Hangs Beneath a Hungarian Flag-themed Ribbon in the Counter-monument. Source: Natalie Bennie.

seen in figure 7.2, is a pair of battered young children’s shoes, hanging underneath a Hungarian flag-themed ribbon. The photographs’ captions and the personal nature of the artifacts suggest that the individuals who were murdered ought to be commemorated not only because they were human beings, but particularly because they were human beings who existed in relationship with the contemporary Hungarian citizens who built and still maintain the memorial. This context gives a texture to their memory, a proximity of relationship that provokes the witnessing audience to seek the living relative who brought the photograph or the suitcase to the site. The evocation of familial relationships in turn affords a level of credibility and authenticity to the Szabadságszínpad activists, whose performances function as witness testimony to the events of the Holocaust in Hungary. Though in most instances survivors of the Holocaust are not present, their children (second-generation survivors) are. Thus, the evocation of familial proximity allows them to share their relative’s testimony with a sense of authority, even though the stories are not “theirs.” Just as Hirsch and Spitzer (2009) and Choi (2016) all suggest the power of an embodied witness comes not from their words but rather through a performance of the body, which, for survivors of the Holocaust, is monumental in its embodiment of trauma. Though the children of survivors may not physically embody the injuries, scars, or tattoos

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associated with anti-Semitic persecution during the first half of the twentieth century, their presence at the memorial site is nevertheless an embodied act of witnessing. By connecting their presence with the persecution of their family, they embody an act of witnessing. Lastly, the counter-monument evokes the embodied presence of the Jewish activists through the rituals of commemorative practice that occur there. Recall the work by Erőss which draws attention to actions that occur, such as the watering of flowers, the lighting of candles, and maintenance of the artifacts from weather damage or intentional vandalism. Each afternoon, one activist comes to the site to practice these rituals, a performance in its own right for all who may be present to observe. With diligent care and patience, he inspects each photograph and poster for damages. He checks the donation bin for loose coins. He waters and weeds the flowers that grow beside the memorial pebbles and stones that evoke a Jewish cemetery for humans who were denied a final burial place. In this repeated performance, a daily ritual embodied in a singular man, this practice becomes commemorative, constitutive of a struggle for a public memory of the Holocaust in which Hungarian citizens play an active role in its maintenance. Cultural geographers have paid attention to the ways in which activists shape the politics of space through memory struggles like the practices of commemoration discussed earlier. Wang (2017) suggests how, in the case of one American activist in Memphis, embodied protest transforms the memorial space into a memorial place, a struggle of ideology, memory, and politics. Such a phenomenon happens daily at Szabadság tér with the daily practice of maintaining the monument and the daily performances of the Szabadságszínpad activists. Their practices, no matter how quotidian, involve their embodied presence as witnesses to both the Holocaust in the 1940s and the Holocaust revisionism of the Orbán administration in this decade. As second-generation survivors, they embody the trauma of the former event. Through carrying on their family’s stories and artifacts, they become witnesses tasked with preventing the latter.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argued that the embodied performances of Hungarian Jewish activists at Szabadságszínpad is one in which the activists act as moral witnesses to both the atrocities of the Holocaust and of modern-day Hungary. By explicating how second-generation survivors can continue to bear witness to a trauma that they did not directly experience through familial proximity and repeated testimony, I hope to have added to conceptions of embodied trauma

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and public memory as espoused in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. If indeed the goal of embodied witnessing is to project an ethical sense of responsibility onto the audience, then the stakes are high. One can readily see these stakes in the study of Szabadságszínpad activists, who maintain their embodied witnessing through daily protest in the face of a global rise in populism and the neo-fascist government of Viktor Orbán’s attempt to shape collective memory in order to cohere a conservative national identity. As memories about the Holocaust begin to disappear (Astor, 2018), the challenge of ensuring “Never Again” is nigh. A rigorous understanding of the politics of memory and the embodied contestations of revisionist memories is critical to ensuring both long-term peace and ethical commemoration of the past.

Chapter 8

An Actor-Network Approach The Role of Art in Public Spaces in the Gezi Protests Nora Suren

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1963) asserts, injustice should be seen as a threat, and everyone should take action to stop it, as it poses a threat to the concept of justice no matter where. The Gezi protests exemplify the injustice in Turkish society, exemplified by the police’s excessive use of force through water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets (Amnesty International, 2013; Farro & Demirhisar, 2014; Gül et al., 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2013; Özbudun, 2014; Öztürkmen, 2014). These police actions were directed toward unarmed and peaceful protestors. The Gezi Park protests began in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 28, 2013, then grew to become a nationwide movement. The movement started in opposition to the “Taksim pedestrianization project,” which was approved by the municipality. According to this project, the Gezi Park, located in Taksim Square, would be demolished in order to build military barracks and a shopping mall in place of the park. The project was introduced as the pedestrianization of the Taksim Square, which is considered the heart of modern Istanbul. On May 27, a portion of Gezi Park’s wall was destroyed and, in addition, trees in the park were removed under the scope of implementing the aforementioned project. To protest the removal of one of the last remaining parks in downtown Istanbul, a local group called Taksim Solidarity Group gathered in the park. The protests began as an innocent and environmentalist demonstration with people setting up tents in the park, similar to the Occupy Movement that was seen in the United States in 2011 (Juris, 2012). Despite the fact that these activists were peaceful, intervention by the police against these people was extremely harsh.

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As a reaction to government’s oppression, in just 2 weeks, the Gezi protests spread to 80 of the country’s 81 provinces, with more than 3.5 million people participating (Amnesty International, 2013). While news of the occupation spread on social media, many of Turkey’s mainstream media outlets were caught off guard by these events (e.g., protestors being routed with tear gas and water cannons) and slow to adapt their coverage. Particularly, on June 1, as police brutality during the protests in Istanbul reached its peak and went out of control, one of The Turkish mainstream TV stations CNNTürk aired a documentary on penguins instead of demonstrating the real event during which police were firing tear gas bombs to tens of thousands of youth and political activists (Amnesty International, 2013; Ozturkmen, 2014). As a result, the penguin became an ironic symbol of media cowardice in the protests (Ozturkmen, 2014). Additionally, other pro-government stations like NTV continued to push the government’s conspiratorial talking points (Ozturkmen, 2014). GEZI IN REVIEW: IDENTIFYING THE GAPS AND THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE Thus far several scholars have emphasized the role and use of art in the Gezi protests, such as humor, poetry, and street art (Aytekin, 2017; Colak, 2014; Gorkem, 2015). For example, Gorkem (2015) investigates the undercurrents and outcomes of the Gezi demonstrations by arguing that social media is an important battleground for the “cyber war” between the protestors, the supporters of protestors, and the government and its supporters. Her argument is largely based on offline and online humorous texts with semiotic analyses of composition and content, which is conducted as a means to degrade the other party’s credibility and gain more supporters. Similarly, Aytekin (2017) underlines the role Second New Wave (SNW)1 poetry played in the protests, as the protestors appropriated the verses of the SNW poets to create a unified movement. Drawing upon a Rancièrean notion of politics2 and inspired by Peter Weiss (2013), Aytekin (2017) focuses on the aesthetic political acts within the movement, particularly delving into the SNW poetry. Unlike Gorkem (2015) and Aytekin (2017), Colak (2014) discusses the capability of art and humor in the conception and development of the Gezi resistance by looking at multifarious forms of art, including examples from humoristic productions, street art, and a dance show performed by a whirling dervish with a gas mask. Although Colak looks at the relationship between multiple forms of art and politics, his study is limited in the sense that it does not explain how different forms of art and politics work in unison. Also, Colak investigates the usage of artistic and humoristic productions in new social movements in

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terms of Scholl and Bakhtin’s (1984a; 1984b) concept of “carnival.” A “carnival” understanding does not concur with the weighty context of the Gezi protests. Although protestors used humor to construct counter-hegemony, the police violence, the casualties, the dead, and the government’s brutal interventions, they all created a weighty context. As it can be seen from the examples discussed earlier, most previous research on the Gezi protests has been one-sided and studied the protests from one perspective. However, a multidimensional perspective helps me to analyze the diversity of multiple art forms and put those elements under a broad network. As Everhart (2014) explains, specific genres shape the formation and course of the events differently. In addition to that, movements do not generally rely on only one form of art. As stated in Reed’s (2005) research that during the Battle of Seattle (i.e., a series of protests surrounding the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999), activists utilized multiple forms (e.g., creative performances as dancing Santas, fire-eaters, clowns, and drag queens) in the street. Thus, an analysis based on multiple forms of art employed by the Gezi protestors allows me to understand one of the most significant actors in the Gezi network. Social media provides a space for people to participate in social movements (Castells, 2015; Costanza-Chock, 2011; Nelson, 2012; Pierskalla & Hollenbach, 2013; Rheingold, 2008; Thigo, 2013). For example, Gerbaudo (2012) claims that social media can be used as a tool to mobilize people. Further analysis is provided by Pierskalla and Hollenbach (2013) who assert that mobile technologies influence collective action events. Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl (2005) also assert that technologies of information and communication are theoretically and empirically intriguing from a collective action standpoint. Self-organizing online groups, rapidly assembled networks of protestors, “meetups,” new structures for interest groups, and “viral” email lists are some of the examples they demonstrate as to prove that collective behaviors employ advanced communication and information technologies. The protests of 2004 and 2011 in Madrid and London demonstrated that mobile phones allowed people to text their friends and access the social-media outlets, which increased people’s abilities to organize and join the protests (Bradshaw, 2009; Sherwood, 2011). The recent literature on the Gezi protests also have shown that social media in general and mobile media in particular were used as a tool to connect people in order to increase information flow and participation (Baban & Guzel, 2015; Gorkem, 2016; Gümüştekin, 2015). Although in the case of the Gezi protests, social media outlets were the central communication tool for the protestors, and indeed played a critical role in the emergence and spread of the protests, some scholars have overly focused on the role of social media technologies in detriment of other nonhuman

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actors, including art, humor, and politics in the network of the Gezi. For instance, Gorkem (2016) examined digital activism in Turkey focusing on the significance of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for Turkish activists, and the way activists use digital media (Baban & Guzel, 2015). Similarly, Baban and Guzel (2015) investigated the way activists use social media and how social media affects the globalization of social activities. These scholars particularly focus on digital activism and roles and meanings of SNS for activists in the Gezi protests. These studies on digital activism and mobile media affordances are highly valuable for the Gezi literature in the sense that they highlight the importance of digital media and SNS in the emergence and formation of the protests; however, as the aforementioned scholars who have focused mostly on the specific art form during the Gezi protests, they only emphasized the role of the individual parts of the network. As stated before, this caused most of the academic literature surrounding the Gezi protests to remain incomplete and one-sided. By putting these perspectives in conversation with each other in the form of a network, I am providing a more robust and complex analysis of the protests and refusing to reduce the Gezi network to one cause or element. As such, this chapter critically engages with the literature on Gezi, arguing that an effective understanding of the Gezi network can only be obtained if the roles of different actors are acknowledged. Because the Gezi protests can be seen as a milestone for democracy and a signal for greater change in Turkey, it is important that they are explored on a broader scale. The emergence of the protests and the greater change the protests brought on Turkey is a very complex one. In order to understand this complexity, we need to look at the whole system. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is valuable to understand this system because it takes the whole picture into account and helps us understand it better. In addition to contributing to the literature on Gezi, this chapter also suggests that we can still learn from a 7-year-old protest by having a different framework derived from ANT instead of reducing the phenomenon into a singular component as the narratives among most scholars have tended to do so. As Bruno Latour argues, instead of focusing on discrete actors with particular interests and intentions, it is more productive to trace how action is articulated through associations between human and nonhuman actors. Enmeshed in these associations and the complex network, actors are not stable, they are rather constantly assembled and reassembled. Through these associations, material entities, such as visual arts, graphic design, music, protest signs, and humoristic contents, become actors. Latour (2005) also emphasizes that not only humans but also nonhumans have agency. This does not necessarily mean that they determine or cause action on their own. Rather, they should be understood as “participants” in actions, which “might authorize, allow,

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afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on” (p. 72). According to Latour, ANT does not argue that objects do things “instead” of human actors: it simply says that no science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored (Latour, 2005). Thus, ANT allows me to identify how this network of human and nonhuman agents act together to cause a change in Turkish youth. The young activists of the Gezi movement reinterpreted art and performance. One of the most popular examples for the reinterpretation of art was “The Whirling Dervish with a Gas Mask” performance in Taksim Square and many other places. With a red dervish skirt and gas mask, artist Ziya Azazi reappropriated the Sufi whirling in his own way. Mevlevi Sufism is one of the oldest Sufi traditions in Anatolia dating back to the thirteenth century. The Mevlevi (also known as the whirling dervishes) follow their strict rituals during their famous practice of whirling, which is a form of remembrance of God. The photographs of the exceptional performance of Ziya Azazi that were disseminated on Facebook and Twitter were one of the notable moments of the Gezi protests. Together, these elements (e.g., online and offline spaces, photographs, and the public performance itself) formed a complex network in which a generation that had been accused of being apolitical became engaged in politics without reproducing what they perceive as the dull, exclusionary, and pointless politics of elder generations (Aytekin, 2017). Scholars have stated that there is a fundamental need for activists to communicate their message and build visibility for the movement among the public and media (Andrews & Caren, 2010; Rohlinger, 2006; Sobieraj, 2011). According to Katherine Everhart (2014), artistic expressions are one of the ways movements can communicate their message and make it visible to others. Examples from past protests such as political cartoons, visual flyers, graffiti, protest songs, protest signs, costumes, and documentary videos are some of the ways through which activists have spread their message to both the public and media (Adams, 2002; Reed, 2005). These imply that art, especially when it is performed in public spaces, is one of the most important elements in the context of the Gezi network which helps me to fathom the protests and how they drove a great change in Turkish youth. Depending on the medium, art has the potential to reach more diverse groups of people than more traditional means of political communication, such as news stories or political meetings (Everhart, 2014). Therefore, one form should not necessarily be deemed more successful than the other, but rather, they have the potential to reach different audiences (Rohlinger & Brown, 2013). While there are a number of excellent studies available on the Gezi protests, little research has been conducted on how specific artistic and humoristic forms of expressions, politics, and social media technologies are involved

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in the protests and networked with each other. Furthermore, much of the research on Gezi appears to consider art or social media as neutral “tools” that can be appropriated and shaped by particular social actors. It is also clear that these studies tend to focus on particular “social” actors and their specific interests; for instance, Gorkem (2016) and Baban and Guzel (2015) show how different “human” actors use new technologies to achieve certain ends. Drawing a conceptual framework from ANT, this chapter rather considers art, politics, and social media as “participants” in the Gezi protests. As such, I examine how the diversity of elements across a network, including art in public spaces, social media’s technological features, as well as the circumstances surrounding the political environment of Turkey mutually articulate each other in the emergence of the protests and opening the road of civic participation for the Turkish youth. To that end, I attempt to answer the question: What does the network formed by human and nonhuman agents in the Gezi protests do together? Taking the ANT approach allows me to address this question and understand each different actor in the emergence and the course of the Gezi protests. My analysis covers the networks surrounding the most visible and relevant actors that were digitally traceable. On Actor-Network Theory: An Overview Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a sociocultural approach that has generated considerable interest among scholars from overlapping topics of science, technology, organization, and media. Developed by Michel Callon (1986), Bruno Latour (2005), and John Law (1987), ANT posits that everything in the social and natural worlds exist in constantly shifting and evolving networks of relationships. It argues that nothing exists outside those relationships. According to ANT, the influence exerted by nonhuman artifacts on social interaction is as significant as that which is exerted by human actors (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005; Law, 1987). As stated by Callon and Latour (1981), ANT distinguishes itself from other sociotechnical approaches by considering both human and nonhuman elements equally as actors within a network. That being said, in order to fully understand and better reveal the complexities of the Gezi network, we should attribute the same level of importance when faced with either a protestor, a public performer, an image, or a technological tool: “An actor in ANT is a semiotic definition—an actant—that is something that acts or to which activity is granted by another . . . an actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of action” (Latour, 1996, p. 373; Callon & Latour, 1981, p. 286). As such, the identities of the diverse elements that emerged from the Gezi protests should be defined through their interaction with other actors with which they are associated.

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Actor-Network Theory focuses on the description and analysis of associations between natural, human and technological entities (Law, 2009). It informs Science and Technology Studies (STS) research with an approach to trace associations between human and non-human agents in order to better understand how social dynamics are reassembled in contemporary settings, which are characterized as being more fluid, intricate and accelerated (Baron & Gomez, 2016). As Latour (2005) states, instead of focusing the analysis on discrete social actors with particular interests and intentions, it is more productive to trace how action is articulated through associations between human and nonhuman actors. Entangled in these associations, actors are far from stable, but are rather constantly assembled and reassembled. Through these associations, material entities, such as keys, viruses, laboratories, and cars, become actors. In the words of one of ANT’s key proponents, John Law (2009): Actor network theory is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. Its studies explore and characterize the practices and webs that carry them. (p. 141)

In Reassembling the Social, Latour (2005) first claims that there are no fixed groups. There are only group formations, as groups are constantly made and remade. This way of understanding groups is helpful in the analysis of the Gezi protests because it allows us to avoid addressing “online activists” or “protestors” as stable and fixed groups. Though the protestors united with a purpose during the protests, they were all from different backgrounds and political views; decentralized, flexible and without formal representatives. Moreover, like most recent protests, Gezi had no leaders or spokespersons who spoke for the group existence. Not only the group of protestors or activists, but also the police were not stable and fixed as both of these groups added new members to their formations or lost the old ones and continually moved around the country throughout the course of the Gezi action. As Latour (2005) states, “Groups are not silent things, but rather the provisional product of a constant uproar made by the millions of contradictory voices about what is a group and who pertains to what” (p. 31). Additionally, according to Latour, it is important to distance oneself from the idea that action is a product of deliberate intentions of particular actors. Rather, Latour asserts, action is overtaken; it “is borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated” (p. 46). This is important because the action should not be attributed to the deliberate intentions of specific actors, such as

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social media, art, or the protestors. Rather, dispersed actors (including human and nonhuman elements) all played different roles, mobilizing and holding the protests together. As Latour (2005) emphasizes, objects have agency too. This does not mean that they determine or cause action. Instead, they should be understood as “participants” in actions, which “might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on” (p. 72). Everyday objects, such as cleaning sprays, paint respirators, goggles, scarves, and plastic bottles became medical supplies or tear gas protectors during the Gezi protests. For instance, cleaning agents with pumps were filled with milk and used to ease the effect of tear gas by spraying into tear-gassed eyes. Thus, materials, objects, or technologies can become political, too, as they are not mere passive recipients and they co-articulate agency. Even though it might mean letting elements in which, for lack of a better term, we would call nonhumans. This also reminds us that “the social is materially heterogeneous and the technical is socially heterogeneous” (Callon & Law, 1997): Often in practice we bracket off non-human materials, assuming they have a status which differs from that of a human. So materials become resources or constraints; they are said to be passive; to be active only when they are mobilized by flesh and blood actors. But if the social is really materially heterogeneous then this asymmetry doesn’t work very well. Yes, there are differences between conversations, texts, techniques and bodies. Of course. But why should we start out by assuming that some of these have no active role to play in social dynamics? (p. 168)

As ANT suggests, studying the associations between heterogeneous actors—be it Erdogan himself, and his stance on the protests as well as the protestors—helps us explore how they worked in unison and constituted this actor-network through the effects of these connections. The mainstream literature on the roles of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within social movements tends toward technological determinism. From the Mexican Zapatista movement’s use of the Internet to the role of mobile communication in the protests related to President Estrada in the Philippines and to the use of Twitter in the protests in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt, mostly focused on technology and its “impacts” on social and political practices (Mungiu-Pippidi & Munteanu, 2009; Shirky, 2011; Stepanova, 2011). For instance, Shirky (2011) attributes the loss of the Moldovan Communist Party during the 2009 elections to the impact of cell phones and social-media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, by reducing the whole network to only one cause and ignoring other possible actors that might have had agency too.

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There have been alternatives to this dominant literature. By taking a socially deterministic perspective, other scholars argue emphasize the impacts of online communication should be understood as one of the outcomes that emerge from a complex mesh between various human and nonhuman actors, institutions, and practices (Cassara & Lengel, 2013; Lengel & Newsom, 2014; Newsom, et al., 2011; van de Donk et al., 2004). Further, some claim that the Internet and associated ICTs actually support existing political structures, dictatorships, and authoritarian regimes (Chatfield, 2011; Diamond, 2010; Morozov, 2011; van Laer & van Aelst, 2010). van Laer and van Aelst (2010) avoid an Internet-optimism by pointing out the limitations of the Internet and it “will never be able to replace traditional forms of activism and face-to-face communication” (p. 1164). According to these scholars, the Internet is unable to establish trust and strong ties among a network of activists as they tend to dismiss online activism as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism.” ANT, however, rejects this distinction between the social and the technological by differing from both technological deterministic perspective and social construction of technology approach. Through the use of ANT to analyze the Gezi protests, this study departs from both of these views. The ANT framework has indeed been applied in the context of other events. For example, Poell, de Kloet, and Zeng (2014) analyze the involvement of the microblogging site Sina Weibo, one of the most popular social-media sites in China, in the instances of political contention. Poell et al. (2014) draw inspiration from ANT to show how Sina Weibo’s particular technological features, its user cultures, its systematic self-censorship practices, as well as the occasional government interventions, mutually articulate each other. Their ANT approach allows them to trace how technological features and emerging practices become entangled with each other and help them to establish a broader overview of how new publics are constituted and how symbolic reconfigurations unfold in the case of a platform like Sina Weibo. Heeks and Seo-Zindy (2013) also adopt an Actor-Network Theory approach in order to explore the role of ICTs in Iran’s Green Movement. With this approach, they aim to move beyond the dualities most of the previous literature have presented on this topic: seeing either technology or society (or culture) as the cause of impact. In order to answer their research question, which focused on the role ICTs play in the development of a social movement network from an ANT perspective, they selected a single case study, which was the Green Movement in Iran (i.e., a protest against contested presidential election results in June 2009). Lim (2012) also moves away from technological determinism by delving into the historical analysis of online activism in Egypt from 2004 to 2011. She argues that “the role of social media in the Egypt revolt was not merely technological but also sociopolitical” (p. 4). Following these studies, I seek to move beyond the dualities of technology

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and society, and beyond traditional concepts of cause and effect. ANT helps me expose the dynamics and processes that underpin the trajectory of a social movement network like the Gezi. Angry, unemployed, and oppressed youth participated in the Gezi protests with the same grievances, goals, and a common identity in opposition to the government’s decisions. Nevertheless, these grievances alone are not enough to explain the evolution of events during those times. Actor-Network Theory helps me unearth the entanglement between physical sites (e.g., Taksim Square), ICTs, particularly social media, and the Gezi movement. In doing so, this chapter moves away not only from technological determinism, in which technology determines social processes and cultural values, but also from social constructivism, in which human action is seen as directly shaping technology. My analysis is based on ANT, especially Latour’s (2005) perspective, because it is useful to understand the greater change in the Turkish youth and the complex system through which the Gezi protests unfolded. My analysis traces the associations and the networks among powerful actors of the Gezi protests, and as such allows me to focus on the whole picture. THE ROLE OF ART IN PUBLIC SPACES IN THE GEZI PROTESTS Istanbul-based visual artist, Can Altay (2013), wrote, “Imagination expands slowly and strikes suddenly” (para. 15). Altay notes the role of art and humor in the Gezi protests should be examined with great care as it paved the way for the people of Turkey to imagine and invent something that is new. Art, humor, and social media merged in the network of Gezi to help people create multiple platforms to raise their voices and claim the power to protect their public spaces and their lives. Art is pervasive in many political movements and it is instrumental in the achievement of its objectives (Adams, 2002). For example, art in public spaces has been a critical part of the shantytown women’s protests in Pinochet’s Chile. Art-making raised awareness among the shantytown women who were unemployed, abused, tortured, or victimized by the regime and helped them earn their own income to support their families. In the United States, songs sung during the civil rights movement between 1954 and 1968 played a significant role in solidifying the stance of the activists and the ethos of the social movement. Likewise, rock music acted as a communicator of the punk/rock movement’s ethos to the public in East Germany. By examining the role of art in public spaces in the Gezi protests, I demonstrate that protestors used art to revolt against the authority of the state in transforming

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the public space. My ultimate goal is to show how art is an essential element of social movements in general. Before delving into the role of art in the Gezi protests, I begin this chapter with the role of art in social movements. Then I turn to a brief definition of public spaces and an analysis of the role of public spaces in social movements. I then focus on the Gezi protests, followed by an in-depth analysis of three prominent examples of art in public spaces during the protests: “The Standing Man,” public performance; “The Whirling Dervish With a Gas Mask,” public performance in Taksim Square; and an example of street art—penguins on the walls, sometimes with gas masks, and sometimes marching. I conclude by arguing that we need to trace the associations between the various human and nonhuman actors of Gezi to better understand the dynamics of the network. The Role of Art in Social Movements Several scholars suggest that social movements use artistic expression to communicate with the larger society (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Kaplan, 1993), as well as internally. First, raising political awareness via public art can help mobilize protestors (Chaffee, 1993; Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Sanger, 1997). For instance, performance art (e.g., theatrical, musical, or dance) can be the locus of a manifestation of political attitudes (Goldfarb, 1980; Kaplan, 1993; Wicke, 1992). As Wicke (1992) suggests about musical performances, rock music in particular, in East Germany: “Music is a medium which is able to convey meaning and values which . . . can shape patterns of behavior imperceptibly over time until they become the visible background of real political activity” (p. 81). Thus, rock music can serve as an oppositional tool and voice that contains political content. By making political statements, rock songs in East Germany found creative ways to erode the dominant ethos and appeal to people’s political sensibilities during the punk/rock movement. Also, rock music produced a message that resonated with the young people who listened to that specific music genre, enabling them to relate to the movement. Second, art also helps recruit individuals into a specific movement by providing emotional messages (Jasper, 1998), reinforcing the value structure of individuals who are active supporters of social movements (Denisoff, 1983), and catering to the feeling that social and political change is possible. Individuals have been recruited to participate in political movements through songs as well as art workshops. Shantytown women in Santiago and in nearby towns in Chile, for example, were recruited to participate in arpillera (burlap)3 workshops. Even though they had never made any artwork before, they were used to sewing, and so it was easy for the Vicaria de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity)4 to get them involved in the group (Adams, 2002). The Vicaria recruited the shantytown women who were the victims of the regime (either

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unemployed or tortured and abused) into these workshops to help them earn income while educating them about “the political and economic situation, human rights, and women’s rights” (Adams, 2002, p. 30). Third, art is useful to social movements because it keeps people committed to a movement (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Jasper, 1998; Sanger, 1997). One of the most important reasons why people continue to participate in social movements is through collective art-making, which helps them develop bonds with other members. As Jasper (1997) exemplifies, music-making that is done in a group can create a network of friends and comrades and allow people to get involved in the subculture of the movement while sustaining their participation through the bonds they cultivate with other members. Furthermore, art keeps people participating in movements by creating a feeling of group solidarity (Adams, 2002; Jasper, 1997; 1998) and collective identity (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Jasper, 1997; Kaplan, 1993). To exemplify the feeling of solidarity and collective identity, Adams (2002) talks about the Chilean resistance between 1973 and 1990, and how the movement had “a very strong ethos of solidarity” as the members communicated their doctrines via the arpilleras they made (p. 40). This creates feelings of “insiderness” (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Jasper, 1998). For example, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 utilized the power of music within their movement by using popular and traditional songs and turning them into new uses in order to “provide a sense of identification and rallying strength to resist authority” (Eyerman & Jamison, 1995, p. 457) among the student protestors. Similarly, religious songs in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States served as a bridge between the students and outsiders, thus creating a feeling of insiderness among members and nonmembers (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998). Numerous researchers have examined the effectiveness of art as an oppositional tool in authoritarian regimes. As they suggest, art can be the locus of an oppositional voice (e.g., Chaffee, 1993). It can indicate a way for a movement to threaten the regime (Chaffee, 1993). For instance, street art under authoritarian regimes signifies an activist and collective sense. It essentially becomes a form of psychological warfare and creates a counter-hegemony against the dominant culture (Adams, 2002). As mentioned earlier, Wicke (1992) suggests that “rock music contributed to the erosion of totalitarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe long before the cracks in the system became apparent” (p. 81). Through their song lyrics which conveyed political statements, rock music raised a political voice, thus showing the oppositional power of the music. Likewise, Adams (2002) discusses the role of arpilleras in helping deteriorate the Chilean regime in the same way. Overall, most of these studies (Adams, 2002; Chaffee, 1993) put forth that street art or other forms of art under authoritarian regimes construct a collective sense by

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paving the way for a subculture to emerge as an organized opposition and culture of resistance toward the dominant culture and the elite. The Role of Public Space in Social Movements So far the Gezi Park movement has been compared to other social protest movements such as the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt, the Arab Spring, and the movements in the capitals of Western cities, such as Occupy Wall Street and those of the Indignados, the anti-austerity movement in Spain, also referred to as the 15-M Movement (Kaya, 2017). Gezi shares several characteristics with its predecessors, such as the anti-capitalist nature, and seeks for democracy. Also, all these protests had neither leaders nor hierarchies, thus embracing all kinds of citizens. For instance, in the case of the Gezi protests, “youngsters, socialists, Muslims, nationalists, Kemalists, Kurds, Alevis, gays/lesbians, ecologists, football fans, hackers, artists, activists, academics, anarchists, anti-war activists, women” (Kaya, 2017, p. 2) participated equally. But most importantly, all these protests used an intersection of offline and online forms of participation: the protestors mobilized and organized via the help of social and mobile media, and maintained their resistance by “occupying” the squares and public spaces such as parks in their cities. That being said, several scholars pay attention to the interplay between physical and digital practices in contemporary protest movements (Gerbaudo, 2012; Jurgenson, 2012). For instance, Jurgenson (2012) points out how the digital and physical entangle to form an augmented reality, It is this massive implosion of atoms and bits that has created an augmented reality where the advantages of digitality—information spreads faster, more voices become empowered, enhanced organization and consensus capabilities—intersect with the importance of occupying physical space with flesh-andblood bodies. (p. 86)

It should also be noted that from the mesh of social practices with digital and physical spaces, a “hybrid reality” or a “hybrid space” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 265) arises. A hybrid space “is a conceptual space created by the merging of borders between physical and digital spaces, because of the use of mobile technologies as social devices” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 265). However, it should be highlighted that a hybrid space is not an outcome of technology, it is only “materialized by social networks developed simultaneously in physical and digital spaces” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, pp. 265–266). Thus, in hybrid spaces, the use of mobile technologies, social interaction, communication, digital, and physical spaces all play significant roles.

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While the Gezi movement shares some features with the above-mentioned movements, it distinguishes itself in a few ways. For instance, although the Gezi protests resemble the Arab Spring in terms of the occupation of a public square and the anger that was aimed at a hegemonic state, the political structures of the two movements are quite different. Turkey has had free elections since 1946; whereas the Arab Spring expressed the demand of the majority to have a voice, via democratic elections. Additionally, the Gezi Park movement shares some common features with European movements such as the Indignados who protested high unemployment rates, welfare cuts, Spanish politicians, and the two-party system in Spain, as well as the political system, capitalism, banks, and political corruption. However, the biggest reasons for those protests to happen were the threats posed by economic instability and financial crisis, which was not the case with the Gezi protests. The Gezi protestors objected to the urban development projects undertaken by the AKP government. This does not mean that the motives behind the Gezi protests were only about defending the trees in the Gezi Park. The plan to construct a shopping mall in the place of the public park was just the boiling point. In the Gezi Park movement, environmental sensitivities and the critique of global capitalism became intertwined. For the Gezi protestors, the project of constructing a shopping mall in the middle of a park open to all meant “the confiscation of a public space by private capital” (Göle, 2013, para. 8). Thus, one of the main objectives of the Gezi Park movement was to protect a public space against commercialization. The park stands for the public sphere. It is a space in which citizens can give voice to their opinions and gather together as seen in the Gezi protests. The interference in this public space by state power led to the participation of ordinary citizens from different stratas of the country. This multivariate participation signals a common goal that unites all the protestors: the dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. Because of the fact that the Gezi Park was one of the last remaining public parks in a major city like Istanbul, protestors did not want their park being taken away from their hands, like the other facets that were taken by the government. Thus, the Gezi protests illustrate the importance of physical space as a prominent element in the Gezi network for constructing a counter-hegemony against the political and economic authorities as well as providing a stage for interaction, community-building, humor, creativity, performance, and art among the protestors who gathered and performed both in the Gezi Park and on Taksim Square. Since the 1970s, a growing body of literature has sought to incorporate the study of social space, and in particular public space, into the social sciences. These studies have moved beyond the traditional understanding of space as the mere background of social relations to examine how space is socially produced, defined, and contested (Giddens, 1990; Harvey, 1989; Lefèbvre,

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1974/1991). As Edward Soja (1985) states, “The essential and encompassing spatiality of social life is being progressively revealed and provocatively repositioned at the very heart of social theory and political consciousness” (p. 90). In other words, the overall spatiality of social life is gradually changing and is taking on a more “provocative” position, well situated within politics and social studies. Moreover, literature that followed has traced a connection between the geography of social mobilization and contentious politics. As Charles Tilly (2000) and William Sewell Jr. (2001) focus on the control and use of space by social movements, they highlight the relationship between space and protest. Sewell (2001), for example, declares that the spatial dimension is an “object and matrix of power” for the modern state (p. 68). Tilly adds to it by asserting that “state power is embedded in a concrete territory and particular spatial routines, thus contention over space is a direct challenge to state control” (Tilly, 2000, p. 138). As an effective way to challenge state authority, protest can also “reshape the symbolic meaning of the spaces where it takes place” (Sewell, 2001, pp. 65–66; Tilly, 2000, pp. 138–139). For instance, the Gezi protests transform streets, squares, and public parks around the country from their routine daily use into “a venue for the public expression of contentious claims” (Zajko & Beland, 2008, p. 721). Thus, it can be argued that the Gezi experience, the occupation of city squares and public parks, indicates a new transformation of the public sphere (Vatikiotis & Yörük, 2016). As Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) point out, “Urban spaces are constantly changing to accommodate new tools and practices” and “technologies enable urban practices to extend beyond what one can touch or see” (p. 88). In the case of the Gezi protests, there were many actors that reconfigured the everyday practices of public spaces; however, public performances and street art are the ones that will be explored in detail in the following sections. The histories and politics of public spaces help us understand the dynamics of protests in concrete locales as well as the tendency for social movements to organize through decentralized, diffuse, and leaderless networks since the 1960s (Calhoun, 1994). While space retains its prominent role at a “macro level,” it is arguably possible to see that the state’s absolute power, which was exerted toward controlling the protests was the subject of dispute, in relation to the occupations (Foucault, 1975/1977), which happened by the appropriation and resignification of specific urban spaces such as public parks and squares for the use of public gatherings and demonstrations (Sewell, 2001; Tilly, 2000; Zajko & Beland, 2008). However, on a more “macro level,” the aforementioned occupations formed the focal point of the stance against turning what is “a social space into abstract space” (Juris, 2012) within the frame of neoliberal capitalism. As argued by Henri Lefèbvre (1974/1991), when capital is globalized, it

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brings about a reinterpretation of how space is viewed, planned, and structured, making it a focal point for how capital is perceived and ascribed value through infrastructures. Therefore, one could argue that movements that aim for shifts in norms also strive to redefine what space could be according to this new interpretation (Dirlik, 2001, p. 36). This brings to mind the connections with “urban squatters, indigenous communities, unemployed and landless workers, and direct-action activists,” who turn various spaces into living spaces (Juris, 2012, p. 269). This in turn provides fertile ground for communities to grow and the public to organize in a democratic atmosphere. In this sense, the Gezi protests, particularly the sit-ins in the park, sought to redefine urban space as a common public space, whereas maximizing profit has been at the heart of urban planning decisions (Karasulu, 2014). We should also acknowledge that there has been a distinction between public and private when it comes to the traditional sociological definitions of public space. First, the separation of public and private can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks, as the public, an open space (e.g., the Agora), was the place for politics whereas the private, a closed and sheltered space, belonged to the place of property and the family (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012, p. 143). With the growing economy during the eighteenth century, public spaces became privatized. Also, at the start of the twentieth century when technologies became prevalent and the concept of “a new urban subject” (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012, p. 87) was constructed, “the metropolitan man” (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012, p. 88) had to accommodate everyday life realities (e.g., meeting strangers in public spaces) in this new urban subjectivity. Although there have been socially constructed borders between public and private, these boundaries are more permeable and blurred today. It should also be noted that with the use of mobile technologies, there has been a change in the way we understand public spaces. There are no clear cuts between public and private anymore, as these entities are “objective” and “socially negotiated,” as well as “constantly shifting” (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012, p. 15). The networked connections of this era have had an impact on physical spaces, the shared spaces of the public, as suggested by de Souza e Silva and Frith (2012), they “need to take into consideration both face-toface and remote connections” (p. 74). This contemporary sense of public spaces points out that “both remote and co-present interactions are now interfaced via mobile technologies fundamentally redefines how we understand public spaces and the character of locations” (p. 74). Therefore, the tension between the public and the private is being challenged by the growing use of mobile technologies, as they act as interfaces to public spaces, “shaping mobility, privacy, power and control” in these spaces (p. 12). As one of Istanbul’s well-known public arenas, Taksim Square has been subject to the city’s various sociopolitical stages of crisis and protest,

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becoming a symbolic space in terms of expressing demands and mobilizing politically throughout the 1970s, as well as a popular spot for tourists. In that regard, the role of governmental forces is also brought into the spotlight, as they exert their power on these spaces and their extensions (Karasulu, 2014), of which Gezi Park and Taksim Square are chief examples. One could argue that the protests surrounding Gezi Park were sparked by what seemed to be a simple stand-off against the destruction of a public space (an open space for politics and protests), whereas upon taking a look at the bigger picture, it could be inferred that this was a defense of the urban commons and their subjectification to capitalist motivations and what might be termed “gentrification” of one of Istanbul’s last remaining public parks. The attempted redefinition of the city as a space for capital profit was therefore met with resistance by the Istanbul urbanites (Kuymulu, 2013). The Gezi protests were striking for their use of performance art. Wellknown performances like “The Standing Man” and “The Whirling Dervish with a gas mask” revealed the possibilities of merging art and activism (Taş & Taş, 2014). The two prominent examples of public art performances in Taksim Square highlight this tension between digital and physical spaces, which reveal the power asymmetries since these spaces were utilized by both protestors and the police during these specific instances. This tension is caused by the increased control of the power mechanisms of Turkey over space, along with the lack of control over protestors’ own movement in these spaces. Public art performances empower not only artists or other citizens in public but also governmental forces, who control, surveil, and exert power over individuals. “The Standing Man” One of the most iconic works of performance in public space during the occupation of the Square was “The Standing Man.” Erdem Gündüz, a Turkish dancer, actor, performance artist, choreographer, and teacher, stood in silence for about 8 hours right in the middle of Taksim Square. This silent performance was soon adopted by ordinary people in various cities around Turkey, becoming their main form of civil disobedience. Since this was the first example of a passive resistance during a protest in Turkey, the photos and videos of the performance went viral. The fact that such a silent performance received popularity among protestors demonstrates the need for a nonviolent form of civil disobedience amidst the violent climate in Gezi. One might possibly draw parallels between the performance of Gündüz and that of Mahatma Gandhi, who led a passive resistance campaign in South Africa. “The Standing Man” performance underlined the fact that the body is a site of resistance (Grosz, 1990). In Foucauldian terms, the body always entails the

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possibility of a counter strategic reinscription. As Foucault often draws connections between political power and the body, he argues that one can train the body to make it socially productive. It is therefore possible to suggest that Gündüz’s body could be an element of counteraction in relation to the way the government and the police handle the social management of the citizens. The police were startled by Gündüz’s act of passive resistance, not knowing how to react to a man who was merely standing there. Meanwhile, the protests spread all over Europe, including London, Stuttgart, and Amsterdam as well as in the United States, including Boston, Las Vegas, and New York City. There was even a Standing Kid who performed on the streets in Australia. With these increasing reproductions, the influence and the image of the act became important actors of the Gezi network. For instance, inspired by the motionless protests of the “Standing Man,” many protestors stood silently and read books in Taksim Square. The chosen reading material of the protestors could be seen as a way to express their discontent with the political environment. To exemplify, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell was a popular choice of the protestors, as the dystopian novel centers on a police state with total government control. By using a performance act as a tool for nonviolent action, Gündüz can be seen as a stance against governmental repression and police violence. This performance showed us that the use of a silenced body could still speak against the repression and be heard in a political environment where every dissident voice is being silenced. In an interview with the BBC (2013), Gündüz indicates his relationship to “The Standing Man,” explaining, I’m nothing. . . . The idea is important: why people resist the government. The government doesn’t want to understand, and didn’t try to understand why people are on the streets. This is really silent resistance. I hope people stop and think “what happened there?” (para. 9)

As being one of the prominent actors of the Gezi network, “The Standing Man” performance cannot be separated from the other actors that were in Taksim Square at the same time as “The Standing Man,” including other citizens who were reproducing his act, the gas masks some of the supporters were wearing, the police officers who were searching his backpack, and the cameras that captured this performance, thus reinforcing the viral sensation of it. After standing silently for 8 hours, Gündüz became one of the significant symbols of the resistance movement. With extraordinary speed, his act was emulated by thousands of others. Additionally, as Latour (2005) states, it is crucial for us to understand that action does not take place of the deliberate intentions of particular actors. Though Gündüz deliberately went to the square to perform his silent standing act, the replication of his performance

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by other citizens as well as the virality and visibility of his act were beyond his intentions. His performance as an actor is far from stable but rather constantly assembled and reassembled by the nature of its imitability. With the reproduction of his performance all over the country and world, the impact of this action is also “distributed.” Thus, this helps us to fathom that Gezi does not only consist of one element but rather constitutes a network, entangled with a diverse range of other actors in the course of the protests. Another major symbol of resistance via public art which arose from the Gezi protests was “the Whirling Dervish with a Gas Mask.” As in the case of “the Standing Man,” the images of the artists’ performances went viral online via social media, and contributed to the outcome of the protests. “The Whirling Dervish with a Gas Mask” On June 2, during the occupation of the Gezi Park, people witnessed a whirling dervish performance by Ziya Azazi, a Turkish dancer and choreographer focused on contemporary dance. The artist was dressed in traditional dervish costume wearing a gas mask. Azazi worked with a photographer to document the project, which focused on the Sufi philosophy. Sufism is centered on the ideas of being open to all, which fueled Azazi’s approach: he welcomed everyone from all backgrounds and urged them to stand together in solidarity. His performances featured Sufi dancers in gas masks, which was a way to point out the “collective determination to survive immediate tear gas bombs, and by extension, the divisive, suffocating rule of the AKP” (Potuoğlu-Cook, 2015, p. 110). Despite being evicted from his chosen spot for performance due to the police seeking to disband all public assembly, he continued with the project in different locations across Istanbul for the next month and a half. Stencils of this image included the Turkish phrase Sen de gel (Come along!), a reference to a famous thirteenth-century poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose followers founded the Order of the Whirling Dervishes. The words of the poem—“Come whoever you are, come as you are”—made a very powerful and moving statement in the context of the Gezi protests inviting people from different backgrounds to participate in the protests and experience the collective identity of the Gezi network. Despite a decline of Sufi orders in the modern Turkish society, Sufism has continued to play an important role in the Islamic world and in Turkish national culture, and has also influenced various forms of spirituality as it draws on the philosophy of openness and welcoming everyone regardless of their social or political standing. According to Bayraktar (2016), Azazi’s choreography arguably acted as a gateway for the positioning of public in “negotiations with power,” where the body of the individual is geared toward the pursuit of survival, and supported by new forms of movement, in this case the act of whirling. Azazi

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combined the Sufistic form of dancing with a more Western style of physical expression, which is a technique he had previously worked on in his Dervishin-Progress project. Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Sufism, Azazi uses quotes from Rumi’s poems in his work, as well as delving into the concepts of “stillness and repetition” that are ascribed to the dervishes of the Mevlevi order. Azazi’s improvization-based interpretation of the Mevlevi whirling stands out in the sense that it became an iconoclastic image of resistance during the Gezi protests. Throughout the protests, expressions of solidarity were often seen in the form of dancing, both by professional and amateur participants, highlighting the role of choreography as a unifier, a mobilizer, and a catalyst of social action. These ballerinas, mimes, and tango enthusiasts wearing gas masks and safety helmets took an active role in rallying the protestors across the city’s streets and public arenas. Azazi’s choice to perform in a public space such as the Grand Rue de Pera in Istiklal Street is interesting on various levels. First, it enabled the place of performance to become a space of encounter (Bayraktar, 2016) for the young, educated protestors within the movement, as well as residents and tourists of that area. It also enabled people from various sociopolitical spheres to interact, creating a potential space for dialogue (Bayraktar, 2016). These series of performances were also conducted in heavily policed areas, with the possibility of (violent) intervention at all times. The gas mask, which was arguably central to the visual aesthetics of the performance, was reproduced in various forms of expression later, such as stencils and graffiti, becoming a catalyst to distinguish the sacred dervish body from the dancer’s vulnerable body (Bayraktar, 2016). As the Gezi protestors were often met with interventions of pepper spray, this forged an interesting connection between the image of the protestor as a vulnerable being that still resists, and the presence of the dancer as someone who uses public space and positive attitude drawn from Sufism for expressing dissent. These performances also put Azazi in the spotlight as an icon in the resistance, as his performances were depicted as chief contributions to the protests as a whole, as well as inspiring the discussions on the act of whirling and its possible effect as a catalyst for individual and social awareness (Bayraktar, 2016). To that end, one can argue that Azazi’s union of modern dance with political expression yielded a reimagining of the Sufi dervish identity as an icon of resistance, thus updating the concept of the dervish as a current actor in the network of this protest. The act of whirling, therefore, could be seen as a strategic way to use performative expression to make a larger statement that inspires the public. Azazi’s “whirling body in the street does not only inhabit a Sufi dervish but becomes the bodies of protestors who had fought, survived, been injured or even died in the previous few days” (Bayraktar, 2016). In

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other words, Azazi’s reinterpretation of the dervish whirling is a combination of the traditional and the contemporary, which becomes the voice of the protestors through his public performance and his body. “The Standing Man” performance shares numerous qualities with that of “The Whirling Dervish with a Gas Mask.” First, both can be classified as public performances as they occurred in Taksim Square as well as other public spaces such as parks. Second, both Gündüz and Azazi are performance artists, choreographers, and dancers. Third, both performances are prominent examples of nonviolent resistance as they protested against the brutality of the police during the Gezi protests by only using their bodies. Moreover, their performances involved the public too (either deliberately or not). Overall, even though one of the acts was motionless, and the other was mobile, both are symbols of great resistance which arose from the Gezi protests. Following Azazi’s gas mask performances and the Standing Man, an image of standing penguins with a gas mask went viral online as a reaction to the main Turkish TV station. Penguin Street Art: The Standing Penguin with a Gas Mask CNN Türk was broadcasting a documentary on penguins during the peak of the police intervention toward the protestors who were being attacked with gas and water. This total blackout of media triggered a series of responses across both digital and physical spaces in which “the penguin” became one of the essential icons of the Gezi events. Social media was filled with images of protest penguins, bravely facing water cannons in Antarctica, carrying slogan cards on the ice, wearing gas masks, or posing as “standing penguins” (a reference to “The Standing Man,” as well as the penguin documentary that CNN Türk showed instead of reporting on the Gezi events) (Ozturkmen, 2014). Not just on social media, the penguins also circulated in the public space as in various forms of street art. By appearing in a variety of forms, the penguin’s original standing as a symbol of the mainstream media’s attempts to ignore the protests was clearly subverted. The Gezi culture embraced the image of the penguin as a symbol of the very public that the mainstream media turned its back on, making it an unlikely icon in the course of the protests, along with the whirling dervishes. In that regard, it could also be said that the Gezi protests involved the subversion of tactics of suppression and oppression by the mainstream media and the state, as the images and phrases were appropriated using “disproportionate intelligence” (Gorkem, 2015, p. 583; Colak, 2014, p. 469) against “disproportionate violence” (Gorkem, 2015, p. 583). As Law (2009) argues, “ANT treats everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located”

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(p. 141). That being said, the multiple applications of penguins into different forms illustrate the continuous production of endless traces and relations in the Gezi network. There are countless versions of the penguins as forms of street art, however, my last site of examination includes one particular instance of “the standing penguin with a gas mask” as it is one of the most prevalent actors in this network. This example of penguin street art functions as a communication device for informing and persuading, as well as mocking the Turkish media and its censorship culture. As a medium for political expression, street art is one of the few tools for people to vocalize their dissent freely in repressive regimes where systems attempt to cut off every other platform. With the standing penguin with a gas mask street art, it can be argued that it did what the mainstream media could not do by forming a social consciousness and breaking the silence (Chaffee, 1993). This example of street art exemplifies the Lefèbvrian idea of “the right to the city.” Lefèbvre (1996, p. 158) defines the city as “an oeuvre, a work in which all citizens participate.” The right to the city is the right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of . . . moments and places” (Lefèbvre, 1996, p. 158). Similarly, David Harvey (2012) defines the right to the city being far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (p. 4)

These both approaches highlight the fact that street art is one of the many important actors of the Gezi network, as it is directed toward the urban transformation projects in Istanbul which aimed to change the rights of citizens to live in the city. Thus, street art in Istanbul during the course of the Gezi protests shows the aesthetics of the revolt against the authority of the government in shaping the public space as well as the city. The example of penguin street art can be viewed as one of the instances that shapes public space as a form of resistance. Furthermore, by emphasizing the excessive use of tear gas against the demonstrators, the standing penguin with a gas mask serves as an actor to reclaim the walls of Istanbul and the public space. That said, this specific example of art cannot be separated from the other actors that can be traced in the associations of the Gezi network, such as the anonymous graffiti

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artist(s), the work of art itself, as well as streets and walls of the city as they both become artistic resources (Riggle, 2010). CONCLUSION At their core, the Gezi protests illustrate the importance of hybrid space as a prominent element in the Gezi network for constructing a counter-hegemony against the political and economic authorities as well as providing a stage for interaction, community-building, humor, creativity, performance, and art among the protestors who gathered and performed both in the Gezi Park and Taksim Square. In this chapter, I analyzed three important examples of art in public spaces: The Standing Man, the Whirling Dervish, and the penguin street art example (a.k.a. the standing penguin with a gas mask). While the Standing Man and the Whirling Dervish underline the role of public space as well as performance art in the Gezi protests, the penguin street art piece as a decentralized form signifies the censorship culture that is present in Turkey. These examples all demonstrate the importance of actor-networks which should be understood as participants having their own agencies in actions and exploring those participants, as some of them are nonhumans, proves Latour’s (2005) point: “No science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored” (p. 72). NOTES 1. Second New Wave is a poetry movement, which opposes itself to the earlier Turkish poetry. The poets of this movement, who were inspired by such movements as Dada and Surrealism, tried to create a more abstract poetry. 2. Aytekin’s (2017) study bases its argument on Rancière’s (2010) theory of dissensus and his discussion of the interrelation between art and politics, demonstrating the pervasiveness of art and aesthetic political arts in the protests (See also Žižek, 2004). 3. “Arpilleras” are patchwork pictures made in cloth. 4. The Vicariate of Solidarity was a human rights organization in Chile during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. They helped the poor and victims of human rights abuses, while educating them politically during the Pinochet regime. In doing so, they set up arpillera workshops to recruit shantytown women and enable them to earn an income.

Section III

SILENCE AND IN/VISIBILITY

Chapter 9

A Handmaid’s Tale of Protest Analyzing Intersectionality through Silence-Body-Image Jordin Clark

As Brett Kavanuagh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings began, 15 women clad in vibrant full-length red robes and white bonnets stood on the second-floor ledge and gazed silently down upon a room full of raucous protestors, spectators, and senators. This moment is one of a series of protests that occurred across the world known as the handmaid’s tale protests. The protestors invoked The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopic novel-turned hit Hulu series. The novel and series present a world wherein the government strips women of their rights and agency while forcing them into roles designed solely to serve men, be it as housewives, maids, sex-workers, or reproductive vessels. By embodying the handmaid characters, activists bring forward The Handmaid’s Tale as an admonitory narrative to challenge proposed reproductive legislation that threatens women’s rights to their bodily autonomy. Visualizing and enacting this narrative, the protestors position themselves as a silent but poignant caution to our society’s increasing likeness to this oppressive world. The first handmaid’s protest occurred on March 20, 2017, in front of the Texas Senate. Here, they protested the vote on Senate Bill 415 that would ban a safe procedure for second trimester abortions (Pearson, 2017). Since then, the protest’s red robes have expanded internationally to repeal an abortion ban in Ireland; support legislation that would legalize abortion in the first 14 weeks in Argentina; disrupt Trump and Pence’s visits in London, Philadelphia, New York, and Denver; sit in on legislative hearings in Washington D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and Concord, New Hampshire; and protest Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court (Bradley, 2019). Indeed, the prevalence and tactics of these protests garnered the attention of 177

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media and “became an international protest symbol” for reproductive activism (Bell, 2018, para. 1) as well as a “viral protest uniform of 2019” (Ellis, 2019, para. 1). In the long and always shifting feminist struggle, the international appeal and quick rise of the handmaid’s protest marks another point in feminist activism to consider how protests like these sculpt the continuing battle for reproductive justice.1 Of course, reproductive rights activism has a long history of silencing the rights, experiences, and images of women of color (Davis, 1983), trans folks (Strangio, 2015), queer (Price, 2017), migrant (Onís, 2015), disabled (Tilley et al., 2012), and fat women (LaMarre et al., 2020). As such, we must “remain cautious of any attempt that (re)positions white heteronormativity as the underpinning of an ideal citizenry, progressive or otherwise” (Poirot, 2017, p. 323). As a white, cis, able-bodied woman who has benefited from the privileged repositioning of white supremacy in much of the mainstream reproductive activism, it is important for me to retain this caution and critique whiteness as it continues to fold into the feminist movement. Given the feminist movement’s long history entrenched in white supremacy, any current instantiations of the reproductive movement, like the handmaid’s protest, merit critical attention. In particular, criticism should be based in an intersectional approach that calls attention to the ways protests may continue the lineage of whiteness within feminist activism (Davis, 1983). Relying on silence, the handmaid’s protest utilizes an intersectional rhetoric and centralizes the relationship between the body, image, and silence as the main rhetorical site of argument against anti-reproductive rights legislation. While rhetoric scholars have attended to body rhetoric and silence as potential frameworks for activism and useful tools to address intersections of power, the field has done less to theorize movements that utilize silence as an embodied tactic. To do so, I amend Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s analysis of the interconnections between speech-body-image to investigate the rhetorical dynamic of silence-body-image. Through this framework, I also theorize the significance of embodied silence/silences in protest. Necessitating an intersectional approach, reading silence through the body and within narratives challenges the political efficacy of protests like the handmaid’s protest across lines of race, class, ability, and nationality. Specifically, I argue that by combining silence-body-images within reproductive activism, the handmaid’s protest constitutes imaginations of the ideal—read as white, ablebodied, cis—woman’s state of precarity while collapsing the potential space of agency for more inclusive reproductive justice. While only one in a string of protests, I focus on the Kavanaugh protests because it was one of the more widely mediated events and the handmaid’s silence and “restrained method was a sharp contrast to other scenes going on throughout the Senate side of Capitol Hill” (Murray, 2018, para. 3).

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Garnering mass media attention, the images of the handmaid’s protest that accompanied news headlines became both the umbrella representation for the various protests throughout the Kavanaugh confirmation and a stark contrast to other concurrent protests. To analyze this protest, I first explicate silence-body-image as intersecting rhetorics that constitute a collective activist identity. Then, focusing on silence-body-image, I analyze the handmaid’s protest during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation through an intersectional lens and contend that this protest marks a moment wherein the multiple forms of protest coalesce into further rhetorics of exclusion within the history of the feminist reproductive movement. SILENCE-BODIES-IMAGE The handmaid protest’s use of silence strays from traditional and contemporary feminist protest forms that aim to cultivate and broadcast their contentious voices. In the absence of words, this protest relies on the form of silence-body-image to perform their protest against anti-reproductive rights discourse. To analyze this protest through its rhetorical form, I turn to Darrel Enck-Wanzer’s concept of intersectional rhetoric with specific attention to how silence, bodies, and image interweave to perform and constitute particular women and issues as precarious. Intersectional rhetoric, according to Enck-Wanzer (2006), “is a rhetoric that places multiple rhetorical forms (in this case, speech, embodiment, and image) on relatively equal footing, is not leader-centered, and draws from a number of diverse discursive political or rhetorical conventions” (p. 177). From this perspective, scholars are tasked to move away from analyzing protest tactics as purely instrumental to the message. Instead, intersectional rhetoric attends to how the multiple forms of a protest interweave to perform resistance, constitute movements political and social goals, and activate new spaces of agency. In particular, when the protest’s form differentiates themselves from other movements, it is imperative to draw out how the use of form negotiates concepts of agency and “revise[s] our collective and growing understanding of how marginalized groups craft power through rhetoric” (Enck-Wanzer, 2006, p. 177). As more protests turn to alternative and multiple forms of activism like silence-bodies-images, we must continuously revise our understandings of how intersectional rhetoric creates or limits agency for marginalized communities. In order to understand the impact of intersectional rhetorics on marginalized communities, I steep my understanding of silence-bodies-image in intersectionality. By intersectionality, I am referring to the term that Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined, which draws attention to the overlapping, interwoven, and multiple forms of privilege and oppression that exist but vary within

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all bodies. From a rhetorical perspective, I also consider Hailey Otis’ (2019) theory of intersectional rhetoric which focuses on “rhetors who produce intersectional rhetoric—rhetoric that mobilizes the theoretical and analytic principles of intersectionality through embodied rhetorical praxis to make nuanced political arguments about oppression on multiple axes” (p. 371). Bridging these conceptualizations of intersectionality and intersectional rhetoric with Wanzer-Serrano’s work foregrounds how a protest’s form serves as rhetorical agent in two ways. The first form constitutes the movement’s possible political and social arguments. The second form constructs or collapses spaces of agency within underlying forms of oppression and privilege. In this section, I detail how the rhetorical properties of silence, bodies, and images, within protest, interact through power relations to create agency and invite imaginations for alternative realities. Within rhetoric, scholars have been interested in how silence rhetorically produces moments of voice not connected to speech or sound. Founded within the realization that silence is not merely the absence of sound but instead functions as a dialectic to speech, rhetoric scholars have focused on silence in two main frameworks: rhetorical silence and rhetoric of silence. Rhetorical silence underscores silence as a rhetorical strategy. In this line of scholarship, scholars like Robert Scott (1972) and Barry Brummett (1980) demonstrate how public figures’ strategic silence “(1) violates expectations, (2) draws public attribution of fairly predictable meanings, and (3) seems intentional and directed at an audience” (p. 289). In this case, silence’s power stems from the speaker disrupting or refusing expectations to speak. Here, the silence itself creates space for audiences to produce their own meanings that diverge from what would have been spoken. However, rhetorical silence is predicated on the rhetorician’s ability, privilege, and expectation to speak. To account for the differential power inherent in silence’s rhetorical possibilities, another strand of work considers the rhetoric of silence. Dana Cloud (1999) defines rhetoric of silence as “a discursive pattern in which speakers gesture incompletely toward what cannot be uttered in the context of oppression” (p. 178). In this understanding of silence, it is paramount to consider the rhetorical negotiation of silencing—a mechanism of power that imposes silence upon a body (Glenn, 2004). Understanding the differential power within silence, the rhetoric of silence/silencing becomes more than a refusal to speak, but rather an embodied negotiation of silencing mechanisms that can be both a source of oppression and a potential form of rhetorical agency depending on the rhetors embodied experience of overlapping privileges and oppressions (Glenn, 2004, p. xi). In moments of protest, the strategic choice to utilize silence collides with the power dynamics inherent in the rhetoric of silence. To untangle the rhetorical dynamics of protest’s use of silence, scholars must address the differential experiences of silence

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and silencing. To do so, critics need to “identify spaces in which silence may be a powerful rhetorical strategy” while considering “those rhetors with few rhetorical means, whether limited by their abilities or by the situations in which they are called to speak, silence is a risky rhetorical strategy” (Bell, 2014, p. 190). One route for identifying these spaces is to consider protest’s strategic and rhetorical silence as an inherently intersecting rhetoric that interweaves with interlocking oppressions and privileges surrounding silence, silencing, and speech. In particular, silence confers power and oppression from and through the body. As rhetorical in and of itself, social movement scholarship has cited the body as a tool for argumentation (DeLuca, 1999), a site of rhetorical invention and meaning-making (Hawhee, 2006), and a performative mechanism for protests and everyday resistance (Brouwer, 1998; Calafell & McIntosh, 2017). Underscoring the body in and as action, these works highlight how the body in protest is productive of the movement’s message. As a part of the protest form, it is helpful to consider the performative dimensions of the body through its relationship “to how bodies and bodily experience are always relevant to rhetoric in situational and particularized ways” (Chávez, 2018, p. 287). Embodied silence, in particular, necessitates the navigation between tensions of bodily experience and body as argument because of the ways that silence falls differentially across bodies. For those who turn to the body as a performative vessel through silence, the body comes to bear the marks of the protest and “announces the invisible even when the wearer remains silent” (Brouwer, 1998, p. 115). To adequately read silence into and through the body, scholars must triangulate how bodily experiences and embodied performance come to announce that which protestors want to make visible. The relationship between bodily experiences and embodied performances takes the body as the site of our being and pays credence to the fact that any understandings of politics, experience, consciousness must develop from and through the body (Moraga, 1981/2015). Critics, then, must consider protest silence both as embodied, but also from the body to examine “the interconnected nature of being silenced, in multiple ways, and the lived (bodily) manifestations of those silencings” (Griffin & Chávez, 2012, p. 7). For example, bell hooks (1989) details how silence, for white women, is a “sign of woman’s submission to patriarchal authority” (p. 6). Whereas, for Black women “the struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of [their] speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard” (hooks, 1989, p. 6). Lining analysis with understandings of the historical production of intersecting embodied identities (Anzaldúa, 2012; Ehlers, 2012; Snorton, 2017) offers scholars further context to understand how silence functions from the body and as a constitutive force in creating the body.

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When using silence as a rhetorical device, rhetors draw the audience’s attention to the performative expression that marks embodied experience and do so while “the public’s attention is riveted on the silence as it tries to attribute meanings to it” (Brummett, 1980, p. 290). Leaving the audience to interpret and make silence meaningful leaves much out of control for the rhetor and therefore requires work to direct the audience toward particular meanings. Especially in protest, groups utilizing silence “are in hostile territory with little control. What they do have some control over, however, is the presentation of their bodies in the image events” (DeLuca, 1999, p. 10). Image events are staged spectacles designed to visually disseminate a protest’s message in a way that gains attention from a wider audience (Johnson, 2007, p. 2). The staged event makes the movement more visible to a wider audience. Additionally, the disseminated image creates a situation wherein protestors can dictate or mark that which was invisible. The images taken and constructed offer new articulations that reconstruct social issues and redefine reality (Deluca, 2005, p. 6). As a staged spectacle, protestors often draw on body rhetoric to enter into the public discourse. From these embodied spectacles, protest holds the ability to remap the field of discursivity with themselves and their message as a central connecting point within the social issue. Put differently, image events press social movements into the spotlight where their embodied rhetoric and the images created can present new meanings and linkages to reimagine an alternative reality (DeLuca, 1999, 2005; Harold & DeLuca, 2005; Johnson, 2007). However, the rhetoric of protest silence does not simply produce image events but also must navigate the already prevalent images of the bodies, experiences, and messages already attached to the protest(ers). Within rhetoric of silence, the meanings produced rely, in large part, on the audience’s ability to interpret their silence. Therefore, to understand the intersecting rhetorics of silence-body-images it is important to consider both the images produced from the protest—how is the protest framed as an image event— but also how social, cultural, and political images inform the audiences’ interpretation of the silence. I contend that audiences draw on contextual nods, cultural codes, and shared symbolic tropes to create meaning out of silence. Framed by shared cultural meanings, these interpretations run the risk of being directed through the lens of controlling images, which could potentially lead the audience to turn to the culturally steeped stereotypes and images that pervade popular culture and the cultural/social imaginary (Collins, 1990/2009). While the alternative reality that protestors offer is disseminated in the form of images, the reality itself is initiated within, competes against, and attempts to renegotiate a version of the collective imaginary. Collective imaginary, according to Robert Asen (2002), is a process and product of

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a continual discursive negotiation of the public sphere that constitutes our social expectations, habits, and understandings of the public. Through acts like image events, protests create moments of controversy wherein the collective imaginary becomes “amenable to changes in imaginings by unsettling background understandings and engaging imagining as an active force” (Asen, 2002, p. 352). As protestors turn to images as a means to unsettle and rearticulate public discourses around particular issues like reproductive rights, it is imperative to evaluate how the protestors negotiate issues of inclusion/presence and exclusion/absence as they widen or rearticulate public imaginations. Robert Asen points scholars to the multimodal creation of collective imaginaries to include linguistics and images as a means to circulate compelling messages that widen representations and produce a more inclusive collective imaginary. The handmaid’s protest utilizes the multimodal form of silence-body-image to create a message of reproductive justice that has circulated across nations and, in so doing, engages, alters, and solidifies existing collective imaginaries within reproductive activism. For the handmaid’s protest, the organizers, Demand Justice, released a statement describing their collective imaginary: Right now in America, far too many women of color cannot access safe, affordable healthcare and the ability to decide whether, when and how to raise thriving families is out of reach . . . Brett Kavanaugh will take this already harsh reality and make it worse. (Wheeler, 2018, paras. 7–8)

The handmaid’s protest aimed to showcase how the already harsh reality can worsen if Kavanaugh is confirmed. Using silence-bodies-images as the form of protest, the protestors turn to the silent embodiment of the characters and narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale to constitute the movement’s goals and create a space of agency within reproductive rights. While the content of their message speaks to a goal of reproductive justice, the form of the protest produces a different message as it constitutes certain women as precarious while excluding others from crafting their agency out of their own lived experiences. Put differently, in spite of Demand Justice’s statement, the form of the handmaid’s protest differentially locates precarity and minimizes spaces of agency for marginalized communities. A HANDMAID’S TALE OF PROTEST Rather than voice their opposition to Kavanaugh’s confirmation and its potential consequence for Roe v. Wade, the handmaid’s protestors remained silent and defied the expectations and forms of other similar protests occurring at

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the same time. Through this silence, the handmaid’s protestors separated themselves from other activists to forefront their embodied enactment of the imagined Handmaid’s Tale narrative and craft an image event that sheds light on society’s contemporary steps toward this dystopian world. Yet, if we consider the form of the protest, silence-body-image, as a meaningful dimension in the context of reproductive activism, then the rhetorical message reveals an alternative tale. Specifically, I argue that combining silencebody-images within reproductive activism, the handmaid’s protest constitutes imaginations of the ideal—read as white, able-bodied, cis—woman’s state of precarity while collapsing the potential space of agency for more inclusive reproductive justice. In this section, I focus on three dimensions of the protest that builds into the protest’s form and inflects how the handmaid’s protest constitutes its goals and cultivates spaces of agency: (1) the use of the handmaid’s character to construct precarity, (2) the embodied materialization of the handmaid’s in the present space and time, and (3) the (dis)connections between the handmaid’s protest form with other protests. First, the protestors cast themselves into the handmaid characters within The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel and the series, handmaids represent a sect of society that has no agency over their sexual and reproductive body as they are marked only as surrogates for procreation. This character and their experiences call forth poignant comparisons to current issues around sexual assault and the tenuous nature of reproductive rights. The protestors turn to this character within the narrative of Gilead—the name of the totalitarian regime The Handmaid’s Tale is set. By turning to these characters, protestors entrench the images and imaginations of the potential future world within the life of the handmaid’s perspective. Doing so in silence forces the audience to attribute meaning to the protest and invites that meaning to come through the experiences of the handmaid characters. The audience is invited to contemplate their possible precarity within the impending threat against reproductive freedom in the future. By embodying these characters, the protestors direct these connections toward the possible precarity that the ideal reproductive woman may face if we continue to tread our current path. However, in both the novel and the series, these women are depicted as white, cis, and ablebodied, which is an image that has long dominated the vision of reproductive rights in popular culture and legislation. While these characters offer a relevant indictment for the current moment, the handmaids represent a singular struggle for white, able-bodied women who embody the societal ideal for procreation (Collins, 1990/2009). Utilizing only these characters out of the show, the protestors draw connections to certain bodies, thus silencing the experiences and precarity of other bodies. Indeed, in the novel and series there is a tiered structure of power where women hold multiple roles outside the handmaid. In the novel, people of

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color are sent away in the “resettlement of the Children of the Ham,” implying they were sent to Africa to maintain the white supremacist dystopia (Atwood, 1986, p. 83). “Unwomen” and “unmen,” which represent “gender traitors” or queer individuals, older women, infertile women, or activists, are sent to the colonies to clean up “the toxic dumps and the radiation spills” (Atwood, 1986, p. 112). Those who are not immediately sent away take on roles that fit the tropes and images used to discipline women of color. These include the “Martha’s” who are housemaids and the prostitutes who are stationed at “Jezebel’s” at the outskirts of society to service top officials’ sexual needs. Between the novel and series, women of color occupy the Martha and Jezebel roles, thus continuing the controlling images of mammie and jezebel (Collins, 1990/2009). Focusing the narrative toward the handmaid character offers only one version of who and how people are precarious within the struggle for reproductive justice. This choice to represent a limited experience is further instantiated by how the handmaid protestors choose to materially instantiate the characters into the time and space of the Kavanaugh hearings through their costumes, silence, and embodied performance. As a part of the Gilead dystopia, uniforms marked each person’s role and status within the societal structure. Of these, the most recognizable is the handmaid’s garb—the red robe and white bonnet—which signifies a woman’s ability to procreate and places their role as a mere womb to be filled. To mark themselves as the handmaid’s characters, the protestors mimic this sartorial style. By physically and performatively embodying the role of the handmaids, these protestors take the characters from the pages and screens and instantiate them into the contemporary physical realm. Removing the narrative medium allows the protestors to bring forth and make more materially concrete the images evoked in the series and novel. Not only do they wear the handmaid’s garb, but they also enact the handmaid’s forced silence and submissiveness. With heads bowed and voices silenced, the protestors insert women’s possible precarity into the space and atmosphere of the senate building. In this enactment, protestors demonstrate the visceral oppression within the patriarchal order of Gilead and bring its oppressive silencing into the Hart Atrium. Able to draw connections between the protestor’s presence and the present context, the sartorial mimicry and embodiment of the handmaid’s oppression places the speculative future Margaret Atwood imagined into the body and space of women now. Doing so by materializing the handmaid’s robes and silence, however, risks erasing bodies and silencing differential experiences with reproductive issues. One defining instantiation that the protestors bring into the present space and time is the popular handmaid’s wardrobe. The costume was taken up as a symbol of women’s agency in the face of subservience (Ellis, 2019). The use of oppressive symbols represents a potential site to (re)claim power among

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those targeted by the symbol. However, if we consider how the costume functions in relation to silence-body-images, a different story emerges. In particular, as protestors embody the image and performance of the handmaids, the costume produces the protestors as an abstract body and erases bodily experience under the umbrella of the ideal woman’s experience (Chávez, 2018). Bringing the potential dystopia into the present moment through the handmaid’s garb also brings forth the imagined purpose of the robes, which is to erase personal past identities, promote a uniform experience as handmaid, and deter men’s desirous gaze. This purpose materially manifests in a vibrant red, loosely fitted garment that hangs over the body covering from shoulder to foot as well as a white bonnet with an elongated front bill used to shield the face as the head bows down. In this costume, the face and hands are the only possible traces available to identify any specific dimensions of the body beyond its visual likeness to the handmaids. As the protestors further perform the handmaid’s submissive stance with their heads bowed and hands held together, any differentiations between protestors is subsumed underneath the robe and bonnet and performance of silent submissiveness. While the actual protestors varied across race, ethnicity, and age, the wardrobe intentionally erases flesh and experience under the designation of the handmaid (Bloch & Bloch, 2018). With their bodies covered in red cloth and faces hidden underneath a white bonnet, the protestors blend together under the experience of the handmaid’s which is at the same time an experience of whiteness. Additionally, by erasing the body and supplanting the protest’s argument with silence, the protestors call forth the experience of and reaction to white women’s oppression throughout history. For white women, silence was a form of submission and voicelessness in the public sphere which marred their ability to gain political rights. Following previous protests that utilize silence, the intentional enactment and reiteration of this oppression highlight the societal silencing of women and rearticulate silence as a form of power and resistance now in the hands of the protestors (Southard, 2008). By tracing this history of oppression, however, the protestors only embody certain oppressions and further elide others. Indeed, bell hooks (1989) argues, This emphasis on woman’s silence may be an accurate remembering of what has taken place in the households of women from WASP backgrounds in the United States, but in black communities (and diverse ethnic communities) . . . [the] struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard. (p. 6)

Silence as a protest tactic relies on whiteness within The Handmaid’s Tale as a narrative crux to the creation of the dystopian future. One of the more

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insidious facets of whiteness is its ability to remain an invisible yet central form of power. As they embody the handmaid’s characters, the protestors call on their silence to be contextualized through the white women’s experiences, which elides the embodied histories of reproductive violence. In so doing, they bring the dystopian fiction into the present space and time. From this tactic, they also craft a future imagination withdrawn from already present and past lived experiences and centered in white women’s possible precarity. By using silence-body-image to differentiate their form from other protests simultaneously occurring, the protestors not only constituted the movement’s goal through the ideal woman’s precarity but also collapsed other protestors’ space of agency. In particular, the handmaid’s embodied placement in the space and reliance on silence created an image of juxtaposition between the handmaids and the other protestors. In a moment where other protestors were purposefully raucous to disrupt the proceedings, the handmaids stood atop the second-floor balcony and looked down in silence at the rest of the crowd that filled the Hart Atrium’s main entrance. Standing overhead, the protestors spatially detach themselves from the rest of the proceedings and call people to physically look above and beyond the people protesting or moving within the main hall. In directing the audience’s gaze away from the main hall, the protestors constitute themselves outside of the everyday experiences of those below. Instead, the handmaids demarcate themselves from the protestors dressed in more everyday clothes; stand above a space often used as an entrance to daily activities; and construct themselves within a different imagined world that rests outside of the space and time of the Kavanaugh hearings. Further differentiation happened as the form of the protest became a comparative measure to other ongoing protests. The confirmation hearings saw a litany of different protests and organizations who loudly voiced their dissent for Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Yet, as media coverage of the event noted, “the group’s restrained method was a sharp contrast to other scenes going on throughout the Senate side of Capitol Hill” (Murray, 2018, para. 3). The very form of the protest became a point of differentiation among other protests, which served to discipline the raucousness of other protestors and even silenced some of the handmaid protestors. As the hearings moved forward, multiple handmaid protestors took off their robes as they entered the confirmation proceedings to join other protestors and vocalize their concerns. The choice to break out of the protest form while expressing their thoughts, experiences, and discontent exemplifies how the handmaid’s form constrained the protestors’ agency to vocalize their embodied experiences during the hearing. The silence from the handmaids became an obstructive rhetorical strategy that limited the

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protestors’ ability to speak and, given the media’s focus on the handmaids, be heard. The constraining silence turned into absence as the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing turned into a public hearing regarding sexual assault accusations. After garnering much media attention for the first round of hearings, the handmaids were conspicuously absent during the next round of Kavanaugh hearings. In these hearings, the senate committee questioned Dr. Christine Blasey Ford after she and three other women came forward accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. There was a clear distinction between the first and second hearings. The first represented a moment where Kavanaugh threatened Roe v. Wade, while the second hearing Kavanaugh directly threatened women’s safety and represented women’s overarching vulnerability to sexual assault and lack of bodily autonomy. If the handmaid’s protest relies on silence-body-image to voice their message, then their absence in these proceedings continues to reflect and disseminate a message. Being present for Roe v. Wade and absent for sexual assault, the handmaids isolated their message to reproductive rights while disconnecting the protest from larger issues of reproductive justice. Within the handmaid’s world, sexual assault and rape are used as forms of domination and thus falls in line as a possible tool of criticism within the second Kavanaugh trial. Therefore, utilizing silence in particular contexts engaged with reproductive rights while remaining silent in farther reaching moments of reproductive justice, the handmaid’s protestors disconnect from larger structures of power and systemic violence that encapsulate feminist activism. On October 11, 2020, the handmaid’s protestors returned to resist Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court judge appointment (Michallon, 2020). Barrett is another conservative judge who actually served as a “handmaid” with the People of Praise, a conservative all-men-run religious organization that maintains biblical views of gender and gender roles. While Barrett’s title of handmaid is not linked to Atwood’s novel, the handmaid protestors were sure to capture that connection by silently praying at her confirmation hearing in full garb and silence. Maintaining their form and gaining further media attention, the handmaid’s protest deepens the connection between reproductive rights activism and their protests. By entrenching this connection further, the handmaid’s protest is becoming a consistent image of reproductive rights activism. As this chapter argues, however, this image casts the white, able-bodied, cis woman as precarious while silencing other embodied experiences. As the handmaids become the consistent image of reproductive rights, the space for agency shrinks. As such, it is important to critically examine the dominating form of protest in these moments of reproductive justice. By viewing silence-bodies-image as an intersecting rhetoric, scholars can begin to engage these critiques.

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CONCLUSION Within Trump’s first 10 months in office there were over 4,000 protests ranging across issues of civil rights, environment, immigration, healthcare, women’s rights, racial injustice, worker’s rights, and executive power (Caruso, 2017). From these, the handmaids by no means are the only protestors that employ silence-body-image in protest. Kneeling protests started by Colin Kaepernick in the National Football League (Garber, 2017), die-in protests utilized by groups like Black Lives Matter and youth groups protesting gun legislation (Mirzoeff, 2015; Zezima, 2018), and NoH8’s self-acclaimed photographic silent protest against anti-LGBTQIA+ measures are but a few examples (Robinson, 2013). To say that silence-bodies-image, as a protest form, constrains the intersectional possibilities of social change or that all of the handmaids’ protests that utilize this form recreate these same issues would be a grave and problematic overgeneralization. Instead, this chapter examines the rhetorical potentialities and power relations within silencebodies-image to understand how this increasingly used form of protest takes shape within an intersectional world. NOTE 1. Originating from the U.S. Black feminist movement Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, reproductive justice widens concerns beyond pro-choice claims for abortion in order to “analyze power systems . . . based on gendered, sexualized, and racialized acts of dominance that occur on a daily basis” (Reproductive Justice, n.d., para. 7).

Chapter 10

Embodied (L)activism Mothering and/as Embodied Nourishing Molly Wiant Cummins

In her work on “breasted experience,” Iris Marion Young (2005) posited that breasts are scandalous for a patriarchal society because “they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality” (p. 88). Breasts create another binary where women are the site, “The virgin or the whore, the pure or the impure, the nurturer or the seducer is either asexual mother or sexualized beauty, but one precludes the other” (p. 85). Hausman (2004) extended this idea to breastfeeding specifically, saying it “represents a radical, alternative form of embodied subjectivity when compared to the idea of autonomous personhood held up as ideal in Western societies” (p. 276). Breastfeeding “destabilizes the subject as closed, complete, and singular” (Boon & Pentney, 2015, p. 1761), compelling us to think about the bodies of the mothers and children as well as the boundaries between them (Koerber, 2013). Furthermore, Koerber acknowledged that when we hear or tell breastfeeding stories, the focus is on bodies. Koerber (2013) claimed the stories are about bodies that work or do not work, bodies that get scrutinized for public behavior that some believe should be done in private, bodies that are judged as either pure or contaminated, and bodies that are told two different truths by society and the medical establishment. (p. 131)

Breastfeeding bodies also destabilize the clean/dirty binary. Bartlett (2002) identified this succinctly saying that social institutions “act to limit, dry up, hide, pathologize, remove and stem the flow of women’s wet, juicy, bleeding, lactating bodies, which profoundly disturbs the dichotomous biomedical logic of bodies’ inside/outside surface/depth” (p. 118). We are taught from a young age to conceal our bodily floods, to hide the dirty parts of ourselves (Carpenter, 2006). When people1 choose to breastfeed in public, then, many 191

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binaries—public/private, clean/dirty, sexual/maternal—are troubled, and the various reactions to public breastfeeding (Hauck et al., 2020; Sheehan et al., 2019; Smyth, 2008) demonstrate the anxieties Western society has with women’s “leaky, open, fluid” (Lupton, 2012, p. 333) bodies. Given the ways breastfeeding turns the focus onto bodies, Hausman (2004) argued breastfeeding implicitly involves feminist politics, saying it should be a facet that urges motherhood as a political project with a focus on “what makes mothers particular kinds of embodied citizens, with needs, rights, and perspectives on the public good” (p. 275). Olson and Simon (2020) cited Dr. Christine Northrup who believes breastfeeding is “feminism in its purest form” (p. 5). Members of La Leche League International, the most internationally well-known breastfeeding support group, would agree, believing themselves early feminists for reclaiming their bodies through breastfeeding (Bobel, 2001). Their well-known breastfeeding book The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (Wiessinger et al., 2010) is “a means by which women can reclaim their bodies, boost their sense of self-esteem and resist conventional authority in all its forms” (Faircloth, 2013, p. 92). As a feminist political project, breastfeeders engage in activism through breastfeeding. For some, this feminist activism is better known as (l)activism where the parentheses denote activists working to normalize breastfeeding as one option for infant nutrition. (L)activism can be defined as “practices of embodied breastfeeding activism carried out by breastfeeding women and enacted through breastfeeding” (Mecinska, 2018a, p. 21). Some suggest (l) activism is about reclaiming public space, normalizing breastfeeding virtually or physically (Boyer, 2011; Seals Allers, 2017; Stearns, 2013). For example, in her article looking at a nurse-in, and the responses to it, at a Starbucks in Maryland, Carpenter (2006) argued how (l)activists “consciously staged the act of public breastfeeding as a means of political advocacy, cultural resistance, and ideological subversion” (pp. 347–348). In non-academic spaces, the San Diego County Breastfeeding Coalition (Tseng, 2018) and Breastfeeding World (2020) are examples of communities committed to breastfeeding activism. In the virtual world, Mecinska (2018a; 2018b) looked at (l)activism online, a place where breastfeeding selfies, or brelfies, are used to normalize breastfeeding, highlighting that the presence of brelfies in breastfeeding groups becomes part of mundane embodiment online. Beach (2017) argued that brelfies specifically are “a way of lessening the social stigma surrounding breastfeeding in public by repeatedly practicing, capturing, and publicizing this taboo” (p. 45). Giles (2018) also discussed brelfies as both raising awareness of breastfeeding and complicating audience relationship to breastfeeding, asking viewers to contend with their perceptions of (public) breastfeeding. Boon and Pentney (2015) posited that brelfies complexify

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normative motherhood in their study, where brelfies become a powerful site of “self-making and community building” (p. 1760). Not everyone agrees with this definition of (l)activism, however. As Jung (2015) asserted, (l)activism easily pushes into lactivism (without the parentheses) when “it limits rather than protects women’s choices” (p. 7). “At their most extreme,” Jung (2015) continued, lactivists see breastfeeding as “an activity to be defended at all costs, even when it threatens the health and wellbeing of babies and mothers” (p. 7). In a particularly scathing understanding of lactivism, Tuteur (2016) claimed that shaming other mothers is “integral to lactivism” as it preserves “the self-image of lactivists” (p. 159). Lactivism of this kind falls under Olson and Simon’s (2020) notion of hegemonic mothering, an ideology proclaiming that “breast milk is the only acceptable form of infant nutrition” (p. 9). Hegemonic mothering becomes yet another discourse, like new momism (Douglas & Michaels, 2004) and total motherhood (Wolf, 2011), which all seem to fall under intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996), and with which modern mothers must contend. Intensive motherhood, according to Hays (1996), is “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (p. 8). It is the prevailing and pervasive normative discourse that prescribes what “good mothering” should be and compels people into fulfilling its unrealistic expectations. The intensive motherhood ideal is white, cis, straight, married, middle-class and above, abled-bodied women who are the primary stay-at-home parent (O’Brien Hallstein, 2017; Wiant Cummins & Brannon, 2021). Clearly, intensive motherhood is aimed at a narrow swath of parents, yet it is nonetheless pervasive; intensive motherhood is “the proper ideology of contemporary intensive mothering that all women are disciplined into, across race and class lines, even if not all women actually practice it” (O’Brien Hallstein, 2008, p. 143). The discourse of intensive motherhood is especially powerful in its ability to individuate parenting experiences (O’Reilly, 2016). By individualizing the experience, parents, especially those privileged parents who fit the intensive motherhood ideal, are less likely to see motherhood as a potential site of feminist, collective action (hooks, 2015). In the dialectical tensions of breastfeeding binaries, especially whether it should be public or private, breastfeeding may also be an individualizing experience. Mothers may be aware that others do/are breastfeeding but may still feel alone and/or uncomfortable breastfeeding in public (Hauck et al., 2020). The choice to breastfeed is extremely personal and based on many factors, not the least of which is having support in the process (e.g., from lactation consultants to co-parents). The benefits are touted, encouraged, recommended (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2012; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.a, n.d.b; World Health Organization, n.d.), and implemented across cultures (Alianmoghaddam et al., 2017a; 2017b;

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Aryeetey, et al., 2018; Carroll, et al., 2019; Hromi-Fiedler, et al., 2018; PérezEscamilla, et al., 2012; Pérez-Escamilla, et al., 2018), even as the science behind breastfeeding has also been scrutinized (Jung, 2015; Rosin, 2009; Tuteur, 2016; Wolf, 2011). In this way, breastfeeding can be both empowering and disempowering for people, and Olson and Simon (2020) noted that both states can coexist. As Blum (1993) explained, breastfeeding is “not a widely available or free choice and that social institutions and practices make it a less-thanviable option for many groups of women” (p. 299). Olson and Simon (2020) claimed that “current breastfeeding discourses also reveal a traditional, eurocentric, able-bodied, and heteronormative narrative of mothering, parenting, and family life” (p. 6). Jung (2015) expanded saying, Measured by this standard, the affluent white women who follow the official recommendation to breastfeed exclusively for six months are beyond reproach, both good parents and good citizens. Measured by this same standard however, the largely poor African American women who do not breastfeed appear to be failing in some important respect. (pp. 11–12)

Because white mothers are the intensive motherhood ideal, provided they fulfill most of the other categories of the ideal (e.g., able-bodied), their breastfeeding, especially to the recommended 6-month mark, is seen as a marker of good motherhood. On the other hand, Black mothers who have historically been degraded for breastfeeding, a problem made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic (Freeman, 2020a; 2020b), are simultaneously judged as bad mothers for not breastfeeding (Knox-Kazimierczuk et al., 2021). Morrissey and Kimball (2017) noted this explicitly by rhetorically analyzing the hyper- and invisibility that mark Black motherhood. The majority of lactivism currently studied underscores that breastfeeding advocacy of this form is often a marker of class and race privilege—those who can afford to stay home in close contact with children are often white, affluent women. In this chapter, I argue that mothering can (and should) be a site of feminist, collective, political resistance, but the normative discourse of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996) reproduces white supremacy as the hegemony and many white women chase the unrealistic ideals demanded by intensive motherhood rather than see possibilities for collective action across race, class, ability, and gender lines. Yet, breastfeeding certainly positions mothering as a potential site of political efficacy (Carpenter, 2006). As Carpenter (2006) argued, The corporeal protest of the breastfeeding mother not only focuses attention on the maternal function of the breast over its potential to ignite male desire, but

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the orchestrated breastfeeding that takes place at nurse-ins pointedly destabilizes heterosexist constructs even further by collectively affirming the lactating body and recognizing the socio-political power of galvanized “mothering.” (p. 361)

Although mothers may feel dis/empowered (or both simultaneously) while breastfeeding, the embodied activism of breastfeeding has the capability to break open binaries. (L)activists have explored some of this potential through nurse-ins in Western cultures (Bartlett, 2002; Carpenter, 2006; Codd, 2008; de Waal, 2016; Harmon, 2005; Helderman, 2004; Pittman, 2016). In this chapter, I focus on the Big Latch On (n.d.a) which hosts an annual event called the Global Big Latch On “where people gather together to breastfeed and offer peer support to each other” at registered sites at specific times around the world (para. 1). I chose the Big Latch On website and its corresponding Facebook page as public sites because they have a worldwide presence aimed specifically at a worldwide show of embodied activism. Using feminist rhetorical criticism, I analyze how the Big Latch On does or does not promote breastfeeding as a site of feminist, collective action for all parents. FEMINIST RHETORICAL CRITICISM At a fundamental level, feminist rhetorical criticism “begins from the assumption that there is gender inequality between men and women, particularly in today’s industrialized economies, and thus power differentials” (Brummett, 2017, p. 169). Feminist rhetorical criticism is invested in how texts “explicitly describe (and thus implicitly prescribe) ‘appropriate’ behavior” for women and femme-identified persons (Hart, et al., 2018, p. 292). Olufemi (2020) argued that feminist goals must be inherently intertwined with other forms of liberation that “the abolition of all prevailing systems of violence” is necessary for feminist futures (p. 3). Thus, feminist rhetorical criticism should uncover how texts create normative discourses about behavior, about who should be valued and who should not. Considering the prevailing discourse of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996), I analyze what the Big Latch On says about breastfeeding and for whom breastfeeding is an option. I ask the following question to guide my analysis: How does the (Global) Big Latch On website and public Facebook page position breastfeeding and (l)activism, and whom do they say breastfeeding and (l) activism are for?

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A FEMINIST READING OF THE BIG LATCH ON The Global Big Latch On began in 2005 in New Zealand with Women’s Health Action, not being introduced to the United States until 2010 when Joanne Edwards began an LLC in Portland, Oregon (Big Latch On, n.d.a, para. 4), though there is no information as to why the event began at this time. The Big Latch On (n.d.a) hopes to gather not just people breastfeeding, but the friends, family, and entire community to “promote and support” breastfeeding, including raising community awareness and working to normalize breastfeeding in public (para. 3). The Global Big Latch On takes place over three days during World Breastfeeding Week (August 1–7), including in-person and virtual attendance (via hashtags). Of note, 2019 marked the 10-year anniversary of the Global Big Latch On in the United States. I analyzed the Big Latch On’s website and the public Facebook page associated with the organization which appears to be moderated by Joanne Edwards, but I will use “the moderators” when discussing the Facebook page. The Facebook page is tied to the website, but it does not have to exclusively promote the global event, thereby creating a space where all parents may be welcome. I chose to look at July 1, 2019 to September 1, 2019, on the Facebook page as this was the month prior to the Global Big Latch On event for August 2019 as well as all the posts for the rest of that month. This allowed me to see not only a cross-section of what “typical” posts for the Facebook page might be but also to see how Edwards specifically posted leading up to, and after, the event itself. The posts from these two months fell within four general themes that create fertile ground for examining my research question. The four themes are breastfeeding support/education, posts about the Global Big Latch On event, personal posts (of group members posting, or being featured on, the public page), and other posts which included parenting memes, ads, and other information that might be interesting to this audience. Personal Posts and Other Information I start with the last two themes as they are the least salient. Over the course of the two months, the Big Latch On Facebook page centered itself as a place for parents in general, offering memes or information parents might find useful. This included only two “ads” for companies, one of which is listed as a sponsor on the Big Latch On website (n.d.d). Throughout the two months, personal stories were also highlighted. These appeared to be stories from Instagram shared on the public Facebook page. They showed a variety of people breastfeeding and sharing their stories. These stories included a person of color, a person with a visible disability using a wheelchair, and a person with a larger body.

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Although there were only two ads on the site in the two-month window I analyzed, it is clear that a connection to capitalism through sponsorship still matters for an organization like this to grow. Additionally, the sharing of general parenting information or memes demonstrates a desire to normalize breastfeeding as one of several choices parents make on behalf of their child(ren). Through these less salient themes, the Big Latch On promotes breastfeeding as something all mothers can do, allowing for different bodies to represent different aspects of their breastfeeding journeys. Global Big Latch On Event The public Facebook page operates as an additional outlet for the Big Latch On website, especially around the Global Big Latch On event. Even on the first day of July 2019, the moderators posted that this was the 10th anniversary event, asking followers to tag 10 friends who breastfeed/have breastfed to let them know about the global event. Only two people responded—one sharing their personal story of breastfeeding and the other tagging multiple people with the Global Big Latch On date. On July 11, 2019, the moderators posted that there were 3 weeks remaining before the event and that 553 locations were already registered. By July 26, the posts about the global event became more frequent with stats from previous years being listed each day. Additionally, different locations’ specific events were listed either by the Big Latch On or when the specific event used #biglatchon2019 to connect with the event/page. On August 2, the Facebook page shared a picture of what appeared to be mostly white, 3–6-year-old children sitting on a picnic-table bench facing outward. Another child is on the table behind them holding a multi-colored sign reading “Big Kid Latch On” where the children appear to be “breastfeeding” or feeding their stuffed animals and dolls. The moderators suggested this is a great way to teach the next generation as they copy the behaviors of their parents (Big Latch On, 2019d). Then, the first post on August 3 announced that the participation count was already 5,213 with further updates throughout the day (Big Latch On, 2019e). The Big Latch On (n.d.b) website explains how many participants are there and how the organization accounts for them. There are counts of “the number of children breastfeeding at the same time (the latch count), how many breastfeeding people [are] gathered and the total number of people who come out to show their support” (Big Latch On, n.d.b, para. 2). The counts begin at 10:30 a.m. local time, and they are inclusive of the kinds of breastfeeding they support—whether a person latches a child (or children), uses a supplemental nursing system, uses a nipple shield, uses a hand or pump to express milk, or feeds a child breastmilk from another method, they are all counted as breastfeeding, regardless of the child’s age (Big Latch On, n.d.b, para. 5).

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The count happens over three days, so the same breastfeeding duo might be counted up to three times. Additionally, participants may also be counted as breastfeeding with virtual entries, properly hashtagged. For 2019, the Big Latch On (n.d.d) announced that “over 58,000 people around the world” took part with 19,414 breastfeeding parents (whether physically or virtually) and over 18,500 children “latched” at the appropriate time (para. 1). There were 814 registered events in 28 countries according to the press release (Big Latch On, n.d.d, para. 2). Posts about the Global Big Latch On event provide additional insight into the organization’s agenda. Through posts about the global event, the Big Latch On website and Facebook page necessarily center breastfeeding as that is their mission. They position breastfeeding as a choice to be celebrated, using embodied activism to raise awareness, support, and understanding. Further, the posts about the global event position breastfeeding as multifaceted; breastfeeding duos (parent–child) are counted whether or not there is direct skin-to-skin contact during the event. Similarly, the organization promotes the numerous ways “breastfeeding” can be counted at the event, an important recognition that breastfeeding is not a singular story. Once again, the Big Latch On demonstrates their inclusive understanding of breastfeeding journeys as an important site of embodied (l)activism. Breastfeeding Support and Education In their effort to celebrate and promote breastfeeding, the main function of the Big Latch On Facebook page is to serve as breastfeeding support and education. The website seems to mainly answer questions and promote the Global Big Latch On event, so the organization can do more specific support outreach through the Facebook page. The first post for July 1, 2019 is shared from a page called “New Beginnings” (2019) and shows a Black woman tandem nursing (nursing two children at the same time). The photo is stamped with a La Leche League USA logo, and the wording across the bottom of the photo says, “Like childbirth, breastfeeding is natural, but it’s not always easy. If you need help, you’re not alone” (New Beginnings, 2019). This photo may be purposefully chosen as breastfeeding rates for Black mothers are historically lower than for white mothers (Beauregard et al., 2019; Morrissey & Kimball, 2017). So, the variety of bodies represented in pictures on the Facebook page matters, even if the audience does not necessarily match (i.e., is mostly made up of white parents). Much of the language used on the Facebook page is inclusive. In a July 12, 2019 post, a leader of the Big Latch On (Aotearoa/New Zealand) named “Isis” captions a picture to explain that organizers “have tried to focus on making the Big Latch On a more inclusive and supportive event that respects

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and celebrates peoples [sic] infant feeding journeys (however they may look!)” (Big Latch On, 2019a, para. 1). She explains that they want all people to feel welcome to participate, specifically naming “anyone who is breastfeeding, pumping, mixed feeding, formula feeding, donor milk feeding, tube feeding, using supplemental nursing system (SNS), tandem feeding, chestfeeding” and so on (Big Latch On, 2019a, para. 1). To be clear, pumping is expressing milk with the use of a machine, motorized, or by hand; mixed feeding is using both formula and breast milk to feed an infant; donor milk is breast milk from someone other than the parent of the infant; tube feeding is for those who cannot (yet) swallow or have other medical conditions; a SNS allows milk to be fed from a small tube meant to simulate breastfeeding; and “chestfeeding” is a term for trans people and/or those who seek to have a more inclusive term for all feeding from a parent’s body to a child. As Isis says, “All feeding journeys are precious and unique!” (Big Latch On, 2019a, para. 1). The Big Latch On invites all to participate. However, there is not necessarily a similar message on the website. On the Frequently Asked Questions page, the Big Latch On (n.d.c) explained who can partake in the global event, saying that “the focus is on breastfeeding and breastfeeding support, but we are flexible on the way in which this is done. The Big Latch On is designed to be as inclusive as possible” (para. 68). While they do, again, explicitly mark the desire toward inclusivity, this reads much more that only those who breastfeed or feed their child(ren) breast milk may participate as more than a supporter. In thinking about inclusivity, the Facebook page does seem to be very careful about word choice, especially when it comes to how breastfeeders talk about themselves and their journeys. Moderators of the page even remind their viewers of this on July 15, 2019, saying that parenting is difficult, having a support system helps, but that parents need to “be careful about the words we use for ourselves in our individual journeys,” working instead to reframe the statements into “positive, empowering” affirmations (Big Latch On, 2019b). On July 21, the moderators shared a picture from a page called “Breastfeeding” (2019) depicting a white-appearing woman breastfeeding an older infant outdoors on a dock near a pond (the picture has an imprint from the Southern Natural Parenting Network). White font over the picture, framing the breastfeeding duo, reads, “Mothers who reach their breastfeeding goals are ‘lucky,’” but not because they had no problems. They were “lucky” to be given accurate advice, practical support, and not be told to just give up. Mothers don’t fail to breastfeed; society fails to support them to do so (Breastfeeding, 2019). Posting this picture both inspires viewers that the difficulties they may have faced while breastfeeding are normal and are not a reflection of their own failure and reminds viewers that the Facebook page

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can act as just such a supportive environment, offering “accurate advice” and “practical support.” Of course, this frames breastfeeding as only success or failure rather than offering mothers agency in the parenting choices they make for a variety of reasons. Similarly, as World Breastfeeding Week approached and the global event drew closer, the Facebook page was especially cognizant of the language used. On July 31, 2019, the moderator’s page shared a picture and post from “Raise a Little Love Photography.” The picture is a sunset scene with a couple of trees in the background, although the image is blurred. Written in black font over the picture is a single question, “Why isn’t there a week for people who couldn’t breastfeed?” The answer lies in the post, written by “Raise a Little Love Photography”: “There is. It’s World Breastfeeding Week” (Big Latch On, 2019c). The post continued, “World Breastfeeding Week is not just for mothers who met their breastfeeding goals. It is also for every mother who ever wanted to breastfeed for a day, a week, a month, a year and wasn’t able to do so” (Big Latch On, 2019c). At the end of the post, the writer explains the whole point of World Breastfeeding Week is “so every mother gets the practical and emotional support she deserves. So no other mother ever has to go through this pain” (Big Latch On, 2019c). This is echoed in a post from August 4, 2019, when the moderators shared a picture and post from “Breastfeeding Berkshire” (Big Latch On, 2019f). The picture shows a blue-green background with black font that reads, “I really wanted to breastfeed, but I only managed to for 6 weeks,” where the “but” and “only” are crossed out and “and” is written above the “but.” This changes the message to, “I really wanted to breastfeed, and I managed to for 6 weeks” (Big Latch On, 2019f). In this way, the moderators, through sharing this picture and post, suggest viewers reframe for themselves that any amount of breastfeeding means the person breastfed and that they should be proud and celebrate that accomplishment. The Big Latch On Facebook page, through its focus on reframing language toward inclusivity, aims to shift the ways breastfeeders talk and feel about moments that might be perceived as failures. Through the theme of breastfeeding education and support, the Big Latch On positions breastfeeding as natural and sometimes difficult. Moderators share posts on the Facebook page that acknowledge how society often assumes breastfeeding should be easy. Yet, they try to reassure viewers that every breastfeeder deserves adequate support and reliable advice, acknowledging that support is often lacking. Further, they position low breastfeeding rates as a failure of society, not as a failure of those who tried breastfeeding. In this way, they shift the blame of stopping breastfeeding, removing a part of the intensive motherhood ideal that requires mothers sacrifice everything to provide “the best” for their children, shouldering the blame when those

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sacrifices are not enough. The posts on the Facebook page position breastfeeding as an important topic about which to talk, learn, and think, rather than as a private choice that comes easily to all, moving toward a space of collective action. Instead, the posts on the Facebook page work to normalize the challenges as well as the successes in the journey of this one aspect of parenthood. Again, the Big Latch On Facebook page promotes mothering as a site of potential collective action through the inclusive ways they portray breastfeeding. This is especially seen in the Facebook post by Isis who explicitly names that even those who formula-feed are welcome within the group. There is a disconnect here, however, between the Facebook page and the website. While the group is ostensibly for all parents, regardless of feeding choices, there is not the same all-inclusive message on the website. The website does not position breastfeeding as the only correct choice for infant-feeding, but they do remark that the focus is specifically on breastfeeding, a suggestion that (l)activism is only done by breastfeeders. Although this may seem like a small point, it may feel like the difference between an open welcome and a hostile space to those who do not breastfeed. I argue that this disconnect is related to the apparent overall goals of the two sites. The website serves as an information repository geared toward the Global Big Latch On event, one particularly focused on breastfeeding and support, while the Facebook page has more leeway as to the population it serves. Neither the Big Latch On website nor the Facebook page builds a reality in which breastfeeders are atypical or face extreme hostility. While the website does focus on normalizing breastfeeding in communities, there are no comments that this should be to the detriment of parents who formula-feed or to make breastfeeding the only option for infant-feeding. One of the only places there was a push specifically for breastfeeding is in the Big Latch On’s policy about hospitals as host sites for the global event. Some hospitals are designated “Baby Friendly” as part of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative which began in 1991 as a joint effort between UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) to “ensure that all maternities, whether free standing or in a hospital, become centers of breastfeeding support” (UNICEF, 2005, para.1). This means a facility cannot “accept free or low-cost breastmilk substitutes, feeding bottles or teats, and has implemented 10 specific steps to support successful breastfeeding” (UNICEF, 2005, para. 2). The Big Latch On (n.d.c) is compliant with the WHO code for marketing breastmilk substitutes, meaning they cannot accept donations from those who sell or distribute substitutes, including bottles, nipples, or any commercial food for infants under six months old (e.g., formula). So, in the post about hosting a global event at a hospital that does not hold the Baby-Friendly Initiative designation, the Big Latch On Facebook page suggests holding an event at

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the hospital is “a fantastic way to support breastfeeding and gain momentum towards becoming Baby Friendly,” thus making the assumption that a babyfriendly hospital is a better hospital than one not designated as such. FINDING A WAY FORWARD In general, the Big Latch On website and Facebook page do not position breastfeeding as the only option when it comes to infant-feeding. Instead, they support and encourage those who are seeking education or help on a breastfeeding journey. Although the whole aim of the Global Big Latch On event is (l)activism in terms of raising awareness and support for breastfeeding in all its variety, it does not appear that the organization is militant about their lactivism (Faircloth, 2013). Instead, it appears the organization supports (l)activism with the aim of inclusivity. Jung (2015) said that projects like the Big Latch On seem like “positive examples of breastfeeding advocacy” as they “project women’s ability to choose how and where to feed their children” rather than a “moral crusade” of lactivism (p. 6). In this way, the Big Latch On website and public Facebook page promote mothering as politically efficacious through (l)activism in a communal setting, often in a public place, as an embodied activism supporting a movement breastfeeders (may) already engage in and support. In my research question, I ask how the Big Latch On website and Facebook page position breastfeeding and (l)activism and whom they suggest it is for. The aim of this question was to identify whether the website and Facebook page were invested in inclusivity outside of the intensive motherhood ideal. In other words, were mothers who are considered outside the realm of “good motherhood” (e.g., mothers of color; queer mothers; disabled mothers) welcome in the space of the Big Latch On? Initially, I conjectured that the Big Latch On would also be aimed at the white, affluent, stay-at-home mother of the intensive motherhood ideal. What I found, however, was representation and inclusivity across the spectrum. This is undoubtedly important, but it is equally important to note that representation is not enough. Without a feminist critique of the power structures at play, the Big Latch On website and Facebook page are only a beginning. Indeed, with the prevailing prevalence of intensive motherhood, many white, privileged mothers cannot see beyond the normative strictures of the discourse to understand that collective action would benefit all families—in this case, collective action with mothering as the nexus of political activism. To see breastfeeding as one aspect of mothering centered in collective action, Western societies (specifically the United States) must normalize the various infant-feeding options, particularly breastfeeding in public (Grant,

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2021; Sheehan et al., 2019) and the challenges associated with breastfeeding (Acker, 2009; Seals Allers, 2017). Moreover, normalizing means valuing aspects of mothering like choice, the labor involved, support, and bodies. Valuing choice means recognizing that mothers (and all parents) make infantfeeding decisions based on a variety of factors, including how the infant responds to those choices, and that all choices need space to be valued and recognized (Olson & Simon, 2020). For those parents who choose to breastfeed, valuing the labor involved is essential. Although often touted as free, breastfeeding is not without labor costs (Rippeyoung & Noonan, 2012). Hausman (2004) named breastfeeding as a practice, saying that when breastfeeding as a practice has “adequate social and financial support” it becomes part of a range of behaviors a parent uses to enact mothering labor (p. 278). A recognition of that labor means a valuing of bodies must also happen. Koerber (2013) explained that much ground has been gained in scientific arguments for breastfeeding, yet breastfeeding is often divorced from the maternal body that has produced the breast milk. For example, the separation of breastfeeding mothers and children at the U.S.-Mexico border devalued, at the very least, the bodies involved in breastfeeding labor. Koerber (2013) argued that a discursive space must be expanded to allow for the positive ways science is accepting and recommending breastfeeding while also remembering breastfeeding is “an embodied activity that sometimes gets in the way and disrupts our usual ways of doing things,” whether for the mother–infant duo or for the rest of society (p. 134). In order to value bodies doing labor, they must have adequate support. When society values support, it requires our recognition that breastfeeding cannot be “rhetorically isolated” from mother’s daily lived realities if it is to be an actual option for mothers (Koerber, 2013, p. 149). There is some burgeoning support, such as New Jersey’s 2018 bill to prohibit breastfeeding discrimination (Catalini, 2018) or Senator Tammy Duckworth’s Friendly Airports for Mothers Act (McClellan, 2018). However, this is not the case in all arenas. One way in which we can break down this isolation is to recognize how companies do/not support breastfeeding. Jung (2015) posited that companies typically do not support breastfeeding, but policies that promote pumping, which Jung called “business-friendly work-arounds” to resolve the disconnect between the recommendation that mothers exclusively breastfeed at least 6 months with the fact that the United States does not have any federally protected parental leave (p. 13). These work-arounds push intensive motherhood farther, demanding mothers individually figure out how to reconcile working and breastfeeding—a neoliberal feminism at best (Rottenberg, 2018). Again, this is where intersectional feminism is required, such as thinking about breastfeeding from a queer perspective (Lee, 2019; MacDonald, 2019)

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or from a disability perspective (Andrews et al., 2021; Powell et al., 2018). For collective action toward better parenting for all, society must value and support the embodied labor of breastfeeding across identity positionalities in addition to supporting those who choose not to breastfeed. CONCLUSION Because the discourse of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996) remains pervasive, whether a woman chooses to breastfeed or not leaves them feeling as though they do not live up to a “good mother” ideal. Even though breastfeeding is recommended by many major health organizations around the world, mothers are still demeaned and deterred from engaging in it, especially in public. Some parents engage in breastfeeding activism, or (l)activism, to normalize breastfeeding. Although my study could be bolstered by viewing other organizations or activists alongside the Big Latch On, the organization and the annual, global event are international examples of breastfeeding (l) activism meant to raise awareness and support of breastfeeding in society. I analyzed the Big Latch On’s website and public Facebook page to understand how they promote breastfeeding and whom breastfeeding is for in Western society (U.S.-specific) in an effort to understand mothering as a potential site for collective change. I found the Big Latch On appears to accomplish what it aims to do, creating a space—virtually and physically—of support and education for those interested in breastfeeding. As a result, the organization may represent a step on the path to where parental choice, labor, bodies, and support are valued. Parental and mothering collective change makes hope possible that we can create a discursive space where mothers no longer must live up to the ideal of intensive motherhood, but instead, may enjoy their parenting journeys with education and support to make the best-informed decisions for their own lives and families. NOTE 1. I follow Mecinska (2018a) here who acknowledged that she is focusing on breastfeeding/women/mothers, but tries to use more gender-neutral language when possible “in recognition of the reality of nursing parents who do not identify as woman/female/mother,” even as some forms of activism are pointedly about patriarchal effects on women’s bodies (p. 21).

Chapter 11

Subversive Silence Productive Discomfort as Embodied Activism Sakina Jangbar

Typically, social movement campaigns entail noise. Activists organize marches or sit-ins, chant slogans, carry signs, and give speeches to advance their agenda. However, noise is not the only way to register dissent, and many activists embody silence to challenge the status quo. Even though it seems counterintuitive that to be heard one must remain silent, there are many examples of silent political protests in the United States. One of the earliest examples of silence in U.S. politics is the Silent Parade of 1917 in which 10,000 African Americans marched to protest lynching and other forms of anti-Black violence (see Newsom et al., chapter 1, this book; Smith, 2009). Another prime example is the eerie silence of University of California, Davis students: on November 18, 2011, students at UC Davis were peacefully protesting on campus when police in riot gear doused them with pepper spray (Cherkis, 2011). The next day, hundreds of students lined up to protest the excessive use of force and delivered an uncanny silence to the UC Davis chancellor as she walked from her office to her car (Memmott, 2011). Emma González, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, stood silent at the podium in the middle of her speech at a rally on gun violence to bring attention to the gap left by those who died in the shooting at her school (Bent, 2020). At any moment, numerous silent protests are occurring around the world. Recently, for example, the following groups employed the strategy of silence when protesting: in Dehradun, India, priests engaged in silent protest outside Kedarnath Temple either seated or in Sirsasana (a headstand position) to gain support for their autonomy. The priests demanded the disbanding of the Char Dham Devasthanam Management Board which would give full control of temple-related issues to the Uttarakhand government. The priests reported 205

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that they were marginalized and unconsulted in the process (ANI, 2021a; 2021b). In Copenhagen, Denmark, protestors laid out 67 coffins in front of the city hall to remember the 67 Palestinian children killed by Israeli air strikes in May of 2021 (Dumpis, 2021). In Barcelona, Spain, art students staged a silent protest at the Picasso Museum to draw attention to the neglected topic of how the artist abused women in his life (Dafoe, 2021). In Cape Town, South Africa, environmental activists and leaders of faith-based groups including the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute, Green Anglicans, and GreenFaith Initiative, stood silently on the steps of St. George’s Cathedral to protest drilling of oil and gas in the Okavango Basin in Namibia and Botswana (Thebus, 2021). In Auckland, New Zealand, activists held a nationwide silent protest to remember the victims of child abuse (Cheng et al., 2007). In Santiago, Chile, 1,000 women, dressed in black and holding white scarves, marched silently to protest the killing of activists who were demonstrating against the Chilean government earlier (Larsson, 2019). Silence has always been a resource for people, but people are increasingly using silence to draw attention to an issue and to register dissent. This chapter argues that silence is a powerful strategy for protesting in a noise-filled world as silence interrupts the constant flow of messages and creates space for the possibility of reflection and attitude change. The focal study in this chapter is a campaign called “Day of Silence” in which activists take a vow of silence for one day to protest the bullying of LGBTQIA+ youth in educational settings (GLSEN, 2019d). It is part of a larger project (Jangbar, 2018) that asks if a genre of rhetorical silence, defined as intentional and strategic use of silence to influence, is emerging in response to message saturation in contemporary societies. The Day of Silence campaign is analyzed in order to understand how the strategy of silence affects those who maintain and witness such silences. Following a brief overview of the relevant literature on silence and a description of the method for the study, the analysis addresses GLSEN’s goals and rationale for employing the strategy of silence. Student activist voices are highlighted to add more layers of meaning to the goals and rationale articulated by GLSEN. Unintended consequences of taking a vow of silence are also analyzed. Next, I discuss why speech is required from students: schools demand an emesis of signs in order to keep students docile. Finally, I examine the contemporary communicative situation in which a silent response seems to have more influence than words. The power of a silent protest lies in the fact that the form does not appear to be consistent with social movements. Social movements typically aim to saturate the moment of activism with speech acts—chants, slogans, speeches, signs, and noise. However, silent protests are becoming increasingly common because they circumvent algorithmic logic by presenting audiences with a .

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silence that invites reflection and understanding of perspectives rather than reducing subversive messages to bite-sized spectacles. The study ends with concluding remarks on the popular conflation of nonviolence with silence, which brings into focus the defining characteristics of subversive silence—a type of silence that can bring about social change. SILENCE AS COMMUNICATION AND AGITATION Language is only one resource with which people communicate. In addition to words, people can also communicate by keeping silent. Indeed, as Max Picard (1948) notes, speech arises and disappears from the vastness of silence. Although silence is an integral component of communication, it is often mistakenly associated with oppression (Carrillo Rowe & Malhotra, 2013). Silence can be just as expressive and strategic as speech; however, Western tradition equates voice with agency and silence with passivity or stupidity (Glenn, 2004). The association of silence with oppression is flawed because “it assumes that silence can mean only one thing” (Jangbar, 2021, p. 4). To avoid flattening of differences, each iteration of silence requires careful investigation so that we can begin to unpack the complex and varied meanings embedded in silence. The use of silence is becoming more prevalent in social movements because excessive information has depleted our ability to sit in quiet contemplation and reflect on the status quo. “Data smog,” a term coined by David Shenk (1997), refers to the overabundance of conflicting information that has not only crowded out quiet moments but also decreased our ability to make sound decisions. More data has produced more confusion rather than more understanding. In conditions of information chaos and information overload, silence can persuade people by offering space for reflection and consideration of perspectives other than our own. Although silence can be a significant resource in data-rich environments, research on the Day of Silence presents mixed conclusions. Some studies suggest that silence can be a positive strategy for fostering change whereas others suggest that speech is more helpful than silence. Christine Keating (2013) found that keeping silent can help straight students craft an antidominant identity. Similarly, Jenni Conrad (2019) notes that participating in the Day of Silence can help teachers expand their agency and build trust with students. Conversely, Adriana Murphy (2013) concludes that silence is not a useful strategy for middle school and junior high participants as the students in her study had a difficult time remaining silent and preferred to talk about LGBTQIA+ issues rather than stay silent. Similarly, Susan Woolley (2012) writes that the strategy of silence takes away the valuable weapon of voice

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and fails to provide a critical platform for addressing the harassment that LGBTQIA+ students face. This study suggests that the disruption caused by silence can be productive even if it is uncomfortable or difficult to be silent, the strategy of silence appears to be counterproductive, or the campaign seems to have failed. An unexpected silence can bring attention to an issue that remains obscure for people who are not directly impacted by it. Not only does silence bring awareness of a problem, it also develops understanding of alternate identities and experiences. Enduring the discomfort of holding back words can change people and deepen their commitment to a cause. Silent campaigns need not be successful in every iteration and should not be held to a higher standard of success than verbalized protests. METHOD In order to understand the pragmatics of the strategy of silence, I organized a Day of Silence in April 2017, while I was a doctoral student at the University of Texas, Austin. I maintained silence while teaching and while I was in my office. I had prepared my students for the Day of Silence and arranged for them to present their papers while I assessed their presentations in silence. My colleagues knew I was observing silence on the Day so they simply smiled and encouraged me. I was not entirely successful in keeping silent all day. I had to speak to wake up my son for school, coordinate my schedule with my partner, dismiss class at the end of student presentations, and (wo)man a table for the Day of Silence, as seen in figure 11.1. Staying silent was more difficult than I had imagined and led to some awkward situations, which I will discuss in the analysis.   Since the website and my own experiences provided limited opportunities, my search for artifacts led me to three rich sources of data: student blogs posted on GLSEN’s web page, two zines published by GLSEN in support of the Day of Silence, and an ethnographic study on the Day of Silence. The blogs and the zines proved useful because students described not only their intentions but also their experiences of going through a school day without speaking. I analyzed the blogs and zine essays and grouped them according to thematic similarities. Some student writings had several themes embedded in them and, therefore, are mentioned under more than one category. Another source of data was an ethnographic study conducted at a high school. This study was useful in my analysis because the researcher’s conclusions were negative, which contrasted with the information gleaned from student blogs and essays. I refer to this study to understand the unintended consequences of the silent strategy. Now that I have described my method, in the next section,

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Figure 11.1  Space for Reflection about the Day of Silence at the University of Texas, Austin. Source: Sakina Jangbar.

I will provide an overview of the Day of Silence campaign and then analyze why participants found silence to be a useful strategy. DAY OF SILENCE Day of Silence is a national social movement campaign organized in schools across the United States to bring attention to the discrimination against LGBTQIA+ youth in educational settings (GSAFE, 2021; GLSEN, 2019d), such as seen in figure 11.2. Students take a vow of silence for one day to raise awareness of the bullying, name calling, and harassment experienced by LGBTQIA+ students and their allies (GLSEN, 2019d). The Day is one of the campaigns offered by GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network; pronounced “glisten”), a national organization formed in 1990 by a group of Massachusetts teachers who wanted to provide a safe educational environment for all students regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. The first Day of Silence was organized in 1996 by students at the University of Virginia. Over 150 students participated. In 1997, Day of Silence became national, and in 2001, GLSEN adopted the campaign and became its official sponsor (GLSEN, 2019a). The goal of GLSEN is to change the culture of bullying and name calling in schools by advocating for school policies that are more inclusive, providing teacher training for effective responses to the bullying, and organizing school campaigns such as Day of Silence, Solidarity Week, and No Name-Calling Week (GLSEN, 2019b; 2019c).  

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Figure 11.2  Day of Silence Protest Organized by Sakina Jangbar, University of Texas, Austin. Source: Sakina Jangbar.

Resources are available for those who want to participate in the Day of Silence. Students are encouraged to register their schools and download printable resources. The website offers virtual and in-person guides, selfie signs, Zoom backgrounds, and what organizers call “speaking cards” to name a few resources (GSAFE, 2021, para. 1). The speaking cards are carried by studentparticipants to explain why they are silent: Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence, a national youth movement protesting the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies in schools. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by harassment, discrimination, and prejudice. I believe that ending the silence is the first step towards fighting these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today. What are you doing to end the silence? (GSAFE, 2021, para. 2)

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The speaking cards explain that student-participants are observing the Day to end the silence that is forced upon LGBTQIA+ youth and expresses the participants’ commitment to address the injustices experienced by a vulnerable population. In addition to the speaking cards, the GLSEN website provides a template for a sign for selfies, on which students can write their names and state how they will end the silence. The resources on the website not only make it easy to host the Day but also provide a sameness to the experience regardless of where the campaign takes place. The printable materials make the protest recognizable as the Day and give it the character of a national campaign. The GLSEN Public Policy Office (2019b) advises students on how to exercise their First Amendment rights without violating school policies. Students are encouraged to solicit the cooperation of teachers and administrators by obtaining permission for the Day and giving teachers notice. GLSEN (2019d) clarifies that student-participants may engage in their silent activism before school, after school, during recess and lunch, and while passing in the hallways, but not during instructional time. In other words, if a teacher asks a question in class, students are required to respond. Guidance from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on student rights during the Day of Silence is available in online resources of the ACLU (2021) and GLSEN (2019b). The ACLU guidance addresses school principals and superintendents, asking them to support students who wish to participate in the Day and explaining that a complete moratorium on student protest would be unconstitutional. It is important for both students and school officials to know what rights students have so that rights can be exercised without unnecessary disciplining. The Day of Silence typically culminates in a “break the silence” moment when students who had taken a vow of silence come together to make noise and share their experiences. During these meetings, students also discuss ways in which the silencing of LGBTQIA+ youth can be addressed and redressed. The “break the silence” moment can occur online on Zoom or take the form of an after-school meeting or students can attend large rallies advertised on the GLSEN web page. Where the vow of silence highlights the discrimination, the “break the silence” moment offers an opportunity for dialogue, strategizing for the future, and community-building. Now that I have provided an overview of the Day of Silence campaign, next I will present the themes that emerged in this study. Why Silence? Voice is often paired with agency and silence with oppression (Carrillo Rowe & Malhotra, 2013). Therefore, employing silence to register dissent appears,

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at first glance, to be a counterproductive strategy. A closer look reveals a reasonable rationale. GLSEN (2019c) explains its choice to organize a campaign around a trope that is not usually associated with empowerment: Why silence? Aren’t we trying to fight against silence? A silent demonstration can be a peaceful way to bring urgent attention to an important issue. Silence as a method of organizing is much different than silence that is coerced or forced through oppressive bullying, harassment and intimidation. A silent demonstration is active, rather than passive, and causes people to pay attention. Silent demonstration can bring attention to an issue and encourage reflection on the issue; simulate how others are silenced; focus the attention on the issue or cause and not the protester; demonstrate that the demonstrators desire a peaceful resolution; spark discussion and dialogue. (Para. 1–3)

Gabby Rivera, a spokesperson for GLSEN National Student Council, in the Council’s zine Silence Is Ours: Reclaiming Silence One Generation to the Next, explains the goal of the organization in employing the strategy of silence is to reclaim a tool of oppression. Rivera (2017) recommends her organization to use the phrase “Silence is Ours” as “the primary slogan of Day of Silence, with the overall theme emphasizing the reclaiming of silence as a tool for advocacy, rather than a means of oppression” (emphasis mine). The organization frames the strategy of silence around three themes: silence is described as peaceful and active, goals are identified as bringing attention to the issue and creating opportunities for reflection and dialogue, and the proposed rationale is that a vow of silence can simulate the experience of marginalization for the allies and reclaim the instrument of oppression from the oppressors. The themes identified by GLSEN are broad and somewhat abstract, allowing students to discover personal reasons for participating in the Day of Silence. Students report many reasons for taking a vow of silence on the Day. Some student voices add a more concrete and visceral understanding of the themes articulated by GLSEN, and some add a fresh perspective acquired from the vantage point of being part of the school-aged population that GLSEN wants to influence. I have organized student perspectives into six categories. Each category adds a distinct element that not only clarifies why silence was chosen to register dissent but also provides a vivid description of what occurs when a body is not allowed to speak. Raises Awareness In blog posts and essays, students reiterate GLSEN’s articulated goal of employing the strategy of silence to raise awareness of the discrimination

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that LGBTQIA+ youth face in schools. Student-participants provide a more nuanced understanding of how silence performs the desired function. Kristin J. (2015), in her blog post, states, It’s a day where myself and hundreds of other kids can show other people who haven’t been in our footsteps that yes, there are kids out there who can’t speak up. That there are kids out here that harm themselves because they have to keep everything bundled up inside. . . . This day shows people that we are silent for a reason. (para. 2)

Kristin J.’s post highlights two different kinds of silences: the silence that is created when students are not allowed to speak up and the silence that is intentionally created to draw attention to the forced silence. Esmee Silverman (2021) also notes in GLSEN’s zine that we must continue to stay silent in order to “break the silence for those who have no choice” (p. 2, para. 1). The difference between the two types of silences is that one is oppressive, and the other is agentive. Kristin J. also emphasizes that the problem is real, not imaginary, when she states that “yes, there are kids out there who can’t speak up.” GLSEN Day of Action Intern, Anthony Crisci (2019), also draws attention to the reality of the anti-LGBTQIA+ environment in school, although his focus is on facelessness rather than on the absence of LGBTQIA+ voices. Crisci (2019) writes, These faceless students are exactly what the Day of Silence represents . . . The Day of Silence is a day when these faceless students make the news. For one day the entire country will stop and acknowledge the existence of anti-LGBT1 bullying and harassment. (para. 2)

Crisci’s post suggests that when the marginalization of LGBTQIA+ students is ignored by school officials, the marginalized students cease to exist (become faceless). On the other hand, when student-participants voluntarily stay silent on the Day, people are forced to acknowledge the existence of the faces that were erased. Kian Tortorello-Allen (2017), in an essay featured in GLSEN’s zine, defined as a printer-friendly, small-circulation magazine, echoes Crisci’s position that silence on the Day brings visibility to an issue that is frequently ignored. Tortorello-Allen writes, “By participating in Day of Silence, you are not only making your voice heard but also bringing attention to the voices that aren’t” (para. 3). Tortorello-Allen emphasizes how intentionality transforms silence from oppression to advocacy and reclaims the instrument of oppression from the oppressors.

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Invites Reflection The vow of silence invites reflection not only in the audiences who are witnessing the silence of their peers but also in the participants who begin to understand their own journeys in the space created by silence. Kristin J. (2015) writes, “It’s a day where I can look back at all the times I haven’t been able to speak, talk out, and express myself” (para. 4). Kristin J.’s post suggests that the Day holds commemorative significance for her. Her silence on the Day memorializes the times she felt voiceless and faceless and serves as a reminder of why participating in the Day is important to her. Aiden Ramirez-Tatum (2019), member of the GLSEN National Student Council, echoes the importance of silence as commemorative significance for LGBTQIA+ youth who “often don’t have a choice of whether or not to be silent . . . we recognize this. We hold a memorial for all the words unsaid” (para. 11). The memorialization aspect is significant because it allows students to validate those who are routinely silenced and erased from public culture. Reggie Eaton (2021) writes in the Day of Silence zine that gender performance is like wearing “an itchy, oversized sweater” that they were supposed to grow into but never did (p. 8). Reggie’s post suggests that on the Day of Silence, they pause and reflect on how their body feels when performing gender. Similarly, Rebekah R. (2017), in her zine essay, employs a poetic metaphor to explain how silence can make a difference in a social climate that is saturated with messages: Like a sword, it [silence] slices through the constant, every day chatter. Silence offers a moment for people to reflect and ponder. In our everyday world, consistent chatter is the norm. People are constantly connected through social media, and we are often forced into social situations where communication is expected. In this way, remaining silent serves as an act of civil disobedience. (para. 1)

Rebekah R.’s insight is significant for two reasons. Her observation that silence cuts through everyday chatter is a philosophical take on the strategy of silence. Rebekah R. (2013), perhaps unknowingly, is paraphrasing Martin Heidegger’s position that idle chatter produces a surface deep understanding and forecloses the possibility of deeper intelligibility. Heidegger (1927/1962) states, Keeping silent is another essential possibility of discourse. . . . In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can ‘make one understand’ (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. (p. 208)

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Rebekah R.’s (2017) observation that silence gets heard because it overcomes the constant chatter on social media underscores the subversive potential of silence. A willful silence upsets the norms of polite social interactions and the expected form of protest and is therefore “a powerful tool” (para. 5). Carly (2019) draws attention to the pedagogical opportunities created by the Day. Carly’s blog reflects on the benefits of being an ally. She states that being an ally not only “breaks down the wall of silence between LGBT students and their straight peers” but also prepares one for challenges that one may face (para. 5). Thus, the Day of Silence invites reflection in those who participate and those who simply observe the silence of their peers. Builds Community Some students articulate that the Day of Silence creates a community where the LGBTQIA+ youth do not feel isolated. Kian Tortorello-Allen (2017), in his essay for the zine, notes, “Seeing people at my school participate in Day of Silence made me feel less alone. It assured me that people within my school were willing to stand up for me when I experienced anti-GLBTQA harassment” (para. 4). Audri (2019) writes, “I feel like I am part of something bigger than myself” (para. 3). Amelia (2012) writes, “I’m choosing to participate in Day of Silence, not just because I want to make a point that this bullying needs to stop, but also so I can stand with other victims of antiLGBT name calling” (para. 1). Nowmee (2011) blogs, “It [Day of Silence] gives students a platform to stand up against bullying and show solidarity with LGBT students” (para. 1). Red O (2011) writes, “I will show support to those who have been muzzled in fear by giving up my voice for a day” (para. 3). The theme of community and solidarity is emphasized by both the LGBTQIA+ students and their allies. However, some allies also describe the discomfort involved in holding back their voices on the Day. Leads to Productive Discomfort GLSEN’s rationale for utilizing silence in their campaign is that silence can simulate the experience of marginalization for those who are allies of the LGBTQIA+ community. The descriptions given by students provide insight into how such a simulation occurs and what the allies experience when they silence themselves in solidarity. Meghann G. (2011) explains the physiological effects of staying silent on the Day, The meaning of Day of Silence is so much more powerful when experiencing it, hearing about it doesn’t compare. The feeling of isolation puts you in a daze, where you forget about the ‘importance’ of everyday conversations. The lack of talking even dries out your throat and when you do speak again your voice cracks on the choked

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out words. (para. 3)ntion to the visceral experience of maintaining silence: the bewilderment, the drying out of her throat, and the cracking of her voice when she finally speaks. Going beyond the physiological impact of staying silent, Meghann G. (2011) observes that silence on the Day influences the participants more than anyone else. She writes, Day of Silence isn’t just a protest against bullying or something to bring attention to others, but it’s to bring a more intense, tangible, awareness to the participants. I tell people it’s not hard as it sounds, just to get them to do it, but in all reality it is hard and stressful and saddening to an extent; however it is also enlightening and eye-opening and incredibly, absolutely powerful. Anyone who has participated the whole day would know. It’s inspirational. (para. 2)

Meghann G. (2011) expresses that the Day of Silence brings “intense” and “tangible” awareness to the participants, which is simultaneously saddening and inspirational. Meghann G.’s testimony suggests that allies who hold back their words gain a deeper appreciation of the difficulties experienced by the LGBTQIA+ students who routinely stifle their words. My own experience of taking a vow of silence on the Day corroborates Meghann G.’s (2011) insight. When I took a vow of silence on April 21, 2017, I had imagined that my Day would turn out to be like any other day, and the only thing different would be that I would go through it in silence. I was not prepared for how much harder my day would be and how ordinary decisions would become weighty. I wanted to hide in my office so I would not feel conspicuous and vulnerable. Every act that required interacting with people whose responses I was uncertain of seemed threatening. Even small acts like taking an elevator, buying coffee or lunch, and walking to the restroom loomed large and consumed mental and emotional energy, and I had to talk myself into interacting with people. My discomfort for a short time on the Day heightened my awareness of what it is like to have a body that is constantly under threat and has increased my commitment to be sensitive to the needs of my LGBTQIA+ students. Meghann G.’s (2011) comment and my own experience suggest that the strategy of silence has the most influence on ally-participants. According to my observation, there are two groups who participate in the Day: those who are members of the LGBTQIA+ community and those who are allies. The members do not need a Day of Silence to make them aware of the marginalization, discrimination, silencing, bullying, name calling, and harassment that they experience. It is a reality that many members manage and negotiate every moment of their lives. I venture that the most change is wrought in the allies who voluntarily stay silent to show support for their LGBTQIA+ peers.

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I know from my own experience that keeping silent on the Day heightened my awareness of the silencing that is experienced by those who identify as LGBTQIA+. The swallowing of my words, the hyper-awareness of my body, the minute decisions that loomed large, and the exhaustion that accompanied the worrying are all examples of things that must be experienced rather than explained. Before participating in the Day, I had only a surface understanding of the experiential component of having a body that does not conform to the sexual and gender norms of society. However, after my participation, I developed a more nuanced understanding of what it means to have a body that is hyper-visible and silenced, and this experience has deepened my commitment to the cause. Carly F. and Rebekah R. remind us that the discomfort of silence is worth enduring, as it can lead to social change. Carly F. (2016) writes, “Because it may be really hard—just like staying silent for a whole day (and I’m a talker, so I know it’s tough)—but it can also bring a lot of people together to produce incredible understanding and change” (para. 5). Rebekah R. (2017) observes, Wielding the power of silence forces people to consider why certain voices are missing at the table. It forces people outside of their norm and sometimes into a state of discomfort. This place of discomfort is often the most effective place for people to learn. (para. 6)

Silence may be uncomfortable for the allies, but ultimately the discomfort is productive because it can bring about the desired change. Provides Space for Listening Although GLSEN mentions dialogue and reflection, the organization does not emphasize the listening component of silence. The notion that listening could occur in the absence of noise is unique to student-participants. Rachel S. (2019) pens a poem that implores people to still their voices and hear what the silence signifies, This is a day to listen; this is a day to think; what do you hear? Do you hear the slurs, the insults of the bully who picks on the weak? . . . So today do not speak, listen instead, and see what you can now hear. (para.1)

Ilana K. (2019) explains in her poem that she stays silent to create the conditions in which those who are routinely silenced would have the chance to be heard, “I put away my voice for a day . . . to bring attention to all the people . . . who are forced into the silence” (para. 1). She goes on, “because people don’t listen” (para.1). Rachel S. and Ilana K. both emphasize that if people

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stop talking for a while, they will hear messages that are usually drowned out by the constant chatter. These students articulate that the Day of Silence is also a day to listen because when a person willingly stops talking, they can then hear what often goes unnoticed or unheard. Silence Is a Mode of Speech Another perspective added by the students is that silence is a mode of speech. Some students express that their silence “speaks more” on the Day. Ilana K. (2019) blogs: “Even when I am silent I am speaking so many words, So one day a year my silence speaks more, Than I ever could out loud, My silence speaks for those who do stop talking” (para. 1). Ilana K. (2019) notes that her silence speaks for those who stop speaking. Another blogger, Red O. (2019), also emphasizes the audibility of silence, and she implores her peers to let their silence be loud. She writes, “It is important that we all stand together to make the echo of silence roar through our communities. Let kids know that they are not alone and that some people really do care” (Red O., 2019, para. 3). These students realize the difference between a communicative silence, in which the author employs the mode of silence to express their inner word, and a non-communicative silence, in which the author uses the strategy of silence to end the discursive activity. The difference is that the former is a way to communicate, and the latter is a refusal to communicate. Unintended Consequences So far, I have discussed only positive outcomes of staying silent on the Day; however, the silent strategy can also result in negative experiences for the participants. Some unintended consequences are increased bullying from peers due to hypervisibility, missed opportunities for dialogue, and disciplining from school officials. Being harassed and disciplined dampens the excitement of having a national day that specifically addresses the challenges faced by the LGBTQIA+ youth in educational settings. Some students report an increase in bullying on the Day of Silence due to hypervisibility. J. A. (2008) describes her experience on the Day: We were met with statements such as “Oh my god . . . I see Faggots.” or “Why do you support the Fags.” and sometimes worse. One of my best friends was told “Just be like your father and kill yourself; then you can be silent forever.” We spent the whole bus ride home comforting her. I am sickened that people in our school used our beliefs as an excuse to make fun of us. (para. 1)

J.A.’s friend was told to kill herself so she could be silent forever. Such comments reveal that, even though the participants may see their silence as a

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form of protest speech, others may view silence as absence. It is not unusual to think of silence as death or absence, since speech is associated with agency and personhood and silence with an absence that signifies the lack of an agentive subject. However, I venture that the notion of silence as the absence of a speaking subject is an outdated mode of thinking, and comments that refer to silence as death arise out of learned habits of speech from older generations whose public cultures were not saturated with messages. Some students bully the silent participants precisely because silence registers as dissent and subversion rather than as absence. Susan Woolley’s (2012) 3-year ethnographic study of McArthur High school’s GSA club and club events, which includes the Day of Silence, corroborates J. A.’s (2008) report of increased bullying on the Day. Woolley (2012) describes the experiences of a student who was harassed by her peers all day long and could not defend herself because she wanted to keep her vow of silence: For some students, the strategy of silence opened them up to even more verbal harassment than usual on this day. In 2009, Fani—a lesbian and white-identified young girl—was followed around by a group of boys and called “faggot” repeatedly all day long, but she wanted to stay silent for the duration of the school day, so she did not respond to her harassers and her teachers never intervened. (p. 278)

The students’ frustration at not being able to defend themselves leads Woolley (2012) to conclude that the strategy of silence takes away “the valuable weapon of their voices to defend themselves and to educate others, thus failing to provide a critical platform” for addressing the harassment of LGBTQIA+ students (p. 279). The strategy of silence can sometimes backfire and, instead of students feeling empowered by withholding their voices, they can feel further marginalized and helpless in the moment when oppression occurs. But this risk is not unique to silent protests. The risk of harm appears to be a perpetual companion of activism regardless of who is protesting, how, and why. A person may stand at the pulpit and deliver a passionate speech to which the audience response may be to throw rotten tomatoes at the speaker or to deliver state-sanctioned violence. Activists take on the risk of harm in order to change an unjust system: the suffragettes were arrested and force-fed in prison; the Civil Rights Movement activists had fire hoses and dogs turned on them; the Occupy Wall Street protestors were sprayed with tear gas; the Black Lives Matter proponents were met with police in riot gear. The risk of harm can range anywhere from school bullies harassing a person who has taken a vow of silence to a white supremacist running over counter-protestors at the white supremacist Unite the Right

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Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (ADL, 2017; Aheron, 2021; Castle, 2021; Newsom et al., 2020). Protest, whether it takes the form of speech or silence, entails risk, and it is difficult to subtract the risk of hateful rhetoric or physical violence from activism. Another unintended consequence of silence is that it sometimes results in missed opportunities for dialogue, especially when a counter-protest is held in school on the same day. Susan Woolley (2012) writes that a group called “Youth for Christ” held a counter-protest not only on the same day as the Day of Silence but also in the same location. Youth for Christ members played Christian rock, spun records, and sang songs, which obliterated the silence of the LGBTQIA+ group and resulted in missed opportunities for meaningful dialogue between the two groups. Woolley (2012) states, The learning that could have taken place between these two student groups was cut short, as silence barred the GSA’s students’ participation in any vocal conversation. In this situation, silence foreclosed the possibility of the students engaging in dialogue with individuals who held differing views, and silence limited their methods of responding to an epithet thrown their way. (pp. 279–80)

Woolley emphasizes the limitations of the silent strategy. Although I do not deny that the limitation exists, my experience has led me to a different viewpoint regarding missed opportunities for dialogue. When I observed silence on the Day, I was tempted to break my vow when I handed a written order to my barista on the backside of the speaking card and my barista told me that she is gay. I wanted to speak to her and tell her that I appreciated her trust in me. I wanted to produce a response that would reflect my inner state. Instead, I was bound by my vow. Woolley (2012) notes that the strategy of silence results in missed opportunities for dialogue, but my experience was that the opportunity to have a dialogue was created by my silence. In the word gap, a space for meaningful talk was created and, even though the opportunity was not taken advantage of that day, the possibility for future dialogue remains open. What is important to note is that my silence on the Day created the opportunity in the first place. In addition to increased bullying and missed opportunities for dialogue, participants also report being disciplined by school officials. On their blog post, GLSEN posted several messages they received from students: By 10 am this morning more than 30 students had already been called to the office for participating in the Day of Silence. They were told [not] to participate. They had to go home with an unexcused absence, but they were an educational distraction to be silent all day.

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School personnel are telling me that I cannot support it by putting a printed piece of paper on my shirt telling why I am not talking. And an attendance clerk said to me “I am not playing these stupid little games.” Administrator sent an e-mail saying to bring all the students participating in the day of silence to the office. We can not discuss in class nor give materials to students. Students who choose to participate must report to a counselor. We have been denied having a GSA even after several groups of students have asked for one. We have a transgender student who needs our support. I’m being asked to take down the poster in the library and not hand out bracelets to my group. (GLSEN, 2011, para. 1–4)

Some students emailed GLSEN and reported that their schools were blocking their efforts to hold a Day of Silence. Students were told to go home, accused of playing games, called into the office, told to remove their posters, or were not permitted to distribute materials. The disciplinary actions taken by school officials immediately raise the question: Why is speech being demanded from students? The answer to this question is in the next section. Emesis of Signs GLSEN’s web page for the Day of Silence makes it clear that students have the right to stay silent during free time but not during instructional time. An open letter from the ACLU posted on GLSEN’s web page informs school principals and superintendents that the right to not speak is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of United States, and “a blanket school policy against ‘protests’ such as the Day of Silence violates the First Amendment” (ACLU, 2021). The letter asks the schools to allow the participating students to engage in silent lessons or be given written assignments or at least allow them peaceful expressions during noninstructional time. The question that immediately comes to mind is why schools would require students to speak. Typically, schools restrict disruptive behavior to maintain discipline and maximize learning time. Therefore, behaviors that are perceived as interruptions, such as side conversations, are curtailed with warnings and other disciplinary actions. But what is so disruptive about silence that schools have been given the right to demand speech? If silence were viewed as simple passivity, then students participating in the Day would not be required to respond with speech during class time. Surely a passive student is a common enough phenomenon in schools that it would not raise any red flags. An intentional and strategic silence registers as protest rather than passivity, and therefore the counter-demand for speech is made to thwart the protest and to keep the engine of heteronormativity running.

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The disruption that the Day causes is not accidental but intentional, as the Day attempts to normalize what society has thus far labeled deviant. Arny (2010), a student-participant, blogs, “The majority of us [are] rebelling from traditional values, ignorant peers, and a society that shuns us for who we are whether it be based on race or sexual orientation” (para. 1). Rebekah R. (2017) writes, “Some associate silence with passivity, but if one truly embraces the silence and wields it in a powerfully disruptive way, so much more can happen when we take control and reclaim our silence” (para. 4). The verbs employed by the students—rebel, wield, disrupt, control, reclaim—suggest that the students are not only aware of the disruptions that their silence will cause but also hopeful. Schools demand speech from the silent protestors because silence is a refusal to follow the norms of society. Dick Hebdige (1979) explains that subcultures announce their “sinister presence” by giving objects double meanings. For example, a tube of petroleum jelly becomes a site where the struggle between dominant and subordinate groups becomes apparent. Although silence is not an object, it functions as a sign of “Refusal” that is just as “sinister” as a tube of petroleum jelly. Silence becomes a sign of “forbidden identity” and “deviations.” Therefore, the demand for speech is made and students are required to emit signs of compliance to override their defiance. Since GLSEN’s strategy of silence is planned and advertised, schools are equally prepared to counter the silence. Schools can ask students to vomit signs so that the discomfort is felt only by the student-participants. Word preserves order and keeps school-aged bodies docile. The involuntary emesis of signs leaves bodies weak, sweaty, and shaky from the forced expulsion, and bodies that are weakened can be controlled. New Responses in New Situations Silent campaigns are powerful because the form does not appear to be consistent with social movements. Typically, social movement campaigns are composed of noise—speeches, chants, slogans, songs, signs, and music. It is because several elements come together in a predictable manner that a campaign is recognized as such. Let’s take the example of the airport protests that occurred on Friday, January 27, 2017, after President Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries (Thrush, 2017). Spectators knew that it was a protest because people were opposing the executive order (situation); the intent of the protestors was to question the legitimacy of an order that required a religious test to enter the country; the protest was made up of chants, signs, and speeches (content); the stylistic elements like cardboard signs were indicative of a rushed response; and the protest was similar to other protests such as civil rights and gay

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pride (convention). When audiences viewed video footage from the airports, they knew it was a protest because it met their generic expectations. Generic similarities make a protest recognizable as a protest. However, sometimes genres begin to decay because either the situation or the audience demands a different/new response. Silent protests are occurring in the age of mass communication, which calls for a change in the genre of protests. One of the positive outcomes of technology and social media is that citizens have the power to influence public opinion by providing alternate news. One of the downsides of the digital age is information overload. People are plugged into the Internet for almost every moment of the day. When we are awake, advertisements and political messages are delivered on our cell phones, computers, tablets, televisions, and radios. Even when we are asleep, devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches record our resting heart rates and sleep cycles and regurgitate that information to us upon waking. Just like pollution is a byproduct of the Industrial Age, data smog is the byproduct of the Information Age. Shenk (1997) notes that Data smog is an expression for the noxious muck and druck of the information age. Data smog gets in the way; it crowds out quiet moments, and obstructs much needed contemplation. . . . The blank spaces and silent moments in life are fast disappearing. Mostly because we have asked for it, media is everywhere. (p. 31)

One of the problems with information glut is that more information does not necessarily lead to more clarity. Indeed, an excess of information has paralyzed us. Shenk (1997) explains that “the psychological reaction to such an overabundance of information and competing expert opinion is to simply avoid coming to conclusions” (p. 93). Information helped us make rational decisions until it became so abundant and contradictory that it began to deter rational and efficient decision-making. For example, the jury is perpetually out on whether people can safely consume a moderate amount of caffeine. This uncertainty leads to people basing their coffee decisions on social motives and personal preferences rather than on research-based (rational) advice. More data has produced more confusion rather than more understanding. In conditions of information chaos and information overload, silence can persuade people by offering space for reflection and consideration of perspectives other than our own. The model of invitational rhetoric offered by Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin (1995) is especially relevant in this context: The goal of invitational rhetoric is to create understanding rather than to persuade an opponent with superior arguments. Foss and Griffin (1995) state, “Invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world

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and to see it as the rhetor does” (p. 5). The strategy of silence promoted by GLSEN is an invitation to allies to experience the world from the perspective of a body that defies heteronormativity and gender norms, and therefore is forced into an oppressive silence. Invitational rhetoric is based on feminist principles that seek to create relationships of equality by acknowledging that human beings have inherent value and a right to make their own decisions (Foss & Griffin, 1995). The strategy of silence provides the space needed to encounter the perspectives of others and thus see that all human beings are unique, are inherently valuable, and have the right of self-determination. By operating outside of argumentative logic, silence can create the possibility of understanding, which is often a precursor to social change. The silence of the activists provides a refuge from the constant churning of messages and invites citizens to see the world from the LGBTQIA+ perspective so that society may acknowledge inherent value and grant the right of self-determination. The Day of Silence case study has allowed me to closely study the strategic and intentional use of silence to influence people. Silence is not the absence of discourse but a mode of discourse. Moreover, it is a mode of discourse that can express resistance to traditional norms of sexuality and gender identity/ expression. The silent participants may have personal reasons for participating in the Day, but, collectively, the protest disrupts norms to crack open a space for the LGBTQIA+ folks at the table. Silent protests subvert the efficiency and speed of communication by adopting a form that is more suitable for a message-saturated digital culture. Instead of adding to the information overload, silent activists invite people to slow down, reflect, and understand to create a more inclusive society. In the following section, I distinguish the strategy of nonviolence from silence to develop a more precise understanding of how and why silence is employed by activists. Nonviolence versus Silence Silence is often conflated with nonviolence even though the two phenomena are distinct. For example, a headline from the St. Louis American reads: “St. Louis is the New Selma”: Protestors March Silently through Downtown Monday Morning (Vaughn, 2017). The news story describes the actions taken by the protestors in St. Louis who wanted to oppose the not-guilty verdict given in the trial of former police officer Jason Stockley in the 2011 shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith. Protestors in several cities marched through the streets with the predictable elements that define protests—chants, signs, and speeches. However, some 200 activists in St. Louis not only marched “uncharacteristically slow for the typical fervent pace of protest march” but also maintained “utter silence” (Vaughn, 2017, para. 5). They walked with their “arms locked, heads held high and mouths closed” (Vaughn, 2017,

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para. 5). Once they reached city hall, the protestors paused for 10 minutes of speeches and expressed that their goal was “to let people know that our presence is powerful . . . this was power walking down this street” (Vaughn, 2017, para. 7). I venture that the only thing in common between the St. Louis protest of 2017 and Selma of 1965 is the goal of the activists—equal rights for all. However, similarity of goals is not enough to classify nonviolent protests with silent protests. Subversive silence and nonviolence are two distinct phenomena despite popular misunderstanding that the two are coterminous. Silence and nonviolence are often conflated because both are considered to be passive reactions. The parade in St. Louis is more like the Silent Parade of 1917—when thousands of African Americans marched in silence in New York City to oppose lynching and other forms of violence on Black bodies—and less like Selma which was noisy and bloody. Although nonviolent protests accomplished major goals in India (Gandhi) and the United States (Martin Luther King Jr.), these movements are distinct from silent protests. Not only is the current moment significantly different from the 1960s, but also the strategies employed are quite different. The nonstop chatter from multiple devices has fogged up our agora, and, in response, silence is emerging as a strategy for shaping public opinion. Silence and nonviolence are not passive and not coterminous; rather, they are two distinct phenomena that work in different situations. CHARACTERISTICS OF SUBVERSIVE SILENCES Three characteristics of subversive silences emerge as I conclude my case study: bookending of silence with speech, the potential to subvert hegemonic norms, and the desire to know the rhetor’s intended meaning. As for the first characteristic, the Day of Silence case study shows that silent protests are bookended by speech to make the meaning of silence clear. Activists who choose silence as their strategy tend to mark the beginning and end of their silent moments with speech to explain the reasons for their silence. When the mode of silence is balanced with speech, the meaning of silence is restricted so that objectives can be achieved. A second characteristic of subversive silence is that it has the potential to upset hegemonic norms. Norms can be efficient as they provide guidelines for being and behaving; however, norms can become oppressive when they marginalize people who are in the minority. Silence invites people to slow down and reconsider their beliefs and actions, which is not always efficient, but can be incredibly transformative as expressed by the students who participated in the Day of Silence campaigns. In the information age, people tend to

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value speed and efficiency, and machines are built around those logics. The logic of efficiency leads to the discarding of information that cannot be translated into computer language (Lyotard, 1979/1984). Slowing down and being silent is a human activity that is difficult for machines to compute. The goal of silent protests is to subvert the principles of efficiency and speed that drive our society, and remind us that our humanity cannot be reduced to zeroes and ones. Silence is neither speedy nor efficient because it slows down time and requires human interpretation. Silent activists attempt to reduce our data consumption so that we might encounter alterity and respond ethically. The computer is neither human nor humane, whereas people have the potential to be both. The silent activists announce their presence by saying nothing: they do not add to the information glut but instead invite us to slow down, encounter, reflect, and understand. A third characteristic of disruptive silence is that it creates a mystery, which can result in an audience for a message. Silence evokes a desire in the audience to know the meaning of the unexpected silence. A subversive silence hooks people in, which is not an easy feat to accomplish in the age of information overload. The Day of Silence does not fully capitalize on the mystery aspect of silence because participants have to obtain permission from school officials and organize the annual event. These preparatory activities are necessary for running a smooth campaign, but compromise the mystery factor of silent protests. This leads me to the tentative conclusion that although some explanation for the silence must be provided for message precision, a lack of explanation can captivate an audience. A shrewd rhetor must balance the need to communicate a specific message with the need to create audience interest in the issue. On one hand, an audience needs to be primed to receive the silence; however, too many explanations before the silent event can ruin the surprise factor. On the other hand, too much mystery can squander the opportunity to get the message across. Rhetorical speech and subversive silence share a symbiotic relationship: silence creates the opportunity for discourse (and influence), but without speech, silence remains unintelligible. Thus, the strategy of silence needs to be applied artfully for rhetorical effect. NOTE 1. Older usages of acronyms such as LGBT and GLBTQA illustrate how quickly these acronyms shift as cultural understandings of non-binary gender evolve and are publicly recognized.

Chapter 12

Emerging Activisms Responding to Current and Future Crises Desiree A. Montenegro, Victoria A. Newsom, and Lara Martin Lengel

It has been a monumental time for embodied activism. From the AntiExtradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, more widely known as the Hong Kong protests, the Extinction Rebellion in London, the Indigenous Colombians’ protest in Bogotá against mass killings of their people by drug cartels and armed groups controlling rural areas, the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in Paris, the Blockupy movement in Germany, and the New York City-based Decolonize This Place movement, to the global Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and uprisings in response to anti-LGBTQIA+ violence and murders around the world; thus, there have been a myriad of activisms centered in the embodiment of individuals, groups of individuals, and structural, institutional, and environmental impacts upon human bodies.1 In fact, at the time of writing this conclusion, the Carnegie Endowment is currently tracking 230 significant anti-government protests worldwide across 110 countries. Our work is far from finished. It is imperative not only to document these activisms but also to analyze the efficacy of embodied activism, whether different forms of activism are beneficial, and to what extent they actually affect real and lasting change. The need to better understand contemporary activist events from an embodied perspective is rooted in the relationship between embodied identities and the systemic oppressions at the core of contemporary protest movements. Analyzing the efficacy of activisms, particularly those in the face of government and corporate silencing power are often exceptionally difficult to analyze, given their nuanced differing contexts, for example, from the extended and sizeable protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Standing 227

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Rock, North Dakota, to the public outcry and demands for free speech protections in China following the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, an individual health-care provider who was detained by police for exposing the coronavirus outbreak (Green, 2020; Hegarty, 2020; Langley, 2020). By theorizing the condition of embodied activism when identities are simultaneously contained and activated, we need to continue to illustrate how embodiment through activism seeks to reveal personalized, activist goals while striving to deconstruct systems. In The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, Micah White (2016), one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street and the broader Occupy movement, notes, “activism is at a crossroads.” He argues, “We can stick to the old paradigm, keep protesting in the same ways and hope for the best. Or we can acknowledge the crisis, embark on wild experimentation and prepare for revelation” (p. 241). The constructive perspective of leaders of movements can enhance the assessment of activism and associated social movements. Informed by The End of Protest and White’s (2014) provocative arguments in his Occupy Wall Street blog, that protests as we know them must end, and that “activism faces a dilemma: how to walk the line between false hope and pessimistic resignation” (para. 9), we lay out a directive for embodied activisms at present and in the future. There is an abundance of historical evidence confirming that change is a slow process and not all forms of activism have equal visibility. Recall, from the introductory chapter of this book, the testimonies of three survivors of the Tulsa Massacre. After the decimation of their community, survivors made insurance claims, all of which were denied. They fought for reparations for decades. Survivors wrote what they witnessed, for instance, Mary Jones Parrish, who in her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster, retold her horror of watching machine-gun fire by the white mob who descended upon their neighborhood the night and early morning of May 31–June 1, 1921. In October 2020, 6 months before the massacre centennial, activists in Tulsa painted a mural on the site of the massacre. It was removed by city authorities within two hours (AP, 2020). But it was the Congressional testimony of survivors Viola Fletcher, Hughes Van Ellis, and Lessie Evely Benningfield Randle, the embodied presence of Fletcher and Van Ellis in the halls of Congress, and the first-hand witnessing of the massacre that brought a level of visibility that may, finally, make a change, 100 years later. As we are completing this book merely weeks after the Congressional testimonials of Fletcher, Van Ellis, and Benningfield Randle, it is too early to assess the impact of those Tulsa massacre survivors’ voices. We are also well aware of such specific visible, highlighted testimony, and visibility more broadly, do not guarantee desired results, justice-centric change, or effective action. Lasting change tends to take slow, deliberate, and continued action;

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meanwhile systems of power push back to maintain themselves and, thereby, the status quo. Activist leaders remind us of these challenges. Numerous activists who have reflected upon and written of their experiences, for instance, Jane McAlevey (2016), Saul Alinsky (1971/1989), Noam Chomsky, Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, and Paul Shannon (2021), remind us that contemporary activism from an embodied perspective is organic and complex, involving multiple layers of actualization and impact. Therefore there is a need for highlighting and inspecting these forms of activism for the purposes of scholarship and practice. Alicia Garcia (cited in Martin, 2020), principal of the Black Futures Lab and activist who, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometti, founded what is now the global Black Lives Matter movement, reflects on her own activisms: I’ve been an organizer for 20 years, and seven years of those two decades have been involved in helping to build the Black Lives Matter movement. And so, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned over the last seven years is that there is such a hunger for better understanding how movements happen. Can you turn hashtags into movements? What is the way to use social media to bring people together? Can influencers also be organizers? These are all big questions that I get every single day. (para. 7)

To reflect upon these questions, Garcia (2020) published her book The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, as “a tool that we can use to better understand what our role is in making change and how we can use our talents, whatever they are, to contribute to a movement that can change the world” (para. 7). The evolution of activist goals based on acknowledged systemic and structural inequities throughout the centuries indicates the continuing relationship between activist practices and embodied identities. Thus, there is a significant need for revisiting, redefining, repurposing how activisms are addressed, discussed, and actualized both in theory and practice. This book, and the larger project from which it emerges, was designed to interrogate how historically significant events have influenced developments in activisms as well as shifts in understandings of identity and the role, significance, and impact of embodied experiences. From this, we provided new avenues for investigating the relationship between embodied experience and advocating processes by focusing on the transformative qualities of these forms of activism for individual practitioners and stakeholders rather than the success or lack thereof of social changes instigated and achieved through advocacies.

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THE WEIGHT OF OUR EFFORTS The authors’ framing of embodied activisms through this book was designed to address a descriptive gap in accounts and scholarly literature about embodiment within activism—the transformative experience of participatory bodybased action on the collective communities of practice. Recall, from chapter 1, our framing has also addressed the need for clear labeling of the performative nature of embodied activism in contrast with contemporary, pejorative accounts of “performative activism” that imply false or status quo affirming bases to some practices of activism. We have therefore offered our notion of embodied activisms to address both of these gaps and inconsistencies. Thus, as evidenced throughout this book, we have defined embodied activism as identity-based participatory advocacy directly utilizing the body as a site of power from which to resist structural and systemic inequities and limitations. This definition is more comprehensive than earlier inclusions of embodied experience within definitions of activism, and grounds the need for social justice movements to emanate from embodied experience. Embodied activists, therefore, are those who perform their advocacies utilizing their bodies as a tool for change, often as highly visible acts of civil disobedience or small-to-large-scale protest movements. These practices are intended to increase visibility of and raise awareness of issues and validate the legitimacy of the need to a large audience or political agency. These actions require the practitioners to take risks, which can vary in significance and threatlevel both to themselves and to those for whom they are advocating. These forms of activism are not new, but they are conceptualized in this text within a framework that highlights the relationship between structural need and human, embodied experience. In this book we and the contributors have focused on contemporary actualizations of embodied activism that illustrate the varied perspectives of understanding bodies and how they exist within advocacy. The pursuit of the body, both physical and spiritual, as an entity of significance within advocating processes gives a universally inclusive value to the collected essays. The multitude of embodied activisms function by heightening the performative aspects of selves navigated through layers of dramatic and artistic expression and practice. Thus, the collected essays in this volume illustrated the extent to which embodied activism is simultaneously political and performative and plays out through potential impacts in multiple aspects of individual lives, including raced, gendered, ethnic, classed, and censored bodies. We have grounded our volume and its larger project in a historical analysis of how embodiment has been actualized within activism and the limits of how this has been described in scholarship and activist literature. Our chapters then developed the concept through how activist roles exist within a series of

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resistance narratives. Our contributors investigated the relationship between marginalized identities and embodied experience, and how this relationship is negotiated as a site of argument construction and community-building. These processes, which span global and experiential settings, allow us to illustrate how the need for embodied activism for scholars and practitioners articulates a practical, self-actualizing, personally perceptual, and participatory welcomeness within exercises of advocacy. INTERSECTIONAL/INTERGENERATIONAL ACTIVIST-SCHOLARS Along with the centenarians sharing their testimony of surviving a massacre 100 years ago, the successor generations of activists are tremendously inspiring and deserve far more attention. Activist youth worldwide have made it clear that they are willing to advocate from within embodied activist movements. For example, Amanda Gorman, Greta Thunberg, Shamma bint Suhail Faris Mazrui, Malala Yousafzai, David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez and other Parkland survivors, Yara Shahidi, and Desmond Napoles are all youth leaders representing contemporary embodied activisms. These young people are embracing the change they wish to see in a world which they perceive has leadership or government that has failed them. Thus, they take upon themselves the torch to enlighten a brighter future with the guidance and clarity of a just, moral, and integral society. It not only takes the youth of this world to stand up, speak, and act to effect change. It also takes multigenerational collaboration to build bridges of understanding, resources, and strategies that are necessary to effect lasting and effective change within activism regarding clarity of goals and efficiency, as well as sustainability, through this coalition-building, and mentorship of the next generation of activists is made possible. As critical rhetorician Philip Wander argues, as scholars we should be advocates: Whither ideology? Nowhere and everywhere, and if we cannot now, in the privacy of our own imagination and the collectivity of our action, find a way out of the labyrinth within which we are gathering up future generations to feed the minotaur we have created, then God help us to help our selves, our people, our fellow citizens, and the whole of life on the planet now and in the future. (Wander, 2011, p. 427)

For example, the making of this book on “Embodied Activism” was embarked upon as a multigenerational collaborative project and act of embodied activism.

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Our authors have spanned generations of activism, and generations of activist-scholarship. They have also spanned academic disciplines and incorporate a variety of embodied writing styles. We are scholar-activists, teacherscholars, and teacher-activists (Donovan & Tracy, 2017; Elliott, 2017; Frey & Palmer, 2017; Griffiths, 2017; Romano & Daum, 2018; Romano & Highby, 2018; Sullivan, 2015; 2017). As academics, we serve a role helping students engage in better research and influence their critical thinking abilities and civic engagement. Some educators are now calling for more scholar-teacheractivism in pedagogical processes, with a focus on encouraging students not only in activist action but in studying and understanding how activisms function and progress in society. We are generations of activist-scholar-teachers, and we incorporate our embodied experiences into our scholarly activism and teaching (Guajardo et al., 2017). We range from first-generation civically minded students who have become instructors to scholar-activists with a long family history of educational efforts, we embody a variety of gendered, racial, and ethnic encounters with activism and scholarship, inspired by social, political, and moral convictions. We are emerging teacher-scholar-activists, emeritus teacher-scholar-activists, and embodied activists engaging with educational, political, and other institutional norms. We write in ethnographic, autoethnographic, literary criticism, performative, poetic, and other varieties and forms of academic-activist writing. In this volume, authors have drawn on an interdisciplinary foci including, but not limited to, critical theories, intersectional studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, intercultural and international communication studies, sociology, social psychology, performance studies, and cultural theories regarding activist identities, the limited nature of personal versus structural empowerment, and the embodied processes that construct extremist rhetoric and violence. We examined embodiments of witnessing, which is evident through advocative, legal, and political processes, and even in death. We examined the role of silence in and the types of silence that impact advocacy and activism. We examined the nuances of leisure spectacles, slacktivisms, digital and physical activisms, and everyday activisms of embodied resistance in the public and private spheres. We looked at how embodied performance engage the activist-self and those with whom the activists engage in productive sites of power, pleasure, and possibility. Scholars in the volume examined emerging activisms as well as longstanding efforts of resistance and embodied engagement for freedom, equality, and justice. We assessed the impact and role of memory within embodied activisms, and the need for ethical commemoration of historical events and truths. We looked at the role of narrative and language in the construction of embodiment and embodied activisms, and the power relationships that are constructed by and within power-knowledge dynamics as they relate

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to activists’ and oppressed selves. And we looked at the need to overcome stigma and biopower limitations through embodied activist engagement in the public sphere. As editors of this volume, we have also enacted our embodied activistscholarship in our editorial framing and work on our framing chapters. We are multigenerational scholars ourselves: Lara Martin Lengel was Victoria Newsom’s professor and mentor in graduate school, and Victoria Newsom was Desiree Montenegro’s professor and mentor in graduate school; thus, three women connected by one central narrative and overall objective to effect change in the world and leave it a better place for the next generation of scholar-activists, teacher-scholars, and teacher-activists, and citizens who are committed to economic, environmental, racial, gender, and social justice. Such examples of embodied activism are only made possible through intergenerational embodied activisms, this book is instrumental in that process. Understanding the body as a site of power, we know that no one can stop an individual, group, or population from actualizing one’s reality and impact unless and until it is policed out of existence, therefore self-policing and subversive attempts to silence or mute the body must be visible and invisible resisted through acts of embodied activism. WHERE NEXT? Not all forms of activism are equally effective and systemic change requires multiple overlapping efforts through several different advocating means to address any single issue as part of a larger connected set of inequities. For example, hypervisible activists must work with policy advocates as well as agents for personal advocacy capable of reaching individuals within the constituencies of need. Activisms cannot function in a vacuum and cannot thrive without effort from both within and outside of the activist community. Without these overlapping efforts, lasting effective change cannot be achieved. Embodied activists must highlight the issues of inequitable body statuses and work to change their own realities while ensuring that their messaging and systemic change efforts address the needs of living people outside of the movement. The application of multipronged approaches and multilayered advocacies allow activists to fight for different levels of change, while appealing to the different audience(s) toward social change application. However, avoiding the pitfalls of the pejoratively discussed version of “performative activism” wherein the advocate stands alone and apart from their audience(s), such as critiques of the Occupy movement and various hashtag movements. Similarly, what many people interpreted as “failures” of these

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movements are rooted in perceptions of immediacy and sustainability. For example, critiques of these movements center around themes such as “failures” to coalition-build, “failures” to maintain visible anti-narratives, “failures” effectively manage public perception to counter-hegemonic aggression discouraging media coverage and public participation. Upcoming analyses of current globally recognized movements such as MeToo and BLM have faced similar public critiques. However, unlike most activisms, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have been unique in that they openly marketed their central narratives to a wider audience, which may serve to explain the aggressive hegemonic counter-narratives faced by these movements. For example, the relationship between the BLM movement and recent public arguments from the U.S. political right to ban teaching Critical Race Theory and the 1619 projects keep this topic in a highly visible space, thereby encouraging visible embodied narratives response and activism. Thus, we must continue to examine the visibility of activism and how that visibility encourages participation. We must also critique the visibility when it is limited to performative, spectacle, or Astroturf activity that does not directly influence systemic dismantling. These actions reside too often within a space of visibility that is itself limited in view and perspective, and often serve to reinforce the status quo rather than dismantle structural inequities. For example, the rise of anti-masking and anti-vaccination efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly within the United States, are themselves forms of embodied activism, however, lacking in structural reform goals. CODETTA Ultimately, embodied activisms are intersectional, intergenerational, transnational, transgender, cross-disciplinary, and intertextual. Therefore, these efforts are most effective when they center in collaboration and coalitionbuilding and are responsive to changing needs and shifts within the rhetorical constructions of reality. Embodied activisms must also engage with and ground active scholarship and the role of the activist-teacher-scholar. In short, we must engage with teaching and memorializing the kinds of efforts discussed in this volume, participation in activist-scholarship that resonates with current social, political, cultural, and environmental awareness is key to ensuring fully developed student identities (Elliot, 2017; Frey & Palmer, 2017; Guajardo, Guajardo, & Locke, 2017; Romano & Daum, 2018; Romano & Highby, 2018). After all, we must both teach about the Tulsa Massacre and participate in marches, spectacle displays, and other embodied events highlighting such forgotten and minimized histories in order to inspire a

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generation of embodied activists, scholars, and advocates. This moment of scholar-activism closes, but the next movement is beginning its crescendo. Embodied activisms must also continue to be investigated in terms of how they address interconnected identities, communities of practice, and participatory governance and institutional roles. They are movements that provide space for witnessing, both witnessing contemporary acts and as a means of narrating the past. The actions and narratives provided by Darnella Frazier in capturing and sharing the death of George Floyd on video, like the Tulsa Massacre survivor narratives of Viola Fletcher, Hughes Van Ellis, and Lessie Evely Benningfield Randle, both interrogate traumatic experiences of bodily harm and provide the needed pathos-laden expression to reach other people within their own lived, embodied experiences. These voices will no longer be ignored and must be actualized within continuing efforts to understand and make visible ongoing embodied activisms. NOTE 1. For analyses and details about various activist movements mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, please see the following: For the Extinction Rebellion in the UK, see Lee, 2021 Richardson, 2020; Virasami, 2021. For analyses and details about the Blockupy movement in Germany, please see Daphi & Zimmermann, 2021; Kaindi, 2013; Mullis et al., 2016; Rak, 2020. For the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement in Paris, see Grossman, 2019; Shultziner & Kornblit, 2020; Wilkin, 2020. For the Decolonize This Place movement, see Brown, 2016; Chen, 2016; Greenberg, 2018; Jegroo, 2018; Penny, 2019. For a report on the most recent protest against a fatal homophobic hate crime, see Goodman, 2021.

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Index

15–M Movement (Spain), 163 1992 National Coalition of Racism in Sports and Media Forms, 84 Abdelghany, Abdelrahman, ix Abdul–Aziz, Nora, ix, 6 Abu Mustafa, Ibraheem (Reuters), 122 Abu Saleh, Fadi, 122 accountability, 33, 97; police, xvi, 37–54 action(s), xiii, 33, 64, 65, 71, 75, 79, 96, 123, 131, 149, 154, 158, 173, 224, 225, 230, 235; disciplinary, 221; embodied, 55, 57, 58, 60; full, 43. See also Police Accountability Activism (PAA); physical action of protestors, 57; political, xv, 6, 97–98; transformative social, 58 activism(s), ix, xi–xx, 3–28, 31, 33–35, 37, 39–42, 47, 55–61, 63, 65–70, 76–79, 91, 96, 124, 126, 129, 135– 37, 146, 154, 159, 167, 178–79, 183–84, 188, 192–96, 198, 201–2, 204–6, 211, 220–21, 227–35; and advocacy, 61; animal rights activism, 6; anti–violence, 6; “Astroturf”, xiv, 5, 234; authenticated visible, 27–32; “behind–the–scenes”, 22; breastfeeding, xix, 191–204;

direct, 64; eco-, 74; embodied, ix, xi–xx, 3–35, 37–79, 81–93, 95–115, 119–37, 139–73, 177–89, 191–235; emphatically visible, 22–27; feminist, 37–54; in gender and feminist contexts, xv; in global and transnational contexts, 119–37, 139–73; hypervisible embodied, 10– 16; invisible embodied, 17–22; limits to embodiment within, ix; militant, 64; Police Accountability, xvi, 37–54; and risk to bodies, lives, and identities to promote social change, ix; sex worker, 6; silent, 167–68, 177–89, 205–26 Activism, Police Accountability (PAA), xvi, 37–54 activist(s): embodied, ix, xi–xx, 3–35, 37–79, 81–93, 95–115, 119–37, 139–73, 177–89, 191–235; feminist, 37–54; goals, evolution of, 229; Hungarian Jewish, 149; interpretation of activists as disorganized, 63; LGBTQIA+, 38, 205–26; scientist, 98; spectacle, 55–79; writers, xvi, 95–115 Actor Network Theory, xix, 151–73. See also Latour, Bruno acts of peaceful assembly, 66

281

282

Index

aesthetic(s), 42, 152, 172 affect/affective, 59, 81, 131, 143; embodied activism, 269; potential, 143 African American teachers, 20 Agent Orange, 98, 102 Aguiar–Castillo, Lidia, 78 AIDS, 90–92; homophobic and racist response from the Right, 90 Akindes, Fay Yokomizo, xxin2 Alaimo, Stacy, 58. See also trans– corporeality Alcatraz Island, 31 al-Ghandour, Laila, 122 alienation, 82 Alinsky, Saul, 229 Al–Karama, Thawrat [The Revolution for Dignity], 17. See also “Arab Spring” Allis, Kevin, 32. See also National Congress of the American Indians (NCAI) Al Mazrui, Shamma bint Suhail Faris, 231 alQaws, 137 alterity, 226 Amendment(s), U.S. Constitutional: First, 40, 41, 45, 49, 86, 211, 221; Second, 40, 45; Nineteenth, 15 American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, 61 American Heart Association’s Heart Walk, 61 American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs), 28–33 American Indian Economic Development, Harvard Project on, 32 American Indian Movement (AIM), 31 Americas, xiv amnesia, discursive, xvii–xviii Amnesty International, 151–52 analysis, textual, 65 anger, 68, 164 anguish, 37, 101. See also Floyd, George

anti-colonial, 132; resistance movements, 137 Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement (Hong Kong) protests, 227 anti–government protests worldwide, 227 anti–masking and anti–vaccine protests during the COVID–19 pandemic, 26 anti-place, 108–10, 113 Antonetta, Susanne, 95–115 Anzaldúa, Gloria, xiv, 20, 181 Aotearoa, 198 “Arab Spring”, 6, 17, 35, 163–64 Arbery, Ahmaud, 4, 57, 76 Armenia, 21 Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes Párt), 140 art as protest, xviii, 151–73 art in public spaces, 151–73 artistic expression, xiii, 161, 230 Asia, xiv, 108 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), 303 “Astroturf” activism, xiv, 5, 234 Aswat, 137 Athey, Ron, xvii, 85–92 Atwood, Margaret, xix, 177, 185, 188 Auschwitz, 147 authoritarian/authoritarianism, 18, 25, 50, 159, 162 Authority Collective, 44 “awful but lawful”, 45 Axis Powers, 140 Azazi, Ziya, 155, 169–71 Belafonte, Harry, 12 Bennie, Natalie, xviii, 139–50 Benningfield, Lessie Evelyn Randle, xii, 228, 235. See also Tulsa Massacre Berkeley Copwatch, 37–54 Big Latch On, 191–204 Big Latch On, Global, 195 “biketivism”, 69; bio–power, 5, 8, 13. See also Foucault, Michel Birzescu, Anca, xiv, 14

Index

Black: bodies, xii, 15, 53, 54, 81, 93, 225; feminist movement, 189n1; Futures Lab, 229; and Latinx communities, 16; motherhood, 194; Panther Party/Black Panthers, 39; Power Movement, 39; Power salute, 6; Wall Street. See Tulsa Massacre. See also Black Lives Matter movement Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC), 35 #blacklivesmatter, 4 Black Lives Matter movement, 13, 41, 189, 219, 227, 229, 234; and Police Accountability Activism, 37–54; protests worldwide, xxin1, 6; of Seattle–King County (BLMSKC), 16 Blockupy movement, 227, 235 blogs, student activist, 208, 210–11 Bock, Mary Angela, xvi, 37–54 bodily performance art, 88 body/bodies, 3–35; absence of the lived, 143; activist, xv, 8, 34; Black, xii, 15, 53, 54, 81, 93, 225; burdens, xvi, 95–118; classed, 230; discursive conception of the body, 54; HIV–positive, 90; impacts to, 5; marginalized, 81–93; “muttering”, 84–85; paint, 72; protesting, 238; rhetorical construction of, 4; as a site of resistance, xii; socially constituted into culture(s), 8; social value of, 91; subjugations of, 5; suffering, 85 bombings, 128–29. See also Stop Bombing Gaza Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773, Boston, Massachusetts), 14 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, xx Bouazizi, Mohammed, xxin1 bounce(y) house, 63 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8–10, 14 boycott(s), bus (Montgomery, Alabama), 59; Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, 136

283

Bracewell, Lorna, 56, 79 breastfeeding, xix, 191–204; discrimination, 203 Breastfeeding World, 192 Bristol (England) Black Lives Matter protest, 6. See also Reid, Jen British government’s condemnation of the American Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, 28 Brown, John, 18 Brown, Michael, 4 #brownlivesmatter, 4 brutality: police, 4, 16, 37–54, 152, 171 Budapest, Hungary, xviii, 139–50 Buehler, Antonio, 41. See also Police Accountability Activism (PAA) Butler, Judith, xii, xvi, 10, 19, 54n2, 55, 58, 77–78, 81–83, 126 Califia, Patrick, 89–90 California Coalition for Women Prisoners, 21 Canada, First Nations, 32 Canadian Indian Residential School sites, 32 cancer, 61, 95, 99–115 capital, 61, 164–67; cultural, 9, 22; embodied, 9–10, 14; forms of, 9–10; physical, 9, 14. See also Bourdieu, Pierre capitalism, xix, 164, 197; global, 164; globalized, 165; neoliberal, 165 Carlisle Indian School (Carlisle, Pennsylvania), 30 Carlos, John, xii. See also Smith, Tommie Carlton, Darryl, 86. See also performance, art Carnegie Endowment, 227. See also anti–government protests worldwide Carson, Rachel, 95, 109. See also Silent Spring Cassara, Catherine, 159 Castile, Philando, 4

284

Index

catastrophe, 119, 123, 129, 135. See also Nakba/Nakba day Cavin Hambrick, Margaret, xvii, 81–93 Center for Artistic Activism, xii change, ix, xii–xiv, xvii, xx, 3–5, 7–8, 10–13, 17–20, 23–25, 33, 46, 56, 63, 79, 119–20, 132–33, 142, 154–55, 160, 166, 172, 181, 183, 186, 204, 206–9, 216–17, 223, 227–31, 233; agents of, 19; justice–centric, 228; lasting, xx, 227–28, 231, 233; policy, 50, 70; political, 25, 161; resistance to, 7; social, ix, 3, 7–8, 18, 25, 82, 161, 189, 207, 216, 224, 229; strategic, 27; systemic, 7–8, 10, 27, 219, 233 Charlottesville, Virginia, 229–30 Chávez, César, 21 Chávez, Karma, xiv, 181, 186 Chiune, Sugihara, 18 Chomsky, Noam, 229 Chouliaraki, Lilie, xxn1 Chrifi Alaoui, Fatima Zahrae, 35n2 citizen/s, 40, 42, 47, 51, 97–98, 108, 121–22, 133, 139, 163–64, 167–69, 172, 192, 194, 223–24, 231, 233; activists, xvi; Hungarian, 141, 145, 147–49; journalists, xi, 40 citizenship, 35n4, 86, 119, 178 civic engagement, 232 civil disobedience, xiii, 56, 125, 167, 214, 230; highly visible acts of, 230 civil rights, 6, 189, 222; activists, 21; demonstrations, 16; movement (U.S.), xii, xvi, 12, 16, 55, 59–60, 160, 162, 219, 222; protests, xii, 222 Civil Rights and Anti–War Movements (U.S.), xvi, 12, 55, 59–60, 160, 162, 219. See also songs sung during the U.S. civil rights movement civil society, 54 civil society organizations, 20–22, 32–33, 137, 197–98, 209–12 Civil War (U.S.), 12, 17, 28 Clare, Eli, xx

Clark, Jordin, xix, 177–89 Clark, Septima Poinsette, 20 Clark, Stephon, 4 class, 9, 178, 193; hierarchies of, 41; and intersectionality, 20, 47; middle, 193; privilege, 194; white ruling, 11; working, 14 climate catastrophe, 6 climate change: activism/movement to address, 6, 62; denial of, 6 coalition–building, 13, 64 Code of Indian Offenses, 30 Code Pink, 83–84 collective communities of practice, 230 collective memory, 119–37, 139–50 Collins, Patricia Hill, xiv, 182, 184–85 Colombia. See Indigenous peoples, Colombians’ protest (Bogotá) colonialism, settler, 132, 136 colonial/ist, 47; violence, 135; white frames, 47 colonial ruling powers, 3 colonization, 132; of the body, 25; impacts of, 32; Western, 130 colonized: peoples, 3, 132, 137; spaces, 132 Colston, Edward, 6 commemoration of the past: ethical, xviii communal experience, 73 communities, vulnerable, 32 community, xix, xx, 46, 52, 57, 60, 64, 68–69, 71–74, 77–78, 104, 109, 129, 136, 196; action, 64; activist, 233; –building, xviii, 46, 49, 64, 68, 71–73, 127, 164, 173, 193, 211, 215, 231; diasporic, 120; discourse, 64; embodied act of, 78; global/international, 127, 131, 137; identity, 64; Indigenous, 120; leisure activity, 56; LGBTQIA+, 49, 215–16; oppressed, 5; organizing, 121; Palestinian, 128; political, 126; of practice, 27; “sacrifice”, 110; scientific, 95–98;

Index

sense of, 74; solidarity, 73, 74; sovereignty, 74 Comstock Act of 1873/Comstock Laws, 24 “confrontational encounters”, 59 consciousness, 75, 181; “differential”, 21; double, 4; political, 165; public, 12, 76; social, 172 consciousness–raising, xiii, 11, 33, 136 Constitution, U.S., 221 constitutive event, 64 contact zone, 58 contextualizing, xv continuous history, xvii Cop Block, 37–54 cop–watching, xvi, 37–54 Copwatch in Oakland, 37–54 coronavirus: coronavirus outbreak, 228. See also COVID–19 counter–memorial, xvi counter–monument, 141–42, 144–49 counterstrategic reinscription, xiv Courts of Indian Offenses, 30 COVID–19/COVID–19 pandemic, ix, 6, 14, 16, 26, 32, 57, 66, 75–76, 91, 194, 234 creative practice, embodied, xiv Crenshaw, Kimberlé, xiv, 47, 179 crisis/crises, xviii, 32, 164, 166, 228 critical/cultural: analysis/analyses, xiv, xvi, 57; scholars, 65 Critical Mass (bike ride demonstration event), 66, 69–71 Critical Race Theory, 14, 26, 234 Crowe, Eyre, 27–28. See also witnessing Cullors, Patrisse, 229 Culp, Andrew C., 83–85 cultural, xiii, xiv, 8, 24, 28, 29, 41, 44, 93, 107, 129, 149, 160, 182, 226, 232, 234; capital, 9–10, 14, 22; creativity and artistic expression, xiii; disruption, 79; genocide, 33; mechanisms, xiii; memory, xii, xvii; nuances, 14; production, xv;

285

resistance, 192; and rhetorical phenomena, 60; stereotypes, 14 culture(s), xiii, xvi, xvii, 8–9, 19, 28–29, 50, 105, 107, 114, 120, 124, 132, 159, 163, 182, 184, 193, 195, 209, 224; censorship, 172–73; counterculture/subculture(s), 69, 162–63, 222; dominant, 162–63; Gezi, 171; national, 169; public, 214, 219; state–sponsored memorial, 139; Tribal, 30 “cultural indoctrination”, 13 “culture jams”/“culture jamming”, xvi, 54–57, 61, 63, 67–68, 74, 78–79 Cummins, Molly Wiant, xix, 191–204 Curry, Stephen, 12 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), 6, 74, 227–28. See also Standing Rock Sioux dance–in(s), 57 D’Aponte, Mimi, xxin2 Davis, Angela, 178 Dawes Act, U.S. (1887), 29 Day of Silence, xx, 205–26 Dean, Tim, xvii, 82–86, 90 de Certeau, Michel, xiv, 142 decolonial, xviii, 119–37, 301; approach(es), 135; memory–work, xviii, 119–37; movements, 135 Decolonize This Place (movement), 227, 235n1 defiance, 57, 222; direct, 77; performative, 75–77 delegitimized stereotyping, 23 DeLuca, Kevin Michael, 55, 59–61, 124–25, 181–82 Demand Justice (organization), 183 demonstration(s), xvi, xviii, 16, 31, 37, 55–79, 120–21, 129, 134, 139, 151, 152; civil rights, 16, 55; leisure spectacle, 55–79; public mass, 55–56, 60–61, 65, 68, 76, 165; silent, 151–73, 177–89, 205–26. See also Black Lives Matter; “culture

286

Index

jams”/“culture jamming”; occupy movement(s) demonstrative protest rhetoric, 62 Derber, Charles, 229 de Souza e Silva, Adriana, 163, 165–66 dialogue(s), 136, 170, 211–12, 217–18, 220, 230 Dichloro-Diphenyl-Dichloroethylene (DDE), 101, 109–10 Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), 101, 109–10 discourse(s), xvii, 37–79, 81–83, 86, 89–93, 95–115, 119–37, 177–89, 191–204, 214, 224–26, 237; of the body, 256; breakdown of, 93; of collective memory, 143; colonial, 267; conspiratorial, 61, 81; defiant, 261; deliberative, 81; disruptive, 88; embodiment in, 42–45; failed, 83; homophobic, 83; incoherent, 81; limits of, 83; nonrational, 81; of the Other, 82; political, 83–84; of power, 88; public, 15, 86, 92, 182–83; rational, xvii, 85, 90, 92; surrounding police accountability, 41–45, 49, 53; theory of, 83; vernacular, 35, 64; virulent, 92 discrimination, 33, 203, 209–12, 216 discursive amnesia, xvii–xviii disenfranchisement, 26 disruption(s), xvi, 55–79, 89–89, 177, 208, 222 disrupt(ive), 93, 180, 187, 203, 221–22, 224; and performative critique of motorized space, 70; potential, 83; silence, xx, 224 dissident(s), 64, 168 Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), 22 Dolan, Jill, 85 dominance, 189; gendered, sexualized, and racialized acts of, 189n1 dominant meanings, 63 Douglass, Frederick, 12 DuBois, W. E. B., 16. See also NAACP

Duckworth, Senator Tammy, 203 Durham Peters, John. See Peters, John Durham Dweik, Sarah Cathryn Majed, xviii, 119–37 dynamic spectacle, 64 dystopia/dystopian, 168, 184–87. See also Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ecocriticism, 96 economic, xviii, 4–5, 9–10, 13–14, 28, 30, 32, 108, 136, 162, 164, 173; control of Indigenous peoples, 28, 30; identity, 5; inequality, 4, 28, 32, 59; in/justice, 6, 233; instability, 13, 164. See also Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development; systemic Edwards, Joanne, 196. See also Big Latch On, Global embodied: action and temporality, 62; activism(s), xi–xxi, 3–35, 37–79, 81– 93, 95–115, 119–37, 139–73, 177– 89, 191–235; creative practice, xiv; performance, 143–44, 181, 185, 232; practice(s), xix, 5, 37–38, 40–41, 47, 51; protest, xvi, 56, 73, 75–76, 149; routinized practice, 38; sensorial, material, and personal aspects of, 58; visual disruptions as embodied activism(s), 55–79; witnessing, xvi– xviii, 37–51, 139–50 embodiment: within activism, ix, 230; historical analysis of, 230 emotion(s), 50, 79, 81, 90, 98, 106, 131–32, 143–44. See also affect/ affective emotional, 10, 48, 106, 129, 161; distress, 50, 52, 127, 216; support, 200 empathy, 89 emphatically visible activist bodies, xv, 22–27 Enck–Wanzer, Darrel, 179

Index

Endres, Danielle, 59, 62–63, 68–69, 73, 144 engagement, xvii, 27, 85–86, 91, 126, 129, 133–34; activist, xviii, 6, 14, 23, 233; advocacy, 125; civic, 232; collective, 126; embodied, 6, 232; of hope, 133; with memory–work, 136; performative, xv, 34; public, 136; sensory, 60 engagement, embodied activist, 6 English Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 (The), 23 English seventeenth–century enslaver, 6 enslaved: Africans, 27–28; people(s), 3, 5, 27, 34. See also François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture; Haiti; slavery environmental, xvi, xvii, xx, 60, 151, 164, 227; activists, 206; awareness, 57, 69–70, 234; justice, xiii, 96, 233; organizations, 20, 98; science, 95–112 ephemeral, 109; enactment, 72; fissures, 62 epistemology, 40, 48; feminist, 37, 47, 51; of past trauma, 144; witnessing, 40 equality, xviii, 3, 133, 224, 232 equal rights, 225 Erőss, Ágnes, 142, 149 essentialism, strategic, 22 essentialization, process of, 22 essentialized activisms, 24–25 essentialized categorizations of identity, 23–24 ethic(s), 72; of care, 48–54, 96; environmental, 96; feminist, 37–54; journalistic, 44; of witnessing, 143, 147 ethical, 49, 58, 96, 139, 143, 147; commemoration of the past, xviii, 150, 232; duty, 144; mandate, 144; responsibility, 150; urgency, 139 ethnic justice movements, 4

287

ethnographic fieldwork/research, xiv, xviii, 42, 70, 78, 208, 219 ethnographic writing, 119, 232 ethnography, xiv, 71, 78 Europe, xiv, 61, 108, 123, 168; anti– Semitic regulations in, 139; anti– Semitism in, 139; East Central and Southeastern Europe, xiv; Eastern, 162 European: colonialism, 123; – influenced, 28; protest movements, 164, 168 evocative resistance narratives, xv exigency/exigencies: overdetermined rhetorical responses to, 90–91 extension of subjectivity, 77 Extinction Rebellion (UK), 6, 227, 235 Facebook, xix, 154, 155, 158, 195–204 “fake news”, 6 Fanon, Frantz, 15 Fanone, Michael, 7, 26 far–right, 247 fascism/fascist, 26, 140; neo–, 150 Fausto–Sterling, Anne, xvi–xvii fear, 79, 114–15, 124, 215 Fedak–Lengel, Daniella, 6 FEMEN, 6 feminism(s), 17, 47, 192, 203; disguised, 17; intersectional, 203; neoliberal, 203 feminist/s, 17, 20, 24, 49, 54, 91, 137, 192; activism(s), xiii, 18, 47, 178, 188, 192; approach(es), 8; collective action, 194–95; collective political resistance, 195; contexts, xv; criticism, xvi; critics and theorists, 58; critique, 202; embodiment, xvi; epistemology, 37, 51; ethic of care, 48–49; ethics, xvi, 37–54; intersectional, 203; lens, 49; moral philosophy, 52; movement, 178, 189; neoliberal, 203; philosophy, 37, 47–51, 53; politics, 192; postmodern, 54; principles, 224; protest, 179;

288

Index

reproductive movement, 179; resistance, 194; rhetorical criticism, xix, 179, 195; scholars, 47; struggle, 178; theory, 18, 38, 47–48; voices, 19 Fernández Huerta, Dolores Clara, 20–21 Fidesz Party (Hungary), xvi, xviii, 139, 141, 242 first African American protest (July 28, 1917, New York City), 15–16, 205, 225 “First Amendment Checks”, 41 First Nations, 28–34; march on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (1981), 31; protest of the removal of indigenous and treaty rights (Edmonton Arena, Alberta), 31. See also American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) first (U.S.) silent march, 15–16, 205, 225 Fisher, Walter R., 44 Fletcher, Viola, xi–xii, 228, 235. See also Tulsa Massacre Floyd, George, xiii, xxin1, 4, 6, 15, 26, 28, 37, 40, 43, 47, 51–53, 227, 235 Fonda, Jane, 12 food and housing insecurities, 32 Foucauldian, xiv, 13, 47, 51, 167; panopticism, 51; philosophy, xvi, 13 Foucault, Michel, xiv, 5, 8, 23, 41, 47–48, 51, 78, 165, 168; and counter strategic reinscription of the body, 167–68 Frazier, Darnella, 4, 37, 52–54 freedom, xviii, 128, 232; of expression, 86; Palestinian, xviii, 119–37; reproductive, xvii, 178, 183–85, 188, 189. See also March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, The (August 28, 1963, Washington, D.C.) Freedom Rides, 56, 59 Free the Snake Flotilla/Niimíipuu River Rendezvous, 66, 73 Frey, Lawrence R., ix, 232, 234 Friendly Airports for Mothers Act, 203

Frith, Jordan, 163, 165–66 Fulbright scholar(s), 299, 300, 302 Full Cycle Supper, 72 “gamification” of protest, 78 gamified acts of protest, 59 Garcia, Alicia, 229 Garner, Eric, 4, 40, 41 Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN), xx, 205–26 Gaza, 121–22, 126, 127, 132, 137; bombings of, 128–29; Heath Ministry, 122; Strip, 122 gaze, 41, 186, 187; disciplinary, 51; surveillance, 47 Geldoff, Bob, 12 gender, 19, 23, 41, 47, 49, 51, 53, 81, 194; and activism, xv; –based violence, 6; biblical views of, 188; binary, 53; and Butler’s theory of performativity, 81; expression, 209; hegemony, 23; hierarchies of, 41; identity, 209, 224; inequality, 195; justice, 223; narratives, 23; –neutral language, 204; non– binary, 226; norms, 23, 217, 224; –oriented embodied activists, 24; performance(s), 214; politics, 258; and power, 19; reframing of, 23; rights, 23; roles, 188; studies, 232; “traitors”, 185; trouble, 245; violence, 237; visibility of, 23. See also Butler, Judith; transgender gendered, 49, 51, 232; acts of dominance, 189; aspects of the body, xvii; bodies, 230; falsely, 54 genocide(s), 21, 146–47; cultural, 33 Germany: Blockupy movement, 227, 235; East, 160–61; Nazi, 17–18, 139–40 Gezi Park, 151–73 Gezi protests, xviii, 151–73 Giddens, Anthony, 164 gilets jaunes [yellow vests] (France), 227

Index

Gilligan, Carol, 48, 54 GLBTQIA+. See LGBTQIA+ global and local politics, ix González, X (Emma), 205, 231 GOP, 26 Gorman, Amanda, 231 grassroots activisms/activists, 141 Great March to Return, 122 “guerilla theater”, 61 Gündüz, Erdem, xiv, 151–73 habitus, 8–14. See also Bourdieu, Pierre Haiti, 3–4, 11, 12 Haitian War of Independence, 11 Hall, Stuart, xv Hambrick, Margaret Cavin, xvii, 81–93 Handmaid’s Tale, The, xix, 177–89 Hanson, Genevieve, 4 Harding, Sandra, 25 Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The, 32 healing, xvi, 95–96, 112 healing change, xvii Hebdige, Dick, 222 hegemonic, 7, 9, 13; authority, 25; bio– power, resistance to, 8; counter–, 153, 164, 173, 234; counter–hegemonic aggression, 234; counter–narratives, 234; cultural structuring, 8; frameworks, 13, 22; gender narratives, 23; identity constructs, 28; institutions, 34; mothering, 193; norms, xiii, 7, 27, 225; oppressions, xiii; power(s), 56, 125; reproduction of white supremacy as, 195; resistance, 6; state, 164; status quo, xiv; structures, xii, 5, 7, 10, 15; subversion, xx; subversion of norms, 225; systems, 6–7, 9–10, 20, 22, 27, 34 hegemonically established and authenticated understandings of truth, xvii hegemony: aspects of, 26; center of, xviii; counter–, xviii, 153, 165, 173; destabilizing/destabilization of, 5;

289

reproduction of white supremacy as, 194; structures of, 8 Henrik, Wieder, 147 Hess, Aaron, 139 heteronormativity, 224. See also patriarchy heterotopia, 78. See also Foucault, Michel hexis, 8–14. See also Bourdieu, Pierre hijab, 13 Hill, Collins Patricia, xiv, 182, 184–85 historical analysis, 230 historically disenfranchised ethnic group(s), 19 HIV/AIDS, 85–86 Hogg, David, 231 Holocaust, 18, 139–50; in Hungary, xviii, 139–50; memory/memory studies, 139–50; revisionism, 139– 50; survivors, second–generation, xviii, 141–43, 148. See also trauma Hong Kong (Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement) protests, 227 Honor–Your–Oath, 40 hooks, bell, xiv, 15, 19, 181, 186, 193 Hopper, Isaac, 18 House of Representatives, U.S., xi Huff, Billy, xvii, 81–93 human corporeality, 58 human rights, 21, 25, 105, 133, 172; abuses, 173; organizations, 20, 173; of Palestinians, 119–37; violations, 120, 125, 135 Human Rights Watch, 128, 151 humor, 104; and activism, xviii, 152–73; and protest signs, 56, 79; subversive, 104 Hungary, xv, 139–50 Husserl, Edmund, 8 hybrid space(s), 163 hypervisible: activist bodies, 10–16; body–based advocacies, xv; embodied activisms, 10–17; and invisible system–outsider status, xvi. See also activisms, authenticated

290

Index

visible; emphatically visible; invisible embodied identity/identities, xi, xvii, 3–5, 8–9, 25, 34, 70, 75, 104, 120, 125, 160; anti– dominant, 207; –based participatory advocacy, 230; collective, 72, 120, 126, 128–31, 133–35, 160, 162, 169; collective activist, 179; commodification of, 25; community, 64; constructs/construction(s), xv, xvi, 4–6, 14, 23, 28, 134, 153, 162, 184, 187, 232; embodied, xvii, 9; “forbidden”, 222; gender, 209, 224; group(s), 25, 64; hegemonic constructs of, 28; marginalized, 231; markers of, 86; narrative, 5, 131; navigation/negotiation of, 27, 65; Palestinian collective, 126, 128–31, 133–35; Palestinian national, 120, 124, 133; performance(s), xvi, 57, 130; pluriversal approach to resistance and identity, 137; politics, 83; positionalities, 204; shared community, 64; significations of, 124; subversion of, 245. See also Butler, Judith; symbols that mark, 81; terrain, 65; Tribal, 28, 35; understandings of, 229 ideological, xiii, 7, 22, 26, 75; conflicts, 25; constraints, 98; and material commitment to inequality, 13; narratives, 25, 28; subversion, 192 ideologically driven messaging, 22 ideology/ideologies, xvii–xviii, 64, 71, 123, 149, 193, 231; capitalist, 70; far right, 6; of place, 256; populist, 14 Illinois, 16, 99, 105, 115; State Cancer Registry, 115 Image Protest Form, xix imaginaries, collective, 183 immigrant rights, 249 independence (from colonial rule), 3 India, 205 Indian, American, 28–33; movement, 237. See also National Congress of

American Indians; National Indian Education Association (NIEA) Indian Citizenship Act, U.S. (1924), 30 Indian Removal Act, U.S. (1840), 29. See also Dawes Act, U.S. (1887) Indian Reorganization Act, U.S. (1934), 30 Indian Reserves (Canada), 31 Indian Residential School(s), 31–33; in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, 33; in Marieval, Saskatchewan, Canada, 33; Quaker Indian boarding schools, 270. See also Code of Indian Offenses; Courts of Indian Offenses Indigenous peoples, 25, 28–34, 74, 124; Colombians’ protest (Bogotá), 227; community/communities, 31–32, 120, 166; embodied experience, 31; injustices faced by, 31; resistance, 136; tribal rights and sovereignty in the Pacific Northwest, 73. See also American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs); Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC); First Nations Indignados (anti–austerity movement in Spain), 163 inertia, social, 7 influencers, 229 inherent privilege, 13 injustice(s), 39, 125, 151, 210–11; economic, 6; in education, 32; experienced by Indigenous peoples, 28–34; and Palestinians, 125; racial, 23, 32, 189; social, 32; in Turkish society, 151–73 insurrection (January 6), 25, 26 insurrectionists, 7, 25 interconnected/interconnectedness, 34, 48, 65, 96, 102, 181, 235 International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), 6 International Red Cross, 22

291

Index

International Women’s Day protest, Tehran, 1979, 13 intersectional, 20, 27, 34; activism(s), xviii, 234; activists, 25; activist– scholars, 231; approach, 178; challenges, 20; dimensions, 47; feminism, 203; and intergenerational, xx, 231; issues, 18; marginalizations, 13, 20; and multiply marginalized, 13; oppressions, 25; political alliances, 272; possibilities of social change, 189; rhetoric, 177–89; studies, 232; world, 189 intersectionality, xix, 3–35, 47, 177–89; conceptualizations of, 180; and embodied activisms, 234; principles of, 180; of selves, 34. See also Crenshaw, Kimberlé invisible: activist bodies, xv; and behind–the–scenes activism, 22; embodied activisms, 17–22; in/ visibility, 3–35, 177–235; Iranian women, 13, 258. See also activisms, authenticated visible; activisms, emphatically visible invitational rhetoric, 223–24 Iran, 1979 regime change, 13 Iranian Green Movement, 158–59 Irigaray, Luce, 7–8 #iRunwithMaud, 76–77 Istanbul, Turkey, 151–73 Jangbar, Sakina, xx, 205–26 January 6, 2021 insurrection (Washington, DC), 7, 25–26 “jarring”, 63 “Jasmine Revolution”, xxin1 Jenkins, Henry, 22, 25 Jewish population, Hungary, 139–50 John, Sir Elton, 12 Jones Parrish, Mary, 228 journalism: citizen, xiii joy, 72 justice, xviii, 46, 57, 101, 105, 151, 232; –centric change, 228; Demand

Justice (organization), 183; environmental, xiii, 96, 101; ethic of, 48–49, 52–53; ethics of care and, 52; masculinist ethic of, 48; reproductive, xix, 178, 183–85, 188, 189n1; social, xiv, 4, 7, 230, 233; traditional ethic of, 48 Kaepernick, Colin, xii, 189 Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, 33 Kapoor, Priya, ix Kavanaugh, Brett, xix, 177, 179, 183, 185, 187–88 Kedarnath Temple (Dehradun, India), 205, 239 keffiyeh, 129–31 Keiden, Lois, 88 Keystone XL Pipeline protests, 31. See also Standing Rock Sioux Khamis, Sahar, ix King, Anthony, ix King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther, x, 151 King, Rodney, 39, 40 Kitis, E. Dimitris, 59 kneeling protests, 189 knowledge: of the body, 112; body as a site of, 8; cumulative, 48; local, 96; misuse of scientific and technical, 97; multiple forms of, 47; and power, 47; rises from discourse, 47; scientific and technical, 97, 98, 115; situated, 51. See also Foucault, Michel; from story, 115 Komen (Susan G.) Race for the Cure, 61 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, xvi Kowalski, Ann, xxi, 6 Kutz–Flamenbaum, Rachel, 67–68 Kwansah–Aidoo, Kwamena, 15 Lacan, Jacques, 82 Lacan’s category of the Real, 82 Lacanian–influenced definition of desire, xvii

292

Index

Lacanian psychoanalysis, 81 (L)Activism, xix, 191–204 “Lactivists”, 191–204 La Leche League International, 192, 198 Laqueur, Thomas, 23 Latinx communities, 16; Black and, 16 Latour, Bruno, xiv, xix, 154–58, 160, 168, 173. See also Actor Network Theory law(s), xiii, 8, 12, 13, 24–26, 28, 43, 45, 48–50, 52, 124, 143, 227 Lebanon, 122 Lee, Wenshu, ix, xvii–xviii, 231. See also discursive amnesia Lefèbvre, Henri, xiv, 164, 172 legitimization, 22 legitimized stereotyping, 23 leisure spectacle demonstration, xvi, 55–79 Lengel, Lara Martin, x, xi–xxi, 3–35, 159, 227–35 Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night Walk, 61 LGBTQIA+: activists, 38; community, 215–16; perspective(s), 224; rights, 69, 72; students, 205–26, 254; youth, xx, 205–26 liberation, 92, 195; Palestinian, 129–32 Liberty Park (Salt Lake City, Utah), 62 Liberty Square monument (Budapest, Hungary), xviii, 139–50 Liberty Stage (Budapest, Hungary), xviii, 139–50 liminal/liminoid, 78. See also Turner, Victor literacies, media, 14 Lopez Davila, Nora Maria Guadalupe, ix Lorde, Audre, xvi L’Ouverture, François Dominique Toussaint, 3–12 #lovewins, 4 ludic mass disrupting, 74 Lyotard, Jean–François, 226 mainstream media, cause(s) that struggle(s) for attention from, 73

Mapedzahama, Virginia, 15 March of Silence (June 12, 2020, Seattle, Washington), 16 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, The (August 28, 1963, Washington, D.C.), xii Marieval, Saskatchewan, Canada, 33. See also Indian Residential School(s), Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada; mass grave(s) Martin, Emily, xvii Martin, Ross, ix masculinist ethic of justice, 48 masculinity, 9; hyper–, 50; socially constructed, 50; toxic, xvi, 50 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 97 mass disrupting, 74 mass grave, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, 33. See also Indian Residential School(s) material fleshiness, 58 Mauss, Marcel, 8 McAlevey, Jane, 229 McCoy, Mark, 15 meaning, shared, 90 Mechehoud, Meriem, ix Mecinska, Lula, 192, 204 Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], 22 Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation in central Budapest, xviii, 139–41 memory, 9, 64, 65, 75, 112–13, 119–37; attempt to reshape, 139; cultural, xii, xvii; revisionist, xvii; work, xviii, 119–37 Merleau–Ponty, Maurice, 8–9 methodology, 65–66, 139; field observations, 65; interviewing, 37–38 #metoo/MeToo, 4, 12, 234 Michigan Cancer Foundation (MCF), 103–4 Middle East and North Africa, xiii, xiv, 35

Index

Middleton, Michael, 64, 139 Milani, Tommaso M., 59 Minneapolis police, 4, 26 mobilize/mobilizing/mobilization, 18, 61, 153, 161, 165 Mobley, Mamie, xii Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 47 Mohawk Nation, 31 Montenegro, Desiree A., ix, xv, xx, 3–35, 227–35 Moodliar, Suren, 229 motherhood, 24, 191–204; intensive, 193, 200, 202–4; as a political project, 192 mothering, xix, 191–204; hegemonic, 193; as potential site of political efficacy, 194 movement(s), 76; destabilizing and disruptive movements, 6; social, 6 multi–methodological approach(s), xvi Museum of the Palestinian People, 133 Muslim(s): participants in Gezi protests, 163; travel ban, 222 “muttering bodies”, 83–86, 90. See also Dean, Tim NAACP, 20 NAACP Youth Council(s), 20 Nakba/Nakba day, xviii, 119–37 Napoles, Desmond, 231 narcissistic anarchism, 78 narrative(s), xiii, xv–xvii, 12, 40, 44, 51, 84, 88, 95–115, 129, 154, 178, 183–86; able–bodied, 194; activist, 13; admonitory, 177; authority, 40, 43; central, 233–34; collective, 136; empathy, 261; environmental, 285; essentialist, 10; established, 22; Eurocentric, 194; far–right, 6; hegemonic, 15; heteronormative, 194; historical, 28; Holocaust revisionism, 142; ideological, 28; media, 63; meta–, 10; of mothering, 194; national, 128, 139–42; phenomenological, 45; of power, 6;

293

resistance, xv, 4, 231; revisionist, 142; role of (in embodiment), 232; strategic, 7, 22–26, 34; structures, 15; survivor, 235; tools, 13; traditional, 194; transgressive, 17; universals, 258; witnessing, 42 narrative authority, 40, 43 National Center for Women and Policing, 50 National Congress of the American Indians (NCAI), 32 National Indian Education Association (NIEA), 32 Navajo Nation, 32 Nazi occupation, 139–40 neo–fascist government, 150 neoliberal: capitalism, 165; feminism, 203 neutrality of science, 97–99 Newsom, Victoria A., x, xi–xxi, 3–35, 159, 205, 220, 227–35 New York City, 168. See also Decolonize This Place (movement) New Zealand, 196 Niimíipuu River Rendezvous, 66, 73 NoH8, 189 non–governmental organizations, 20–22, 32–33, 137, 197–98, 209–12 non–violence/nonviolence, xx, 39, 40, 207, 224–25 Nyilaskeresztes Párt [Arrow Cross Party], Hungary, 140 occupation of Alcatraz (November 20, 1969 to June 11, 1971, San Francisco Bay, California), 31 occupy movement(s), 6, 56, 66, 78, 151, 228, 233 Occupy Wall Street, 59–60, 228 Oliver, Kelly, 143, 269. See also witnessing Olympics, 1968, xii ontological: anarchy, 242; de–, 48 oppression(s), 4; hierarchies of, 54; intersectional dimensions of, 47;

294

Index

multiple vectors of, 47; patriarchal, 47; systemic, xiii, 4, 27, 126, 227 Orbán, Victor, Prime Minister, Hungary, xvi, 139–40, 149–50. See also Fidesz Party organization(s): civil society and nongovernmental, xi, 20–22, 32–33, 137, 197–98, 209–12; environmental, 20, 98; formal advocacy, 70; health, 201, 204; human rights, 20–22, 173; LGBTQIA+, 205–26; religious, 188; World Health (WHO), 201, 280 Orta, Ramsey, 41, 251 Orwell, George, 168 Other, [T]he: construction of, 14; desire for, 82; discourse of, 82 Othered body, 15 Our Bodies, Ourselves, xx overdetermined rhetorical responses to exigencies, 90 pain, 90 Palestine, 119–37 Palestinian cultural studies, 277; Palestinian Feminist Collective, 137; Palestinian rights and freedom, xviii, 119–37; Palestinian Youth Movement, 137 Palmer, David L., 232, 234 pandemic, ix, 6, 26–27, 66, 75, 194, 234 panopticism (Foucault), 41, 51 paradigm(s), 38, 53, 228 “parallel” pandemics, 6 Paris, 227 Parkland survivors, 231 Parks, Rosa, xii Parrish, Mary Jones, 228 participant: observation, 39; recreator/ activist, 61. See also methodology patriarchy, 8, 19, 48–51, 53 Peaceful Streets Project, 40 Peeples, Jennifer, 55, 59–61, 124–25, 181–82 performance: art, 81–93; of desire, 81–93; sadomasochistic practices

within the medium of, 89; studies, 5, 85, 232 “performative activism”, xii, 4, 68, 229. See also Kutz–Flamenbaum, Rachel performative defiance, leisure acts of, 75 performativity: empty, 27; sophistic, 27 persecution, 149 Peters, John Durham, 43, 51 phenomenological narrative, 45 phenomenology, 9, 45 photographic empiricism, 37 Photography is Not a Crime (PINAC), 40 place, 97–115 “place–as–rhetoric”, 59. See also Endres, Danielle; Senda–Cook, Samantha Platt, Kamala, 96 play/playful protest(s), 62 Plevin, Arlene, xvi, 95–115 Police Accountability Activism (PAA), xvi, 37–54 police brutality, 4, 16, 37–54, 152, 171 policy–makers, 63 political: access, cultural creativity and artistic expression, xi; agency (and embodiment), xx; authorities, 164; commitments, 61; community, 72; consciousness, 165; discourse, 83; ethical and political possibilities, 58 politics: changing global and local, ix; of disruption, 83; of identification, 91; identity, 83, 91; of memory, xviii, 139–50; of place, 250; of witnessing, 238 polka and protest, 66–68 polyvocal, 64 populism, 150; global, 139; in Hungary, 139; right–wing, xviii pornography, 24 postcolonial feminism(s), 281 postmodernity, 257 posttraumatic stress, 27, 50, 82 post–truth media, 281

Index

power, xiii–xiv, xvii, xx, 4–7, 9–19, 28, 34, 37–51, 62–66, 71, 79, 82–83, 91–93, 105, 112, 129 powerless, 19 practice(s): community/communities of, xiv, xviii, xx, 27, 230, 235; creative, xii, xix, 238; embodied activist, xiii, xviii, 3–35; photographic, 37–54; social, 41, 142, 163 precarity, 58 prejudice, 76, 210 Prelli, Lawrence, 62 presence, embodied, 149 Pritchett, Andrea, 43, 52 protest(s), xix, 6, 12, 26, 238, 239; against anti–LGBTQIA+ measures, 189; against LGBTQIA+ violence and murders, 227; anti–government protests worldwide, 227; Black Lives Matter, 6, 13, 41, 189, 219, 227, 229, 234, 239; Civil Rights movement, 59, 189; deliberative, 74; demonstrative protest rhetoric, 62; Gezi Park (Turkey), 151–73; handmaid’s tale, 177–89; human rights, 119–37; for Indigenous rights, 31; leisure spectacle, 55–79; Nakba day, xviii, 119–37, 238; nonviolent, xiv, 52, 121, 125; playful and gamified acts of, 59; “pleasure of protest”, 79; public, 23, 55–79, 119–37, 139–73, 177–89, 191–226; racial injustice, 189; Silence–Body–Image, 177–89; silent, 151–73, 177–89, 205–26; Szabadságszínpad (Hungary), 139–50; use of humor, poetry, and street art in, xviii–xix, 152, 164 ; for worker’s rights, 189; yoga as, 62–63 Prude, Daniel, 4 psychoanalysis, 85 public nudity, 58 public space in social movements, role of, 151–73, 192

295

public sphere, everyday acts of embodied resistance in, xvi “pussy hats”, 79 Q–Anon, 84 qualitative inquiry, 144 Queer activism, 81–93, 176, 203 Quinn, Marc, 6 Race Massacre, Tulsa. See Tulsa Massacre racial: binary, 15; in/justice, 32, 189, 233; justice movements, 4; prejudice, 77; violence, xi, 57; violence in U.S. history, xi, 57 racialized acts of dominance, 189 racism, 47, 84; anti–Asian, 239; awakening to, 269; denial of, 84; of the early suffrage movement, 47; institutional, 16; and intersectionality, 47; intersectional marginalizations of sexism and, 20; and police brutality, 16; structural, 84; systemic, 33, 84. See also 1992 National Coalition of Racism in Sports and Media Forms radical culture jamming, xvi radical ecoactivist culture jam, 74 Ramadhan: vegan, 6 Randle, Lessie Evelyn Benningfield, xii, 228, 235. See also Tulsa Massacre Red Umbrella, 6 Reid, Jen, 6. See also Bristol (England) Black Lives Matter protest relationship between embodiment and activism, 4 relevance, 76 remembering (and witnessing), xvii representation(s): false, 54; inclusive, 202; in political power structures, 19 reproductive: justice, xix, 178, 183–85, 188–89; rights and, 178, 183, 184, 188 resistance, xvi, xviii–xix, xxi, 4–7, 9, 14, 26, 28, 56–59, 72, 78, 90, 120,

296

Index

123–26, 129–33, 135–37, 162–63, 165, 167–72, 179–81, 192, 224, 231–32; body as a site of, xiv, 167; embodied, xvi, xviii, 232; and Foucault, 8, 167; Gezi, 151–73; of Mahatma Gandhi, 167–68; nonviolent, xix, 171; to norms, 224; Palestinian, 119–37; passive, 167–68; pluriversal approach to, 137; political, 194; in public spaces, 163; to revisionist politics of memory, xviii, 139; silent, 168–70, 205–26; toward the dominant culture and the elite, 163. See also “Standing Man, The” revisionist: politics of memory, xviii, 139, 150; public memory, xviii Revolution for Dignity, 6. See also Al– Karama, Thawrat; Arab Spring Rheingold, Howard, 153 rhetoric(s), 74; agitative, 64; critical, xiv, 231; defensive, 91; embodied, 182; of exclusion, 179; intersectional, 179; invitational, 224; of spectacle, 55–79; vernacular, 64 rhetorical: criticism, xvi, xix, 57, 142, 195; field methods/fieldwork, 65–66; potentialities, 189; response, 90 Rice, Tamir, 4 Richmond, Virginia, 27 right(s): human, 21, 25, 105, 172; LGBTQIA+, 69. See also civil rights; reproductive, rights; U.S. Civil Rights Movement right–wing: Fidesz Party (Hungary), 139–50; politics, 41–42; populism, xviii Roe v. Wade, 24, 183, 188 role of public space in social movements, 151–73, 192 Roma and Sinti populations of Hungary, 140–41 Rosser, Aura, 4 Royal Academy of London, 28

Said, Edward, 135 San Diego County Breastfeeding Coalition, 192 Save Our Wild Salmon, 73 Save Sheikh Jarrah, 137 Scarry, Elaine, 90 Schindler, Oskar, 18 Schmitt, Casey R., xvi, 55–79 science, environmental, xvi, 95–115 Scott, Walter, 4 Second Amendment, 40, 45 self–perpetuating structures, 19 Selma, 224–25 Senda–Cook, Samantha, 59, 62, 65, 73 Serbia, 147 settler colonialism, 125, 136–37 Sewell, Jr., William, 165 sexism, 20, 237 “sextremist” activism, 6 Shahidi, Yara, 231 Shannon, Paul, 229 shared meaning, 90 Shilling, Chris, 9, 14 signs, nonverbal, 90 silence, xiv, xix–xx, 15–17, 19, 168–70, 205–26; Day of, xx; disruptive, xx, 168–70, 205–26; March of (Seattle, Washington), 16; and in/visibility, xix–xx silence–body–image, 179–89 silent, 110, 114, 157; activism/activists, 177–89, 205–26; embodiment, 183; march/parade (July 28, 1917, New York City), 15–16, 205, 225; presence, xii, 205–26; protest, xix– xx, 5–17, 167–70, 177–89, 205–26; resistance, 168; witnessing, 52. See also Gündüz, Erdem Silent Spring, 95, 109. See also Carson, Rachel Sinti and Roma populations of Hungary, 140–41 Sioux occupation of Mount Rushmore (1970), 31

Index

Six Nations of the Grand River protest, 31 skateboarding, 70 “slacktivism(s)”, xvi, 57, 63, 159 slacktivist, 74 slave–hunting organizations, 50 slave rebellions, 3–4 slave revolts, 3–4 slave traders/enslavers. See also Colston, Edward slavery, 3, 11, 17–19, 27–28, 34; abolitionists, 12; witnessing, 27–28. See also Crowe, Eyre “Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia” (painting by Eyre Crowe, 1856), 27 Slosarski, Yvonne, 67 Smith, Tommie, xii Snake River (Wisconsin), 65–66 Snow, C. P., 96–97 social change, ix, xiii–xiv, 3, 8, 18, 25, 82, 189, 207, 217, 224, 233 social justice, xiv, 7, 233; movements, 4, 230 social meaning, 72 social media, 37–40, 44, 47, 69, 76, 78, 122, 152–56, 158–60, 169, 171, 214–15, 223, 229 social practice, 41, 142, 163 Soja, Edward, xiv, 165 songs sung during the U.S. civil rights movement, 160 sovereignty and solidarity, community, 74 space(s), xiv, xviii, 12, 15, 32, 43, 58–60, 63, 70, 72, 74, 78, 83, 87, 99, 112–13, 120, 127–28, 133, 140, 153, 165–67, 170–73, 178, 180, 184–85, 187, 196, 201–4, 206–7, 209, 214, 217, 220, 223–24, 234–35; of agency, 178, 183–84, 187–88; of collective action, 201; discursive, 203–4; disruptions of, 59; institutional, 63; memorial, 143, 149;

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politics of, 149; public, xviii, 57, 62, 69, 161, 163–67, 170–73, 192 Spartacus, 3–4 spectacle, visual and material, 73 Spivak, Gayatri, 10, 22, 25 “Standing Man, The”, xiv, 161, 167–69, 171, 173. See also Gezi protests “Standing Penguin with a Gas Mask, The”, 171–72. See also Gezi protests Standing Rock Sioux, 6, 31, 74 standpoint, 4; theory, 25 Stanley, Demetrius, 4 Steingraber, Sandra, 95–115 Step It Up climate demonstration, Salt Lake City, 62, 73 stereotype(s)/stereotyped, xv, 10, 14, 25, 182 stereotyping, 28; legitimized, delegitimized, and reinforced, 23 Sterling, Alton, 4 “St. Louis is the new Selma”, 224–25 Stockham, Sophia, ix Stop Bombing Gaza, 137 strategic and intentional use of silence, 224 strategic narrative(s), 7, 22, 23, 25; issue-based, 25 street art, 152, 161, 162, 165, 171–73. See also Gezi protests Stroud, Christopher, 58 structural and systemic inequities, resistance of, 230 structural inequities faced by tribes, 32 structural racism, 84. See also oppression(s), systemic struggle, xi, xviii, 3, 52, 130–31, 136– 37, 139–50, 178, 181, 184–86, 222 student activists, ix, 205–26; blogs, 208, 210–11; voices, 206 subculture(s), 162–63, 222 subject, determined, 47–48 subjective experience, 47, 90 subjectivity, 9, 51, 77, 98, 143; understanding of, 143

298

Index

subversion, 83, 219; hegemonic, xx; ideological, 192; of tactics of suppression and oppression, 171 subversive silence, 205–26 suffering, 140, 143; body, 83–93 suffrage movement(s), women’s, 15, 47, 219 Sumartojo, Shanti, 142 Summit on Race in America, April 8, 2019, 21 Suren, Nora, xviii–xix, 151–73 “Surge of Power (Jen Reid), A,” sculpture, 6 surveillance, 37–54; gaze, 47; studies, 37, 41 survivors, xi–xiii, 139–50, 228, 231; activist, 146–47. See also Holocaust; Parkland survivors; Tulsa Massacre symbolism, 90; public, 58; visceral, 56 systemic, xv, xix, 9, 22, 25–26; biases, 5, 18; change, 5, 7, 27, 233–34; constraints, xv; inequities/ inequalities, xiii, xiv, 6, 33, 229–30; oppression(s), xiii, 4, 27, 126, 227; “Othering”, 13; power, xiii, 5–7, 13–14; racism, 33, 84; violence, 188 Szabadságszínpad [Liberty Stage] (Budapest), xviii, 139–50; activists, 141–50; Hungarian Jewish activism/ activists at, 142–43, 149; protests, xviii, 139–50 Szabadság tér [Liberty Square] (Budapest), xviii, 140, 149 tactics, 59, 68, 122; aggressive, 77; confrontational, 77; essentialist political, 22; protest, 68, 177, 179; resistance, 124, 136; subversion of tactics of suppression and oppression, 171 Tahrir Square, 163 Taksim Solidarity Group, 151 Taksim Square, xiv, xviii–xix, 151–73 Taylor, Breonna, 4 Tayyip Edoğan, Recep, xiv

technology, xiii, 23, 125, 156–60, 163, 223; of the self, 125. See also Foucault, Michel testimony, witness, 143; embodied performance of, 143 Thawrat Al–Karama, [The Revolution for Dignity], 17, 248. See also “Arab Spring” theoretical grounding, xv theorizing embodied activisms, xv, 14 thinking, binary, 54 Thunberg, Greta, 231 Till, Emmett, xii Tilly, Charles, 165 Tometti, Opal, 229 torture, 128 toxic: body, 95–115; chemicals, 95– 115; masculinity, xvi, 50. See also Antonetta, Susanne toxicity, xvi, 95–115 toxins, environmental, 95–115 traces, 23, 172 “Trail of Broken Treaties”, 31 “trans–corporeality”, 58 transgender, 234; bodies, 93; people, 210; student(s), 221 trauma, xi, xvi–xvii, xix, 3, 7, 26, 120, 127, 136, 141, 143, 235; body, xvii; collective, 126; communication of, 143; embodied/embodiment of, 143, 148–49; of the Holocaust, 141; memorializing, 128; remembering, 127–28; shared, xviii, 120, 126, 128, 133, 135; and witnessing, 143. See also posttraumatic stress traumatic/traumatized, xi, xvi, 82, 235 Trump’s travel ban, 277 truth/s, xvii, 28, 33, 107, 114, 144, 191, 232; post–, 14 Tulsa Massacre/Tulsa Race Massacre (May 31–June 1, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma), xi–xiii, xxn1, 228, 234–35; Fletcher, Viola; Van Ellis, Hughes; 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, xi–x. See

Index

also Benningfield, Lessie Evelyn Randle Tunisia, xxin1, 35, 158. See also “Arab Spring” turbulence (of leisure spectacle), 61 Turkey, xv, xviii, 151–73 Turner, Victor, 78 Tweet regarding white privilege, 15 Twitter, protestors’ use of, 154–55, 158 underground: movements, 17; performance art culture, 85 Underground Railroad, 17, 18 UNICEF, 201 Union of Concerned Scientists, 97–98 United Farm Workers Association, 20–21 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 129 United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), 129 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), 128 United States v. Clapox (1888), 30 unspeakable loss, 82. See also Dean, Tim unusual mass disrupting, 74 U.S. Civil Rights Movement, xii, xvi, 12, 16, 55, 59, 60, 160, 162, 219, 222 U.S.–Mexico border, 203 Uttarakhand’s Char Dham temple board, 205–6 Vanderbeek, Marianne, ix Van Ellis, Hughes, x, 228. See also Tulsa Race Massacre video, evidentiary, 40, 44–45 violence, 37–54, 57, 108, 121–37, 153, 171, 188, 205, 207, 219, 220; and trauma, 127–28. See also nonviolence voting rights, Indigenous, 35

299

Wadsworth, Nancy, D., 56, 79 Walker, Scott (R–WI), 66–67 Walls Lanier, Carlotta, xii Wall Street (Occupy) movement, 6, 56, 59–60, 163, 219, 228. See also occupy movement(s) Walter Arts Center (Minneapolis), 85–86 Wander, Philip, ix, xvii–xviii, 231. See also discursive amnesia “War on Terror”, 72 Warren, John T., ix, xxi Washington (DC), 1963 March on, 59 Weldon Johnson, James, 16. See also NAACP Wells, Ida B., 20 Wenliang, Dr. Li, 228 Westlake, E. J., xxi “The Whirling Dervish with a Gas Mask”, 152, 155, 161, 167, 169–71 White, Micah, 56, 59, 78, 228 white privilege, 15, 19, 202 Wiant Cummins, Molly, xix, 191–204 Wierling, Dorothee, 23 Williams, Dana M., 70–78 Williams, Raymond, 22 Williams, Terry Tempest, 95–115 Wilson, Woodrow, 15–16 Wisconsin’s Act 10 “Budget Repair Bill”, Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, 66 witnessing, xiii, xvi, xvii–xviii, 37–54, 93, 128, 143, 214, 235; as activism, xx; embodied, xvi, xviii, 37–54, 139–50, 232; of enslavement, 27–28; flesh, 28; mediated, 43; and/as testimonial, xiii–xvi; of violence, 128, 136, 228. See also cop–watching; Crowe, Eyre; Police Accountability Activism (PAA) witness testimony, 143 Wolf, Stacy, 85 women: as carers, 53; category of, 23; and the environment, 95–115; exploitation of, 267; and invisible embodied activisms, 17–22; in Iran, 13; killed

300

Index

by police, 34; lives of, 48; Muslim, 257; National Center for Women and Policing, 50; pushed to the sidelines, 51; suffrage, 15; visibility of, 23; writers, 95. See also International Women’s Day protest, Tehran, 1979; National Center for Women and Policing; reproductive, rights Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, 189n1 Women’s: March on Washington January 2017, 79; Suffrage Parade, March 3, 1913 (Washington, D.C.), 16 working class, 9, 14. See also class working poor, 9 World Bank, The, 22 World Breastfeeding Week, 196 World Health Organization (WHO), 201 World Naked Bike Ride, 65 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference of 1999 protests, 153

World War I, anti–protest, 15–16 World War II veteran, x. See also Van Ellis, Hughes Wounded Knee, 31 Wright, Daunte, 4 writers, activist, xiv, 95–115 Wuhan Central Hospital, 228 X (Emma González), 231 Yancy, George, 15 Yavapai protests of the Orme Dam (Arizona), 31 Yellow Vest [gilets jaunes] movement (France), 227 Yeung, Michelle, ix Yousafzai, Malala, 231 YouTube, 43, 154 Zoom, 153, 210–11 Zuccotti Park, 59

About the Editors and Contributors

EDITORS Victoria A. Newsom, PhD, is professor of Communication Studies and affiliate faculty in Social Justice and Diversity at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. Her research centers are on the negotiation of gender, power, and identity in communication and performative contexts. Her current projects include work in media activism, peace studies, Islamophobia studies, postcolonial feminism(s), performative pedagogies, fan and media studies, and cultural studies-grounded analyses of transnational policy making. She has published articles in, among others, International Journal of Communication, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Global Media Journal, Communication Studies, Communication Yearbook, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Feminist Media Studies, iMex: México Interdisciplinario, French Journal for Media Research, and Women & Language. Her current research and activist interests focus on the preservation of human rights and human dignity, and the intersection of post-truth media and consumerism. Victoria is also particularly dedicated to curriculum and pedagogy development and assessment in the areas of digital and critical literacies. Lara Martin Lengel, PhD, began her research on transnational cultural studies as a Fulbright Research Scholar and American Institute of Maghreb Studies Fellow in Tunisia. Her refereed research appears as lead articles in Text and Performance Quarterly, Journal of Communication Inquiry, International Journal of Health Communication, and Convergence: International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, and in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Communication Studies, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Gender & History, International and 301

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About the Editors and Contributors

Intercultural Communication Annual, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Women’s Studies, and International Journal of Communication. Her books include Computer Mediated Communication, Casting Gender, Intercultural Communication and Creative Practice, and Culture and Technology in the New Europe. She is professor in the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University where she and colleagues were awarded nearly $500,000 in competitive federal grants from FulbrightHayes, the Middle East Partnership Program, and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. CONTRIBUTORS Natalie Bennie studies the broad linkages among memory, social change, and deliberation. Her recent research focuses on the ways counter-monuments can function as public argument and as sites of protest in the context of Holocaust memorialization. Through the methodology of situated rhetorical fieldwork, her thesis project examined the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project, the largest decentralized memorial in the world, to suggest the opportunities and limitations of counter-monumentality. Her current projects involve discussions of activism, performance, and memory conflicts both within and beyond the German cultural context. In addition, she has several projects which involve academic debate, particularly as it is practiced in international arenas. Natalie was named a Fulbright Scholar to Germany and a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship in 2016. Mary Angela Bock, PhD, is associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. She is a former journalist with an interest in photographic practice, the relationship between words and images, and digital media. She is particularly concerned with matters of truth and authenticity in the process of image production. Her current research examines the way citizen videos are changing the public conversation about police policy in the United States. Her latest book Seeing Justice: Witnessing, Crime, and Punishment (2021) theorizes the relationship between media and the state in the production of visual representations of the crime, the courts, and justice. She coauthored Visual Communication Theory and Research (2014) with Shahira Fahmy and Wayne Wanta. Her 2012 book Video Journalism: Beyond the One-Man Band studied the relationship between solo multimedia practice and news narrative. Jordin Clark is currently a visiting assistant professor at Wabash College. She received her MA and PhD at Colorado State University in Communication

About the Editors and Contributors

303

Studies with an emphasis on rhetoric. Her research focuses on power and resistance within everyday life. In particular, her scholarship pays attention to everyday spaces as sites that entrench dominant values while analyzing embodied rhetorics as resources to (re)imagine alternative worlds. Her recent publications that analyze these alternative worlds include “‘Daddy Pence Come Dance’: Queer(ing) Space in the Suburbs” in Western Journal of Communication and a coauthored book chapter entitled “Under Quarantine in a City Project: Stories of Food, Family, Fear and Community” published in an edited collection entitled Global Reflections of COVID-19 and Urban Inequalities. Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik is a PhD student at the Pennsylvania State University in Communication Arts & Sciences, with an emphasis in rhetoric. She graduated from Washburn University in 2018 with a BA in Communication Studies and an MA in Communication Studies from Texas Tech University in 2020. Her research lies on the intersections of memory, imagination, and Palestine utilizing Palestinian feminist and decolonial lenses, with a focus on grounding Palestinian voices and resistance. She plans on graduating with her PhD exploring how Palestinians communicate their past, present, and future in the rhetoric of home and Return. Billy Huff, PhD, is lecturer in the Department of Communication and affiliate faculty with the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is also a research associate with the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He received his PhD from Georgia State University. His scholarship engages lived and embodied experiences of transmasculinity and queerness through performative autoethnography. His research can be found in academic anthologies, such as Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography: Embodied Theorizing from the Margins and Living Sexuality: Stories of LGBTQ Relationships, Identities, and Desires, and academic journals, such as Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Margaret Cavin Hambrick, PhD, is professor of Communication at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida. She received her PhD from the University of North Texas. She has published articles and essays in which she examines the dissent rhetoric of various activists. Her most recent publication was a chapter titled “Al Feldstein and Mad’s Humor of Social Critique,” published in the edited volume Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy. Her most recent publication was a chapter titled “Al Feldstein and Mad’s Humor of Social Critique,” published in the edited volume Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy. She is

304

About the Editors and Contributors

currently completing a rhetorical biography titled On God’s Left Side: Rev. William Sloane Coffin’s Radical Prophetic Dissent Rhetoric, under contract with Michigan State University Press. Sakina Jangbar, PhD, is assistant professor at St. John’s University in New York City where she teaches courses in rhetorical theory and criticism. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin where her dissertation research focused on the persuasive role of intentional and strategic silences in societies that are hyper-saturated with messages. Her current research focuses on the rhetoric of Pakistani activists, poets, politicians, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the discursive practices of South Asian Muslims. Her research examines not only words but also silence as a mode of communication. When she is not writing, she replenishes her soul with art, music, poetry, and live shows, and she is thankful for her two children who expand her capacity to love and live. Her work has been published in Journal of Communication & Religion and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. Desiree A. Montenegro is a faculty member at Palo Verde College, and affiliate faculty with the California Department of Corrections where she specializes in working with first-generation students, students with disabilities, and prison-based populations. She earned her MA in Communication Studies at California State University of Los Angeles, where she began to focus her pedagogical and activist commitments to working with at-risk and underserved populations. Desiree has also worked to promote disability awareness in General Education instruction, beginning when she worked closely with the general education coordinator at CSULA to provide all adjunct faculty and student teachers Disability Awareness Training while still a graduate student. She has published in areas including gender studies and Holocaust and genocide studies. Arlene Plevin is a Professor Emerita at Olympic College in Washington. She is a lifetime activist-scholar-writer engaging in the promotion of nonoppressive sustainabilities. She received her MFA in poetry from the Writer’s Workshop at University of Iowa, and has written about modern slavery, publishing that work in Interdisciplinary Environmental Review. Other scholarly articles have been in collections published by Rutgers University Press, Wayne State University Press, and State University of New York Press. As a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Lecturer at Central University in Himachal Pradesh, India, she researched and taught sustainability and diasporas, and volunteered at Dharamsala Animal Rescue. She previously was awarded an additional Fulbright position in Taiwan at Tamkang University in Taipei.

About the Editors and Contributors

305

Arlene is an active member and officer of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Arlene’s scholarly accomplishments interrelate with her lived activisms. She was nominated for Washington State’s Environmental Educator of the Year, and was an editor/writer for the National Wildlife Federation and the League of American Bicyclists. She has also bicycled solo all over the world. Casey R. Schmitt, PhD, is associate professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. He received his PhD from the University of WisconsinMadison. His research explores environmental narrative, embodied action, and ethnographic fieldwork, especially in constructions of wilderness and natural spaces. His secondary research includes studies on the social import of American folk narrative, representations of Indigenous Americans, and popular culture. He is the author of over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and chapters, including essays in the Western Journal of Communication, Environmental Communication and Cultural Analysis. He is a coeditor of Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change (Routledge, 2017), coeditor of Water, Rhetoric, & Social Justice: A Critical Confluence (Lexington, 2020), and co-editor-select for the Western Journal of Communication. He has also served on the editorial staff of multiple other academic journals, including New Directions in Folklore, the Oral History Review, and Western Folklore. Nora Suren is currently a third-year PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is studying media and culture and explicit and implicit racial rhetoric online. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Istanbul University and her Masters of Science in Communication from North Carolina State University, where she examined how the diversity of elements across a network, including art in public spaces, humor, social media’s technological features, as well as the circumstances surrounding the political environment of Turkey mutually articulate each other in the emergence of the protests and paving the way to civic participation for Turkish activists and Turkish youth. Her current research analyzes the history and theory of digital media, digital culture, gender, critical and cultural theory, and white supremacist discourse. Molly Wiant Cummins received her PhD at Southern Illinois University. She is currently lecturer and the introductory course coordinator in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at Arlington. She focuses on motherhood and feminism in relation to pregnancy, birth, and mothering discourses. Her work in this area, “Reproductive Surveillance: The Making of Pregnant Docile Bodies,” is published in Kaleidoscope: A Graduate

306

About the Editors and Contributors

Journal of Qualitative Communication Research. She also researches in critical communication pedagogy and critical/cultural studies. Her publications include “Learning to Care” in the volume Doing Autoethnography. Her coauthored work, with Sandra Pensoneau-Conway, is published in Critical Education and, with Rachel Alicia Griffin, in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Her most recent refereed scholarship appears in Southern Communication Journal, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.