Feminist Vigilance 303059792X, 9783030597924

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Feminist Vigilance Edited by Patty Sotirin Victoria L. Bergvall · Diane L. Shoos

Feminist Vigilance

Patty Sotirin  •  Victoria L. Bergvall Diane L. Shoos Editors

Feminist Vigilance

Editors Patty Sotirin Walker Arts and Humanities Center Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI, USA

Victoria L. Bergvall Walker Arts and Humanities Center Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI, USA

Diane L. Shoos Walker Arts and Humanities Center Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-59792-4    ISBN 978-3-030-59793-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty Images, oxygen. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents, Paul and Muriel—ps To Craig Waddell and Benjamin Bergvall Waddell—vlb To my “sibs”—Karen, Kathy, John, and Lori—dls

Preface

Just as we were finalizing this collection, two major social-historical events transformed everything: the novel coronavirus pandemic and the #BlackLivesMatter justice movement. These events have changed our world and vigilance has become a watchword everywhere. Vigilance during the pandemic is now part of all of our everyday social practices, manifested in hand-washing, social distancing, and the conduct of work, play, worship, consumption. Our governments are charged with vigilance over health supplies, medical services, infectious sciences, social support, and recovery policies and their implementation. Vigilance over racial justice has now been recognized as crucial to protecting the lives and wellbeing of marginalized peoples as well as our collective future. Traditional and emergent communities, coalitions, and organizations have taken up watch over the practices and policies of local, state, and national governance. Both of these events are etching indelible scars into the social body that will remind us forever of inequities and suffering but also of resilience and courage. It is only by dint of vigilant struggle for change against the recalcitrance of established systems and entrenched institutions that these scars will be redeemed. Even as vigilance has become so much more critical and visible, the need to reframe this concept has also become more critical. This is because vigilance practiced without care, compassion, and collective benefit threatens to unravel social democracies, that is, the governance of social life by, for, and with the people. Vigilance in the service of white supremacy, polarized politics, and profits-above-all undermines the conditions vii

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necessary to ensure the wellbeing of the people themselves. The conception of feminist vigilance elaborated through these chapters responds to the urgent need to engage the risks and opportunities of current crises proactively and collectively and offers a care-based, relational, and ultimately, a hopeful conception and strategy of feminist vigilance. The ideas about feminist vigilance that chapter authors advance are invitations to readers. We invite you to consider our ideas and examples, to work through your own, and to contribute to ongoing conversations about feminist vigilance over intersectional inequities and reimagined futures shaping everyday life and academic work. We contend that feminist conceptions of why vigilance matters and how vigilant relations work are necessary to rethink and restructure historically embedded relations of power and privilege and to guide the development of lived possibilities based in feminist commitments to equity, care, and empowerment. In the current moment, the stakes for feminist vigilance have become extraordinarily visible and dear. The idea for a collection on feminist vigilance emerged from the nurturing community of feminist scholars who gathered for the annual Conference of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG) in fall 2013 held on the Michigan Tech campus in Houghton, MI. The three editors were the conference organizers and attending to every detail with care and pleasure made vigilance a watchword of that experience. We extend our gratitude to Keynote speaker Roxane Gay as well as to the Michigan Tech staff and faculty who helped us foster that vibrant scholarly gathering, made all the more vibrant by the famous fall colors and colorful sunrises and sunsets of the Upper Peninsula. All but one of the chapter authors either were in attendance at that conference or have been integral to OSCLG since that time. This collection is thus a testament to the rich and nurturing community that is OSCLG. Houghton, MI  

Patty Sotirin Victoria L. Bergvall Diane L. Shoos

Acknowledgments

Patty Sotirin: Most of the people I would like to thank are authors of the chapters in this book. They are my friends and collaborators from Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG) and I’ve known many of them for a long time. It is a heart-­ filling experience to develop a collection in the company of those you respect and admire. In particular, Laura L. Ellingson has been one of my dearest friends as well as my co-author on numerous scholarly adventures; we are each other’s confidantes intellectually and personally. I am indebted as well to my co-editors, Vicky and Diane, who are the remaining members of a 30-year Gender Writing Group at Michigan Tech; they have been my lifeline through the years. I also wish to acknowledge Jennifer Slack, my steadfast friend and mentor, with her finger on the (Twitter) pulse of contemporary events. Finally, I am grateful to my family for being supportive as only family can be: my parents, Paul and Muriel, my siblings Barbie, Cree, Paulie, and GOB; my stepmother Lorraine; my children, Elena, Tara, Tavis, and Zakris; my dogs Zooey, Gessie, and Sophie; and my grandchildren Eli, Maddie, and Emmet. Thank you all for your vigilant care. Victoria L.  Bergvall: I would like to acknowledge first and foremost Patty Sotirin, who has been the motive force behind this book and the OSCLG conference that gave birth to it; without her steadfast support, intellectual guidance, editorial acumen, and sustaining vigilant empathy, this collection wouldn’t exist. I am also grateful to Diane L. Shoos, who with Patty, has long been a dear friend and collaborator in explorations ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

into what it means to be a feminist, pushing me to think more deeply about the ways media affects our lives; their presence has made it possible to persist so long and so well in a STEM-focused university. I appreciate all the authors in this book who have stuck with this long-term project and produced such insightful and informative work, particularly Nancy Henaku, whose discussions with me about transnational feminism and the Global South have so enriched my intellectual life. My work has benefitted from being honed by feedback from warm and inspiring colleagues at OSCLG, the International Gender and Language Association, and the Georgetown University Roundtable in Linguistics. I am deeply appreciative of eternal, sustaining family support from my parents, Ruth and Dick, who modelled empathy and strength, and my brother Dennis and sisters Lynn and Jackie, whose love embraces me always. Finally, I am most grateful to my husband, Craig, whose empathy, eagle-eyed editorial skills, humor, and care make life worth living, and to my son, Ben, who gives me great hope and joy for the future of our world. Diane L.  Shoos: My first acknowledgment is to Patty Sotirin, whose profound and inspiring commitment to feminist inquiry has nurtured, shaped, and propelled this project forward, as it has so many others. Patty and Vicky Bergvall have been my professional and personal bedrock throughout my years at Michigan Tech and working with them on this book has only increased my admiration for their intellectual insight and way with words and my gratitude for their ongoing, compassionate, generous support. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with the authors of this collection, many of whom I have been fortunate to get to know through OSCLG, and who have deepened my thinking about feminist vigilance in unexpected and meaningful ways; I have learned so much from all of you! As always, my family has been and is a source of vigilant strength: to my parents, Margaret L. and Kenneth J. Shoos; my siblings and “outlaws” Karen and Vic, Kate and Dave, John and Lisa, and Lori and Sean; my sisters-in-law Prudence Roberts and Eleanor Whieldon; my aunt and uncle Mary Ann and Dick Snider; Laika and Isla; my daughter Anna; and my husband Marty–you are my inspiration and my joy, always.

Contents

1 Introduction to Feminist Vigilance  1 Patty Sotirin 2 The Informatics of Domination and the Necessity for Feminist Vigilance Toward Digital Technology 23 Sarah A. Bell 3 Paradoxes of State Feminism in the Postcolony: An Appeal for Feminist Vigilance 43 Nancy Henaku 4 “Watch Night” for Black Women: Reflecting on Vigilance and Repurposing Strength for Self-Care and Survival 65 Karla D. Scott 5 Catholic Women Religious: Discerning Faith-­based Vigilance 83 Bren Ortega Murphy 6 Watching with Feminist Vigilance: Media Genres of Male Partner Violence Against Women 101 Diane L. Shoos

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7 Black Women, Black Panther, and Black Feminist Anticipatory Vigilance123 Siobhan E. Smith-Jones 8 Vigilance in/as Feminist Research147 Laura L. Ellingson 9 Essentialism, Empathy, and Economics in Silicon Valley: A Feminist-Vigilant Critical Discourse Analysis165 Victoria L. Bergvall 10 Lessons for Feminist Vigilance Against Gun Violence193 Patty Sotirin Index219

Notes on Contributors

Sarah A. Bell  is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. She explores the cultural history of information and communication technologies, especially those that simulate human embodiment. Bell has been a Digital Studies Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and has also received research fellowships from the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Strong Museum of Play, and the Association for Computing Machinery. Victoria L. Bergvall  is Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of Humanities, Michigan Technological University. Her research interests include the discourse on the neuroscience of gender and women in STEM.  She has served as president of the International Gender and Language Association and the chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics. She is coeditor of Rethinking Language and Gender Research, and her work has appeared in Language in Society, Discourse and Society, and The Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. Laura  L.  Ellingson is the Patrick A.  Donohoe, S.  J. Professor of Communication and Women’s & Gender Studies at Santa Clara University. Narrative, feminist, and pragmatic perspectives guide her research on communication in health-care delivery and in extended/chosen families and her passion for methodological innovation. She is the author of xiii

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Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research, Embodiment in Qualitative Research, and (with Patty Sotirin) Making Data in Qualitative Research: Engagements, Ethics, and Entanglements. Nancy  Henaku  holds her PhD in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture from Michigan Technological University where she wrote a dissertation examining the discursive dimensions of the complex translocal factors defining the politics of Ghana’s first female presidential candidate. Her research is broadly situated at the nexus of rhetoric and discourse studies, politics and culture but with an emphasis on the transnational dimensions of Global Southern discourses, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa. Henaku’s work can be found in the African Journal of Rhetoric, Gender and Language, and Language in Society. Bren  Ortega  Murphy is a professor and has a dual appointment at Loyola University in the School of Communication and Women’s Studies/ Gender Studies. Her primary research areas are gender representation in U.S. popular culture and the role of Catholic women religious in U.S. social discourse. She has served as president of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Culture and is the director/ producer of an award-winning feature-length documentary, A Question of Habit. Karla  D.  Scott, Ph.D.,  is Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University. Her teaching and research focus on race and communication, dialogue across identity divisions, and Black women’s lived experiences. She is the author of The Language of Strong Black Womanhood: Myths, Models, Messages, and a New Mandate for Self-care. Her award-winning research is published in Women and Language, Discourse and Society, Women’s Studies in Communication, Qualitative Inquiry, International Review of Qualitative Research and several edited volumes on race, culture and communication. She is the president of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender. Diane  L.  Shoos  is Professor of Visual Studies in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. Her research interests include feminist theory, feminist film and media studies, and domestic violence in the media. Her work has appeared in such journals as Film Criticism, College English, and NWSA Journal as well as numerous edited collections. She is the author of Domestic Violence in Hollywood

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Film: Gaslighting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and was a member of the board of directors of the Barbara Kettle Gundlach Shelter Home for 18 years. Siobhan E. Smith-Jones, PhD  (University of Missouri) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Louisville. Her research interests include explorations of African American women as interpretive communities. She teaches courses in mass media, race, culture, fandom, and media literacy. She co-authored a special edition of Women & Language with Karla Scott and Cerise Glenn, which focused on FLOTUS Michelle Obama. She is past president of the Kentucky Communication Association and received the OSCLG Feminist Mentor Teacher of the Year Award in 2017. Patty  Sotirin is Professor of Communication in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. Her research interests include feminist theory, critical and feminist qualitative methods, and relational communication. She has been president of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender and Editor of Women & Language. She has published three research books (with Laura Ellingson) and co-edited three collections. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Family Communication, and Journal of Higher Education.

List of Tables

Table 9.1 Linguistic hedges that mitigate Damore’s claims; for example, about women and men171 Table 9.2 Biases of the left and right 174

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Feminist Vigilance Patty Sotirin

Vigilance has become a hallmark of public life in contemporary times. In today’s attention economy, everyone is alert, fear is readily mobilized, and disinformation circulates freely. We are admonished to be vigilant about a myriad of potential threats, from terrorist attacks and identity theft to body image and unconscious bias. This is particularly the case in contemporary social life given the staggering death count and multifaceted downturns from the recent COVID pandemic; the ascendency of highly volatile nationalistic politics and leaders; the increasing intensity and devastation of climate change events; the high stakes of global financial relations; and the embodied threats of large-scale personal violence from terrorism, gun violence, cyber-attacks, or ideological extremism, for example, White nationals or “incel” misogynists. Recent social activism over racial injustices has spawned a social media-enhanced vigilance over the brutalities and discriminations built into policing and other institutions of “civil order.” The prevalence and inequities of neoliberal precarity, terrorism and securitization, social and technological surveillance, contagion risks,

P. Sotirin (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_1

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and refined modes of criminalization make hypervigilance a prevalent affective mode of living. In an attention economy, everyone is alert, fear is readily mobilized, and disinformation circulates freely. This collection is particularly attuned to vigilance over gender disparities and oppressions and the intersectionalities that render gender injustices complex and entrenched. Little wonder that collective action in the streets and online has been marked by affective intensities, for example, the annual women’s marches on Washington since 2017 and the civic actions incited by #SayHerName (Crenshaw & Ritchie, 2016), #Metoo (https://metoomvmt.org/) and #TimesUp (https://www.timesupnow. com/). These movements themselves advocate vigilance against entrenched intersectional injustices, especially sexism and racism. Some feminists have urged vigilance against the appropriation of this gendered anger by conservative groups (Solnit, 2017), while critics have decried these proactive movements as “vigilante feminism” (Kaminer, 2017). Clearly, the need for feminist reflections on vigilance in terms of power, collective agency, and social justice seems pressing. The goal of this book is to advance a useful, theoretically rich, and energizing reconception of vigilance as a feminist concept. The book seeks to rethink conventional connotations to create more potent feminist associations in order to recognize vigilance as a hallmark of contemporary feminist agency and political efficacy. In popular uses, vigilance is associated with defensive, often fearful, and suspicious stances that contribute to polarized enmities. In feminist uses, vigilance has appeared as both a reactive stance against the challenges of postfeminism and popular appropriations and a mode of self-criticism and self-reflection policing internal anxieties over violations of feminism or what it means to be a “bad feminist” (Gay, 2014). Indeed, vigilance has become a hallmark of contemporary academic feminism, not only as a stance of political activism in the context of contemporary neoliberalism and the complexities of racial and gender justice efforts but also as a reactive stance against the ongoing challenges posed by the destabilizations of popular postfeminist assumptions and practices. We highlight three sites of feminist vigilance that provide both evidence of the feminist significance of this concept and its associated practices as well as a basis for more emphatically feminist reconceptualizations as developed by the authors in this collection. First, vigilance appears to be a requisite feminist political stance in the context of what Julie Wilson has described as neoliberal precaritization: the differential distribution of insecurity and social instability given the

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dismantling of systems of state protection and welfare (Wilson, 2018, p.  240). Neoliberal precaritization creates conditions of intersectional oppression and struggle but also opportunities for gendered agency, ethics, and identities. The fluidity, open-endedness, and pace of contemporary conditions and possibilities require ongoing vigilance as a mode of active and affective engagement. This became all the more evident during the Trump administration’s dismantling of progressive political policies and programs critical to women’s well-being, health, employment, family responsibilities, and financial resources. Our present sociopolitical circumstances make especially salient Lauren Berlant’s (2011) analysis of feminist hypervigilance, a response to the perceived moment of ongoing crisis and political impasse in which we are constantly aware of and on guard against the unraveling of modernity’s conventions for living as well as perennial challenges to feminism’s accomplishments. Hypervigilance is marked by existential precarity, “unreliable agency,” and lived genres of crisis and trauma (Berlant, p.  9). Yet in this mode, we can be vigilant not only to what is happening but to the as-yetunshaped potentialities of the unfolding situation for articulating alternative “ordinaries” and ways to inhabit them. In this sense, feminist vigilance is not a defensive mode of attentional consciousness but a way of opening us to emerging aesthetic, affective, and ideological genres organizing alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and living as gendered beings in the everyday. Second, vigilance has become an implicit strategy in defense of feminism itself. Popular postfeminist challenges to feminism entail ongoing and multiform counter-arguments and reversals that destabilize both the accomplishments and commitments of feminism. Not only is feminism dismissed as finished or irrelevant in popular and scholarly commentary (Projansky, 2001; Negra, 2010), but a commercialized and incomplete form of feminism has become a slogan advancing commodity consumption and the public image of celebrities and politicians (McRobbie, 2009; Zeisler, 2016). It seems painfully obvious that academic feminism must be vigilant against these challenges or risk either political irrelevance or reduction to caricature. Feminist scholars have called for vigilance against these undermining threats, whether as a theoretical and political response (cf. Spivak’s interview with McRobbie, 1985/1994; also Mandziuk, 2000; van de Tuin, 2015, p. 95) or as a pedagogical response (Dow & Wood, 2014). Third, a residual concern about the integrity and vitality of feminism has been revived in a renewed call for feminist vigilance not against but as “bad feminism” (Gay, 2014). Vigilance has long been a hallmark of

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feminist critique against essentialism, gender polarization, androcentrism, and the institution of patriarchy (Bem, 1993). Third-wave feminism is identified in part with a critique of feminist self-policing (what a feminist doesn’t do/say/want). Even so, “Am I feminist enough” remains a characterizing lamentation. Self-proclaimed “bad feminists” exercise vigilance against self-stultifying normative strictures, eschewing while renewing earlier efforts to rout out patriarchy, chauvinism, essentialism, and so on. We hold that this renewal occurs in the context of philosophical challenges to the humanistic grounding of second-wave feminism in all of its iterations from liberal to radical to constructivist and intersectional forms. Our conception of feminist vigilance differs strategically from conventional depictions centered on threat, vulnerability, and protection. Commonsense conceptions emphasize not just watchfulness but a sense of suspicion and protectionism, embodied in the figure of the vigilante. Social science studies have cast vigilance as a mode of self-discipline and an embodied state functional in the context of routinized tasks. Vigilance in such depictions is curiously double-sided: active yet reactive, outward-­ oriented yet self-protective, a mode of securitization and self-protection based in vulnerability and insecurity. We briefly overview popular depictions of vigilance and vigilantes as well as studies of vigilance and attention because the common associations of vigilance as reactive, defensive, and conservative are evident in these depictions.

Prevailing Depictions of Vigilance and Vigilantes Vigilance is defined in the OED as watchfulness against danger and alertness or closeness of observation. The earliest uses of the term appear in the fourteenth century, applied to parenting, traveling, and soldiering, all activities that required continuing attentiveness. Not surprisingly, vigilance is associated with sleeplessness and insomnia. Cognitive and Behavioral Studies of Vigilance Investigations of vigilant behavior in humans and animals have focused on attentional tasks and processes; for example, predator/anti-predator surveillance in animal groups (cf. Elgar’s critical review, 1989; Lima, 1995) and groupthink and decisional vigilance in human groups (Fandt, 1993;  Hirokawa & Rost, 1992;  Janis & Mann, 1977; Peterson  et  al. 1998). While vigilance has been a traditional line of

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predator/prey animal research, recent studies argue that vigilance is not an individual adaptive/survival behavior but a collective set of attentional activities based in synchronous and coordinated behaviors (Beauchamp, 2015). During World War II, organizational psychology studies began to identify skills and capacities related to “vigilance tasks” or work in which a worker must respond to infrequent cues but watch for these cues over a long period of time, notably in tending automated processes (Broadbent, 1958). The effort to train people to be vigilant led to a vigilance taxonomy (Parasuraman & D. R. Davies, 1977). This line of research dismissed the common view of vigilance as an undemanding cognitive activity and instead promoted “a new view of vigilance as an exacting, capacity draining assignment that is associated with a high degree of mental demand and frustration” (Warm, Parasuraman, & Matthews, 2008). A NATO conference and subsequent research series focused on developing vigilance theory and investigating performance and physiological factors relevant to “watchkeeping tasks” and sleep patterns (Mackie, 1977). Over the past three decades, research developments have proliferated focused on neuroimaging and amygdala functioning in humans involved in such activities as sleeping, driving, and mate retention (Buss & Shackleford, 1997; Davis & Whalen, 2001; Dinges et al., 1997; Ji & Yang, 2002; Steriade, 2000). The significance of vigilance as an objective, multidimensional state (cognitive, emotional, physiological) has generated a broad range of studies. For example, Murphy and her colleagues (2007) assessed cognitive and physiological dimensions of vigilance to test the “situational cues” hypothesis that women in Math, Science, and Engineering settings are vulnerable to identity threat leading to decreased performance and a sense of not belonging. Hence, vigilance appears to be part of a constellation of responses by members of stigmatized groups to environmental conditions triggering sexual and  stereotype threats (Dutcher & McClelland, 2019). While these studies evidence a more complex understanding of vigilance as at once embodied, affective, and cognitive, the focus on functionality flattens this conception. Vigilance is reduced to what works or doesn’t work for realizing desired ends rather than exploring the ethical and political implications of a vigilant orientation. Culturally, the ethical dimension of vigilance is literally embodied in the figure of the vigilante, a heroic characterization of victim justice that retains the romance and violence of masculinist vengeance narratives.

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The Vigilante Vigilante is a label originating in the U.S. and associated with taking the law into private hands to enact usually violent justice warranted by anti-­ government sentiments and perceptions of inadequate protections from formal authorities. Vigilante groups were especially active in the frontier West where citizens banded together against criminals in the absence of institutionalized authorities. Vigilante justice is associated with rebellion and tyrannicide, often featuring heroes who are outside the law fighting against the formal oppression of the populace by those in power. In the U.S., vigilance committees emerged in the nineteenth century as self-­ appointed groups committed to maintaining justice and order against threats to the community. In 1824, a writer in the Missouri Intelligencer opined, “We hate what are called vigilant men; they are a set of suspicious, mean spirited mortals, that dislike fun” (OED). These groups acted independently from the formal offices of law and justice, sometimes carrying out lynchings or other illegal actions against such threats as prostitution, pornography, abolition, wage slavery, and racial and religious differences although consumer boycotts and legal sanctions were also associated with vigilance groups (Robertson, 2002). Vigilante figures have been lionized in popular media such as the classic DC Comics series The Vigilante (Weisinger & Meskin, 1941) about a rogue lawman in the U.S. Wild West or more recently in the DC comics-­ inspired miniseries Watchmen (Kassell et al., 2019); and particularly in the long-standing popularity of the vigilante film genre—exemplified by classics from the 1970s like Death Wish (Winner, 1974) and Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971) and their many sequels—and in the current decade with films like The Vigilante (Leach & Zuckerman, 2016) and Cold Pursuit (Moland, 2019). Across these depictions, vigilance is associated with the independent agent, often a heroic figure and readily associated with populist sentiments. These are masculinist myths of violent vengeance against both personal injustice and the failure of state protections. The vigilante enacts an anarchist impulse that in the end inevitably becomes folded back into the fabric of conventional social life. Feminist historians have recovered evidence of women’s vigilante groups (Keire, 2001; Mercieca, 2007; Pliley, 2010; Sheramy, 2001; Wyly-­ Jones, 2001). For example, vigilance committees composed of Jewish women in the American Jewish Congress successfully carried out a boycott of German-made goods prior to World War II by keeping an eye on

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the merchandise sold in  local shops and picketing when necessary (Sheramy, 2001). While the male leaders of the Jewish Congress have been credited with such actions, it was the women’s vigilance committees that assured day-to-day surveillance. Such studies evidence women as active agents attentive to and affecting the conditions of their daily lives by mobilizing state authority. Two recent movies suggest the emergence of a vigilante feminist character that appropriates masculinist heroism. Both the violent action movie Peppermint (Morel, 2018) and the historical drama Suffragette (Gavron, 2015) portray women as central characters motivated by the failure of institutions to redress the systemic exploitation of women. In line with traditional vigilantism, these women use anarchist violence to compel institutional change. Social media examples of women’s vigilance are the Twitter campaigns and public outcries over those who engage in sexual harassment and assault. These exemplify the way social media amplifies public reaction. “Digilantism” takes vigilance online in response to online cyber-bullying (“e-bile”), tracing perpetrators and prosecuting them publicly or shaming them privately (Jane, 2016). Drawing women into conventional depictions of vigilance does not alter the reactive, conservative, and often violent model of vigilance prevalent in popular thought. Instead, while we applaud the characterization of women as political agents capable of demanding justice, we find that these characterizations retain the curiously duplicitous nature of vigilance as a form of action based on vulnerability, suspicion, and insecurity.

Feminist Vigilance While we have pointed to the prevalence of vigilance in contemporary feminist thought and politics, vigilance is an unthematized concept in feminist studies. It is not hard to find allusions to the need for vigilance but there is very little focused attention on the concept itself. Yet academic feminism has long been organized around vigilance in the context of an ongoing perception/condition of feminism under siege from forces— both internal and external—that may be denigrating and destructive but are often experienced as implicit, subtle, and not easily identified or addressed. Under such conditions, even what appears to be advocacy requires scrutiny. For example, Angela McRobbie’s 1985/1994 interview of Gayatri Spivak, both well-known feminists, is titled “Strategies of Vigilance,” not as a label for its content but as a metaphor for its intent

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and significance. Spivak’s comments range across topics without explicitly discussing vigilance; yet her remarks invoke the need for self-reflexive attentiveness within feminism against racism, colonialism, and essentialism as well as critical surveillance of the flows and scapes of contemporary modernity. More recently, feminist media scholar Roseanne Mandziuk (2000)  chided feminist media scholarship for too readily advancing a monolithic conception of masculinity, often as a foil. Instead, she argued, “the scrutiny of masculinity as a cultural category is a crucial dimension of feminist critique” (p. 105). In other words, there is need for feminist vigilance both against caricatures of masculinity and as a strategy of critique. Indeed, she titled her comments, “Necessary Vigilance.” Hence, vigilance is clearly part of the contemporary feminist vocabulary, a powerful yet unexamined concept integral to feminist commitments and projects. Upon consideration, it is clear that vigilance is a concept in transition in feminist thought. While the feminist project of historical recovery and empowerment has celebrated examples of women’s vigilance activities (noted above), critical feminists have contested the cultural celebration of the heroic individual for masculinist and Western biases. In addition, agency itself has been reconceptualized as communal and contextual. Hence, there is need to reframe vigilance to align more carefully with contemporary feminist understandings of agency, identity, ethics, and community. For example, feminist media scholar Angharad Valdivia cautioned that as a viable force, feminist identity politics must remain “eternally contingent yet vigilant” (Valdivia, 2002, p. 445). We suggest that a contemporary feminist understanding of vigilance might productively be understood through a poststructuralist frame in which the vigilant subject is rendered as fragmented, fluid, and contingently performative (Ellingson, 2017). We draw on contemporary conceptions of embodied agency and relational ethics to re-imagine a vigilant feminism characterized by relationality, moral complexities, and a commitment to intersectional justice, reflexive critique, and communal agency. Reconceptualizing Vigilance Our vision for a feminist vigilance beyond reaction, conservatism, and defensiveness is premised on recent work in feminist poststructuralism, relationality, and materialism. We suggest that feminist arguments about

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embodied agency and relational ethics contribute heuristically to reconceptualizing feminist vigilance. The idea of embodied agency brings forward a history of gendered power relations at the heart of feminist theory and activism. Feminism has long decried pernicious dichotomies affecting oppression and injustice organized around bodily capacities and institutionalized across societal domains. I highlight two as examples: the subordination of women as passive, docile, and subject to natural weaknesses in contrast to men as active, aggressive, and naturally strong; and the nature/culture divide relegating women to the private, domestic, sensate realm of the body and privileging men as the sovereigns of public life, cultural enlightenment, and rational mind. Enabling women’s embodied agency against the tenacious hold of such dichotomies remains central to feminist analyses and agendas. This requires vigilance given the sociopolitical shifts in practices and policies that reframe gendered agencies (reproductive options, workplace opportunities, education resources, etc.) and a vigilant effort to enable and support alternative sites and opportunities. In recent materialist feminist arguments, the idea of embodied agency has been extended to not only deny the enfleshed autonomy of human bodies from other bodies both organic and inorganic but also the separation of corporeality and material existence from the life of the mind. In her work on cyborgs, companion species, and materialism, Donna Haraway has posited a myriad of boundary-crossing entanglements: “the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture” (2016a, p. 4). Such entanglements reframe vigilance not as boundary protection but as complex relations of comportment and connection. The role of attention and attentiveness, reduced to cognitive functionalities in conventional research, becomes an agentic force in itself. Vigilance becomes not a category of cognitive attentiveness in contrast to inattentiveness but an intensity entangling sensory capacities with proximate surrounds that reorders relations among bodies, objects, affects, and spaces. A feminist relationality denies the self-willed actor as the basis for action and argues instead for the significance of a network of relationships in activating and providing the cognitive, emotional, and material resources for action. In addition, we acknowledge the moral complexities and ambivalences that trouble universalistic ethical codes and the gendered

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essentialism of maternal ethics. The moral status of vigilance and the vigilant feminist cannot be guaranteed but emerges within particular relations and contexts in the process of actualizing an alternative moral perspective. Nonetheless, we contend that feminist vigilance must be committed to gender justice (Butler, 2004; Nussbaum, 2011). Further, the necessity of a multidimensional and historical understanding of both the issues confronting contemporary feminism and strategies of engagement are critical to realizing vigilance from a feminist perspective. In this regard, we advocate an epistemological perspective that takes self-reflexivity as imperative, engages interpretive processes as ceaseless and polysemic, and embraces ambiguities and ambivalences (Pillow, 2003). In Hesse-Biber’s words, this entails “a feminist vigilance that recognizes, respects, and responds to differences in a process of continuous interrogation of the self and others” (2013, p. 637). Affective Contexts of Vigilance Feminist vigilance emerges out of and responds to a contemporary affective landscape dominated by anxiety, fear, and suspicion. Two perceptive arguments about the affect of everyday life inform our concern to, in the words of feminist theorist Adrienne Rich  (1972), “re-vision” vigilance. The first is Berlant’s insightful commentary on the contemporary conditions of what she terms “cruel optimism,” a moment in which there is considerable angst over the failure of modernist promises. Berlant’s analyses of the contemporary condition, its historical articulations, and the existential hypervigilance that characterizes everyday life are useful in formulating the alternative conception of feminist vigilance around agency, critique, and ethical relationality. Berlant’s concern is to delineate the affective, aesthetic, and historical character of what she calls “cruel optimism” when that which one desires is the very thing that prohibits achieving one’s desire. This is especially cruel when “a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming” (2011, p. 2). This is the case with the promises of “the good life” genres of everyday life—upward mobility, job security, equality, “durable intimacy”—despite persistent evidence of disappointments, instabilities, and even irrelevancies (p. 3). Under the present conditions of cruel optimism, there is a prevailing sense of impasse and this is a sense that we think pervades academic

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feminism as well. One thinks, for example, of the impasse over essentialism—at once the unraveling of a (White) feminist dream of solidarity and the self-conscious awareness of that unraveling, particularly in the hypervigilant surveillance of feminist treatises for evidence of essentialist thinking and the subsequent denouncements in print or at conferences. For Berlant, the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event (p. 5).

As is clear in this passage, Berlant emphasizes genre as critical to analysis of the impasse. Genres frame the ways we experience events, providing an affective frame of expectations and meanings (p. 6). Specifically, the genres that once sufficed for guiding lived experience and fantasies of the good life into conventional forms have now become irrelevant yet new genres are still emerging, just as established genres of feminism are being questioned and there is narrative confusion over whether we are now organized around waves, generations, or postfeminisms. The second argument about vigilance speaks to recent large-scale events organized around women’s collective anger over sexual harassment, abuse, assault, and discrimination such as #MeToo and #TimesUp. In a prescient essay about the force of pain and anger in feminist activism, Sara Ahmed (2003) argues that anger has always been a critical element of feminism: articulating the pain of oppression, physical assault, discrimination, and subordination compels anger, even outrage, as a call to feminist action (see also, Ahmed 2015, pp. 168–190; 2017). There is danger of fetishizing such injury and pain—a concern that Brown (1993, 1995) has argued can provoke an “overinvestment” in pain itself and a reactive anger of resentiment that stymies inventive action moving beyond those injuries. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s (1981) understanding of anger as a force of energy and vision in her critique of racism against Black women, Ahmed argues that, If anger energizes feminist subjects, it also requires those subjects to ‘read’ and ‘move’ from anger into a different bodily world, not one that forgets what one is against … but one that is moved by all that cannot be contained in the response of ‘against-ness.’ (2003, p. 247)

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Feminism as critique opens a movement into larger contexts, histories, and possibilities and it is in this movement that “anger against” becomes conjoined with “hope for” because, as Ahmed notes, “anger without hope can lead to despair or a sense of tiredness produced by the ‘inevitability’ of the repetition of what one is against” (p. 251). Feminist vigilance partakes of the hope fueled by anger and critique; our reconceptualization understands vigilance as a proactive, hopeful affective force that remains open and indeed seeks out possibilities for change. Berlant notes that crisis has become a prevailing interpretive genre of the ordinary and there are many aesthetic forms that articulate ways of responding and surviving. Ahmed holds that feminism cannot organize around pain but must mobilize anger toward hope for futures as yet unarticulated. Accordingly, we have asked contributors to this volume to expand on our sketch of feminist vigilance as an affective, embodied, and critical response to challenges of the contemporary social milieu in order to move us toward as-yet-unarticulated feminist possibilities. Summarily, the model of feminist vigilance we advance entails the following features: • Embodied, gendered agencies –– Explores enfleshed and human-material relations of comportment and connection –– Engages affective intensities and sensory capacities –– Energized by anger and hope • Contingent and relational ethics –– Acknowledges moral complexities and ambivalences –– Upholds gender justice and a feminist ethics of care –– Enacts reflexive critique based in interpretive polysemy and self-interrogation –– Advances  networked relationships and distributed resources for action

Elaborating Feminist Vigilance We have asked the chapter authors to forward our ideas about feminist vigilance in terms of their own projects, expertise, and commitments. The assembled chapters refine these conceptions of feminist vigilance offering

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concrete examples of the need for and strategies of vigilance in the context of neoliberal precarities, postfeminist challenges, and the cruel optimisms that entrap us yet keep us going. Taken together, they inspire an ongoing engagement with vigilance as a feminist perspective, strategy, and commitment that we hope readers will sustain both theoretically and pragmatically. The contributions of the chapters group together in ways that attest to the generativity of vigilance as a feminist concern. Chapters 2 and 3 develop the possibilities of feminist vigilance as a methodology for feminist critique and reconstruction. Sarah A. Bell traces vigilance as a critical technofeminist methodology in Haraway’s work beginning with the (in) famous feminist cyborg (2016b). She argues that Haraway’s focus on knowledge generation led to an awareness of the growing dominance of computation through the integration of its instrumentalizing knowledge practices into the infrastructures of everyday life. Feminist vigilance as a methodology for collective action against this infusion of data, algorithms, networks, and computations entails situated attention to layered relations of domination and a commitment to “non-innocence” as an intersectional feminist political strategy. Bell posits two tactics for interrupting the informatics of domination in order to reinscribe bodies back into information-­ based systems that have abstracted selected aspects of embodiment: one resisting the disembodiment of geodata tracing and the other demanding accountability for the intersectional impact of affective computing. Bell urges feminists to engage in Haraway’s methodology of vigilance in order to disrupt an informatics of domination that seeks to “define us as other than we are.” Nancy Henaku begins from a perspective situated in the Global South and specifically in the state politics of sub-Saharan Africa. She details the historical emergence and contradictions of state feminism and neoliberal appeals to women’s empowerment in postcolonial Ghanian national politics. The gender-conservative and anti-democratic nature of state feminism becomes obvious in Henaku’s feminist critical discourse analysis of the strategies in three statements by the then-Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection and feminist activists’ responses. However, she offers a methodological turn to a vigilant “cosmopolitical” feminist critique that remains epistemically responsive to the situation of postcolonial subjects of transnational discourses like feminism. It also effects a reconstructive impulse to advance new frameworks for more hopeful, collective, and democratic discursive futures.

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Chapters 4 and 5 develop understandings of feminist vigilance through the histories and experiences of particular communities of women in the U.S.: Black women and women religious. These are very different discussions that take different approaches but both show that embodiment, collective action, and care infuse feminist vigilance as a community strategy for action. Karla D. Scott examines feminist vigilance through the intersectional inequities of race, class, gender, and health that riddle the lived experiences of Black women today. Through this perspective, she takes feminist vigilance to include Black women’s restorative self-care drawn on historical lessons, communal strengths, and hope for the future. Among the strategies of self-care are standing up against the threat of historical erasure; repurposing the idealized strengths of strong Black womanhood; and engaging in restorative practices of self-care in order to sustain hope from the past, through the present, and into a viable and sustainable future for Black women and Black communities. “Watch Night” refers to African Americans keeping vigil together against last-minute actions of slave-­ owners before the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation. Evoking this chilling story about staying alert to threats against community survival, Scott calls for a “Watch Night” vigil by Black women. In poignant vignettes, Scott details the pressure on Black women to abandon or perpetually postpone their affective, mental, and physical self-care in order to counter the still rampant racism, implicit bias, and misperceptions circulating through predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and she calls attention to Black women’s collective efforts to address self-care. Scott’s conclusion is that Black women’s prioritization of their own self-care is a significant form of feminist vigilance. Bren Ortega Murphy makes a compelling case for vigilance as the critical charge of Catholic women religious in the U.S. over the past several hundred years and shows how this charge has served as a passionate commitment and a mode of collective action. Sisters in the early U.S. were charged with keeping vigil over the faith and the flock. They took this to mean keeping watch not only over peoples’ tendencies to stray from the faith but also for the welfare of immigrants and the impoverished, especially by providing Catholic education and health care. Murphy details how the Sisters founded and also staffed institutions for education, health care, and child care, taking on issues such as disease, poverty, violence, and discrimination that they encountered daily. From the mid-1970s in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, they dedicated themselves to addressing racism, immigration problems, prison reform, environmental issues,

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nuclear threat, and U.S. imperialism. In her astute analysis of popular images and media and film portrayals of women religious, Murphy acknowledges that the popular caricature of hyper-vigilant nuns seeking out blasphemy and minor sins has some basis in practice. But she also finds more complex characterizations that depict nuns engaging societal quandaries over moral principles and struggles for social justice. Murphy argues that the collective agency at the heart of the organized work of women religious is a model for feminist vigilance. Women religious show us that vigilance must be sustained, collective, expansive, inclusive, and compassionate. In Chaps. 6 and 7, Diane L. Shoos and Siobhan E. Smith-Jones, respectively, turn to films to elaborate feminist vigilance in the ways we watch and find them meaningful. For Shoos, feminist vigilance entails a sophisticated alertness to the appeal of dominant narratives of domestic and intimate violence and particularly to the way familiar film genres perpetuate those narratives. Vigilance is particularly important given three intersecting moments in contemporary social life: post-awareness, postfeminism, and neoliberal precarity. What Shoos calls “post-awareness” refers to the collective sense that we are now quite aware of the prevalence of male violence in women’s lives and the need to do something about it. Yet we are all the more open to the ready formulas of popular films that depict civil resources as inadequate or unreliable and abused women as vulnerable, alone, and ultimately responsible for their own safety. Shoos argues that we need a “proactive, sustained, collective attention to male partner violence against women as a systemic issue that must be addressed in flexible, multivalent ways” (this volume, p. 102). She demonstrates feminist vigilance as a proactive force for transforming genre conventions and intervening in dominant storylines and social practices through a close review of the independent film, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Hepburn & Tailfeathers, 2019). The film focuses on race, class, women’s bodies, and motherhood in the experiences of two Indigenous women in Canada; both are violated and abused, yet only one by an abusive male partner. The film is vigilant in its awareness of mundane abuses and contextualizing histories and conditions, drawing attention to the intersectional oppressions that marginalized women endure and the complicated choices they must make. By staying vigilant to the opportunities such narratives offer for altering how we understand and, ultimately, how we respond to oppression and abuse, feminist vigilance offers a hopeful and proactive perspective.

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In her proactive and optimistic framing of feminist vigilance, Smith-­ Jones posits an emergent form of Black women’s media response, what she calls Black Feminist Anticipatory Vigilance (BFAV), an attention to and awareness of what they expect from future media representations of Black people and Black life. Based on an exploratory interview study, she identifies a set of criteria that Black women viewers articulated based on their viewing experience of the popular film, Black Panther (Coogler, 2018). Critically, these criteria draw not only  on the movie’s positive images of an imagined African utopia but also on the contrasts among such positive images and the dominant media portrayals  of Black life. BFAV thus affects vigilance as a way of watching with and for collective pleasure, desire, and hope. The criteria are future-oriented, emphasize values of equity, justice, authenticity, and community, and assert preferred standards of Black female beauty, love, loyalty, and Black pride. Notably, BFAV implies a rejection of hegemonic constraints on Black women and embraces the positive depictions of African heritage as grounds for envisioning new possibilities, especially for younger generations. The last three chapters, 8, 9 and 10, explore feminist vigilance by adapting an ethics of care in ways that suggest that the ethical dimensions of vigilance are multifaceted and dynamic. In Chapter 8, Laura L. Ellingson understands vigilance as a dynamic element of a feminist research methodology. She identifies three ways in which feminist vigilance as caring attentiveness manifests in feminist methods. First, she argues for vigilance as a multiform and dynamic ethical commitment to care about and attend carefully to research participants. Second, she explores the ways that vigilance is an embodied methodological practice. Third, she expands on vigilance as a strategy for managing the dialectical tensions that often stymie ethical researchers. Throughout, Ellingson draws on her feminist photovoice study of long-term cancer survivors’ everyday experiences of health and embodiment (Ellingson & Borofka, 2020) to illustrate possibilities for mobilizing vigilance to enrich methodological practices and enhance ethical participant engagement. Contrasting a micro-analysis of an infamous internal Google memo with larger conversations about why women don’t succeed in the supposed meritocracy of Silicon Valley, Victoria L. Bergvall argues for feminist vigilance over technocratic culture and its impact on language and social life. She advances a (non-essentialized) empathy and feminist ethic of care as critical to the deconstruction of these influences. For Bergvall, the misogyny of the memo by James Damore, former Google software engineer, is evident

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in its discursive constructions. She develops an extended Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis that reveals his biologically essentialist assumptions about why there are so few women in STEM professions. Despite Damore's frequent use of discursive hedges (e.g., modal verbs, scalar adverbials, and passives) and advocacy for attending to the overlaps in population distributions, his  arguments fall too readily into the binaries (e.g., empathy vs. reason, left vs. right bias, systemizing vs. empathizing) he overtly decries.  Bergvall argues that we can only build a more humane technological future if we exercise a feminist vigilance over our educational systems and our discourse about technology and gender ability.  Patty Sotirin finds lessons for feminist vigilance in the work of a national gun control organization, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (Moms). A moral mandate of care undergirds the organization’s work—the protection of children. Sotirin examines two signature Moms campaigns: the Be SMART campaign focused on parental responsibility for secure gun storage; and a coalition effort with other gun safety and education organizations to eliminate gun violence in schools that includes a protest against active shooter drills. She characterizes these campaigns as civic action based in vigilant care with lessons to offer for rethinking feminist vigilance (acknowledging that Moms is not a feminist organization). The lessons she draws are unexpected: they attend to affective intensities rather than civilities, to the re-visions of our collective determinations of grievability, and to diffractive re-turnings within the dense entanglements among spaces, moments, and bodies coalescing in gun violence and vulnerability. Together, these lessons frame a feminist vigilance of anger, care, and hope, alert to the possibilities for nonviolent futures. Taken together, these chapters envision feminist vigilance as a powerful affective, discursive-material, and embodied practice. Our reconceptualization of vigilance contributes to a politically and ethically vital feminism that counters postfeminist dismissals and refigurations and offers substantive resources for confronting the precarities of contemporary social life. We invite readers to explore the potency of feminist vigilance.

References Ahmed, S. (2003). Feminist futures. In M. Eagleton (Ed.), A concise companion to feminist theory (pp. 236–254). Blackwell Publishing. Ahmed, S. (2015). Feminist attachments. The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.) (pp. 168–190). Routledge.

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Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press. Beauchamp, J. (2015). Animal vigilance: Monitoring predators and competitors. London: Academic Press. Bem, S. (1993). The lenses of gender: Transforming the debate on sexual inequality. Yale University Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Broadbent, D. E. (1958). The general nature of vigilance. In Perception and communication (pp.  108–139). Pergamon Press. https://doi. org/10.1037/10037-006 Brown, W. (1993). Wounded attachments. Political Theory, 21(3), 390–410. Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton University Press. Buss, D. M. & Shackelford, T. K. (1997). From vigilance to violence: Mate retention tactics in married couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 346–361. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.346 Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso. Coogler, R. (Director). (2018). Black Panther [Film]. Marvel Studios & Walt Disney Studios. Crenshaw, K. & Ritchie, A.  J. (2015). Say her name: Resisting police brutality against black women. Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, New York. Davis, M. & Whalen, P.  J. (2001). The amygdala: Vigilance and emotion. Molecular Psychiatry, 6, 13–34. Dinges, D.  F., Pack, F., Williams, K., Gillen, K.  A., Powell, J.  W., Ott, G.  E., Aptowicz, C., & Pack, A. I. (1997). Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4–5 hours per night. Sleep: Journal of Sleep Research & Sleep Medicine, 20(4), 267–277. Dow, B. J. & Wood, J. T. (2014). Repeating history and learning from it: What can SlutWalks teach us about feminism? Women’s Studies in Communication, 37(1): 22–43. Dutcher, H. & McClelland, S. I. (2019). Laboring to make sex “safe”: Sexual vigilance in young U.S. college women. Sex Roles Online. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11199-019-1004-2 Elgar, M. A. (1989). Predator vigilance and group size in mammals and birds: A critical review of the empirical evidence. Biological Reviews, 64(1), 13–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-185X.1989.tb00636.x Ellingson, L. L. (2017). Embodiment in qualitative research. Routledge. Ellingson, L. L., & Borofka, K. G. E. (2020). Long-term cancer survivors’ everyday embodiment. Health Communication, 35(2), 180–191. Fandt, P. M. (1993). Encouraging decision vigilance through increased accountability. Journal of Applied Business Research (JABR), 9(3), 129–135.

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Gavron, S. (Director) (2015). Suffragette [Film]. Ruby Films & Focus Features. Gay, R. (2014). Bad feminist: Essays. HarperCollins, Inc. Haraway, D. (2016a). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2016b). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-­ feminism in the late twentieth century. In Manifestly Haraway (pp.  5–90). Minnesota University Press. Hepburn, K., & Tailfeathers, E-M. (Directors). (2019). The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open [Film]. Experimental Forest Films. Hesse-Biber, S.  N. (Ed.). (2013). Feminist research practice: A primer. Sage Publications. Hirokawa, R. Y., & Rost, K. M. (1992). Effective group decision making in organizations: Field test of the vigilant interaction theory. Management Communication Quarterly, 5(3), 267–288. Jane, E.  A. (2016). Online misogyny and feminist digilantism. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 30(3), 284–297. Janis, I. L., & Mann, L. (1977). Decision making: A psychological analysis of conflict, choice, and commitment. Free Press. Ji, Q., & Yang, X. (2002). Real-time eye, gaze, and face pose tracking for monitoring driver vigilance. Real-time imaging, 8(5), 357–377. Kaminer, W. (2017, Oct. 27). Beware vigilante feminism. Boston Globe. https:// www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/10/27/beware-vigilante-feminism/ Qix5RT3jJjoVIAzh9Zt9aM/story.html Kassell, N., Williams, S., Green, S., Parekh, A., Semel, D., & Toye, F. E. O. (Directors). (2019). Watchmen [TV miniseries]. DC Comics. Keire, M. L. (2001). The vice trust: A reinterpretation of the white slavery scare in the United States, 1907–1917. Journal of Social History, 35(1), 5–41. Leach, J., & Zuckerman, D. (Directors). (2016). The Vigilante [Film]. Crooked Jaw Productions. Lima, S. L. (1995). Back to the basics of anti-predatory vigilance: the group-size effect. Animal Behavior, 49(1), 11–20. Mackie, R., Ed. (1977). Vigilance: Theory, operational performance, and physiological correlates (NATO Conference Series/III Human Factors). Plenum Press. Mandziuk, R. M. (2000). Necessary vigilance: Feminist critiques of masculinity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(1), 105–108. https://doi. org/10.1080/15295030009388379 McRobbie, A. (1994/1985). Strategies of vigilance: An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In Postmodernism and Popular Culture (pp.  119–129). Routledge. Reprinted from Block, 10 (1985): 5–9. McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. Sage Publications.

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Mercieca, J. R. (2007). The culture of honor: How slave owners responded to the abolitionist mail crisis of 1835. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 10(1), 51–76. Moland, H. P. (Director). (2019). Cold pursuit [Film]. Summit Entertainment & Lionsgate. Morel, P. (Director). (2018). Peppermint [Film]. STX Films & STX Entertainment. Murphy, M. C., Steele, C. M., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Signaling threat: How situational cues affect women in math, science, and engineering settings. Psychological Science, 18(10), 879–885. Negra, D. (2010). Brangelina: The fertile valley of celebrity. The Velvet Light Trap, 65, 60–61. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press. Lorde, A. (1981). The uses of anger. Women’s Studies Quarterly 9(3), 7–10. Retrieved https://academicworks.cuny.edu/wsq/509 Parasuraman, R. & Davies, D. R. (1977). A taxonomic analysis of vigilance performance. In Mackie, R. (Ed.), Vigilance: Theory, operational performance, and physiological correlates (pp. 559–574). Plenum Press. Peterson, R. S., Owens, P. D., Tetlock, P. E., Fan, E. T., & Martorana, P. (1998). Group dynamics in top management teams: Groupthink, vigilance, and alternative models of organizational failure and success. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2–3), 272–305. Pliley, J. R. (2010). Claims to protection: The rise and fall of feminist abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936. Journal of Women’s History, 22(4), 90–113. Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196. Projansky, S. (2001). The postfeminist context: Popular redefinitions of feminism, 1980-present. Watching Rape: Film and television in postfeminist culture (pp. 66–89). New York University Press. Rich, A. (1972). When we dead awaken: Writing as re-vision. College English, 42, 18–30. Robertson, S. (2002). Age of consent and the making of childhood in New York City, 1886–1921. Journal of Social History, 35(4), 781–798. Sheramy, R. (2001). “There are times when silence is a sin”: The Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement. American Jewish History, 89(1), 105–121. Siegel, D. (Director) (1971). Dirty Harry [Film]. The Malpaso Company & Warner Bros. Shoos, D. L. (2020). Watching with feminist vigilance: Media genres of male partner violence against women. In Sotirin, P., Bergvall, V. L., & Shoos, D. L. (Eds.), Feminist Vigilance (pp. xx-xx). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Solnit, R. (2017, Dec. 10). Don’t let the alt-right hijack #MeToo for their agenda. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/ dec/10/dont-let-alt-right-coopt-metoo-agenda Steriade, M. (2000). Corticothalamic resonance, states of vigilance and mentation. Neuroscience, 101(2): 243–276. Valdivia, A. (2002). Feminist scholarship in the new decade: Three challenges to steer us through turbulent times. Women & Language, 33(1), 109–112. Van der Tuin, I. (2015). Generational Feminism: New Materialist introduction to a generative approach. Lexington Books. Warm, J.  S., Parasuraman, R., & Matthews, G. (2008). Vigilance requires hard mental work and is stressful. Human Factors, 50(3), 433–441. Weisinger, M., & Meskin, M. (Writers). (1941). The origin of Vigilante [Comic book]. Action Comics #42, 1(42). DC Comics. Retrieved from https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Action_Comics_Vol_1_42 Wilson, J. A. (2018). Neoliberalism. Routledge. Winner, M. (Director). (1974). Death Wish [Film]. Dino de Lauretis & Paramount Pictures. Wyly-Jones, S. (2001). The 1835 anti-abolition meetings in the South: A new look at the controversy over the abolition postal campaign. Civil War History, 47(4), 289–309. Zeisler, A. (2016). We were feminists once: From Riot Grrl to CoverGirl®, the buying and selling of a political movement. Public Affairs.

CHAPTER 2

The Informatics of Domination and the Necessity for Feminist Vigilance Toward Digital Technology Sarah A. Bell

In 1985 Donna Haraway famously declared, “We are all … cyborgs” (henceforth, Haraway, 2016a). This provocative statement has been extraordinarily generative in disciplines from technology studies to modern art (Ferrando, 2016; Ongley, 2016), even landing her in the pages of Wired magazine (Kunzru, 1997), usually known more for its technolibertarianism than its liberation feminism. Intentionally invoking the terminology of the militaryindustrial complex, Haraway had more in mind by “cyborg” (Clynes & Kline, 1960) than the literal existence of artificial hearts and industrial robotics. However, within the “technophoric cyberdrool” (Squires, 1996, p. 195) of much of the discourse around the early World Wide Web, it became easy to reduce the more radical aspects of the “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (2016a) to a celebration of disembodiment, as it was taken up in the cyberfeminism of Sadie Plant (1997), for example, who ran with the idea that the Internet

S. A. Bell (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_2

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would free women from gender oppression. Haraway herself appeared to move away from the overdetermined cyborg in subsequent work, exploring other configurations including companion species (2003) and Chthulucene kin (2016c). Often the way the cyborg has been taken up  loses sight of Haraway’s key insight that the “information age” brought with it new logics of patriarchal domination that require new methodologies with which to build feminist politics. This is where I call for feminist vigilance. Thirty-five years after “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” we are increasingly subject to this “informatics of domination” (p. 33). This chapter revisits the manifesto to conceptualize Haraway’s methodology of “non-innocence” as feminist vigilance toward the dominations of today’s “technoscape” (Appadurai, 1990) and offers some examples of political tactics that might result. I want to refocus attention on Haraway’s diagnosis of a shift from an “organics of domination” to an “informatics of domination,” and the implications of this for all feminists concerned about surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), algorithms of oppression (Noble, 2018), the new Jim Code (Benjamin, 2019b), the digital poorhouse (Eubanks, 2018), weapons of math destruction (O’Neil, 2016), artificial unintelligence (Broussard, 2018), and anti-social media (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). Haraway was neither the first nor the only theorist to bring these threats to our attention, but her contribution was to diagnose how the knowledge enterprise of the natural sciences was simultaneously necessary and limited as a schema for ordering the world, and how the knowledge enterprise of computation was replacing that of the natural sciences with the same attendant opportunities and risks. The situation is daunting, especially as any intervention in the “informatics of domination” seems predicated on one’s ability to understand complex statistical mathematics or the ins and outs of computer code. However, informatic systems are not just technological “black boxes,” but entire techno-political-economic systems designed to be invisible by their corporate and/or authoritarian owners. As such, they are subject to democratic politics, but avoiding and eradicating their harms requires the vigilance of all liberation feminists.

Considering Feminist Vigilance as a Methodology The need for feminist, postcolonial, and anti-racist methodologies has been compellingly articulated by Ahmed (2017a), Smith (1999), Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008), and others. These arguments show that acts of research cannot be understood as separate from other kinds of world

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building. Methodology permeates action from the academic to the mundane. One way of conceptualizing feminist vigilance, then, is as a methodology for collective action, rather than as a watch for specific dangers. When defined as “attentiveness to danger,” vigilance implies the potentially problematic need for a shared agreement about what is dangerous, as our attention is limited, even collectively. Our limitations threaten to send us all scrambling to assert what is most important from our individual vantage points, with all the attendant conflicts that competitive personhood entails. We run the risk of alienating those who could be allies, of weaponizing our values or abandoning them altogether, of making vigilantes out of victims. We cannot afford to fight over which surveillance technologies do the most harm, for example. While feminists’ politics may be personal, they can suffer from being too much about specific persons, as Crenshaw (1989) made clear. Personhood is one of the disciplining logics of patriarchy and is at the crux of “vexy things” (Perry, 2018) for feminist solidarity, like splintering reproductive politics (cf. Emre, 2018). Instead of becoming a doctrine about what is most dangerous for individual persons, vigilance can be conceptualized as a methodology for situated attention to the layers of patriarchal domination. In “Manifesto for Cyborgs” and its companion essay “Situated Knowledges” (1988), Haraway describes what is necessary in order to share knowledge among power-differentiated communities: a commitment to non-innocence, even at the level of ontology. Haraway has been criticized by some feminist technology scholars, particularly those working within the academic tradition of Science and Technology Studies (STS), for not offering an actionable politics. Recently, though, the negative implied in non-innocence has been successfully used as an intersectional feminist political strategy against the informatics of domination. This section describes what I am calling Haraway’s methodology, and addresses some of the previous critiques that found its politics lacking by showing its recent uptake by academic feminists working in biotechnology and in data science. “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” (hereafter MFC) was published in the Socialist Review at a time when many on the Left had lost some faith in revolutionary politics, and “movement conservatives” (Krugman, 2007) were gaining power. Asked to “envision what was possible” when faced with the backlash of Reagan-Thatcher policies, Haraway, who grew up “with a brain educated by Sputnik” (2016a, p. 203), was a biologist acutely aware of the forms

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that power took in information science-saturated culture and politics (p. 205), particularly how it manifests in our ways of knowing. Haraway has said that MFC was “an effort to come to terms with these … imploding ways of understanding being in the world and being responsible for the world” (p. 206). Some of those imploding ways of knowing were the scientific and technical discourses that Haraway demanded be interrogated, by the counter-intuitive mandate of “holding incompatible things together because … all are necessary and true” (2016a, p. 5). MFC was also responding to a feminist debate about whether technology is oppressive because men control its development and use, or whether technology is itself patriarchal and must be rejected. In the first position, represented by Cynthia Cockburn’s Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (1983) and Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Know-How (1985), social, psychological, and cultural factors work to prevent women from having access to technology as either producers or users, but technology can still be redeemed for women. The latter position is represented by some ecofeminists including Carolyn Merchant (1980), who argued that the patriarchal world view itself had created science that conceptualized reality as a machine and thereby sanctioned the domination of both women and nature. Haraway (2016a) argued instead that technology is central to human activity and that feminists should focus on being responsible for the boundaries it enacts and for reconceiving power relations around its existence (p.  7). Some respondents have referred to Haraway’s position as initiating a “third wave” of feminist theory about technology (Wyatt, 2008, p. 117). It would take a dissertation to summarize the thousands of responses MFC inspired, which run the full gamut of praise and blame, but there is no doubt about the essay’s influence. In the third edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (2007), the “comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field” as published by the Society for Social Studies of Science, Lucy Suchman described MFC as an “intervention” that would seem to have successfully encouraged feminist scholars to “embrace … the increasingly evident inseparability of subjects and objects, ‘natural’ bodies and ‘artificial’ augmentations” (p. 140) as part of the larger poststructuralist move to question the categories and associated politics of difference reproduced through social action and interaction (p.  141). Suchman describes feminist aims in STS as aligned with poststructuralism broadly:

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Certain problematics, while not exclusive to feminist research, act as guiding questions for contemporary feminist scholars engaging with technoscience. Primary among these is the ongoing project of unsettling binary oppositions, through philosophical critique and through historical reconstruction of the practices through which particular divisions emerged as foundational to modern technoscientific definitions of the real. (p. 140)

As with any intervention, some scholars debated its merits. Within STS, two oft-cited scholars questioned the efficacy of MFC for the field. Judy Wajcman, who co-edited the third edition Handbook, published a short history of Technofeminism (2004) in which she expressed ambivalence about “a cyborg solution.” While granting that Haraway “more than any other thinker … prompts us to consider the cultural implications of the destabilization of our entrenched Enlightenment distinctions between human, animal, and machine” (p. 88), Wajcman nevertheless concludes that “Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics” (p.  101). Much of the criticism is anticipated in other critiques of poststructuralism generally: the method of writing is itself exclusionary; the deconstruction of binaries relies on an endless regress of other binaries; or, worse, merely replaces old structures for new ones. Wajcman is careful to distance Haraway’s non-universalizing vision from the essentialism expressed by some of her acolytes, but nevertheless takes Haraway to task for the caricature of feminism implied in choosing sides between the cyborg and the goddess (p. 100). In Wajcman’s estimation, the cyborg proved to be an attention hog but perhaps not a very good ambassador for shared political subjectivities. Sally Wyatt (2008) is likewise impatient with the lack of a practical politics in MFC. Echoing Wajcman, Wyatt observed, While it seems clear that Haraway intended [the cyborg metaphor] to be a political tool with which both to deconstruct the gender relations of technology and to build a new political agenda for feminism, it has more often been employed solely as a tool for deconstruction. (p. 118)

Wyatt asked whether it was time for a new feminist technology manifesto (p. 111), concerned that MFC cast too long a shadow over the progress of technofeminist aims, especially as she stressed it “rather lacks a programme for action” (p. 112). A manifesto is a public declaration of policy

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and aims, and Wyatt is clear about what a new feminist technology manifesto should address: the kind of technology “we” want, the objectives “we” want to support, and, importantly, how “we” can achieve technology “to support the diversity of women’s lived experiences” (p. 112). I believe Wyatt’s intersectional aims were sincere, and her desire for actionable plans is much appreciated, but the inevitable problems with developing a single agenda for all womxn or even only for all STS scholars who consider themselves feminists speak exactly to Haraway’s concerns about doctrine and positive ontology generally. One of the significant double-binds that Haraway recognized was the colonizing imperative of appeals to Liberal ideals such as rights.1 Haraway’s commitment to “blasphemy” and “non-innocence” seems lost in these critiques, as is her argument for situatedness. What may be more apropos of the criticism of feminists within STS toward MFC is the fact that Haraway is sympathetic to the motivations of social construction, but suspicious of its purity claims, another point of irony in the criticism that the result of Haraway’s work is merely an endless regress of deconstruction.2 In essence, Haraway’s theory of process, her attempt to liberate epistemology, seems sometimes lost when we read MFC looking for a politics. This can be chalked up to either the ambiguities of a text that seems to promise “to give us our politics” (p. 7), or to interpretations that ignore the political precursor of a feminist ontology that Haraway demands (p. 7). In the end, perhaps the choice of the provocative terms cyborg and manifesto in the title, quickly overdetermined by James Cameron’s Terminator films on one hand, and the dilution of radical politics by neoliberal logics on the other, inhibited some of the generative response Haraway’s methodology called for. Let’s not call it a manifesto.3 Let’s not address it to cyborgs.4 “One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology,” to which end Haraway offered the figuration of the cyborg (p. 33), but the cyborg isn’t necessary to the task. It’s worth refocusing Haraway’s methodology as feminist vigilance toward an informatics of domination for two related reasons. Firstly, for all their impatience with Haraway’s lack of praxis, neither Wajcman nor Wyatt offers particularly compelling solutions. They each appeal to disciplinary agenda-setting, with Wyatt advocating for more empirical and action-oriented work in STS (p. 122), and Wajcman calling for greater participation of women in Science-Technology-Engineering-­ Mathematics or STEM (p. 109). It is interesting that for a discipline that

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takes as its subject the social shaping of technology, the main political praxis that is advocated amounts to “she can STEM.” Surely if social shaping is a “real” phenomenon, it follows that there should be means of influence open to everyone who is subject to any given technology, even if some technological roles (e.g., producer, user, non-user) offer additional powers of influence. It seems that some of us who believe in the social shaping of technology have floundered in trying to apply observations made about mechanical technologies (e.g., that many kinds of people were able to influence the design of the bicycle before it was stabilized) to the seemingly invisible computational technologies that rely on “black boxed” informational components. We might remember that the black box only hides the processing of inputs into outputs. These technologies are social both after and before the act of processing. Surely, then, there are political strategies available for intervening in the informatics of domination even by those without specialized training. In other words, technofeminism defined merely as advocacy for increasing women’s participation in STEM fields does not require an orientation toward justice that I want to claim here as a necessary component of feminist vigilance. As Ruha Benjamin (2019a) explains, “A justice-oriented approach to science and technology should not be limited to calls for ‘inclusion’ as a vague multicultural platitude; nor is it only about ensuring … access,” but rather requires “refashioning” the relationship between technology and society to prioritize justice and equity (p. 6). The unit of analysis of a politically effective feminist vigilance cannot only be technology qua technology. The social shaping of technology and the social impact of technology are both happening all the time. The feminist vigilance I argue for doesn’t require a degree in data science or computer programming, but does require we work together, because of and in spite of our situatedness, to imagine alternatives to the techno quo of an informatics of domination. The second reason, though, is that when MFC is understood as methodology, it does inspire politics. Benjamin (2016), again, has demonstrated this praxis in her discussion of informed refusal in bioethics: ‘[I]nformed refusal’ may be considered one part of a larger justice-oriented approach to science and technology. How might it change the terms of engagement if subjects’ refusal to participate were more fully institutionalized, beyond the assurance that patients, tissue donors, and human research subjects can ‘opt out’ at any time? For starters, greater onus would be placed

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on institutions to incorporate the concerns and insights of prospective research subjects and tissue donors upstream, far in advance of recruitment. (p. 984)

The negative construct of the refusal is what unites participants, not their various reasons for refusing, or their “right” to refuse. It is the oppression of the knowledge regime that is refused. The tactic of refusal has been developed by Indigenous scholars, including Audra Simpson (2007) and Kimberly TallBear (2013). It is consonant with Haraway’s epistemological demand for situated knowledge, and can be a basic tenet of feminist vigilance, as the following example shows. Haraway has identified her 1988 essay in Feminist Studies as “the sister paper” to MFC (2016b, p.  207). In “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Haraway yearns for a “successor science project” (pacing Sandra Harding (1986)) that could offer “a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions” (Haraway, 1988, p. 579). Though Haraway has been criticized for offering only an endless regression of deconstruction, that is not her intent, as this emphasis on worlding makes clear. What she does acknowledge is that we are all implicated in practices of domination, and therefore, she concludes, we need methods for translation, or the means to share knowledge among power-differentiated communities (p. 580) in order to establish the solidarity required of politics. She reasons that any method of translation must simultaneously accept partial perspectives and demand that perspectives are only ever partial, in order to avoid the twin “god-tricks” of relativism and totalization (p.  584). By way of example, she attempts to reclaim vision from its tainted identification with omniscience (“the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference”) by embracing specific historical acts of seeing that can “be stitched together imperfectly” to “see together without claiming to be another” (p. 586). Haraway demands that politics be situated because bodies are situated, technologies are situated, power is situated, and the only critical field is interrelation. MFC is described by its subtitle: “an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit” (2016a, p.  5). The project centers on finding ways to build solidarity through affinity rather than identity. Haraway was taking seriously postcolonial critiques of the liberal subject, including resistance from womxn in the global east and

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south to accepting western feminism as a “gift.” Identities rely on claims about personhood; affinities do not. Even here, Haraway was describing affinity as kinship (p.  19), a relational model that provides an ethics. Refusal is relational. Recently, a collective of feminists working in data science published a data manifest-no that acknowledges non-innocence and situated knowledge in order to define the boundaries of ethical practice, while avoiding a hierarchy of whose data “rights” should be protected first. As Cifor et al. (2019) explain: Feminism is plural; there are many feminisms and they may differ in their positive visions, methodologies, collective ends, and situated concerns. Yet, what allows them to ‘hang together’ as different but still feminist is the negative construction—a refusal of an inheritance…. Refusal is work, one that at its best can help different feminisms recognize interlocking struggles across domains, across contexts and cultures, and that enables us to work in solidarity to prop up and build resilience with one another.

As Sara Ahmed (2017b) puts it succinctly: “We can return to the start, to the shortness of the word no, a small word with a big job to do; a word we use because of what we have to do to create a world in which we can be.” (Bold in original). Refusal is one strategy. How else might we “stitch” our partial, situated knowledges together in solidarity? How might we not only refuse the world we don’t want, but also co-construct worlds in which we can be? In Haraway’s methodology, we must accept that the world is an active entity, a fact that seems at first not to matter for interrogating an informatics of domination, but her target is instrumentalizing knowledge practices, which she stresses are material and semiotic.5 Haraway (1988) explains, “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge” (p.  592). Instead of a theory of agency that risks reinscribing the world as “a screen or a ground or a resource,” it is enough to concede that objects act, that “actors come in many and wonderful forms,” and that “the codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read; the world is not raw material for humanization” (p. 593). Critically, “no particular doctrine of representation or decoding or discovery guarantees anything” (p. 593). She describes a world made of

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material-semiotic actors, the boundaries of which materialize in social interaction. These two tenets, intra-action and refusal, provide a basis for a methodology of feminist vigilance that can result in political action, as the next section illustrates.

From a Methodology for Feminist Vigilance to Tactics for Interrupting the Informatics of Domination Demanding non-innocence and committing to situated knowledge does not mean that specific actions are never appropriate. The previous section showed how Haraway’s approach to working within regimes of knowledge practice can be both critical and constructive, and involve all feminists as a vigilant collective, regardless of any individual’s position of power or personhood. This section applies that insight by offering examples of political tactics specific to the critique of informational systems. First, I’ll reiterate Haraway’s insight that the knowledge regime of natural science is replaced in the late twentieth century by a knowledge regime of computation, which she refers to as the “informatics of domination.” Then, I’ll demonstrate how attending to the relations of material-semiotic actors can help identify political actions by offering two examples of “boundary work” that reinscribe bodies back into information-based systems as a means to expose potential oppressions. Haraway diagnosed a transition from an “organics of domination” to an “informatics of domination” based on the recognition that the development of networked computing contributed to a new knowledge regime that “[translates] the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (ital. in original, 2016a, p. 34). This is the Universal Turing Machine writ large. The colonizing and extractive imperatives of patriarchal political economy now require that all bodies be defined by codes that can be used as data. Informatics is now the primary means of economic, political, and cultural production throughout the world, even if we haven’t much used the word “informatics” since the early days of the “information superhighway.” Today we are aware of data as a resource processed by algorithms that sometimes replicate bias—racism, classism, sexism—but what is to blame for that bias? Can anyone be held accountable for perpetuating these oppressions? Where is liberation even possible? If we refocus on Haraway’s original diagnosis of informatics as an instrumentalizing

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knowledge practice enacted within a world of material-semiotic actors, the boundaries of which materialize in social interaction, some possible tactics present themselves. Haraway recognized that in informatic networks, boundaries are called interfaces, categories are instantiated in taxonomies, and the biggest threat to instrumental power is the interruption of communication. These are the sites, then, of politics. One way to engage these sites is to read the body itself as interface. Feminist theory, practice, and action have always been at their most meaningful and effective when reading the body. Haraway’s figurations—the cyborg and companion species, but also OncoMouse™, primates, her dog Ms. Cayenne Pepper, and many other kin—draw attention to bodies as the site of ethical worlding because they are markers of inter- (and intra-) action. Her critical readings of the monstrous bodies of science fiction in MFC, evocative as they are of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, remind us that monsters are the embodiment of that which is exiled from the self (Star, 1991, p. 54). The body is the site of gendering, of suffering, of agency, and of violence. It is the site of life and death, of biopolitics. In contrast, computation has no body, as Katherine Hayles (1999) makes clear (although it requires infrastructure, a point I’ll take up below). To speak of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and affective computing is to speak in metaphor. Computation can only abstract aspects of embodiment—sometimes to life saving effect, no doubt—but there is no coming singularity. However, we do interact with computational systems, and by extension the corporations behind them, by way of our bodies, including the embodied mind. Systems must enroll our bodies before they can achieve their goals and, consequently, discipline our bodies to accommodate their own limitations. Intervention is possible, then, at the boundary points of interface. I’ll sketch two brief examples of reading the body as interface in order to illustrate this practice for feminist vigilance. The first highlights enrollment, and the second discipline. Boundary Work I: (Un)Enrollment and Embodied Living Since the earliest days of digital computing, the quest to make the interface between computer systems and human bodies as seamless as possible has been a goal of computer science and engineering. The graphical user interface was a giant leap toward computers becoming “personal,” but it was always going to be a stop-gap. Coinciding with the development of the Internet, a conceptual framework for human-computer interaction

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known as Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) was developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1980s. Predicated on the belief that computing should be an integral and invisible part of the way people live their lives, researchers referred to the framework as part of a “third wave” of computing—after mainframe computing, after personal computing— an age that was supposed to be marked by the “calm technology” of constant computer processing that recedes into the background, like the electricity that revolutionized the age of industry before it. Reiterating the common goal of human-computer interaction designers both before and since, PARC computer engineer Mark Weiser (1991) believed such systems would “free us to use them without thinking, and so to focus beyond them on new goals,” helping humans do “fuzzy” creative work while the computers see to the grunt work of recording, filing, and retrieving (p. 94). This is informatics—the application of data analysis as the solution to every problem. However banal it might be, this grunt work can be extraordinarily powerful for the entity that controls what is being recorded, filed, and retrieved. Weiser was aware of the dangers: “Hundreds of computers in every room, all capable of sensing people near them and linked by high-speed networks, have the potential to make totalitarianism up to now seem like sheerest anarchy…. Not only corporate superiors or underlings, but overzealous government officials and even marketing firms could make unpleasant use of the same information that makes invisible computers so convenient” (p. 104). He “hoped” systems would be designed with privacy in mind. It has turned out that hundreds of computers per room weren’t necessary, because so many of us carry one smartphone computer around almost 24/7, and we tend to use it for everything from shopping to tracking menses, not to mention as our primary media access. But the invisible infrastructure exists and, true to Weiser’s vision, corporate superiors, overzealous government officials, and even marketing firms—in the US, especially marketing firms—collect and process that data with reckless abandon. Both infrastructure and interface have “disappeared” by design. The point I want to stress here, though, is that the success of that data processing requires partnership with embodied living. The body is still an interface boundary, even if other boundaries are hidden. Consider the bodies, and acts of embodiment, involved in location tracking. Real-time interaction with a mapping app only works with location tracking enabled. The processing of the data takes place not on the phone, but distributed across infrastructures, many of which are material bodies that exist in space

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and time. One of these infrastructures includes each of 24 satellites in the US Department of Defense’s radio navigation tracking system. Radio signals are necessary to placing telephone calls, and tracking of that interaction is available at a fairly granular level by tracing signal “pings” between cell  towers. However, real-time traffic updates require that  additional, more specific positioning data be collected through steady communication with the commercial wireless network one subscribes to, which is then processed by the map provider. (Both levels of communication can be disabled by users at present.) Automated infectious disease contact tracing requires even more granular location data still. At present, it can be accomplished via the exchange of Bluetooth signals between individual phones that developers refer to by the embodiment metaphor of a “handshake” because it takes place at ranges of less than 30 feet. Data from these handshakes are then conveyed back out through the other communication channels just described. It is helpful to “read” networked interactions as spatial, because this provides a better sense of where those interactions actually take place, and who is involved in them. The Covid-19 contact tracing capability of Apple and Android/Google manufactured phones requires the coordination of bodies in several locations. In a tweet, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced: “The #COVID19 Exposure Notification technology we built jointly with @Apple is now available to public health agencies in support of their contact tracing efforts. Our goal is to empower them with another tool to help combat the virus while protecting user privacy.” Reading closely, it becomes apparent that Apple and Google control the network communication structures that can track the objects connected to those networks (the phones), that “public health” entities will be responsible for the software that requests and processes the data, and that “user privacy” is a construct for which there must be protocols at several levels. The participation of bodies is necessary, but enrollment here need not be a given until justice is assured. This is how systems and ownership developed in the US, but it could be otherwise. Reading individual bodies back into network infrastructures is one practice that feminist vigilance can foster. Boundary Work II: Disciplining Embodied Emotion A second example of reading the body as interface boundary highlights the potentially insidious nature of discipline. The vision of ubicomp as described by Weiser (1991) made heavy use of ambient location data, but

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was fairly conservative in its vision of what other information about human bodies might be collected. In his hypothetical example of a morning in a ubicomp world, a woman is awakened by an alarm clock that asks if she wants coffee. Weiser was quick to point out that “yes” and “no” were the only words that the alarm clock “knows” (p.  102). This was consistent with capabilities for speech recognition in the 1980s. However, natural language processing for speech recognition made significant progress in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and now each of the five largest tech companies is heavily invested in training us to use our voices as the primary interface by which we interact with their services. They believe that part of persuading us to do so lies in programming voice interactions to be more affective. In other words, they are developing voice recognition software that not only parses the semantic content of what we say, but also the sonic content of how we say it. Affective computing is computing that “relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena,” [emphasis mine] and its pioneer, MIT computer scientist Rosalind Picard, says that it “combines engineering and computer science with psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, sociology, education, psychophysiology, value-centered design, ethics, and more” (https://affect.media.mit.edu/). However, there are very good reasons to believe that its implementation will have significant problematic consequences. At Northeastern University, just across the Charles River from MIT, Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) has been researching emotion and the brain since the 1980s and has collected compelling evidence that there is no such thing as an emotional fingerprint. The idea that there are six universal basic emotions is wrong, and statistical summaries of sensory data, be they the measurement of facial expressions or the analysis of voice waveforms, are abstractions that don’t exist in nature (p. 24). As Barrett explains, an emotion is not a thing, but a category of instances with tremendous variety (p.  16). Picard (2015) finds that conclusion inconvenient for her purposes and so treats emotion “as an engineering problem” by modeling an abstraction of “it” that can be easily measured (p. 15). Affective voice recognition systems are trained on voice data coded as instances of a few basic emotions—a process that Barrett’s research shows is both logically and empirically flawed from end to end. This is sure to result in bias in the same way that other systems reliant on “machine learning” are biased. Instead of facial recognition that can’t

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see pigmented skin (or that is particularly adept at recognizing facial features that are correlated with pigmented skin, depending on the training data), affective voice recognition will respond to some voices differently, for good or ill. “Angrier” voices could raise one’s automotive insurance rates, for example. Another outcome could be that we adapt to a system’s needs to get what we want from it, even if this makes our voice interactions with other people more difficult to negotiate. We’ve seen a small instance of this semantically when, for example, children are no longer disciplined to use social responses like “please” and “thank you” that value another’s participation in an interaction because these are not required for interaction with Siri or Alexa. Being disciplined to use vocalizations that assist the machine, at the expense of those that help with human social cohesion, is one possibility (i.e., using louder and more clipped intonation patterns, using dynamic extremes generally, etc.). Coming to believe that the system’s interpretation and reflection of emotion are “real” is another (i.e., Alexa categorizes your voice as depressed so you “are” depressed etc.). Emotions are categories with significant variation, and significant cultural shaping. There is no single, universal vocal “fingerprint” for any affective experience, but computational systems can’t manage that degree of ambiguity. When emotion is defined in code as a set of categories into which bodies are sorted, some of those bodies will be understood to have more value than others. This is how categories work. When these systems are fully online (and they will be), it will take the perspective of situated knowledges, the recognition of every unique body’s experiences of affects, to constrain these systems’ anti-social impacts. Recognizing the experience of bodies who have been subject to similar systems, for example facial recognition that works by analyzing and identifying facial “features” according to stereotypes, provides a basis for demanding more transparency about the categories systems use to “define” us. The future of affective computing is being developed right now, and vigilant feminists can demand accountability for its implementations before potential harms occur. Public pressure recently helped stall further implementations of computational facial recognition until anti-racist policies can be put in place to regulate its use. The same could be done for affective computing.

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Conclusion: Vigilance as a Non-Innocent Practice The potential patriarchal oppressions inherent in computational systems increasingly call for collective feminist vigilance toward their threats, even from those of us who might not fully understand the details of computation. Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” diagnosed this situation 35  years ago and offered ideas for how intersectional feminists might address the “informatics of domination” through a non-innocent orientation to the situated nature of knowledge production, and attention to technologies by way of their social relations. Computation is a knowledge practice. Paul Dourish, a computer scientist and fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) who studies social and cultural dimensions of computing, has explained its universalizing god trick. In an ACM conference paper, Dourish and Mainwaring (2012) described how colonialization and ubicomp operate from the same logics: that the knowledge of one group is superior to the knowledge of other groups; that progress is contingent on making other groups accept the superior knowledge of the one; certain belief that its superior knowledge can be applied in any other place and time with the same results (i.e., that it is universal, ahistorical, acultural); that the present state of superior knowledge is a model that subsumes the future of others (that the destiny of the “developing” is to become “developed,” or, in the case of data, that the statistical correlation that predicts a future state exists to ensure that future state); and that claims to superiority are, by necessity, based in reductive representations of the world (i.e., quantification and statistics), rather than embodied specificities (p.  134).6 Similarly, David Ribes (2019) has documented how boosters of data science have positioned it as explicitly universal, claiming it as the schema that makes all other knowledge domains possible. Knowledge structures and empire are co-constitutive; both are patriarchal. Part of non-innocence now means understanding that we live within computational regimes that seek to define reality in terms of data correlations that we are urged to believe are constitutive of our future selves. Therefore, we need to remain vigilant about reading our own and others’ experiences as they are expressed beyond computational systems. This is not a call for Ludditism; it is simply a reminder that we must maintain other channels of communication and participation. We live through our digital technologies, but we don’t only live through our digital technologies.

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Haraway loves biology and wanted to be able to live with science and be free of its colonizing tendencies at the same time. She recognized that this would never be possible, but that we still needed strategies for living in an imperfect world. The perspective of the natural sciences proved to be an incredibly powerful way to understand and manipulate reality for a couple of hundred years; it is now the perspective of computation that largely shapes what is “real” and interprets it back to us. We can no more expect to get rid of computers than we could microscopes and telescopes. And perhaps more to the point, we probably don’t want to, because, as tools, they can be useful toward human and environmental flourishing and so there are good reasons for having them around. But in order to use them as such, the perspectives of the world’s “kin” need to be spoken. In a 2006 interview Haraway didn’t beat around the bush: “Our systems are probabilistic information entities…. We had better get it that this is a zone where we had better be the movers and the shakers, or we will be just victims” (Gane, p. 139). So while we pursue political strategies meant to foster equity we cannot afford to ignore today’s primary purveyor of universal knowledge and the stakes for our subjectivity. Vigilant feminists must find strategies to continue to read bodies into the networks that attempt to define us as other than we are.

Notes 1. Haraway does not cite predecessors such as Mary Daly who provided a similar critique of liberal feminism in Gyn/Ecology (Daly, 1978). 2. Note that Haraway’s critique of deconstruction in “Situated Knowledges” was published almost a decade before the Sokal affair. 3. For a list of alternate manifestos, see manifestno.com/playlist. 4. My own take is that the cyborg as Haraway describes it is the “illegitimate offspring of [patriarchy]” (p. 9) that she hoped would prove unfaithful to its inessential fathers, but rarely did. However, my move here is not meant to suggest that the cyborg can’t function as Haraway intended. Many theorists have invoked it as she intended including Gunkel (2000), Edwards (1997), Adam (1998), and Hayles (1999). 5. It is tempting here to pin Haraway to a label within the canon of western philosophy and abandon her in favor of a contemporary like Bruno Latour, a move that plenty of scholars interested in “knowledge questions” have made. I want to stick with the problem of a politics for technofeminism and, therefore, bracket the last 30 years of theorytalk that spun out from the “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences, especially the branch

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of “speculative realism” with which Haraway is sometimes associated that culminated in what I consider to be the deeply misogynist assertions of “object oriented ontology.” In my view, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) plays the relativistic god trick that Haraway warns against. 6. See also Dourish and Bell (2011).

References Adam, A. (1998). Artificial knowing: Gender and the thinking machine. Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2017a). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2017b, June 30). No. FeministKilljoys (blog). Retrieved from https:// feministkilljoys.com/2017/06/30/no/ Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global economy. John Wiley & Sons. Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Benjamin, R. (2016). Informed refusal: Toward a justice-based bioethics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(6), 967–990. Benjamin, R. (Ed.). (2019a). Captivating technology: Race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life. Duke University Press. Benjamin, R. (2019b). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity Press. Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. The MIT Press. Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.  L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., et  al. (2019). Feminist data manifest-no. Retrieved from https://www.manifestno.com/. Clynes, M., & Kline, N. (1960, September). Cyborgs and space. Astronautics, 26–76. Cockburn, C. (1983). Brothers: Male dominance and technological change. Westview Press. Cockburn, C. (1985). Machinery of dominance: Women, men, and technical know-­ how. Northeastern University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139, 139–167. Daly, M. (1978). Gyn/Ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism. Beacon. Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: Mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. The MIT Press. Dourish, P., & Mainwaring, S. D. (2012, September). Ubicomp’s colonial impulse. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, 133–142. Edwards, P. N. (1997). The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America. The MIT Press. Emre, M. (Ed.). (2018). Once and future feminist. Boston Review Forum 7, 43(3).

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Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press. Ferrando, F. (2016). A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts. Palgrave Communications, 2(1), 1–12. Gane, N. (2006). When we have never been human, what is to be done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture, & Society, 23(7–8), 135–158. Gunkel, D. (2000). We are borg: Cyborgs and the subject of communication. Communication Theory, 10(3), 332–357. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2016a). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-­ feminism in the late twentieth century. In Manifestly Haraway (pp.  5–90). Minnesota University Press (original work published in 1985  in the Socialist Review, 80, pp. 65–108). Haraway, D. (2016b). Manifestly Haraway. Minnesota University Press. Haraway, D. (2016c). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Cornell University Press Hayles, N.  K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press. Krugman, P. (2007). The conscience of a liberal. WW Norton. Kunzru, H. (1997, February). You are cyborg. Wired. Retrieved from https:// www.wired.com/1997/02/ffharaway/ Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. Harper & Row. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press. O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books. Ongley, H. (2016, July 26). The all-female art show imagining a cyborg feminist future. i-D. Retrieved from https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/43vjbd/ the-all-female-art-show-imagining-a-cyborg-feminist-future Perry, I. (2018). Vexy thing: On gender and liberation. Duke University Press. Picard, R. (2015). The promise of affective computing. In R.  A. Calvo, S. K. D’Mello, J. Gratch, & A. Kappas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of affective computing (pp. 11–20). Oxford University Press. Plant, S. (1997). Zeros + ones: Digital women + the new technoculture. Fourth Estate. Ribes, D. (2019). STS, meet data science, once again. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(3), 514–539. Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice,’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal of Thematic Dialogue, 9, 67–80.

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Smith, L.  T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed. Squires, J. (1996). Fabulous feminist futures and the lure of cyberculture. In J.  Dovey (Ed.), Fractal dreams: New media in social context (pp.  194–216). Lawrence and Wishart. Star, S. L. (1991). Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions. In J. Law (Ed.), A sociology of monsters (pp. 26–56). Routledge. Suchman, L. (2007). Feminist STS and the sciences of the artificial. In E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 139–164). The MIT Press. TallBear, K. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. University of Minnesota Press. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press. Wajcman, J. (2004). TechnoFeminism. Polity Press. Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94–104. Wyatt, S. (2008). Feminism, technology and the information society: Learning from the past, imagining the future. Information, Communication & Society, 11(1), 111–130. Zuberi, T., & Bonilla-Silva, E. (Eds.). (2008). White logic, white methods: Racism and methodology. Rowman & Littlefield. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Hachette.

CHAPTER 3

Paradoxes of State Feminism in the Postcolony: An Appeal for Feminist Vigilance Nancy Henaku

In response to the geopolitics of feminist theorization, this chapter introduces a Global Southern perspective on feminist  vigilance based on the assumption that a comprehensive discourse on the subject must be truly transnational—that is, it must engage the multiplicities of feminist histories and politics for what they tell us about the present condition of feminism beyond the purview of the nation-state. There are two components to the discussion on vigilance in this chapter: the first identifies a problematic state “feminism” endemic to the project of modernity in the Global South and its transnational neoliberal resonances and the second proposes a new politics of vigilance, which I call a vigilant feminist critique, that is not only “cosmopolitical” (Spivak, 2012) but also, and most importantly, expands feminist “critique” so that it is not simply concerned with a multilayered deconstruction of hegemonic gendered discourses but also

N. Henaku (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_3

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enables us to envision alternative and decolonized discursive infrastructures for building a more just society. Using discursive cases involving a Ghanaian Former Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MOGCSP), Ms. Otiko Afisa Djaba, this chapter challenges us to rethink our view of vigilance to consider how the contradictions of feminist politics in the Ghanaian postcolony interrogate neoliberal visions of “feminist” utopia and thus suggests the urgent need for a comparative North-South outlook for imagining new discursive formations. This chapter centers on sub-Saharan Africa not merely because of the near absence of Africa in mainstream feminist theory but, especially, because of the possibilities that an African lens holds for the future of feminist theorization. As many scholars have argued, Africa—this vast space that has enriched modern criticism and yet is often construed as an epistemic void—can provide insight into our present global condition (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012; Mbembe, 2016).

State Feminism: Transnational Manifestations, and the Ghanaian Context The term “state feminism” simply refers to “the advocacy of women’s movement demands inside the state” (Lovenduski, 2005, p. 4); however, definitions of the term could be complex and may have contextual variations (Kantola & Outshoorn, 2007, p. 2). By “state feminism,” I mean “the efforts by women’s policy machineries to pursue social and economic policies beneficial to women” (Kantola & Outshoorn, p. 3). State feminism exercises a kind of systemic vigilance because it constitutes some effort to “heed” and be responsive to gender concerns at the state level. However, the potentialities of state feminist institutions in addressing gender issues have been a source of debate and in fact, their “feminist credentials” have been questioned (pp. 3–4). For Kantola and Outshoorn, these concerns “reflect the disjuncture between feminist theory and praxis” in that Anglo-American feminist theory, with its long-held anti-statist sentiments, have been “ambivalent about the possibilities about engaging the patriarchal state” (p. 3). Observations about gender machineries in several countries1 suggest that such suspicions are indeed justified and thus highlight the need for a different form of feminist vigilance that holistically engages gendered issues. Some scholars argue that governments could use “state feminism” as a conduit for capitalizing on the gender question to score political

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points without expectations of accountability—a situation that can result in the cooptation of feminism in the promotion of non-feminist goals and curtailment of women’s mobilization efforts (Kantola & Outshoorn, 2007, p. 4). This is evident in Mama’s (1995, p. 41) observation on the deficiencies of state feminism in Nigeria, where she identified “femocracy”—described as an “anti-democratic [and non-feminist] female power structure”—as a manifestation of state feminism in that context. Mama’s theorization of femocracy is concerned specifically with how first ladies capitalize on their proximity to male political power to coopt the global institutionalization of gender for personal political power. There is also another sense of femocracy which refers to “feminist bureaucrats” in state institutions who work to advance women’s cause (Gouws, 1996; Manuh, Anyidoho, & Pobee-Hayford, 2013; Sandler, 2015). Despite their varied manifestations, both senses of femocracy are a result of the mainstreaming of gender and, significantly, both are riddled with contradictions  in the sense that they sometimes sustain, rather than challenge, patriarchal structures. Both notions of femocracy are dimensions of state feminism that are relevant in this chapter’s argument and in fact, in the case of state gender ministries, there might be a possible blurring between these two forms of femocracy. While the minister of state in charge of a state gender machinery is a politician and is thus close to the locus of political power, she works closely with bureaucrats who help shape the institution’s policy framework. While I am concerned with the problems of state feminism in a postcolonial African state, this phenomenon is not unique to Africa as it has, since the post-Cold War era, become a global phenomenon propelled by the present neoliberal hegemonic regime.2 State feminism highlights the contradictory impact of neoliberalism on feminism in recent times (see Fraser, 2013; McRobbie, 2009), for not only is it a result of neoliberal gender mainstreaming policies, but its links with neoliberalism also show how feminism itself becomes appropriated for purposes that are not always feminist. Globally, it is now common for the state and political elites to present themselves as being gender-sensitive and in many African contexts, neoliberal gender policies are often deployed to present a modern and progressive image of the state. In many Global Southern contexts, this present situation is further complicated by an earlier history in which the women’s movement had a tricky relation with the nation-state, prefiguring the current crisis of feminism under neoliberalism. Heng (1997) highlights the “uneasy status” of feminism in the “Third World,” arguing that because of its problematic

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origins and “complicated negotiations with contemporary state apparatuses,” it is “a chimerical, hydraheaded creature, surviving a plethora of lives and guises” (p. 30). This twentieth-century history is now entangled with the ironic status of feminism in a neoliberal era, creating a situation in which feminism in the Global South becomes doubly precarious. Sotirin (this volume, p. 3) is right in suggesting that “vigilance has become an implicit strategy in defense of feminism itself”; however, when this condition is viewed from the “other” side of the world, the argument becomes even more complicated. In contexts where a strong feminist movement does not exist (Kobayashi, 2004, p.  153; Mama, 1995, p.  38) and feminism is highly contested, if not dismissed as another neocolonial enterprise (Dosekun, 2007; Atanga, 2013), it is easy to miss the contradictory impact of neoliberalism on feminism, especially because often the version of “feminism” that is circulated in such contexts is the neoliberal empowerment discourse and its attendant postfeminist implications. Women’s empowerment originated from the consciousness-raising efforts of 1980s transnational feminist discourse when Third World feminists especially became dissatisfied with the “apolitical and economistic” approach of the dominant development discourse (Batliwala, 2010, pp. 112–113). By the early 1990s, women’s empowerment had been coopted and mainstreamed by neoliberalism and now it is considered as “a rather open-ended, free-floating signifier” that has lost its radical aura (Halfon, 2007, p. 83; see also Batliwala, 2010, pp. 112–113; Dingo, 2012, p. 104). The interaction of these historico-­ discursive influences create complex entanglements that require “vigilance”—to cite Spivak (see McRobbie, 1994)—for in such contexts, it is easy to lose sight of how the women’s cause is further derailed by the postcolonial state’s appropriation of the impoverished gendered vision of neoliberal empowerment. In Ghana, state feminism has undergone various iterations under different political conditions but three broad periods are identifiable: the immediate post-independence era (1950s–1960s), the era of military rule (1966–1990), and the recent democratic era (1992–present). State feminism began with the immediate post-independence régime of Kwame Nkrumah which established a national gender machinery, known as the National Council of Ghana Women (NCGW), as part of a nation-building project, with the purpose of organizing women for “useful productivity”—that is, harnessing women’s potential for the state’s socialist-­ informed program of modernization (Sackeyfio-Lenoch, 2018, p.  44).

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This resulted in the merging of all existing women’s groups at the time into a single nationalist women’s movement under state control with a party official as its leader—a situation that highlights the cooptation of women’s activism by the state and ruling party (pp. 44–45). This state feminism had contradictory and lasting effects on feminist organizing in Ghana (Manuh, 2007; Prah, 2004, 2007). It gave some visibility to women’s issues for, as Manuh (2007) indicates, “measurable progress occurred in women’s education, employment and social life” (p. 129); however, the top-down “benevolent pro-feminist” approach of Nkrumah also meant that the women’s movement could not be independent (Prah, 2004, p. 30). Prah (2007) explains that the prevailing nationalist ideology of Nkrumah’s government did not involve “attempts at addressing women’s issues that … raise feminist consciousness and galvanize women into action” (p. 5). For instance, although the Maintenance of Children Law was successful under this regime, the Uniform Marriage, Divorce and Inheritance Bill was not (p. 5), pointing to the ways in which state feminism sustains the social structure rather than promoting vigilance against patriarchy. The shortcomings of state feminism are further evident in the fact that the gender machinery was dissolved when Nkrumah’s government was overthrown in 1966. Between 1966 and 1990, Ghana came under the governance of several military leaders. As is the case for most military regimes, these governments were generally hostile to women (see Bauer, 2017). However, in 1975, the government in power formed a National Council for Women and Development (NCWD). Significantly, this period was characterized by a number of transnational interventions in the area of gender issues. For instance, the United Nations organized its first conference on women, declared an International Women’s Year and called for the establishment of national gender machineries in its member states. The establishment of the NCWD should not be read as a reflection of the government’s “understanding and acceptance of women’s issues” as this action was possibly in response to transnational efforts (Manuh & Anyidoho, 2008, p. 6). Framed by the Women in Development/Gender and Development (WID/GAD) paradigm, the NCWD also had contradictory implications for women’s mobilization. The council engaged in income-generating activities for women, conducted research into women’s access to resources, and promulgated laws against discriminatory practices; however, it relegated women to traditional roles and was unable to provide an alternative discourse to the dominant development model (Manuh & Anyidoho,

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2008, p. 7). Between 1982 and 2000, the council was overshadowed by the Rawlings military regime and the activities of the then first lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and her group, the 31st December Women’s Movement. Prah (2007, p. 13) refers to this period as the “grand ‘feminist’ illusion” because of its acute “femocratic”—in the sense deployed by Mama (1995)—manifestations. In this period, the complex impact of state feminism became even more apparent. For instance, the women’s wing of the ruling government, that is First Lady Agyeman-Rawlings’ 31st December Women’s Movement, not only championed the government’s Women in Development (WID) rhetoric, it also  dominated the space for gender work (Manuh, 2007; Prah, 2007). This monopolization resulted in the collapse of another women’s organization, the Federation of Ghanaian Women (FEGAWO), whose honorary president became a member of the ruling regime. Its proximity to the ruling regime and overemphasis on the WID agenda also meant that Agyeman-Rawlings’ movement was not proactive in its support of women’s issues. The limitations of state feminism are evident in responses to the serial murdering of 30 women between 1997 and 2001. Agyeman-Rawlings organized her own demonstrations against this serial murdering— described in one response as a “public relations gimmick”—but there was a sense that the state and its institutions were not being responsive enough (Browne, 2000; Ghanaweb, 1999). Eventually, it took a coalition of women activists known as Sisters’ Keepers to put pressure on the government and police to solve the case (see Fallon, 2008, p.  1; Sakyi-Addo, 2000), highlighting grassroots activism as a source of effective vigilance. In reinforcing feminist ambivalence to the state, this case raises critical questions about the extent to which state feminism allows for the kind of oppositional consciousness relevant for feminist vigilance. In 2001, the new democratic regime of John Agyekum Kufuor established Ghana’s Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (now Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection) in fulfilment of a campaign promise. Over the years, it has become obvious that the ministry could circulate non-feminist agendas and that its appointees may not necessarily champion women’s issues. For instance, during the tenure of the first head of the ministry, there were reports of women being murdered by their husbands. In response, the Minister of Women and Children’s Affair Gladys Asmah argued: “We find the increasing rate of domestic violence unacceptable … domestic squabbles can be resolved without the use of

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violence or guns…. Men should not take the law into their own hands and resort to the use of guns to punish their wives” (as cited in Archer, 2002; emphasis added). Here again, the Sisters’ Keepers organized demonstrations against gendered violence. Gladys Asmah was also considered one of the people whose discourse frustrated efforts to pass the Domestic Violence Bill (see Ampofo, 2008, p. 414; Hodžić, 2009). In one instance, she is said to have made “a veiled argument against the Bill while appearing to promote it” (Hodžić, 2009, p. 338). These examples reinforce my call for a vigilant feminist critique by both feminist scholars and activists that can account for the discursive ambiguities within these so-called statutory “feminist” apparatuses even as they highlight how the entanglements of local and global factors complicate their problematic “feminism.” The following section shows how this problematic state feminism manifests in the discourse of Ghana’s former Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection (2017–2018), Ms. Otiko Afisa Djaba and demonstrates how vigilant feminist critique can unravel these ambiguities.

The Limits of State Feminism in Ghana: Three Cases Shortly after her appointment as Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection in 2017, Ms. Otiko Afisa Djaba spoke at the 100th anniversary of a Ghanaian girl’s secondary school where she warned “teachers who impregnate girls” saying, “It is an abuse of their rights and you are their role model you must not be the one to abuse the rights of the young girls” (Ghanaweb, 2017a, March 26). In the same speech, the minister also indicated that, “We want to initiate a mentoring program; a girls-girls leadership program in all the schools, from basic to tertiary and as well as within the communities to ensure that we know our rights and we understand what it is to be a woman who is an equal partner in society, no longer women behind but side by side with our men as equal partners.” She concluded by admonishing the students to “be bold … confident … respectful. If you wear a short dress, it’s fashionable but know that it can attract somebody who would want to rape or defile you. You must be responsible for the choices you make” (emphasis added). Underlying this statement is a tension between transnational human rights and conservative discourses. This tension is evident in the suggestion that the female students should “be bold, confident” but also “respectful.” Implied in the minister’s argument is an assumption that

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short dresses cause rape—a classic blame-the-victim argument that shifts responsibility for rape prevention onto females. This argument does not account for the power dynamics that govern sexual relations and abuse. While teachers are warned not to impregnate young girls because they are “their role models,” young girls are instructed to be “responsible for the choices you make.” It is also crucial that the minister refers to “a girls-girls leadership program” which suggests the limited social emancipatory framework structuring the ministry’s gendered intervention—one that will lead to the creation of a successful postfeminist subject. Ghanaian feminists responded, arguing that such utterances perpetuate rape culture. In spite of these critiques, the minister remained persistent, suggesting that: “Every right has a responsibility. If you have a right to speak, it doesn’t mean you should say just anything … if I say you have a right to dress the way you want, then you must be aware that how you dress could provoke somebody else” and that “as a parent, I have every right to advise my children” (Osei, 2017; emphasis added). The framing ignores the role of the ministry in curtailing this issue while also aligning with nationalist construction of women’s social roles. However, several “progressive” responses raised questions about the mismatch between the minister’s role and her comments: It’s not acceptable for a minister for *Gender* in #Ghana to suggest girls are responsible for attracting #rape. (Nii Ayikwei Parkes; as cited in Adogla-­ Bessa, 2017) I saw someone argue that Otiko Djaba is gender minister, not gender activist so somehow her ignorance is okay. Gyimie no ny3 mu ya [trans.: Doesn’t this foolishness hurt you?]. SMH. (Ekuwa [@SorayaSpeaks]; as cited in Adogla-Bessa, 2017; emphasis added)3 Does Ghana really have in @otikoDjaba_otikodajaba a gender minister who tells girls that wearing a short skirt invites rape. Seriously. (Esther Armah; as cited in Adogla-Bessa, 2017)

In drawing a difference between “a gender minister” and “an activist,” Ekuwa’s comment highlights the failings of state feminism. Given the gender ministry’s ironic imbrication in the hegemonic patriarchal structures of the state, one wonders the extent to which it could be effective in leading social change, at least beyond policymaking. As in earlier cases, it takes

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activists outside of state institutions to articulate an alternative view. There was, for instance, a subsequent online campaign #HowShortWasYourSkirt and several written responses to the minister. However, many of these responses, provided by “elite” feminists, fail to recognize the minister’s ironic responses as a manifestation not only of the complexity of Ghanaian gendered discourses but also of the discursive ambiguities of a neoliberal state feminist project. The inadequacy of the minister’s discourse is evident in a second case, which occurred in 2017, a few months after the minister’s advice to the female students. In this case, a four-year-old girl was raped by an eighteen-­ year-­old man. The case caused public outrage and dominated discussions on radio and social media, leading to the trending of a hashtag #JusticeForHer and the publication of an online petition addressed to the Ghanaian Attorney-General. The case did not receive prompt response from the minister, who later claimed that she had been out of the country when the incident occurred. In a radio interview, she indicated: “I want to plead with the civil society organizations to stop sensationalizing issues … we don’t put out fires like this one ‘gidigidi’” [trans: “in a rush”] (Ghanaweb, 2017b). The minister’s use of “sensationalizing” ignores the urgency of a situation in which a child has been abused. It is also ironic that the minister compares the case to putting out “fires” while exploiting the idea of being measured in order to disguise her lack of prompt response. The minister walks a tightrope as she negotiates her roles as a political appointee and as a gender minister whose position requires her to be proactive about gender-related assault. Because of such negotiations, state feminist institutions and their leaders are unable to comprehensively engage issues of oppression facing the vulnerable in society. Without discounting the importance of the gender ministries for policymaking and action, their presence needs to be supported by a strong feminist public that produces alternative and comprehensive discourses that call out these contradictions. Significantly, a Ghanaian feminist scholar, Akosua Adomako Ampofo, drew attention to the minister’s problematic discourse and called for a retraction. She countered the minister’s discourse by suggesting “If your house is on fire do you not respond gidigidi [trans: in a rush]? [D]o you wait to follow processes, no, you act first, and you take the child out of the burning fire gidigidi before you begin investigations” (Ghanaweb, 2017b, October 31).

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The third case I examine is the minister’s response to Christiane Amanpour’s CNN interview of a Ghanaian actor known as Moesha Buduong (CNN, 2018) for CNN’s Sex and Love series, now available on Netflix (Amanpour, 2018). In conversation with Amanpour, the actor argued that “In Ghana, our economy is such a way that you [woman] need someone [man] to take care of you” (CNN, 2018). This comment attracted varied responses, including a formal press statement from the minister. The discourse of the press release not only shamed the actor but also provided a monolithic representation of Ghanaian women’s experiences. The document indicates that the ministry “monitored” the actor’s comments, arguing that her statement does not “represent the multitudes of hardworking Ghanaian women” (emphasis added). She also argued: Ms. Moesha has the right to discuss her lifestyle on any platform but she does not represent the multitudes of hardworking Ghanaian women putting in 10–18 hours a day in the fields, markets and offices across Ghana, to put food on the table, find shelter for their children and guide their families through the turbulence of life to the extraordinary vision of “A Ghana Beyond Aid”, which is within our reach. (Graphiconline, 2018; emphasis added)

The minister’s use of “monitored” discursively points to a kind of institutional surveillance that highlights the power of the state to “watch” and discipline “wayward” citizens. This is a kind of non-feminist state “vigilance” that is not designed to address the many problems that the ministry should be engaging with in the first place. The minister’s rhetoric implies a certain construction of ideal gendered citizenship in which “hardworking Ghanaian women” are set against the actor’s supposed “mercenary lifestyle.” Within this contrastive frame, the minister questions the actor’s lifestyle choice while also constructing a very conservative view of Ghanaian women’s role (“put food on the table”; “find shelter for their children”; “guide their families”). In typical political fashion, the minister “delegitimizes” the actor (through negative other representation) and “legitimizes” the government (through positive self-representation) (see Chilton, 2004, p. 46). She emphasizes the supposedly positive things that Ghanaian women are engaged with while erasing negativity.

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In the face of the giant strides that women from all walks of life in Ghana are making to assert their independence, re-discover their pride and assert their self-esteem, the sweeping generalizations made by Ms. Moesha on international prime time television have invariably done great damage to Ghanaian womanhood, apart from casting Ghanaian men as predatory, uncaring and rapacious. On behalf of Ghanaian women and men, the Ministry condemns Moesha’s statements and in particular her generalizations, which are unjustified. (Graphiconline, 2018; emphasis added)

While the minister’s letter purports to act on behalf of Ghanaian citizens, her discourse is, in actual fact, a defense of the government. The entrenched political positioning of her discourse does not allow her to engage the complexity of the actor’s argument. More importantly, her argument does not reflect the contradictory responses that the actor’s argument received from the general Ghanaian populace. The press statement reads like a public relations intervention for the government, composed because the actor’s comment is seen as damaging to the government’s image. With the Ghanaian government’s recent emphasis on a supposed “Ghana brand” (Markessinis, 2009), comments such as those given by the actor on a global media platform like CNN may not fit the image the government hopes to project. The minister’s response is misplaced, since, irrespective of whether the actor’s analysis is deemed correct or not, her argument, compared to the policies and actions of the ministry, does not have structural implications for vulnerable populations. It is also significant that the minister uses the term “outrage” which is an appropriation of the ways in which activists use anger as a resource for contesting problematic gendered discourses and driving social change. As is clear in the choice of words in the excerpt below, for instance, this supposed “outrage” has a non-feminist basis: Our outrage is situated in Ms. Moesha’s presumption to tar many Ghanaian women with this mercenary behavior. This was made worse by blaming her excessive, lavish lifestyle on the economy of Ghana. Ghana is a developing country but her citizens are striving hard to create an environment in which all citizens can achieve their aspirations with a measure of dignity and respect. Our economy cannot be blamed if a minute minority of Ghanaians decide to live opulent, flamboyant and amoral lifestyles without any discernible means of livelihood. (Graphiconline, 2018; emphasis added)

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In relation to the neoliberal image of this ministry, it is also crucial that the minister’s discourse directly links the actor’s comments to the government’s current economic project, which has as its mantra “Ghana Beyond Aid.” This connection highlights an important link between the project of modernity and the discourses of Ghanaian state feminist machineries and thus shows how the neoliberal Women in Development (WID)/Gender and Development (GAD) paradigm shapes the discourse and operations of the ministry. The minister’s comment suggests that gendered issues are a mere appendage to a larger project of modernity. Within this frame, the minister’s discourse cannot interrogate the systemic issues that the actor’s comment raises. The subsumption of gender issues within this project of modernity is clearly evident in the description of the mandate of the ministry: “MOGCSP exists to contribute to the development of the nation by achieving gender equality and equity, facilitate the enforcements of the rights of children, promote integration and protection of the vulnerable, excluded and persons with disability in the development process through appropriate policies and strategies with adequate resources” (http:// mogcsp.gov.gh/; emphasis added). This discourse suggests that questions of gender and social inequality are subsumed in a deficit view of development that supports a neoliberal economic agenda. Not only does this framing put humans at the service of neoliberalism, it also has a simplistic view of vulnerability that cannot account for the invisible conditions of precarity that, at least partly, determine the choices of young Ghanaian women like Ms. Moesha Buduong. Because of this institutional problem, state gender machineries are unable to adequately address women’s material problems.

Toward a Vigilant Feminist Critique The three cases underline the inability of state gender machineries to be vigilant about gendered issues. Two issues are worth highlighting: not only do we need to be vigilant about the discourses of such institutions, we must also envision new modes of feminist vigilance that are not complicit in the gender power dynamics of the nation-state and its transnational linkages. This section proposes a vigilant feminist critique as an approach for providing a multilayered analysis of state feminism and constructing new discursive models with a more democratic social vision. Discursivity,

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decolonial transdisciplinarity and collectivity, at both local and transnational levels, are critical dimensions of this model of vigilance. Because the deficit vision of state feminism is partly a problem of discourse, it is essential to examine how its policies and representatives deploy specific discursive strategies in its service. I consider perspectives from the critical discourse tradition (see van Dijk, 1993; Fairclough, 2015; Wodak & Meyer, 2016) and especially, its feminist (Lazar, 2005, 2007) version as providing an important frame from which to interrogate how these state gender institutions are imbricated in structures of power that facilitate the reproduction of hegemonic discourses. Within this view, discourse is considered as a dimension of action (Austin, 1962); thus, probing the inconsistencies in the discourses of state feminism can make visible the mismatch between policies and action. Without such critical engagements with the discourses of gender machineries and their officers, its problems will remain invisible. Most importantly, discursive vigilance fosters self-reflexivity in citizens and in our expectations of and engagement with these institutions. Within a vigilant feminist critical lens, analysts—as scholars or critically aware citizens— are able to explain how “progressive” institutions like Ghana’s Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection come to reproduce ideologies that sustain a patriarchal social structure even as it makes it possible for us to imagine an alternative social vision and a more empowering course of action. A vigilant feminist critique also recognizes that the space-time entanglements that characterize transnational flows complexify analyses of power. Underlying the cases examined are the intersections of multiple forms of power including those emanating from state institutions, party politics, personal power, cultural discourses and transnational discourses. A vigilant feminist critique considers this “polycentric” power dynamic— that is the co-occurrence of varied centers of power (Blommaert, 2010, p. 22)—and deploys models that provide multifaceted, rather than monocausal, explanations of the contradictions of state feminism and its agents’ complex negotiations of power. In other words, analytic complexity should be central to feminist vigilance. This requires a creative integration of discursive, feminist, historical, decolonial and transnational perspectives to explain the discursive tensions resulting from these multiple influences, while recognizing that state feminism is itself a reflection of what McRobbie (2009, p. 12) identifies as the “double entanglement” of contemporary feminist politics.

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As evident in the analysis, new media and the new democratic era in Ghana and many African contexts have resulted in renewed discursive activism. While discursive activisms have provided much needed resistance in Ghana, critiques are often one-sided, ignoring the many nuances that impact gendered discourses in Ghana and their implication for examining the paradoxes of state feminist institutions. In such a context, a vigilant feminist critique requires that we heed Atanga et al.’s (2013, p. 15) point that gendered discourses in African contexts are complicated and that “[t]raditional, ‘modern’ and … progressive discourses on gender may in fact be rather specifically competing.” As Hodžić (2009) also argues, “Negotiations of rights occur against a backdrop of multiple kinds of power struggles—from colonialism to neoliberalism—that are shaped by a discursive history which positions ‘culture’ as an anti-imperialist stance” (p. 333). In this sense, then, a “Third World” positionality complexifies a vigilant feminist critique when postcolonial subjects are interpellated by transnational discourses that, for some, are not necessarily theirs. This requires analysts, as scholars, activists and critical citizens, to be epistemically vigilant so as to capture the ever-shifting nature of state gender politics. The transnational dimension of state feminism calls for a “cosmopolitical vigilance” (Spivak, 2012, p. 113) as a crucial dimension of a vigilant feminist critique. This lens can explain how global governance shapes the operations and discourse of state gender machineries. As Spivak observes, the state is unaccountable because it “has been undermined by transforming the State into a managerial state for international capital” (p.  113). Understanding the transnational interests that state gender machineries serve is an important step in providing a vigilant feminist critique of the discourses of its agents. To understand state gender machineries, at least in their recent iteration as cosmopolitical institutions, analysts must be attentive to larger issues besides local politics and culture, although, as is clear in my analysis, local influences must not be overlooked. A vigilant cosmopolitics also requires us to envision a “transversal politics” (Collins,  2009, p.  264) of critique that does not center only one context or experience for, as indicated earlier, state feminism and its problems present transnational problems. A cosmopolitical view requires that we consider the recalibration of the nation-state in our analysis of the tensions of state feminism. This implies that the problematic gendered discourses examined above are not confined to a specific nation-state but are shaped by influences from a transnational milieu. Moreover, state feminist

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discourses from one local context can travel to other contexts as evident in the problematic rhetoric of Ghana’s president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-­ Addo during the Women Deliver 2019 Global Conference in Vancouver, where he argued, regarding calls for more women in politics, that “not enough movement is being made by the 52 percent of the Ghanaian population that are women to be able to be in the position to make … these [political] decisions” (CitiTube, 2019). The president’s comment was criticized by other (female) speakers at the conference, with one referencing his designation as a “HeforShe4 champion,” hinting at the responsibilities that come with such a designation. A cosmopolitical view requires that such discourses are considered not as a specific Global Southern problem, for the manifestations of state feminism are evident transnationally. Reports from the UK explain how state feminism is coopting women’s voices (Allsopp, 2012) and in the United States, Ivanka Trump’s recently launched Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative is framed within the rhetoric of neoliberal empowerment discourses. Because these discourses are shaped and circulated transgeographically, at various stages, by cosmopolitical institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, European Union, African Union and so on, being vigilant toward their contradictions requires feminist cosmopolitical alliances that work to unsettle the tensions of such discourses. This allows for a comparative analysis that provides insight into the “common differences” within the crisis of feminism (Mohanty, 2003, pp. 238–239). Reconstruction is another dimension of a vigilant feminist critique that imagines a more hopeful, collective and democratic future. I acknowledge, as van Leeuwen (as interviewed by Moschini, 2014, p. 211) argues, that “‘critique’ is part of change”; however, reconstruction moves beyond calls for positive critique and the debate on the relations between negative and positive critique in critical discourse studies, for example. Reconstruction is a decolonial option—steeped in transnational feminist response to globalization (Mohanty, 2003)—that focuses on building new discursive regimes with a more democratic social vision. Reconstruction is informed by Mohanty’s shift from “critique” to “reconstruction” (p. 221), with an emphasis on “feminist solidarity” as a cross-cultural antiglobalization praxis (p. 238). Besides this influence, reconstruction as used here includes discursive reconstruction as a critical component of the practical response to state feminism. It is shaped by Smith’s (2012) idea of “envisioning” and “intervening” as decolonial projects (pp. 153 & 148) and Mignolo’s (2018, p.  126) idea of “decolonial delinking” as “conceiving of and

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creating institutional organizations that are at the service of life and do not … put people at the service of institutions.” If the discursive infrastructure that is meant to drive change is stunted, even its agents with the best of intentions are likely to be complicit in the maintenance of the status quo. The hopeful vigilance of reconstructive critique requires that we move beyond deconstruction of the problematic discourse of state feminism to also consider new forms of feminist political action, which are also partly discursive. This hopeful vigilance is impossible without a strong sense of feminist coalition that synergizes the collaborative efforts of various groups, and provides alternative discourses to the contradictions of state feminist rhetoric. This kind of mobilization, which works against the top-down approach of state gender machineries, is intentional and organic and can occur at both local and transnational levels. A hopeful vigilance takes critique beyond the confines of academic and/or elite feminism; it requires a kind of democratization of critique itself so that the ordinary citizen can participate in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the discourses of such institutions. In a context where there is no strong feminist movement, and the state gender machinery is the main vehicle for circulating a narrow, apolitical, and empowerment-like “feminist” vision, this kind of democratization can help build a strong critical public that will be vigilant from below against the hegemonic discourse of gender machineries. The Domestic Violence Coalition and the Ghanaian Women Manifesto Movement underline the significance of coalition politics for transformation. The Domestic Violence Coalition—which is comprised of scholars, activists and policymakers—played a crucial role in the passage of Ghana’s domestic violence bill (see Ampofo, 2008). While the then gender minister (Ms. Gladys Asmah) challenged aspects of the bill through a cultural relativist discourse, a member of the Coalition asked “women … to be vigilant about it … and ensure that it is passed” (p. 414). Ampofo explains that despite the uncertainties that often characterize state-civil society relations, the efforts of Ghana’s Domestic Violence Coalition “reveal the power of collective action for equal rights of citizenship” (p. 417). The Ghanaian Women Manifesto Movement, which was formed partly in response to the serial murdering of women in the 1990s and 2000s, “marked the culmination of an intensive mobilization” and is said to have “provoked heated debates on the meaning of gender transformation in Ghanaian society” (Mama, 2005). This coalition eventually led to the creation of the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana, a “political document” that

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“sets out critical issues of concern to women in Ghana and makes demands for addressing them” (Women’s Manifesto for Ghana, 2004, p. 5).

Conclusion This chapter has shown that both the patriarchal nation-state and the deradicalized transnational empowerment discourse of neoliberalism are unable to comprehensively address the conditions of the marginalized. In highlighting the shortsighted politics of neoliberal state-sanctioned “feminism” in the Ghanaian postcolony, this chapter challenges us to envision new forms of vigilance, with possibilities for holistic accountability, outside hegemonic state control. To do this, there is need for multilayered analyses of the coloniality of gender under globalization—one that recognizes influences from local histories but also realizes that the transgeographical patterns we are seeing are, at least in part, the implications of a set of discourses framed within a cosmopolitical system which enables the flow of these values through transnational discursive circuits, transformed—as they are translated and sometimes contested—in specific microcontexts. In highlighting the links between Ghanaian feminist histories and neoliberalism, the analysis underscores the urgent need to imagine a “cosmopolitics” of vigilant feminist critique. This means that the problematic rhetoric of the Ghanaian minister must be read beyond the personal and the nation-state; instead, it must be considered as a consequence of larger translocal forces that enable articulations of such discourses. This calls for a multilayered, macroanalysis of the present crisis of feminism under a neoliberal hegemonic regime. That is, there is a need for a decolonized transdisciplinary discursive analysis that seriously engages with what the histories of feminisms everywhere suggest about the crisis of contemporary feminism. It is within such a framework that the multivariegated power dynamic of state feminism becomes obvious. Most importantly, there is urgent need for reconstructing new discursive infrastructures that imagine a more democratic future. If our notion of vigilance is only focused on deconstructing hegemonic discourses, and does not include new discursive imaginaries, then it forecloses any expectations for change and results in a collective ennui, if not inertia. Feminist vigilance that effectively dismantles hegemonic structures is as much about reconstruction as it is about deconstruction. Without discounting the essence of (traditional) critique in driving change, it is time to interrogate

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the limits of our current critical praxes. While traditional critique can be an important step for socio-political change, our critical praxis must also reimagine new frameworks for building alternative discursive futures. Brown and Black subjects in the Global South often are those for whom the cosmopolis circulates neoliberal policies of empowerment and gender equality. Thus, if the condition in the Global South mirrors the crisis of feminism in our present moment, then perhaps the Global South more than any other place is a salient vantage from which we can begin to reimagine alternative decolonized visions of vigilance.

Notes 1. For example, Mama (1995) on Nigeria; Baldez (2008) on Chile; Zaki (2015) on Egypt; Ng and Ng (2002) on Hong Kong. 2. See Mama (1995) on Nigeria; Stetson and Mazur (1995) and Outshoorn and Kantola (2007) on several EuroAmerican contexts; Kobayashi (2004) on Japan. 3. All translations are by the author. 4. A United Nations transnational solidarity movement that calls on men to support the campaign for women’s rights. See https://www.heforshe.org/en.

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CHAPTER 4

“Watch Night” for Black Women: Reflecting on Vigilance and Repurposing Strength for Self-Care and Survival Karla D. Scott

I am a Black woman. I learned early on, no one is going to save me so we are working to save ourselves. —Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, March 22, 2020, discussing strategy to address the spread of COVID-19

Black women have always been vigilant and most, if not all, have lived as vigilantes. Living at the intersection of race, gender and class identities, Black women were forced to be vigilant just to survive. During enslavement the labor of African women was not for the benefit of family, extended relations or tribal community—their bodies and labor were “property” supporting the imperialist, White supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 2003) that built the United States. Their ability to survive the brutal working conditions of field labor, physical assaults and sexual

K. D. Scott (*) Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_4

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abuse—for both domestic and breeding-product-for profit purposes—furthered the belief in an innate animalistic nature of African women and contributed to the creation of the myth of a strong Black woman with superhuman powers (Scott, 2017). The ability to survive the harsh realities of enslavement and generations of ongoing racial and gendered attacks is not the result of a mythical strength but rather a function of vigilance, defined for this chapter as “the action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties” (Lexico.com, 2019). Enslaved Black women remained ever watchful for the multiple forms of abuse that were part of everyday lived experiences in a world where their bodies were property and their flesh, feelings and futures could not be claimed as their own. Sojourner Truth’s pain spoken at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio reminds us of that reality: “I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” (Painter, 1996, p. 205). For enslaved African women, mere survival was vigilance as Angela Davis notes: Even as she was suffering under her unique oppression as female, she was thrust by force of circumstances into the center of the slave community. She was, therefore, essential to the survival of the community. Not all people have survived enslavement; hence her survival oriented activities were themselves a form of resistance. Survival, moreover, was the prerequisite for all higher levels of struggle. (1995, p. 205)

With family tentative and at the whim of owners, the vigilance of motherhood became even more critical. Nurturing and protecting children in enslavement took on a deeper meaning than getting them safely to adulthood—a particular form of Black women’s vigilance still operating in twenty-first-century contexts where the White supremacist, capitalist patriarchy has found renewed energy. In this current context, identities of race, gender and class are vulnerable once again to multiple forms of violence and abuse—physical, emotional, professional, political and financial. And, once again, Black women find themselves in a position where they are being asked to “save” those across multiple segments of society while giving little attention to what we need to do to sustain the strength required for such a task. If no one else will think of us, it is up to us; we must save ourselves first—we must be vigilant about our own self-care for survival. It is time for a “Watch Night” for Black women.

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This chapter examines Black women’s history of vigilance and how, despite a mandate for strong Black womanhood that actually creates vulnerability, being on careful watch for dangers and difficulties has allowed us to survive while working to support and save others. It is now critical to understand how contemporary contexts demand we “stay vigilant” and be mindful of the dangers and further dehumanization inherent in requests that we support others to the exclusion of our self-care, safety and well-­being. In spaces and places where we once only could clean and caretake, we are now asked to serve, frequently forced to save; yet still, at the expense of physical and emotional health and wellness. For Black women it is “Watch Night.” In the tradition of a “Watch Night,” I reflect here on the Black woman’s enduring legacy of strength to serve, support and save others. Following historical reflection on this mythical strength, I situate strong Black womanhood in twenty-first-century contexts. I then share an autoethnographic narrative to explore how contemporary Black feminist vigilance maintains watchfulness for dangers and difficulties with specific attention to self-care that is now required to sustain strength for survival of self and the subsequent support for others. I conclude by suggesting we now remain vigilant as we repurpose strength for radical self-care in our everyday lived experiences and caution that without being watchful for the danger we face by omitting such restorative work, Black women’s survival is in peril. This chapter is both an exploration of Black women’s vigilance and an act of Black feminist vigilance—calling for the much-needed restoration of Black women’s minds, bodies and spirits. All my life I had to fight … a girl child ain’t safe in a family of men —Sofia to Celie in The Color Purple (Walker, 1982)

The Watch Night vigil is believed to have originated with the Moravians in Germany with the first service held in 1733 as an end-of-year gathering to reflect on one’s “Covenant with God.” On New Year’s Eve, 1862, African Americans added another interpretation as they “watched” for the dawning of 1863 and the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery. Watch Night services became frequent in many Black communities and in some instances legends of the origin were embellished to include a theory that slaves gathered to “watch” for masters who were coming to sell off property before the end of the year (Chism, 2013). Black women need a Watch Night vigil now not as merely a time to

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“huddle and shiver” as we await the next assault in this current context but more importantly to gather and reflect on how we have managed to survive so much and how we can identify and call attention to further opportunities to repurpose historical strength for the restorative self-care needed to sustain ourselves moving forward. Black women’s vigilance is embedded throughout the history that has been used in the socialization of “Strong Black Womanhood” and that is necessary to help save and sustain us (Scott, 2017). Harriet Tubman was the first woman to lead a military operation in the United States when she and Black Union soldiers conducted the Combahee River raid on June 2, 1863. On July 10, 1863, the following ran on the front page of The Commonwealth, a Boston newspaper: Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch. It was a glorious consummation. (Conrad, 1863, p. 45; original italics)

Tubman is best known for helping close to one hundred enslaved Black people escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad—a journey that required a constant, careful watch for danger and difficulties. In this vigilante role, she was well aware of risks to her own safety as she repeatedly broke numerous laws in order to bring family and friends to safety in locations where sanctioned injustices of dehumanization were no longer a threat to daily survival. Tubman’s iconic strength is without a doubt vigilantism at its best—often offered in current contexts as reasons for Blacks to continue to fight, resist and not give up despite ongoing oppressions and brutalities (Wallace, 1990). In what can be interpreted as homage to Tubman, Alice Walker furthers the vigilance of Black women in the “Definition of a Womanist” found in the volume In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: “Traditionally capable, as in: ‘Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.’ Reply: ‘It wouldn’t be the first time’” (1983, p. xi). Post-slavery Black women remained vigilant with new methods for saving Black communities. For example, in the early twentieth century the National Association of Colored Women Club (NACWC) movement

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adopted the motto “Lifting as We Climb,” indicating the role of Black women in the improvement of Black communities and lives. Founded in 1896, the NACWC took up the charge of Mary Church Terrell to work for improvement of Black communities (Giddings, 1984) and strong Black womanhood took on new meaning, far removed from the structures and systems of slavery but just as burdensome. Black club women were expected to embrace traditional notions of femininity; they were also expected to be engaged in public leadership, be primary caretakers in the home, be educated career women, save the race and have model homes. These women believed Black women could and should do it all (Giddings, 1984; White, 1985; Walker-Barnes, 2014). And most notably, Deborah Gray White emphasizes: “All NACW leaders had to rein in their emotions and put on an artificial face before whites. Being their own best example usually meant being to whites something other than what they really were” (White, 1985, p. 98). In the context of the early twentieth century, to be oneself as a Black woman posed danger as it could involve speaking up about injustice or fighting for equality denied still, through policies and practices almost a half-century after enslavement ended. Successful assimilation required silence and submission of self. For educated, professional Black women “lifting as they climbed” required vigilance in everyday lived experiences to support self and community survival. By the mid-twentieth century, Black women’s vigilance was integral to progress in two important movements even though their contributions were overlooked. Black male leaders were the image of the Civil Rights movement and the face of the second wave Women’s movement was White. In an act of Black feminist vigilance, the long neglected lived experiences of Black women were captured poignantly by Gloria T.  Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith in their 1982 edited volume: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. In the introduction, the authors state: “Like any politically disenfranchised group, Black women could not exist consciously until we began to name ourselves” (1982, p. xvii). Naming ourselves was an act of vigilance against the danger of erasure. Emphasizing the need for such an academic focus in the aftermath of both Black liberation and women’s liberation struggles, they aptly describe why that naming is needed: “Because of white women’s racism and Black men’s sexism, there was not room in either area for a serious consideration of the lives of Black women” (p. xxi). It was time, they proclaimed, for the lived experiences of Black women to be shared, examined, written about

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and critiqued by not just Black women themselves but Black feminists who were resisting the normalized narratives of Black womanhood and redefining the controlling images created from “imperialist, white supremacist racist patriarchy” (hooks, 2003). Their text along with others such as Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Smith, 1983); This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1984) and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (hooks, 2000) provided the context for Black feminists to begin an important conversation in academic worlds—an act of vigilance that, much like the Combahee River Raid of Harriet Tubman, launched a much needed assault that awakened the sleeping masses. Attention to the lived experiences of Black women remains marginalized although Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2000/2009) did much to further vigilance in academic contexts. Collins’ work exposed gaps and intentional omissions, dispelled myths and dismantled controlling images of Black women, furthering a large body of critical examinations that continue to help us better understand the lived experiences of Black women in contemporary U.S. contexts. And this scholarship reveals there is still a need for Black women’s vigilance in the twenty-first century despite their educational and economic progress. One of the most visible contemporary examples of a Black woman’s vigilance is the lived experience of Michelle Obama. Her journey from the south side of Chicago to the White House included a college prep high school, two Ivy League Universities, executive positions as a corporate attorney and wife of an Illinois senator who became president. Her lived experience reflects a vigilance that many Black women consider a hallmark of a contemporary strong Black womanhood (Scott, 2017). While First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) to 44th U.S.  President Barak Obama, her presence garnered both praise and critique for everything from her White House garden, to her dance moves, to impressive biceps in sleeveless dresses (Glenn, et al., 2018). Early in her undergraduate years at Princeton, the first predominantly White institution (PWI) she attended, she began to cultivate the vigilance that would propel her forward: [That] There were so few of us minority kids at Princeton, I suppose, was always conspicuous. I mainly took this as a mandate to overperform, to do everything I possibly could to keep up with or even plow past the more

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privileged people around me. Just as it had been at Whitney Young, my intensity was spawned at least in part by a feeling of I’ll show you (italics original)…. Anytime I found my voice in class or nailed an exam, I quietly hoped it made a larger point. (Obama, 2018, pp. 79–80)

Michelle Obama’s own story of her journey from the “south side” to the White House is one of persistence (Obama, 2018) and for many Black women it is also a contemporary embodiment of “strong Black womanhood” requiring she be ever watchful to the dangers and difficulties encountered even as an Ivy League educated Black woman (Scott, 2017). In her eight years as FLOTUS, in multiple interviews, across networks and various publications as she discussed the politics of the country, her husband and her role, she also advocated for, and advanced a model of, self-­ care as she talked about her food choices and commitment to physical fitness as a strategy to sustain her well-being. Her very public platform also created awareness of health disparities in Black communities and her vigilance—calling attention to this reality—motivated Black women to examine how they could avoid such dangers (Scott, 2017). For example, she often discussed her early morning workouts in the White House gym and in 2015 instituted her #GimmieFive concept to celebrate five years of her “Let’s Move” campaign. Her workouts went viral on social media as she performed her five exercises, including bicep curls and thirty-five-pound dumbbell presses (Davis, 2015). Michelle Obama’s model of self-care offers a compelling look into the vigilance needed to survive and thrive as a Black woman in the twenty-first century even with the privileges of education, professional, and social economic standing. Despite privileged demographics, Black women still face ongoing peril in everyday lived experiences and need ongoing self-care for restoration to survive and thrive. In this current context, Black women need to turn attention to saving ourselves if we are to sustain the strength needed to save others and transform a society gone horribly wrong—and this requires vigilance: a careful attention to dangers and difficulties that result from ignoring our own humanity. We must dismantle the long-heralded race and gender stereotypes and “center ourselves” (Houston & Davis, 2002) in the name of survival. We enact this Black feminist vigilance by looking for opportunities to resist social constructs of Black womanhood as dehumanized, with magical superpowers that assume we will persist despite all forms of abuse and exploitation while neglecting our own safety, security and well-being.

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This Black feminist vigilance is vital to an intentional repurposing of Black women’s mythical strength for the radical revolutionary self-care needed to sustain and survive. Now more than ever Black women must be vigilant to assure we are not harmed by the demands to be the saviors of those that created the current miasma. Black women must be vigilant to assure we are not dehumanized AGAIN in the name of serving/saving the White supremacist capitalist patriarchy—the equivalent of the “family of men” that Sophia, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, references in the quote opening this section. Recognizing the myriad ways a Black woman “ain’t safe” in these destructive oppressive systems, and successfully navigating them, requires vigilance. The health perils of continuously neglecting self for the care and comfort of others in a system that privileges those others while dehumanizing and “othering” us can be examined further in the study of epigenetics— the heritable changes in phenotype unrelated to differences in underlying DNA sequence (Vick & Burris, 2017). In the United States, health disparities in Black communities are alarming and ongoing, with deaths from cardiovascular disease, hypertension and cancer significantly higher than White Americans. Social economic status, education, stress and exposure to racism are often offered in explanation for the disparities and these are further compounded by environment and lifestyle choices including diet and smoking (Vick & Burris, 2017). Further explorations of racial health disparities and exposure to racism examine the link between intergenerational epigenetic trauma, environmental adversity and resilience (Burris & Baccarelli, 2014). While the resilience of people of African descent is lauded and, in particular, Black women’s resilience applauded (Scott, 2017), Jackson, et al. (2018) assert this resilience “has ameliorated but not eliminated the impact of this trauma over approximately 16 generations” (p. 1). Despite the legacy of strength claimed by many Black women (Scott, 2017; Walker-Barnes, 2014), Black women’s high rates of major health and treatment disparities reveal resilience is clearly not enough. Navigating contemporary intersecting systems of oppression and dehumanization requires more than just the resilience coded in the DNA of the descendants of “Strong Black women”—it requires vigilance to survive new forms of racism, sexism and classism that threaten us, yet call on us to save. Vigilance is necessary for resilience; it is the ability to anticipate danger and difficulty and navigate successfully to survive.

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Sistas and Self-care In this next section I examine Black feminist vigilance in an autoethnographic narrative highlighting lived experiences of Black women I know in various positions across the academy. Heewon Chang discusses autoethnography as an instructional tool to further understanding of self and others arguing that: “Self-narratives can be used as cultural texts through which the cultural understanding of self and others can be gained” (2008, p. 13). The stories I share here are my stories, our stories and they tell a compelling story of the need for Black feminist vigilance. Our story informs a larger cultural narrative about Black women and Black womanhood (Chang, 2008) and gives voice to a lived experience many remain willing to dismiss or doubt. Dana, my “SistaFriend” is an administrative assistant in an African American Studies program at a private, elite institution. She is committed to supporting students as she also supports the daily operations of an academic program. For several years she was able to use a classroom managed by another academic unit for a weekly gathering of Black women students to exercise—“Just to be able to move and stretch in a safe place for us,” she says. But her latest request was denied repeatedly and when she was able to ask the White woman who was a newly appointed administrator why the denial now, the answer given was, “The last time you used the space, you did not clean it afterward, it was dirty.” Dana vehemently denied the accusation and followed with a response of classic Black woman vigilance: “I don’t know who told you that but I do know it is not true—Black women on this campus do not have the privilege or luxury of leaving a space dirty. We know what can happen if we do.” Dana’s goal is to support the physical and emotional health of young Black women on the campus and this story offers a compelling look at her vigilance. She is always on careful watch, aware of the difficulties that race-­ based perceptions of Black staff and students create for her effort to find a “safe space” for the gathering. In her two decades at the university she has successfully navigated many such moments with an awareness of dangers and difficulties that come from being a Black woman at a predominantly White institution (PWI). The resulting resilience keeps Dana going to offer opportunities for self-care “to help us be healthier.” The next narrative offers a glimpse of a moment where vigilance— attention to danger and difficulties—also includes awareness of self-care in

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response to a call to save and serve others—often a particular danger for Black women. In my role as faculty representative on a university committee for student affairs I was excited to attend the first meeting of the year, and when I entered the meeting room, I was quite happy to see that my friend, an administrator in Student Affairs whom I affectionally call “SistaDoc,” was also on the committee. She hugged me long and strong and said, “I’ve missed you so much.” I looked for a seat across the room but she insisted, “No!! Sit next to me.” The table in this particular meeting room is very large, a round impressive wood one with contrasting grains, colors and embellishments, apropos for space used only by those who have the university president’s ear and attention. As I glanced around the room, I noticed all the White faces, mostly men, and I  nodded slowly with a slight smile at the lone Black male. The meeting began with the first item on the agenda—a report from the president of the Student Government Association. As the student began to speak and all eyes turned to her, I quietly and quite stealthily, beneath the table, passed my “SistaDoc” a two-bite piece of dark chocolate. She expertly removed the red-foil-wrapped gift from my open hand and smiled. This she knows is my signature share that says “hey” or “I love you,” or “it’s noon,” or “it’s Tuesday,” or “just because chocolate is good for you and brings a smile.” I also had a piece of my own and we both began unwrapping our small bites of joy and discreetly took a bite, a little under half for me. And just as we did, one of the attendees, one of two White women, expressed concern that student groups like the Black Student Alliance or the Indian Student Association are “harmful.” “How will they get to know each other if they are separated? I just don’t see the need. I don’t understand … you know I have this friend … she’s a Black woman, uhm, can I say Black?” She looked at my SistaDoc friend and me, the only two Black women at the table, and we both nodded yes and smiled slightly, with chocolate slowly melting in our mouths. “Well, this woman has done an amazing job in her position but she told me she’s had to work twice as hard because she is a Black woman—and I just don’t know why, what that means, I mean race should have nothing to do with it now—right? Haven’t we passed that?” At that moment as I began to rewrap the remaining half of my dark chocolate morsel I saw to my side my “SistaDoc” doing the very same

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thing—our movements slow, methodical, so as not to destroy the precious remaining piece. In sync, we finished our tasks and both sighed quietly but audibly to each other. We each set our piece of rewrapped chocolate to our side, near the agenda and notepad in tandem, and again in sync, we began to gently yet skillfully explain, in fifteen minutes, what social injustice, oppressive systems and race privilege mean for students of color at a PWI. My appreciation for dark chocolate as a healthy restorative practice is long-standing and was taken to a new level when I discovered the virtues and health benefits of chocolate in Orey’s The Healing Powers of Chocolate (2010). So when my “SistaDoc” and I slowly rewrapped our half piece of dark chocolate in order to respond to a “well-meaning” query of one who just “doesn’t understand” why race is still an issue—we were setting aside our moment of restorative self-care. Our mutual, nearly silent sighs sang the well-known refrain of “Ok, here it is, and we know we gotta go, gotta do this right here, right now.” As Black women in administrative positions, committed to social justice work, we recognize the danger in this vision of a post-racial world on campus and we knew our responses were needed to clarify for the powerful group around that impressive table that race is still very much an issue on our campus and we can give ample evidence and examples to correct that misunderstanding. Yes, again, the Black women were educating but we both knew this group probably had few opportunities to learn about the lived experiences of Black students on our campus. As Black women in leadership positions we are always on careful watch for the dangers and difficulties—for both our Black students and ourselves—in not responding to a naïve belief race is no longer a problem. And we are also on careful watch for the danger and difficulties that may come when a Black woman speaks truth to power (Scott, 2018). Our vigilance allowed us to proceed, compelled to do what needed to be done—provide answers, guidance and leadership that might offer insight to those in positions of power to transform an institution. As Black women in the academy whose “resilience” in doing the hard work that leads to better experiences for our Black students is often admired—without offers of support to assist us—we must practice self-care in many ways. In this particular instance we knew we needed to save that chocolate for a bit of restoration to sustain us and the work we do. In the following narrative Christie Cruise offers a compelling look at the dangers and difficulties Black women in such positions in the academy face and the implications of living in constant vigilance. She posted a glimpse into her reality as a Black woman on her Facebook page on June

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3, 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement spread rapidly in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor on March 13, Ahmaud Arbery on February 23 and George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Here is a portion of that post: It was 4 years ago last month that I left my last position in higher education. Many people couldn’t understand why I would leave my position as an associate dean of students and affirmative action officer…. After over 18 years of fighting for Black students at predominantly white universities to be allowed to just BE, my mental and physical health and well-being deteriorated. In this fight on campuses across the United States, departments that do this work are often underfunded and staffed with one, or at most two, professionals who are charged with all things social justice on campus. We also must be there to support Black students and students of color because we are often the only professionals on campus students see visibly advocating on their behalf. It is NOT easy work. It is exhausting…. It is always having to speak up and having people across campus think you are a trouble maker or an angry Black woman because you refuse to sit quietly. It is having your colleagues tell new employees not to work with you because you are difficult. It is having to facilitate dialogues around police brutality and remain neutral and fight back tears.

As I read Christie’s story that morning I recognized the pain of a position that requires the vigilance and persistence of Harriet Tubman in order to survive in an institutional system that does not support your success— or the success of Black students. For a Black woman in such a position, danger is inherent and as Christie admits, over the long term has serious implications for health and well-being. Christie discusses her own path to restoration in a memoir, It Don’t Hurt Now: My Journey of Self-love & Self-­ Acceptance, where she notes the process of healing includes “letting go and moving on” (Cruise, 2019, p.  1). Black women like those whose experiences I share in this section are aware of the difficulty of the work they do and are becoming more aware of the danger it poses to our well-­ being. Many of us are now seeking strategies to repurpose that historical, mythical strength for a radical self-care needed to support our own survival.

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Restoring the ladder: I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired —Fannie Lou Hamer

Whether it is an administrative assistant at a PWI supporting young Black women’s desire to find a safe space to gather and exercise or experienced, well-credentialed university administrators speaking truth to power, Black women such as the ones whose lived experiences I shared in the previous narrative remain vigilant as they do such important work. As many of us come to terms with the risks faced, we need a call to gather, in the tradition of a “Watch Night,” to reflect on a past that got us here and recognize the danger inherent in continuing to save and serve others while hazarding our own well-being. Looking ahead we must now consider restorative practices as a path to sustain health and wellness in all areas of our lives. For centuries the belief in a mythical strength as key to Black women’s survival has hidden the real dangers we face in everyday life. But now in acts of Black feminist vigilance, centering our realities and calling attention to the danger of our increasing health disparities, we must admit it is time to organize, prioritize and normalize restoration as a strategy for Black women’s wellness. One model for restoration that recognizes the urgent need for a plan and path to support Black women’s health is GirlTrek, founded by childhood friends Vanessa Garrison and Morgan Dixon. The two women grew up together in Los Angeles and admit on their website that GirlTrek was never an “aha moment” but a shared belief in radical acts of self-care. As noted on the GirlTrek LinkedIn page quoting co-founder Vanessa Garrison: This is a health crisis. ‘Black women in the US are facing an unprecedented health crisis. 82% of us are over healthy body weight….’ ‘Black women are dying from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, hypertension. It’s a crisis of epic proportions and yet nobody is talking about it.’ We say, ‘Not on our watch!’ (GirlTrek, n.d.)

In 2010 Garrison and Dixon challenged friends and families to walk with them and today, the non-profit GirlTrek is found in neighborhoods in cities and suburbs across the United States with 100,000 Black women and girls walking for individual and community health. Recalling the role of walking on the path to freedom for Black Americans, the definition of GirlTrek on the website includes as part of its mission, “to reestablish walking as a healing tradition in Black communities as tribute to those who walked before us” (Girltrek, 2020).

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GirlTrek’s mission follows, and flows well from, the work of the National Black Women’s Health Project was founded in 1983 by Byllye Avery (Avery, 1990). It is now called the Black Women’s Health Imperative and dedicated to promoting physical, mental and spiritual health and well-­ being for the nation’s 19.5 million Black women and girls (“Our Story,” n.d.). The work includes advocacy, education and mobilization. Says current President Linda Goler Blount, At the Imperative, this work of self-preservation by Black women begins with the creation of safe spaces where we can challenge and reject the social structures that assault and threaten our existence and our ability to be seen. (Goler-Blount, 2017, p. iii)

Challenging that assault continues with Black feminist, womanist scholars and activists—who are questioning, critiquing, attacking and offering alternatives to constraining images of Black womanhood that ignore our mental, emotional and spiritual health. Navigating those images and social structures requires vigilance, as described by Tamara Winfrey Harris: In an effort to shake the weight of society’s biased expectations, some black women hold their tongues when they are justified in raging, deny their sexuality when they should be making love with abandon, give all their energy and care to others, while they get sicker … and they make decisions not based on their particular needs and wants but to circumvent what society thinks of them. (Winfrey Harris, 2015, p. 9)

GirlTrek and The Black Women’s Health Imperative are examples of vigilance for Black women’s wellness, keeping watchful of danger, while providing models and methods that allow the historical mythical strength of Black women to be repurposed now for the self-care so urgently needed to save ourselves. These restorative practices are examples of Black feminist vigilance advocating self-care to sustain our strength and survive. As Catrice M. Jackson asserts, “You’ve mastered your ability to be resilient and strong, now it’s time to master your healing and ability to thrive” (Jackson, 2019, p. 214). As I previously noted, in the early twentieth century the National Association of Colored Women Club movement adopted the motto “Lifting as We Climb” to highlight the importance of Black women’s work in uplifting Black communities while improving their own

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lives—and that burden was a heavy one. And here in the early part of the twenty-first century we find the burden remains and is further complicated by post-racial ideologies, ignorance of intersecting identities and the enduring myth of Black women’s strength to do anything, no matter how difficult and dehumanizing—and survive. We are still “lifting as we climb” but the ladder that supports the labor in our lived experience needs restoration. To paraphrase the words of Langston Hughes in his 1926 poem “Mother to Son,” “Life for Black women, ain’t been no crystal stair” (1926/2015) and Black women must recognize that despite the myth that says we are strong enough to handle anything—we are not. To counter that mandate and its deleterious effects, we must remind ourselves that we cannot handle everything and that the reality of trying to do so without self-care for restoration makes us vulnerable to the health disparities that also leave us without the energy to pursue wellness and well-being. Echoing the words of Fannie Lou Hamer—mid-twentieth-­ century civil rights and social justice warrior—GirlTrek founder Vanessa Garrison advocates for a vigilant twenty-first-century framing of Black women’s restoration: “We are not a workout group, we are an army of women who are sick and tired of being sick and tired” (GirlTrek, 2020). Serving and supporting everyone else has always been the Black woman’s role, “de mule of de world” as Zora Neale Hurston declared in 1934/2006. It is time for us to be just as vigilant about our own well-­ being. It is no longer enough to “lift” our Black communities as we climb, we are now being asked to save our people and the country from politicians and policies enacting and enforcing—with renewed commitment— the same White supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that dehumanized us when we were enslaved and considered only as products for profit (Scott, 2017). The challenge of the ascent on the ladder is too much to shoulder and survive—let alone thrive. Now is the time to be vigilant Black women in our Watch Night and shout out, in our best “loud Black woman” voices (Scott, 2013), a warning of the clear and present danger approaching on the horizon.

References Avery, B. (1990). Breathing life into ourselves: The evolution of the National Black Women’s Health Project. In E. White (Ed.), The Black Women’s health book: Speaking for ourselves (pp. 147–155). Seal Press. Black Women’s Health Imperative (n.d.). Our story. https://bwhi.org/our-story/

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Blount, L. G. (2017). Forward. In S. Y. Evans, K. Bell, & N. K. Burton (Eds.), Black women’s mental health: Balancing strength and vulnerability (pp. xi–xiv). State University of New York Press. Burris, H. H., & Baccarelli, A. A. (2014). Environmental epigenetics: From novelty to scientific discipline. Journal of Applied Toxicology, 34(2), 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1002/jat.2904 Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Left Coast Press. Chism, J.  L. (2013, December 31). Watch night. The African American Lectionary. Retrieved from http://www.theafricanamericanlectionary.org/ PopupCulturalAid.asp?LRID=184 Collins, P. H. (2009). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment (3rd ed.). Routledge. (Originally published 2000). Conrad, E. (1863, July 10). The Commonwealth Boston, vol. 1, p. 45. Retrieved from harriettubman.com; http://www.harriettubman.com/tubman2.html Cruise, C. A. (2019). It don’t hurt now: My journey of self-love and self-acceptance. Christie A. Cruise, PhD. Davis, A. (1995). Reflections on the Black woman’s role in the community of slaves. In B. Guy-Sheftall (Ed.), Words of fire: An anthology of African American feminist thought (pp. 200–218). The New Press. Davis, J. H. (2015, May 20). Michelle Obama’s vigorous exercise routine is not a stretch. FirstDraft, The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/politics/first-draft/2015/05/20/michelle-obamas-vigorous-exerciseroutine-is-not-a-stretch/ Giddings, P. (1984). When and where I enter: The impact of Black women on race and sex in America. Bantam. GirlTrek (2020). Our story. https://www.girltrek.org/our_story GirlTrek (n.d.). This is a health crisis. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/company/girltrek/ Glenn, C.  L., Smith-Jones, S. & Scott, K.  D., Editors. (2017/2018). Michelle Obama: Black feminism and the First Lady of the United States [Special Issue]. Women and Language, 40(1). hooks, B. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center (2nd ed.). South End Press. hooks, B. (2003). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Atria Books. Houston, M., & Davis, O. I. (2002). Centering ourselves: African American feminist and womanist studies of discourse. Hampton Press. Hughes, L. (2015). Mother to son. In The Weary Blues. Knopf. (Originally published 1926). Hull, G. T., Scott, P., & Smith, B. (1982). All the women are white, all the Blacks are men but some of us are brave: Black women’s studies. Feminist Press. Hurston, Z.  N. (2006). Their eyes were watching God. First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Ed. (Original work published 1937, J. B. Lippincott, Inc.)

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Jackson, C.  M. (2019). Unf*ckablewith: Rising from the ashes into your black woman badassery. Catriceology Enterprises LLC. Jackson, L., Jackson, Z., & Jackson, F. (2018). Intergenerational resilience in response to the stress and trauma of enslavement and chronic exposure to ­institutionalized racism. Journal of Clinical Epigenetics, 4(3). https://doi. org/10.21767/2472-1158.1000100 Lexico.com. (2019). Vigilance. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https:// www.lexico.com/en/definition/vigilance Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (1984). This bridge called my back: Radical writings by women of color. Persephone Press. Obama, M. (2018). Becoming. Crown Publishing. Orey, C. (2010). The healing powers of chocolate. Kensington Books. Painter, N. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A life, a symbol. Norton. Scott, K. D. (2013). Communication strategies across cultural borders: Dispelling stereotypes, performing competence, and redefining Black womanhood. Women’s Studies in Communication, 36(3), 312–329. https://doi.org/10.108 0/07491409.2013.831005 Scott, K. D. (2017). The language of strong Black womanhood: Myths, models, messages and a new mandate for self care. Lexington. Scott, K.  D. (2018). Check Yo’ stuff: A Black feminist rant to “allies” seeking “dialogue” in precarious times. International Review of Qualitative Research, 11(2), 198–209. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2018.11.2.198 Smith, B. (1983). Home girls: A Black feminist anthology. Kitchen Table Press. Vick, A. D., & Burris, H. H. (2017). Epigenetics and health disparities. Current Epidemiology Reports, 4(1), 31–37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40471017-0096-x Walker, A. (1982). The color purple. Harcourt Books. Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mother’s gardens. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Walker-Barnes, C. (2014). Too heavy a yoke: Black women and the burden of strength. Cascade Books. Wallace, M. (1990). Black macho and the myth of the superwoman. Verso. White, D.  G. (1985). Ar’n’t I a woman: Female slaves in the plantation south. W.W. Norton. Winfrey Harris, T. (2015). The sisters are alright: Changing the broken narrative of Black women in America. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

CHAPTER 5

Catholic Women Religious: Discerning Faith-­based Vigilance Bren Ortega Murphy

You don’t know what it means to be up to your neck in nuns. —Bells of St. Mary’s (Nichols, 1945)

Historically, women in most Western cultures have held little institutional power in their respective societies. They have been prohibited or discouraged from holding political, educational, commercial, artistic, or religious leadership positions. Nevertheless, they have often been expected to “stand watch” over cultural, civic, and moral values. One example of this is the concept of “Republican Motherhood,” a term used to describe the advocation in public discourse from the early days of the American republic through the early twentieth century that mothers were “custodians” of virtue and patriotism (Kerber, 1997). Although legally prohibited from voting or running for office, mothers were encouraged to educate their children, particularly sons, to be informed and dedicated citizens. Indeed, one of the arguments against women’s suffrage was that women (that is, white,

B. O. Murphy (*) Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_5

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economically privileged women) were “too fragile” to engage in public life but could, for that very reason, “keep vigil” over private life morality. Similar sentiments are seen in the idea of a woman as the “Angel of the House,” a popular ideal articulated in Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem of the same name. In this idealization, women and men occupy almost entirely separate spheres of existence, each of which depended on the other. Men do the important work of building civilization. Women sustain this important work by providing men with emotional support, homes that are safe havens, and children that carry on men’s legacies. Women are selfless and docile but also pure in that they cultivate virtues that are valued but can be jettisoned in the rough and tumble of “the real world.” Women “keep vigil.” They keep the light burning in the window. They nurture the ideal even when the ideal is being contested. In this model, the most influential women are those connected with powerful men; men with the means to make things happen. Most often this connection is through marriage and motherhood (Moore, 2015, pp. 41–61). An unexpected and uniquely American exemplification of this phenomenon can be found in the story of women religious in the United States. The term “women religious” itself is unexpected to most people who are familiar with words such as “nuns” and “sisters” and the distinction is important to note. Strictly speaking, “nuns” refers to women who have taken vows of a religious life that takes place in a cloistered environment. “Sisters” refers to women whose religious life is beyond that protected environment. Unlike their European counterparts who largely exerted their influence within the confines of state-sponsored religion and carefully curated “girl’s education” of the upper classes, U.S. women religious had to operate in the streets. They had no European thick convent walls. Indeed, often they had no walls at all. This chapter explores U.S. women religious, primarily those who are known as “sisters,” as embodiments of vigilance … those who “kept watch.” The traditional Roman Catholic understanding of that term is that people who keep vigil are those who “stay awake” while others are sleeping. They maintain their vigilance to make sure that harm isn’t done and that core values remain intact. They also keep awake because they do not trust that anyone else will do so. Although Catholic sisters are women, they play a different role than Catholic wives and mothers. They did not restrict their vigilance to their own families. They were in schools, hospitals, orphanages, settlement houses, and other places of service. They kept watch over dozens, sometimes hundreds of people to whom they were not

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biologically related. They also played a slightly different role than secular feminists. What did this entail? How was it conveyed, understood, and received? How did this experience enter into public discourse? What tensions did it create for the women who were asked to play this role? How did this role enter into the public imagination? The chapter also explores how the experience of U.S. women religious contributes to our overall understanding of feminist vigilance. Although women religious were often reluctant to label themselves as feminist, they dominated early leadership positions in health care, education, and social welfare, three areas in which individual moral agency and collective vigilance are essential. In what ways did their experiences both deepen and expand our understanding of feminist vigilance? Note: in keeping with the fluidity of the American experience, in this chapter the terms “women religious,” “nun,” and “sister” will henceforth be used interchangeably as they are in contemporary discourse.

Catholic Women Religious in America European Patriarchal Roots In many ways, Catholic women religious in the United States replicated the model of “angels of the house” described earlier. They were not supposed to be “in charge” of anything other than domestic concerns such as childhood education and nursing. They were sent from European convents by European bishops to keep Catholic immigrants Catholic in a hostile environment. Whatever authority they had, came through a formal patriarchal structure that had male bishops, cardinals, and, in some cases, the Pope as the ultimate authority. Although they were not individually married to men, women religious were often described as “brides of Christ.” Sisters Sent to the New World Were Supposed to “Keep the Light Burning”—McGuinness (2013); Coburn and Smith (1999) In coming to America, Catholic sisters diverged from the Victorian model. Unlike wives or European nuns, their work could not be confined to homes or even the high walls of convents. They would keep vigil in city and frontier schools, hospitals, orphanages, and settlement houses. Sisters

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were often literally out in the streets keeping watch on the waves of immigrants as they entered the “new world.” They knew the neighborhood because they lived in the neighborhood. Rather than creating homes of private shelter and refuge, they made it their business to know illness, crime, and other threats to the well-being of everyday people. Although women religious were neither wives nor mothers, they often were integrated into the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives: the raising of children and the care for the sick. Sisters also realized a twin mission. They were to keep Catholics Catholic but they also had to make immigrants American. The waves of people off the boat barely had their faith in common—to be Irish Catholic is a very different thing than to be German Catholic—but none were “American” (Murphy, 2015). Early and Ongoing Work in the United States The first women religious who came to what would become the United States were the Ursulines. The exact place and date are disputed but it is agreed that fourteen French Ursuline nuns arrived in New Orleans in July 1727. They were sent to educate the daughters of French settlers, but also catechize young Indigenous and freed slave women. In the early nineteenth century, French sisters originally sent to Canada to educate girls followed Canadian migrants to what would become New England. By mid-nineteenth century, sisters were also being sent to the West Coast missions. In every case, their primary mission was education, primarily the education of women. This mission did not arise from any articulated feminist perspective but it did stem from a belief that women were critical in the shaping of society, primarily in the role of mother. Well educated wives and mothers were seen as essential to forming new generations of leaders. When the waves of immigrants started coming to New York in the mid-­ nineteenth century, largely driven by the Great Famine in Ireland and political unrest in Italy, Irish and Italian women religious were directed by the Vatican to minister to the needs of these immigrants. This ministry had many dimensions. For one thing, there was significant resistance to these immigrants on the part of the Protestant establishment. Many were desperately poor. Crowded into city slums, they suffered from the ills common to poverty: hunger, disease, violence, abandonment, and lack of opportunity to get ahead. There were very few social service agencies at the time and those that existed were usually connected to Protestant sects. Catholic bishops and orders of women religious started their own. Some

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provided food, medicine, and even daycare. Some served abandoned children. One example is what is now known as New  York Foundling. Established by the Sisters of Charity in 1869, the Foundling Asylum started in a rented house in Greenwich Village. The legend is that Sister Irene Fitzgibbon put a white wicker cradle just inside the front door and received an infant the very first night; forty-five other babies followed in the first month alone. By 1871, they had accepted over 2500. An adoption service was established to place as many of these children as possible in Roman Catholic homes (Gottlieb, 2001, pp. 11–51). Although public schools were free and supposedly non-sectarian, teachers often assumed that Catholicism was un-American and exhibited bias toward the recent immigrants. Catholic bishops such as New York City’s John “Dagger” Hughes were determined to counter this prejudice by building a Catholic school system that would educate Catholic children in ways that would shape them into people who could not be denied full citizenship: “No need was more urgent, in his view. ‘We shall have to build the schoolhouse first and the church afterward,’ he said. ‘In our age the question of education is the question of the church’” (Stern, 1997, n.p.). Grammar schools and high schools were followed by colleges and universities throughout the country. And who staffed these schools, particularly at the lower levels? Women religious. Since most high schools and colleges were male only, sisters sometimes founded their own for women. Some Catholic schools were intended for the small number of middle-­ class Catholics but others were founded to serve the marginalized. Still others started as elite institutions but adapted to changing neighborhoods by educating whoever felt that their needs were not being addressed by public schools, including a significant number of non-Catholics. As Archbishop Hughes envisioned, these schools—especially the grammar schools—became the cornerstones of Catholic enclaves, small geographic spaces comprised of church/school/rectory/convent. Well into the 1960s cities and suburbs, thousands of Catholic parishes were comprised of these “compounds” that served as protected spaces within which the Catholic faith could be nurtured and sustained. Priests were nominally “in charge” but it was widely understood that the nuns were the primary custodians (Hoy, 2006, pp. 1–11; McGuiness, 2013, pp. 71–81). Much the same can be said for the role that nuns played in health care. Until the U.S. Civil War, most of the ill and dying were cared for in their own homes. Hospitals that did exist were sectarian, primarily Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Seventh-day Adventist.

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European Catholics brought with them a history of institutional health care founded and run by women religious. The first such establishment is thought to be Charity Hospital in New Orleans, established around 1727. Hospitals were sometimes founded in response to epidemics of such diseases as cholera, typhoid fever, and scarlet fever that disproportionately affected the poor, who were more exposed to crowded living conditions, malnutrition, and inadequate sewage treatment (Nelson, 2003). One example is St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. Founded in 1849 during a cholera outbreak, its primary patients were the recent immigrants, the working poor, and the homeless who lived in lower Manhattan. Run by the Sisters of Charity, St. Vincent’s admitted patients regardless of religion or ability to pay. It also operated a soup kitchen. According to an 1892 New York Times article, St. Vincent’s was distinguished from other hospitals in the city by its feeding of “a large number of tramps and other destitute persons.” Until its closing in 2010, it had responded to some of the most troubling disasters in U.S. history. In 1911, St. Vincent’s ambulances responded to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where the attendants watched helplessly as those trapped in the fire jumped to their deaths onto the street below. In 1912, St. Vincent’s received and treated victims after the sinking of the RMS Titanic. In the early 1980s, the hospital had the first and largest AIDS ward on the East Coast and by 1986 became “ground zero” for New York’s AIDS crisis with a third of the beds filled by AIDS patients (Boynton, 2013). And on September 11, 2001, the hospital was alerted to the World Trade Center attack. St. Vincent’s was the nearest hospital. Though only three women religious were still on staff, they pulled in thirty retired sisters and mobilized the hospital staff to deal with the patients and to create a family crisis center that responded to calls from eleven thousand people looking for survivors amid the chaos … [they wanted] to make sure that all of these desperate callers ‘should hear a human voice and not get a voice mail or roll-over.’… The family crisis center went around the clock for ten days…. As in the case of the Titanic tragedy, St. Vincent’s absorbed most of the cost. (Fialka, 2003, p. 18)

Although those answering the phone had no information to give to the callers, they could be human contact in real time. In addition to answering phone calls, the staff posted flyers of missing persons. An entire outside wall of the hospital became “The Wall of Hope and Remembrance.” It was maintained for years after the attack. St. Vincent’s, led by the Sisters

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of Charity of New York, held vigil when there was nothing else that could be done. Women religious also brought the hospital to the battlefield. During the U.S. Civil War, over six hundred tended to both Union and Confederate soldiers as they lay wounded, ill, or dying (Maher, 1989). Though non-­ Catholic women such as those who worked with Clara Barton were on the battlefield as well, the sisters formed the most extensive organized nursing endeavor and were recognized by The Nuns of the Battlefield monument, dedicated in 1924 and located in Washington, DC. On the granite above the relief is inscribed: “They Comforted The Dying, Nursed The Wounded, Carried Hope To The Imprisoned, Gave In His Name A Drink Of Water To The Thirsty.”

Cultural Images of Nuns as Custodians of Morality By the mid-twentieth century, Catholics had become well integrated into American society. They were moving to middle-class neighborhoods and holding middle-class jobs. They appeared as sympathetic characters in Hollywood films. Catholics had been accepted as “real Americans.” Catholic institutions were no longer seen as bulwarks against overt prejudice but were still valued as necessary in “keeping the faith.” Early anti-Catholicism had largely been subdued but Communism loomed large and several of the voices who spoke out against the Red Scare were those of Catholic men, both ordained and lay. Women religious were seen as a critical component, but in relatively individual and domestic ways. Nuns fought against communism as well, particularly in their capacity as teachers but, in many Catholic school children’s experiences, their primary foes were threats to personal morality: short skirts, make-up, close dancing, “condemned” books and movies, and “degenerate” comic books. No longer on the streets per se, they kept vigil primarily in the classroom but tried to extend that classroom to their pupils’ daily lives through a concept called “custody of the eyes.” Generally speaking, Catholics believed images were an important source of knowledge. Therefore, what you viewed could leave an indelible mark on your soul (Orsi, 2016, pp. 1–11). Sometimes this was good, hence the Catholic emphasis on such visual elements of worship as statues of saints, holy cards, and rosaries. But visual elements could harm you as well and present “occasions of sin.” Catholics were taught that they were responsible for anything they looked at so they had to be very careful about what they allowed themselves to

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see. Since Catholics were increasingly likely to venture outside of their “Catholic compounds” where they were shielded, many sisters believed that they had to be on guard, primarily regarding popular culture. Although male clergy and other leaders had instigated such structures as The Legion of Decency, famous for the concept of “condemned movies,” it was left to nuns, primarily those in schools, to be the “reinforcers.” Embodiment in Popular Culture Although women religious “kept vigil” in many ways, it is this last role of private moral monitor that became the dominant image in U.S. popular culture, primarily through the image of the mean, ruler-wielding nun who spurns fun and wants everyone else to do so as well. You see her on countless greeting cards frowning and threatening punishment. The front of the card may read, “Go ahead and have a good time on your birthday,” but the inside says, “You’re going to burn in hell anyway.” In films and plays, cocktail napkins and figurines, calendars and countless other artifacts, the mean sisters caution against drinking, cavorting, fun, innovation, and, of course, sex. The hypervigilant nun seems to know what you’re going to do even before you do it. One magnet reads, “The nuns were still just one step behind her” and shows a grown woman with a fully habited nun looming behind her. One interesting thing about most of these artifacts is that they were produced and marketed well after the time period they purportedly represent. Most women religious in the United States haven’t worn full habits since the mid-twentieth century. There aren’t many teaching in Catholic schools or working in large Catholic institutions. Their numbers have fallen drastically. Those who remain are primarily engaged in issues of social justice (a topic that will be discussed in the next section) but this caricature endures—the nun dedicated to watching for individual foibles. The nun whose gaze you can never escape. Nowhere is the trope of the vigilant nun more evident or varied than in popular American film (Sullivan, 2005). Unlike magnets or greeting cards, films have the capacity to explore the nature, motivation, and consequences of this supposedly faith-based vigilance. And popular films, by definition, have large audiences. Therefore, it is instructive to look more closely at some particular examples to see what assumptions and arguments they make about the nature and function of nuns’ vigilance. Films continue to inform what the general public thinks it knows about

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nuns. From a gender perspective, it is interesting to observe that priests and other male clergy are not depicted in the same ways. Thus, even though nuns were not overtly recognized as women, their depiction often fed into both negative and positive beliefs about gendered vigilance. The following films give an indication of the types of popular culture messages distributed about the vigilance of women religious. They range from the entirely negative and destructive to the misunderstood to the redemptive. • Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You—first appeared in 1979 as a play (Durang, 1980); then as a film, Sister Mary Explains It All (Brickman, 2001). Sister Mary Ignatius is presented as a cruel, bigoted, ignorant nun who made her students’ lives miserable. She is vigilant about “sins” such as homosexuality, abortion, and giving birth to a child out of wedlock. She is vigilant about taking too many bathroom breaks and getting poor grades. She rewards rote repetition of simple-minded lessons by giving cookies. There is nothing protective or loving about her condemnations. In the end, her former students kill her and such action is seen as justified. • The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (Care, 2002). Sister Assumpta is presented as a more complex character who is nevertheless hated by a group of adolescent boys that she teaches. They see her as their primary obstacle to adventure and sex. She seems to catch them at everything they try and although there are some hints that she is really trying to guide them for their own good, they refuse to see this and the film does not prompt much sympathy for her. In the documentary A Question of Habit (Murphy, 2011), historian Dr. Prudence Moylan has argued that the role of the teaching nun charged with monitoring personal morality gets reduced in popular culture to the image of “the mean nun with the ruler.” Moylan wonders whether such conflation is at least partially the result of male adolescent resentment about being scrutinized by women—resentment of female vigilance. • The Trouble with Angels (Lupino, 1966). Mother Superior is presented as a strict, all knowing principal of an all girls’ high school who is determined to shape her unruly pupils into

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responsible adults. Although Mary and Rachel, the biggest troublemakers, initially resent her, even they begin to see her actions as well meaning— even wise and kind. Mary especially is touched by all of the sisters’ dedication and generosity and realizes that their vigilance is for the greater good. The final scene is a touching tribute to the vocation of religious life. • Doubt—first appeared in 2004 as a play (Shanley, 2005); adapted for the screen in 2008 (Shanley, 2008). Sister Aloysius, the high school principal, and Sister James, a new teacher, are initially presented as opposites. Sr. Aloysius insists on constant vigilance against all sorts of things that she considers morally corrosive. These range from ball point pens (they make you lazy) to singing “Frosty the Snowman” at a Christmas pageant (undermines the true meaning of Christmas) to misbehaving in class. She is an advocate of making students believe that nuns have eyes in the back of their heads and advises Sr. James to put a framed picture above her blackboard so that she can see what is going on in the reflection of the glass when she is writing on the board. (It works.) It turns out that Sr. Aloysius may have reason to be vigilant about something far more serious, the possible sexual abuse of students by the new pastor. • Dead Man Walking (Robbins, 1995). Sister Helen Prejean, based on the real anti-death penalty activist of the same name, is seen by some clergy as forsaking her calling to be vigilant against sin when she refuses to wear a habit when visiting a prison and, more grievously, befriends a person who has committed a vicious murder. The parents of one of his murder victims agree but the father of the second victim comes to see Sr. Helen’s actions as true to Christ’s teaching. The movie shows her transformation into a person able to stay vigilant about the horror of any action that needlessly takes life away whether through murder or the death penalty. It’s also about Helen’s insistence that people confront what they have done. The film complicates the traditional vigilance associated with women religious. This vigilance is not about personal piety. It’s about commitment to the sanctity of life. As argued earlier, these films illustrate the range of vigilance associated with women religious. The first, Mary Ignatius, is clearly negative. It provides no justification and no alternative to a kind of vigilance that seeks only to control and punish rather than form moral agents. The second film, Dangerous Lives, acknowledges a negative aspect. What I love about

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the latter three is their more nuanced approach. The sisters had moral standards. They see threats to those principles and do their best to guide and protect those under their care. The Trouble with Angels can easily be dismissed as a frothy, programmatic comedy about wayward girls and hapless nuns but there are moments that illustrate the real care that Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior has for her charges. Doubt raises the possibility that vigilance should extend beyond the laity to the church hierarchy as well. Dead Man Walking goes further to argue that all of us must examine our actions to assess their congruence with our beliefs. This goes beyond personal piety to, in this case, public policy regarding the death penalty. Sister Prejean and Doubt’s Sister Aloysius are especially compelling because they reflect both the serious issues that women religious have grappled with—and continue to do so—as well as their realization that their status as nuns does not make them invulnerable to mistakes and … well … doubt. There are more threatening things than chewing gum and short skirts and their faith calls them to address what are true moral crises. This function of vigilance is indeed what many American nuns saw themselves as called to serve.

An Expanded Understanding of Vigilance: Collective Agency It is important to note that women religious have long kept watch on themselves within the context of community. After all, they were organized into formal organizations known as congregations or orders each of which has formal guidelines. For example, all Benedictines throughout the world live by The Rule of St. Benedict. Over time, sometimes centuries, these guidelines evolved well beyond their founders’ intentions and involved minute details concerning religious garb, ways of walking, topics of conversation, even thoughts such as those of pride or unkindness. Sometimes this resulted in the development of what many now consider to be excessive self-scrutiny and an overly internalized piety that found expression in the suppression of others such as the aforementioned trope of the mean nun spurning all fun. By the mid-twentieth century, American nuns in particular were questioning the usefulness of such hyper-vigilance, particularly at the expense of questioning larger issues of social justice. The goals seemed to have been the perfection of personal piety rather than being on guard for others’ well-being. In her critique of such scrupulosity, Sister Chittister remarked, “When you worship at the altar of oneself, you worship at a very small altar indeed” (2005).

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Well before the famous Catholic initiative known as Vatican II, American sisters initiated a self-education process known as the Sister Formation Act in which they very consciously changed the way they kept vigil on themselves; how they directed their work, how they governed themselves, even how they ordered their daily lives  (Koehlinger, 2007). Directed by the Vatican, they looked to their origins; what had been their purpose? They re-examined their approaches to education and health care in order to discern where their talents might best be used, not just in schools and hospitals. They increasingly saw a broad commitment to social justice issues as the goal of their collective agency. Even as their numbers dwindled, they expanded their ministries to address racism, economic injustice, immigration problems, prison reform, environmental degradation, U. S. imperialism in Central America, and nuclear warfare (Quiñonez & Turner, 1992). In other words, they used their foundational principles and their contemporary communities to re-focus their vision and their energies (Beane, 1993). Another way to put it is that they expanded the notion of “custody of the eyes.” Rather than concentrating on what not to see, they made very conscious efforts to see differently and they called upon others to expand their vision as well. There are many concrete examples of how the tradition of faith-based vigilance sustained by community has been embodied in the contemporary work of U.S. women religious. As mentioned in the discussion of Dead Man Walking, Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ, has worked tirelessly to build support for public opposition to the death penalty. Through books, public demonstrations, countless presentations and interviews, as well as the film and even an opera, she turned our eyes to what she considers a moral violation. Although Prejean has become the obvious touchstone, she consistently refers to her religious community as the wellspring of her effort (Prejean, 1994, 2019). Network  Lobby for Catholic Social Justice (hereafter Network) is an advocacy organization founded in 1971 by women religious in order to “create a society that promotes justice and the dignity of all in the shared abundance of God’s creation” according to the “Network Mission Statement” (2020). In 2012 it achieved a great deal of media attention because of its Nuns on the Bus campaign. It was a highly engaging endeavor that involved a dynamic spokesperson, Sr. Simone Campbell, SSS, and a large bus that traversed the United States with a large banner. At every stop, Sr. Campbell and other nuns spoke about socio-economic disparities and their impact on people’s lives. Once again, although one person, Sr. Campbell, was the most visible, she consistently referred to

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herself as part of a collective, Network, which had been calling people to be aware of such inequity for over forty years. Two documentaries have been made about contemporary nuns and their work in social justice area, Radical Grace (Parrish, 2015)  and Band of Sisters (Fishman, 2012). Although both spotlight particular nuns (one is Sr. Simone), both clearly show the strength and impetus that comes from their communities. There is, perhaps, no more coherent narrative of sustained vigilance of American sisters than can be found in the story  of NYC’s St. Vincent’s Hospital (Hartocollis, 2003). Although its history was noted earlier in this chapter, its singular role during the AIDS crisis bears further discussion. During those early years when fear and uncertainty were so high, the nuns in leadership at St. Vincent’s Hospital decided to keep true to their mission; treat all those in need regardless of their ability to pay, regardless of the potential danger of infection, regardless of any personal factors. AIDS patients were being fired by employers, turned away at other hospitals, and abandoned by families. They came to St. Vincent’s. In an interview, hospital president Sr. Iannicelli, Sisters of Charity of New York (SCNY), was asked if there was ever a question about whether a Catholic hospital would treat people infected through homosexual encounters. She calmly but forcefully replied, “They were sick” (personal interview, 2018). In 2017, Greenwich Village’s Rattlestick Theater produced homage to the institution that had kept watch over lower Manhattan. It was called Saint Vincent Project: Novena for a Lost Hospital. (Rattlestick Theatre, n.d.) As before, their sense of vigilance sometimes put women religious in harm’s way. On December 2, 1980, four Catholic missionaries from the United States working in El Salvador were raped and murdered by five members of the El Salvador National Guard. They were Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan. The women had been working to secure basic goods such as shelter and water for the country’s poor. In her profile of Maura Clarke, Eileen Markey wrote about the women’s unwavering stance against oppression, a stance rooted in their Catholic faith (Markey, 2016. pp. 1–12) and quoted the 1980 Joint Statement of the Maryknoll Sisters and Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, December. Speaking specifically about the two Maryknoll Sisters, the statement read: Our sisters were killed because they lived as the Gospel of Jesus directed them to live…. To those who are blind to the message of that Gospel, our sisters and countless others who daily witness to it by their lives are dangerous. They threaten political structures which promote false idols and destroy

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the image of God in the human person. Ita and Maura were committed to the Gospel and thus gave their lives in love with and for the poor. That and that alone is why they died. (Markey, frontispiece)

In 2005 Dorothy Stang, SND, was murdered in Anapu, a city in the state of Pará, in the Amazon Basin of Brazil. Sr. Dorothy had been public in her criticism of loggers and others whom she believed exploited the poor and the environment. In these instances and others, women religious believed that they were called to stand with the poor and oppressed. Some of the public applauded these changes. Others did not. Upon hearing about the murder of the four churchwomen in El Salvador, then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick (herself a Catholic) remarked that the women must have been “something other than nuns” (Markey, p. 9). Some older Catholics even became angry over what they saw as women religious abandoning them by leaving middle-class American schools and large institutional hospitals to work with new immigrants, prisoners, inner city youth, and other disadvantaged people, many of whom were not Catholic. Sr. Joan Chittister, OP, described this phenomenon in a documentary interview and recounted her response to such an accusation: “We’ve given you over 150 years of service in schools and hospitals. You [meaning middleand upper-class Catholics] don’t need us anymore. We’re going where we went when your great grandparents came over…to the people who have the greatest need and the least resources” (Murphy, 2011). The Patriarchy Strikes Back This expanded understanding of vigilance was officially countered by the 2008–2015 Vatican investigation and censure of the majority of American sisters for allegedly abandoning their vigilance regarding “true Catholicism” in lieu of “radical feminism” (Goodstein, 2015a). American women religious were subjected to “visitations” by official Papal investigators who asked numerous questions about group and individual beliefs and practices. By and large, sisters responded politely but defiantly. They believed that their own self-scrutiny was more authentically motivated and productive than that of Rome.  igilance versus Vigilance V Pope Francis ended the inquiry (Goodstein, 2015b), citing the sisters’ fidelity to their mission. It is important to note that U.S. Catholic laity

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expressed overwhelming support of women religious during this period, often publicly thanking them for their hard work and dedication. Sometimes this support took the form of letters to newspaper editors. Other times there were gatherings of people outside cathedrals and cardinal residences holding up signs that stated sentiments such as “WE [heart] NUNS” (RNS, 2015, April 17).

Implications for Understanding Feminist Vigilance The story of American women religious can teach us something about feminist approaches to vigilance. In some ways, their experiences reinforce patterns of feminine stereotypes outside of the convent. Nuns were thought to be primarily responsible for “domestic morality” such as the education and care for the sick and elderly. Like their secular counterparts, they were often dismissed as moral scolds. However, because of their own communal structures which existed within the larger hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, they were able to construct unparalled systems of education and health care. They built social safety nets for vast numbers of marginalized people. They saw to it that women were educated, that immigrants were integrated into American society, and that abandoned people were attended. They eventually expanded their efforts to address systemic issues of poverty, clerical misogeny, immigration, enviromental degradation, and racism. It is important to be mindful of the legacy of such women. Not all were courageous or wise or selfless. Some did indeed use their positions to demonstrate their supposed moral superiority and maintain quite narrow visions of the world. As corporate bodies, they were late to the game in addressing racism within their own ranks. But many demonstrated a vigilance that went well beyond control of earthly pleasure. Despite changes in their numbers and their work, American women religious continue a long and admirable tradition of vigilance regarding the needs of some of the world’s most marginalized. They abide.

References Beane, M. N. (1993). From framework to freedom: A history of the Sister Formation Conference. New York: University Press of America. Boynton, A. (2013, May 16). Remembering St. Vincent’s. The New  Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ remembering-st-vincents

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Brickman, M. (Director). (2001). Sister Mary explains it all. Tennant/Stambler Productions and Showtime Networks. Care, P. (2002). The dangerous lives of altar boys. Egg Pictures & THINKFilm. Chittister, J. (2005). The way we were: A story of conversion and renewal. Orbis Books. Coburn, C., & Smith, M. (1999). Spirited lives: How nuns shaped Catholic culture and American life, 1836–1920. The University of North Carolina Press. Durang, C. (1980). Sister Mary Ignatius explains it all for you. Dramatists Play Service, Inc. Fialka, J. (2003). Sisters: Catholic nuns and the making of America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Fishman, M. (2012). Band of Sisters. Retrieved from http://www.bandofsistersmovie.com/ Goodstein, L. (2015a, April 17). Vatican ends battle with U.S. Nun’s group. The New  York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/ us/catholic-church-ends-takeover-of-leadership-conference-of-womenreligious.html Goodstein, L. (2015b, July 1). U.S. Nuns facing Vatican scrutiny. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/us/catholicchurch-ends-takeover-of-leadership-conference-of-women-religious.html Gottlieb, M. (2001). The Foundling: The story of the New York Foundling Hospital. Norfleet Press. Hartocollis, A. (2003). The decline of St. Vincent’s Hospital. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2-10/02/03/nyregion/-3vincents.html?pagewanted=all Hoy, S. (2006). Good hearts: Catholic sisters in Chicago’s past. University of Illinois Press. Kerber, L. K. (1997). The republican mother: Women and the enlightenment— An American perspective. In Towards an intellectual history of women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber (pp. 187–205). University of North Carolina Press. Koehlinger, A. (2007). The new nuns: Racial justice and religious reform in the 1960s. Harvard University Press. Lupino, I. (Director). (1966). The trouble with angels. Columbia Pictures. Maher, M. D. (1989). To bind up the wounds: Catholic sisters in the U.S. Civil War. Greenwood Press, Inc. Markey, E. (2016). A radical faith: The assassination of Sister Maura. Bold Type Books. McGuinness, M. (2013). Called to serve: A history of Nuns in America. NYU Press. Moore, N. (2015). The realism of the angel in the house: Coventry Patmore’s poem reconsidered. Victorian Literature and Culture, 43(1), 41–61. Murphy, B. O. (Director). (2011). A question of habit. Whalen Films.

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Murphy, B. O. (2015). Roman Catholic Sisters and the cultivation of citizenship: Rich and contentious legacies. In M.  J. Schuck & J.  Crowley-Buck (Eds.), Democracy, culture, and Catholicism: Voices from four continents (pp. 235–248). Fordham University Press. Nelson, S. (2003). Say little, do much: Nursing, nuns, and hospitals in the nineteenth century (Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving). University of Pennsylvania Press. Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice. (2020). https://networklobby.org/ Nichols, D. (Director). (1945). The bells of St. Mary’s. Rainbow Productions, RKO Radio Pictures. Orsi, R. (2016). History and presence. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Parrish, R. (2015). Radical Grace. Interchange Productions & The Kindling Group. Prejean, H. (1994). Dead man walking: The eyewitness account of the death penalty that sparked a national debate. Vintage Books. Prejean, H. (2019). River of fire: My spiritual journey. Random House. Quiñonez, L.  A., & Turner, M.  D. (1992). The transformation of American Catholic sisters. Temple University Press. Rattlestick Theater (n.d.). Saint Vincent Project: Novena for a Lost Hospital. https:// www.rattlestick.org/events/st-vincents-project RNS (Religious News Service). (2015, April 17). Timeline: The heated battle between the Vatican and American nuns. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vatican-american-nun-timeline_n_7087260 Robbins, T. (1995). Dead man walking. Havoc & Gramercy Pictures. Shanley, J. P. (2005). Doubt: A parable. Theatre Communications. Shanley, J. P. (Director). (2008). Doubt. Godspeed Productions & Miramax. Stern, W.  J. (1997, Spring). How Dagger John saved New  York’s Irish. City Journal. Retrieved from https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-daggerjohn-saved-new-york%E2%80%99s-irish-11934.html Sullivan, R. (2005). Visual habits: Nuns, feminism and American postwar popular culture. University of Toronto Press.

CHAPTER 6

Watching with Feminist Vigilance: Media Genres of Male Partner Violence Against Women Diane L. Shoos

The flood of U.S. media headlines about the repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic included a number that called attention to an additional “public health crisis” (Taub, 2020, para. 1) for, especially, women subject to male partner violence (henceforth MPV). For abused women, virus mitigation efforts such as stay-at-home orders and school closings along with potential economic insecurity meant forced, prolonged proximity to abusers and separation from support systems or, alternately, relocation to shelter homes where the risk of contracting the virus increases dramatically. There is no doubt that the pandemic raised the level of threat for abused women. Yet it is important to note the way in which the rhetoric of crisis of these media reports uncannily echoes that of previous decades, from the 1995 trial of O.J. Simpson for Nicole Brown Simpson’s homicide to that provoked almost 20 years later by NFL player Ray Rice’s 2014 attack on his then fiancée now wife, Janay Rice. This intermittent rhetoric,

D. L. Shoos (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_6

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often linked to the promise of newfound “visibility” and of a cathartic, collective realization of the seriousness of this social problem, both recalls and confirms Wendy Kozol’s 1995 observation that, “American national media are continually rediscovering (and forgetting) the problem of domestic violence that pervades American homes” (p. 646). Similarly relevant to this sporadic and often sensationalized sounding of the alarm about intimate partner violence is Lauren Berlant’s description of crisis as an interpretive genre that rhetorically transforms “an ongoing condition into an intensified situation … something that seems shocking and exceptional” (p. 7). Taken together, Kozol’s and Berlant’s observations constitute a signal critique of popular discourses of abuse for the ways such discourses characterize abuse as an extraordinary event. Such characterizations obscure the realities of abuse as chronic, acute, and widespread psychological and physical violence endemic to patriarchal gender oppression, intersecting with and compounded by racism, economic discrimination, and other forms of social injustice (Crenshaw, 1991; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). I propose that this rhetoric of crisis demands feminist vigilance in the form of proactive, sustained, collective attention to MPV against women as a systemic issue that must be addressed in flexible, multivalent ways. Vigilance defined as alertness to a possible or continued threat is central to feminism. Recalling bell hooks’ definition of feminism as “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression” (2000, p. 33), Sarah Ahmed notes, “A significant step for a feminist movement is to recognize what has not ended. And this step is a very hard step. We might think we have made that step only to realize we have to make it again” (2017, p. 5). A crucial step for ending MPV against women is revisiting, reframing, and re-imaging/reimagining its representation in the media. Media texts have been and continue to be instrumental in the construction of public discourses about social problems. This is especially the case for intimate partner violence, which generally takes place in private, is rarely openly discussed, and thus not only isolates the victim/survivor (Shoos, 2017), but routinely deprives her of external validation and credibility (Jacobson & Gottman, 1998). Thus the wide distribution and relative accessibility of contemporary popular film and television narratives that focus on MPV against women make them a primary vehicle for bringing this difficult subject to audiences who may have only indirect or superficial knowledge about this issue (Kozol, 1995); for example, Sleeping with the Enemy (Ruben, 1991), What’s Love Got to Do with It (Gibson, 1993),

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Dolores Claiborne (Hackford, 1995), Enough (Apted, 2002), Safe Haven (Hallström, 2013), and Big Little Lies (Kelley et al., 2017 & 2019). These media portrayals require feminist vigilance in the sense of attentiveness to the terms of their visibility through what has become the prototypical, highly ambivalent affective and hermeneutic frame for the representation of the experience of abuse (Shoos, 2017). At the center of this frame is the sympathetic figure of the (White) female hypervigilant victim/survivor turned heroine/vigilante who, deprived of resources or disabused of their effectiveness, inevitably confronts and frequently kills the abuser, who is portrayed as a deviant monster outside the bounds of normality (Stark, 2007). This event is depicted as an act of individual empowerment via physical violence that in most cases carries no legal or personal consequences and leaves the systemic, institutionalized sexism that perpetuates MPV against women untouched. In Berlant’s (2011) terms, this narrative frame constructs a relation of “cruel optimism” in that it returns to the scene of a fantasy that sparks a sense of possibility that “actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving” (p. 2). The cruel optimism that most popular media narratives of abuse engage us in—most crucially, the idea that individual abused women can and should “solve” the problem of intimate partner violence on their own—calls for feminist vigilance that alerts us to the continuing power of this frame to position us as viewers and obscure or screen out other potential, more productive narratives. In this chapter, I argue that media portrayals of MPV against women demand feminist vigilance in two complementary ways. First, as alertness to the narrative seductiveness of ostensibly inspiring scenarios of heroic, solitary action that regressively return sole responsibility for addressing MPV against women to the female victim/survivor and the need to deconstruct them. And second, as concentrated attention to strategies for altering the landscape of our collective imagination and changing social practices including: (1) identifying and advocating for alternative narratives that acknowledge the multiple dimensions of abuse; (2) underscoring the complex intersection of MPV against women with categories such as race, ethnicity, and economic status; and (3) suggesting possibilities for shared, collective empowerment through community engagement and communal action. To these ends, in the first part of this chapter I provide an overview of the contexts, assumptions, stereotypes, and genre patterns of mainstream representations of abuse over the last several decades. I subsequently examine the 2019 independent Canadian film The Body

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Remembers When the World Broke Open (Tailfeathers & Hepburn, 2019) as a salient, productive example of recent alternative narratives that center marginalized women, re-vision the vigilance of the victim/survivor, and point to new perspectives and pathways that help to move us incrementally closer to the systemic transformation that is critical to ending MPV against women.

Deconstructing Media Portrayals of Male Partner Violence Against Women Three related contexts contribute to shaping the cruel optimism generated in and through representations of abuse: what I term intimate partner violence “post-awareness,” postfeminism, and particular genre conventions of mainstream film and television representations (Shoos, 2017). I will elaborate each of these as critical sites for feminist vigilance as alertness and attention to deconstructing sociocultural configurations contributing to the persistence of MPV against women and its dominant popular narratives. I define post-awareness as our conviction that, as individuals and as a society, we have progressed beyond our past ignorance and denial, are now fully cognizant of intimate partner violence as a ubiquitous problem, and have made enormous strides in our efforts to help victims and stop perpetrators (Shoos, 2017). As I will discuss, post-awareness poses a critical danger and must be taken as a focus of feminist vigilance. Our conviction stands in stark contrast to recent statistics about abuse: in 2014, one in four women in the U.S. was the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014), and, although homicides of married women have declined, there is evidence that those of women in dating relationships with men have increased (Brody, 2011), with intimate partner violence most common for women between the ages of 18 and 29. (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 2014.)1 In 2015, over half of female homicides in the U.S. were due to intimate partner violence, with non-Hispanic Black and American Indian/Alaska Native women representing the highest rates of homicides (Petrosky et al., 2017). Notably, 43.5 million or more than one-third of women in the U.S. have been subject to “psychological aggression,” including insults and humiliation, separation from their own money, isolation from family and friends, tracking of activities and whereabouts, and threats of physical harm (Smith et al., 2018). Disturbingly, in April 2018,

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the Trump administration revised the official Department of Justice definition of intimate partner violence, previously broadened by the Obama administration to encompass controlling behaviors including psychological, emotional, and economic abuse, henceforth  limiting it to felony or misdemeanor crimes (Nanasi, 2019). These statistics and the policies, laws, and mindsets that fuel them demand vigilance in order to track and publicize them. This vigilance provides the grounding for a collective commitment to promote a deeper understanding of the range of behaviors associated with MPV against women, to confront our own unconscious bias about victim/survivors as well as abusers, and to challenge the ideological and sociocultural frameworks that continue to make abuse possible. Post-awareness is a key site for feminist vigilance because it is a component of what researcher Evan Stark (2007) refers to as the “stalling” in the mid-1990s of the “domestic violence revolution” (p. 6). This stalling followed several decades of victim/survivor advocacy that led to the development of improved services and resources for abused women and their children, legal sanctions against abusers, and challenges to conceptions of abuse as a private, “domestic” matter. Stark argues that this stalling is partly attributable to the lack of a functional definition of abuse. Abuse is often limited to physical violence, thereby preventing us from acknowledging psychological and emotional abuse, not only much more prevalent than physical abuse but often remaining after battering ends (Jacobson & Gottman, 1998). In order to address these abusive behaviors that even abused women themselves sometimes discount, Stark adopts the term “coercive control” to define what he conceives of as a liberty crime: Coercive control entails a malevolent course of conduct that subordinates women to an alien will by violating their physical integrity (domestic violence), denying them respect and autonomy (intimidation), depriving them of social connectedness (isolation), and appropriating or denying them access to the resources required for personhood and citizenship (control). (2007, p. 15)

Stark further notes that, “the domestic violence revolution appears to have had little effect on coercive control, the most widespread and devastating strategy that men use to dominate women in personal life” (2007, p. 8). Notably, coercive control was introduced into the dominant genre of MPV against women in popular culture by the 1944 Gothic romance Gaslight (Cukor, 1944), the first Hollywood film to openly portray

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intimate partner violence and the source of the term “gaslighting.” Gaslight remains one of the only popular movies to focus exclusively on psychological abuse. Even contemporary films that do acknowledge this form of MPV against women such as What’s Love Got to Do with It, Dolores Claiborne, and Enough nonetheless feature a frequently eroticized scene (Kozol, 1995) in which the woman is physically assaulted. Such omissions and under-representation require feminist vigilance in order to acknowledge coercive control and broaden conceptions of intimate partner violence. A danger that must occupy feminist vigilance focused on post-­awareness is the complicity of this dominant stance in the general failure to consider how social factors such as race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, religion, and motherhood impact MPV against women. And here, it must be noted that even vigilant advocates for victim/survivors can be taken to task for this failure. In her influential theorization of intersectionality, feminist legal scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) observes that the characterization by well-meaning anti-abuse campaigns of intimate partner violence as a social problem that cuts across racial and socio-economic boundaries has impaired our ability to understand and address how these reciprocal factors shape multiple dimensions of abuse, including the abuser’s strategies as well as repercussions for victim/survivors. Crenshaw’s work demonstrates the way in which assisting abused women requires vigilance in order to identify and assess the particularities of intersecting sociocultural locations and oppressions. This is a vigilance sensitive to the complexities involved, alert to the limitations of even those critical representations that seem to help us “see” MPV against women more directly. Yet the focus of the majority of popular films and television narratives about abuse on White, middle- or upper-middle-class women, while they may resist racial and class stereotypes of victim/survivors, denies the different consequences and resources for abused women who are also subject to discrimination by law enforcement, legal systems, and even shelter homes (Crenshaw, 1991). We must remain vigilant to what is omitted and denied as much as what is explicitly included and how such representations reinforce the dominant narrative of MPV against women. The need for feminist vigilance regarding post-awareness even in films that seem to “get it right” is demonstrated in the case of the 1993 Tina Turner performance musical biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It. This film is still one of the only Hollywood films featuring major stars that focuses on an abused woman of color. While the film indirectly alludes at

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certain moments to the ways in which ambivalences about race and class inform discourses of abuse, it does not explicitly confront these issues; in addition, the performance scenes and moments of abuse, including a brutal rape scene, objectify the Black female body and tacitly reinforce the stereotypical association between Black men and violence (Enck-Wanzer, 2009; Shoos, 2017). The film, although powerful in its depiction of Tina Turner’s strength and resilience, is also emblematic of the way in which post-awareness obscures the need for vigilant interrogation of narratives of abuse in terms of the absence, stereotyping, or simplification of intersectional issues. Another site for critical feminist vigilance is postfeminism, a point made by Sotirin (“Introduction,” this volume) yet with particular significance when considering popular media representations of MPV against women. Closely allied with post-awareness, postfeminism is described by feminist media theorists such as Angela McRobbie (2007) and Rosalind Gill (2016) as a characteristic of contemporary media texts in which feminism is taken into account yet portrayed as either failed or, because of its successes, no longer necessary, thus in either case as “past.” McRobbie and Gill similarly note how feminist and postfeminist discourses co-exist and are entangled in media texts. A key  focus of feminist vigilance regarding postfeminist portrayals of MPV against women is how resources for abused women are depicted. In recent film and television narratives, available family, civil, and institutional resources are dismissed as completely ineffective, thereby justifying the narrative’s re-delegation of responsibility for her safety back to the abused woman herself. Many of these films invoke a frame of extreme, unrealistic victim empowerment (Berns, 2004), calling on the heroine to throw off her “victim” mentality and confront her abuser. Writing about this media frame, Nancy Berns (2004) observes, Experts encourage women who are abused, telling them that the answers to their problems lie within them. They use slogans like “take control of your life,” “refuse to be a victim,” and “you have the power to end abuse.” This frame is sympathetic and wants to empower the victim. However, the victim continues to be held responsible for solving the problem. The audience can be expected to come away concerned about the problem of domestic violence but hopeful that victims will be able to change their own situations. (p. 13)

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The need for feminist vigilance to such an appeal to individual responsibility is epitomized by the 2002 action film Enough. In the film, Slim (Jennifer Lopez) runs away from her abusive husband with their daughter after she learns that her husband’s abuse will not necessarily prevent him from getting custody. While the narrative does acknowledge the challenges of abused mothers who try to protect themselves and their children, it also exploits this scenario and others, such as Slim’s fear that she will damage her daughter by taking her to a shelter, as a convenient narrative conceit that isolates the woman and paves the way for an inevitable confrontation. Later in the film, after many months of running and changing her identity, Slim learns that her husband may use the custody hearing as an opportunity to kill her or have her killed. Believing that a confrontation with her husband is her only option, Slim literally transforms herself into an action heroine and inadvertently kills her husband in self-defense. Enough thus carefully retreats from the implication that the heroine herself seeks violent revenge. However, such a storyline invites feminist vigilance alert to the postfeminist appeal of an autonomous, self-empowered woman and attentive to the need for more robust resources beyond martial arts training and murder for abused women. While presented as supportive and inspiring, the notion of victim empowerment in narratives about abuse is potentially treacherous for actual abused women who, when they fight back or try to leave, are frequently subject to “separation assault” (Mahoney, 1991), the most frequent form of intimate partner violence. This notion further discounts the agency of abused women themselves and the ways in which, while appearing to acquiesce to the abuser, they are active on their own behalf, creatively preventing, circumventing, resisting, and countering the violence, behavior that is little documented or reported. The idea of abuse as a personal matter best addressed through independent action also resonates with postfeminism’s emphasis on individualism and this poses another site for feminist vigilance. Gill (2016) remarks of postfeminist media texts, “In these iterations of popular feminism, the solution to injustice is to work on the self rather than to work with others for social and political transformation” (p. 617). In making women solely responsible for recognizing, avoiding, and escaping from abusive men and safeguarding their children, the majority of domestic violence films ignore structural factors of oppression and reinstate the victim-blaming they purportedly reject (Nettleton, 2011). They thus relieve the larger society of responsibility while simultaneously placing at increased risk women who

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are further marginalized because of race, ethnicity, class, immigrant status, or other social factors. Feminist vigilance must encompass not only the appeal and limitations of popular narratives but the way that our responses to such narratives are shaped by genre expectations that literally lead us to accept faulty premises and postfeminist representations. Familiar genres such as the Gothic romance, the thriller, the biopic, the action film, and the television dramatic series have played an important role in bringing the uncomfortable subject of intimate partner violence to large audiences. An understanding of genre elements lends feminist vigilance a critical edge in debunking the appeal of such narratives. As the previous discussion of postfeminist media suggests, particular elements of genre such as narrative structure, mise-en-­ scène, and character shape our perspectives on MPV against women in conflicting ways (Shoos, 2017). The thriller as well as the Gothic romance privileges the point of view of the abused woman in order to immerse the viewer in her experience of terror in the supposed safety of her own home. The contemporary Gothic romance Sleeping with the Enemy (Ruben, 1991) demonstrates what a vigilant feminist critique might expose in a popular film that takes the woman’s perspective. Sleeping dramatically shows the way in which the abused heroine is subject to the abuser’s microregulation of everything from what she wears to the meticulous placement of the hand towels on the bathroom rack. Such scenes are nonetheless double-edged and it is the way such a twist reproduces a decidedly disempowering representation of women that feminist vigilance must remain attentive to: while demonstrating the range of the abuser’s coercive control, films like Sleeping also risk projecting this disempowerment onto the figure of the abused woman herself, who may be perceived as weak or pitiable despite the fact that, as Stark (2007) notes, what may seem to be acquiescence is in reality an acute ability to assess risk. The stakes for a vigilant feminist critique of genre conventions are significant. These genres privilege patterns of story development that conform to Hollywood’s penchant for “standard melodramatic crises” (Berlant, 2011, p. 5), inevitably culminating in resolutions of confrontation and individual triumph. Indeed, Berlant argues that conventional genres “potentially foreclose the possibility of the event taking shape otherwise” (6). The 2018 revenge thriller A Vigilante (Daggar-­ Nickson, 2018a) is a recent case in point. In the film victim/survivor Sadie (Olivia Wilde), devastated by her survivalist husband’s abuse and, as we later learn, his spiteful murder of their son, makes it her mission to

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anonymously help other abused women after a member of her support group tells her, “Every graveyard is full of people who didn’t make it. And you sit here alive and wasting. You have to fight back, even if it kills you.” Leaving the shelter counselor her phone number and a code phrase along with a note that says, “Let me fight, so they don’t have to,” Sadie goes underground, trains in self-defense techniques, and learns how to disguise herself. She begins to avenge abused women, forcing their abusers to sign over shared assets and leave. Although she vows not to kill anyone, the exception is, predictably, her own husband. There is much in this film that commends it as an invitation to vigilance over the experiences and impact of MPV against women. Critics have called A Vigilante “a cathartic fantasy,” commending its portrayal of a “societally tamped-down rage over mistreatment and abuse finally welling up and exploding in the faces of men who lord their superior physical strength and patriarchal authority over women and children” (Seitz, 2019, para. 2). Director Sarah Daggar-Nickson speaks openly about what she sees as the appeal of the thriller/revenge genre for this subject matter: One of the reasons I love genre films is because they can be inspired by issues that are difficult to face in real life. And for A Vigilante I was really awe-inspired by the strength of domestic abuse survivors. And really with Olivia’s character wanted to pay tribute to that with a genuine bad-ass hero. And put her in a revenge tale where these extreme stakes—emotionally, physically, financially—are real for so many people. (Daggar-Nickson, Catharsis, 2018b)

What is significant and perhaps not immediately evident from these comments is Daggar-Nickson’s efforts to bring the experiences of actual abused women into the narrative of A Vigilante. In the film’s “making-of” short feature, Catharsis: Creating ‘A Vigilante’ (Daggar-Nickson, 2018b), Daggar-Nickson reveals how she, Wilde, and other members of the cast and production team met and consulted with long-term survivors of MPV against women. With their counselor, also a survivor, on the set to assure a safe and respectful environment, director and cast worked with the women to incorporate aspects of their stories into the film. A flashback scene of a counseling session for a group of survivors features several of these women, including several women of color (the only such scene depicted in the abuse narratives discussed here). In the scene, an abused Black mother talks emotionally about her “leaving moment,” precipitated

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by her discovery of her husband’s physical abuse of their children, including their baby. The scene ends with Sadie’s own revelation of her son’s death at the hands of her enraged husband during her attempt to escape with the boy. Significantly, it is this scene rather than the depiction of physical abuse against the woman or the death of the abuser that is the dramatic center of A Vigilante, a focus that deserves continued vigilance if such perspectives are to become part of—and perhaps even the core of— the accepted popular narratives about MPV against women. In its inclusion of the voices of diverse abused women and its non-­ dismissive recognition of resources for victim/survivors—notably, Sadie tells each of the women she helps that they should stay with or find a support group—A Vigilante does, unexpectedly, expand certain of the reified boundaries of popular media narratives of MPV against women. Yet there is need for feminist vigilance here. What still tethers this film to the historically masculinist figure and genre of the vigilante are the largely vengeful motives of the survivor/victim, the violent and solitary means of her empowerment, her immunity from the law (the police find the husband’s body but no evidence), and the absence of any sense of movement toward institutional or systemic change. Her vigilante mission, although driven by a sense of shared rather than simply personal injustice, puts the heroine solidly in the category of the flawed, “morally questionable” loner (Catharsis). Wilde herself observes that there is “something unhinged” about Sadie, adding that, “while it may be justified because of what she’s been through, she’s still someone who is able to kill someone with their bare hands; she’s someone who takes pleasure in seeing someone suffer because they deserve it” (Catharsis). Indeed, the precautions taken in Enough to distance the heroine from connotations of violence are all but abandoned in this film. This and Sadie’s obsessive hunt for her husband, while it may be viewed as proactive self-defense against a man who has already killed, perpetuate the ready stereotype of moral ambiguity and violent anger that haunts abused women, who, despite not bearing any responsibility for abuse, may nonetheless still be suspected of provoking and reciprocating it rather than simply attempting to make it stop (Jones, 1994). Daggar-Nickson’s commitment to bringing the voices of abused women into A Vigilante is sincere and laudable. Yet just as we must be vigilant about continuing to bring the topic of MPV against women to big and little screens, we must be similarly vigilant in interrogating the ambiguous and contradictory messages of these films and the cruel optimism

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they generate through entertaining yet regressive and potentially damaging narratives.

Reimagining Narratives of Male Partner Violence Against Women Berlant (2011) argues for the contemporary waning of conventional genres as an important factor in feminist efforts to disturb cruel optimism. In particular, Berlant notes that this waning “frames different kinds of potential openings within and beyond the impasse of adjustment that constant crisis creates” (2011, p. 7). The narrative modes and techniques of certain recent media texts about abuse facilitate such a reframing. Documentaries such as Every F-ing Day of My Life (Davis, 2007) and docudramas such as Silent Voices (Gorna, 2005) as well as crowd-sourced online sites such as Project Unbreakable (Brown, 2011) and the hashtag #WhyIStayed#WhyILeft are examples of new media forms that privilege women’s voices and provide insight into the contradictions and complexity of abuse and the daily rather than exceptional struggles against it. In this section, I expand on feminist vigilance as a proactive force in attending to opportunities for altering or transforming genre conventions regarding MPV against women and provide an extended example of how vigilance to such opportunities is generative of an alternative narrative with potential to intervene in dominant storylines and social practices. As the example of Daggar-Nickson above demonstrates, one such opportunity that some independent fiction filmmakers have vigilantly pursued is to ground cinematic narratives of abuse in the experiences of the people most directly involved in and affected by it. French director Xavier Legrand prepared to write and film Custody (Jusqu’à la garde) the 2018 feature sequel to his 2013 Academy Award-nominated short about abuse, Just Before Losing Everything (Avant que de tout perdre), by reading the testimonies of victim/survivors as well as psychological and sociological studies, meeting abused women and attending groups for abusers; He also followed  a psychologist with a specialty in intimate partner violence, attended court hearings, and interviewed police as well as spending several nights at an emergency dispatch center (Laffly, 2018). Both of Legrand’s films about abuse have been praised for their documentary-like authenticity, in which the escalation of tensions in MPV against women is not in the service of thrilling entertainment but as insight into experiences of an

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abused woman who does leave but must still contend with her husband’s violence against her and her children. I contend that the discursive openings created by the hybrid genres and alternative cinematic techniques of independent fiction films are particularly significant for feminist vigilance. One such film is the 2019 Canadian feature The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, distributed in the U.S. by Ava Duvernay’s production company Array. The film itself is remarkable for several reasons. Shot on 16mm film, directors Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn use sparse but pointed dialogue and tight framing in what appears as one long, real-time handheld camera take in an effort to re-view and re-frame MPV against women. The result is a film about race, class, women’s bodies, and motherhood that centers the overlapping yet diverse experiences of Indigenous women in Canada, who are more than twice as likely as non-Indigenous  women to experience intimate partner violence (Robertson, 2010). In this final section of the chapter, I discuss this film as a particularly compelling, complex, and affecting example of the possibilities of current and future media representations of intimate partner violence and a salient model of proactive feminist vigilance over representations of abuse in popular culture. Accordingly, I will begin by describing in some detail two parallel yet divergent opening scenes because of the way they condense and forecast the narrative conflicts, themes, and dilemmas that the film attends to so vigilantly. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open begins on a bus in Vancouver where the two main characters—Rosie (Violet Nelson), a stocky, pregnant 19-year-old woman wearing an oversized sweatshirt, and Áila (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), a thin, light-skinned woman in a simple but stylish coat—momentarily and unwittingly cross paths. Although, as we later learn, both women are Indigenous  (Rosie is Kwakwaka’wakw and Áila is Blackfoot and Sami), in the film their experiential and class differences are as significant as their shared position as Indigenous women. When the bus stops, the camera closely follows Rosie as she walks slowly through the courtyard of an apartment complex, makes her way down a noisy hall, and opens an apartment door. As she does, we get a brief glimpse into a bedroom where Rosie’s boyfriend, his back to the camera, yells at someone on the phone. Rosie puts down her backpack, takes off her shoes, and sits down on the living room couch across from an older Native woman who politely asks her to get her a Coke. We watch for several minutes as Rosie exchanges a few words with the woman, whom we presume is her boyfriend’s mother and who asks Rosie, “Did you get his

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cigarettes?” As they sit in silence except for the background noise of the TV, angry thudding and growling sounds come from the bedroom, erupting into the roar, “ROSIE!” The camera cuts rapidly to a shot of Áila as she enters a building where she is escorted by a nurse to a medical exam room, removes her jeans and underpants, and puts on a paper gown. A male doctor, whose face we see just long enough to register that he is middle-aged and White, enters with the nurse. We learn through the doctor’s list of intrusive yet expected questions, delivered offscreen, that Áila’s pregnancy test was negative, that this is her first IUD, that she has had an abortion, has only one sexual partner, has been tested for STIs, takes anti-anxiety medications, and is 31, prompting the doctor to comment that if she wants children she should “think about it now.” During the procedure, the camera continues to hold a medium shot of Áila who, after the doctor tells her that she will “feel a pinch,” bites her lip, clenches her jaw, and inhales sharply. As she exits the clinic and rounds a corner, Áila again crosses paths with Rosie, who, her clothes soaked and her face bruised, stands barefoot and immobile in the rain as her boyfriend, filmed in an extreme long shot that makes his face indistinct, gestures and yells obscenities at her from across the intersection. When Áila  asks Rosie if she should call the police, Rosie replies no, saying several times, “I just ran.” Áila tells Rosie that she lives nearby and asks if she wants to come to her apartment. Rosie agrees and Áila pulls her down the street as the boyfriend, offscreen, yells, “You’re a fuckin’ dead girl!” As these opening scenes implicate, the film is on one level a reflection on gendered and raced embodiment, its co-constitution with class, and its vigilant surveillance by White supremacist imperialist patriarchy (hooks, 2000). The unusual title, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, is an excerpt from an essay by Driftpile Cree Nation poet Billy-Ray Belcourt (2017). As Belcourt notes in his essay, “To be Indigenous is also to be hurt on the way out, if the ‘way out’ is crowded by the past’s razor sharp edges…. we are not done mourning the ‘world-shattering’ magnitude of settler invasion and its attendant crime scenes of all sorts” (para. 1). Indeed, these opening scenes are stark evocations of the ways in which Indigenous women’s bodies are controlled, disciplined, and violated in socially sanctioned ways according to their perceived racial and class identities. Although Áila’s visit to the clinic for the IUD is an example of class privilege in the form of reproductive “choice,” the close, sometimes claustrophobic camera distance and the impersonally-friendly-yet-authoritarian tone of the doctor’s questions remind us of the extent to which this “right

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to choose” is meted out and regulated by traditionally White patriarchal institutions, including, for example, in the case of the ongoing practice of forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada (International Justice Research Center, n.d.). My point here is that the need for vigilance is not mitigated by what seem to be privileges; we must maintain continued, persistent, and responsive vigilance over the permutations of patriarchal control and male violations of female bodies. Perhaps more clearly a focus for feminist vigilance is the nuanced portrayal of Rosie as an abused working-class Native woman, especially in the context of the decades-long epidemic in Canada of the rape, murder, and disappearance of Indigenous women (Walker, 2016). Rosie defies received ideas about abused women and turns stereotypes of race and class on their head on several levels. Quiet and reticent in the film’s initial scenes, when Áila asks Rosie for the third time whether she should call the police, Rosie finally snaps, “Are you fuckin’ deaf?” After Áila tells her that both she and her boyfriend are Native, Rosie quips “Everyone’s Native these days, eh?” Áila’s unconscious preconceptions about Rosie are reflected in her question about whether she grew up on the “rez” (she didn’t) and her assumption, after secretly following Rosie when she goes to meet a “co-­ worker,” that she is taking drugs (she isn’t, although she does sell the bottle that we see her take from Áila’s medicine cabinet). What comes out in the brief, awkward exchanges that interrupt the silence between the two women as they sit drinking tea while Áila gently tries to persuade Rosie to let her look for a safe place to stay are the differences not only in their situations but in their attitudes. While Rosie is happy about the upcoming birth of her son and confident about her ability to take care of him, Áila, although visibly saddened after the IUD procedure, is wary yet almost envious of her boyfriend’s desire for children, noting, “It’s a lot, eh, being a mum?” After multiple unsuccessful calls, Áila finds a safe house that has a space and carefully but insistently prods Rosie to go with her to check it out. Skeptical of her claim that she is not trying to tell her what to do but softened by her concern, Rosie gets into a cab with Áila. En route to the safe house, Rosie mischievously flips the script of their relationship, telling the White cab driver that Áila is her alcoholic sister who has finally agreed to go to rehab, adding “You know, I’m really proud of you, Sis … getting your life together after all those big mistakes.” When the cab driver remarks that they don’t look much like sisters, Rosie weaves a story about the “love at first sight” romance between their White father, whom Áila “takes after,” and their “straight up” Native mother. Áila smiles and

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plays along, but after Rosie makes a stop to sell the drugs, Áila confronts her, warning her about their effects on the baby. Rosie, angered, snaps, “You think you’re better than me? You’re not fuckin’ better than me. I can take care of myself and I can take care of my kid.” When Áila protests that she didn’t say she was better, Rosie replies, “You didn’t have to,” calling Áila a “dumb White bitch.” Just as these scenes lay bare the varied, complicated intersections of race, class, and gender, the subsequent extended scene in the safe house exposes the realities, contradictions, and dilemmas of Rosie’s experience of abuse as well as her intelligence and agency as an abused pregnant woman. Rosie’s quiet, matter-of-fact narration of the specifics of the abuse in response to the patient questions of the two counselors, Cat (Charlie Hannah) and Sophie (Barbara Eve Harris), reveals the range of her boyfriend’s coercive control, from calling her fat to driving his knuckles into her scalp when she tries to brush or braid her hair (so that she wouldn’t be attractive to other men who might want to “fuck” her), to choking her and kicking her in the belly. Yet Rosie also relates the way this abuse alternates with loving behavior such as giving her gifts and taking her to the movies, saying, “He can be good too.” When Rosie once again says no to calling the police and Áila  questions whether that wouldn’t be better, since then they’d arrest him and she’d be safe, Rosie explains that the boyfriend has already had to post bail, making it clear that, while she wants the abuse to stop, she doesn’t want him to go to jail. She continues by expressing her dislike for cops, “because of the way they look at you…. Like they’re tired of looking at you. Like you’re wasting their time,” her comment functioning as acute commentary on the failure of law enforcement to take intimate partner violence seriously, particularly in the case of women of color, who are further victimized by the assumed endemic violence of relationships. Rosie expresses her own desire to escape judgments based on race and class-based stereotypes when she states that she doesn’t want to go back to Port Hardy to live with her grandparents, where she would be “one of those girls … with a baby.” Perhaps the most important contribution of this scene is the depiction of Rosie’s resistance to and self-protection against her boyfriend’s abuse. Telling Áila and the counselors that her boyfriend had kicked her because he thought she had thrown away his toothbrush, Rosie, smiling slightly, clarifies that she had actually thrown it in the toilet after he had called her fat. Noting that the apartment belongs to the boyfriend’s mother, who “stays in the living room,” and who Rosie speculates is afraid of her son, Rosie states that she doesn’t mind living there because she can pretend to

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fall asleep while watching television with her. When asked whether she is afraid her boyfriend might harm the baby, Rosie recounts how, after his assault, she lay still with her eyes closed, “like he was a bear,” adding, “I’m not stupid. I’m gonna protect him. No one’s taking my baby.” While Rosie appears to warm to the idea of staying at the safe house after she talks to Cat and Sophie, who tell her that she is the one calling the shots, and sees the room that would be hers alone, she quickly refuses Áila’s offer to return with her to the boyfriend’s apartment to pick up her things, stating flatly, “he wouldn’t like that.” Rosie’s comments here and throughout the film highlight her vulnerability but also her careful balancing of the risks of staying with the risks of leaving, confirming Stark’s observation that, “Agency and victimization live one within the other in abuse and the presence of one is evoked by the other” (2007, p. 216). In the last few minutes of this quietly suspenseful scene we watch as Rosie excuses herself and retreats to the bathroom, where she softly croons a song we heard her humming earlier in the film, Cree musician Fawn Wood’s lullaby, “Momma’s Little Guy.” When she emerges she at first replies “maybe” to Cat’s offer to make up the bed, but then unexpectedly declines, saying, “I think I might have exaggerated.” Despite Sophie’s reassurance that it doesn’t matter and that perhaps, with the baby coming, she should take a break, Rosie slowly but resolutely backs away from the idea of staying at the safe house, saying, “I didn’t ask to come,” then, “He’s not usually like that” and, finally, “I just wanna go home.” As Rosie walks out with Sophie, Cat tells Áila that what has happened is normal, and that it typically takes six to seven times before a woman feels she is ready to leave. At the end of the long cab ride to her apartment, Rosie responds to Áila’s parting remark, “I’ll see you soon,” with a smile and another tentatively voiced “Maybe.” In its final moments, then, the film highlights the fact that leaving an abuser is, rather than a moment, a risky, often dangerous, and difficult process. One review of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open refers to it as a “thriller” (Debruge, 2019, para. 1). Yet if the film captures and holds our attention it is by different means, to very different ends, and with radically different effects than the prototypical genres and narratives of abuse that have long been lucrative box office formulas. How does this constitute feminist vigilance? I find several critical strategies in the way that Tailfeathers and Hepburn’s film stays alert to opportunities for upending stereotypic assumptions but also pursues with critical focus depictions that keep larger contextual histories and conditions in the frame. In its slow, contemplative tracing of intimate space and time shared between two

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Indigenous women, one that nonetheless does not erase their very real differences, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open draws out the complexities of Indigenous women’s lives. Most crucially, the film is vigilant in its foregrounding of the intersecting oppressions of marginalized victim/survivors of MPV against women who have remained all-but absent from popular media representations of abuse. Through its portrayal of the intelligent agency and resilience of the victim/survivor and its subtle but insistent movement from individual women to a small collective that respects and supports the abused woman’s autonomy, the film offers an alternative notion of victim empowerment potentially sustained by networks and communities. In these ways The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open counters the cruel optimism of mainstream representations of MPV against women. What the film constructs instead is an opening to the possibility of a vigilant, contingent coming together around the issue of MPV against women, redefined from a private matter to a public one. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open thus enacts a hopeful feminist vigilance and points the way toward possibilities for collective feminist agency and social transformation to end male partner violence against women.

Note 1. Global statistics are even more disturbing: The 2018 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime indicates that more than 50,000 (58 percent) of the approximately 87,000 homicides of women and girls worldwide in 2017 were caused by intimate partners or family members. The report also states that the likelihood of women being killed by relatives or intimate partners has increased by more than 10 percent since 2012, with women in the Americas and Africa most at risk.

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Sokoloff, N., & Dupont, I. (2005). Domestic violence at the intersections of race, class, and gender: Challenges to understanding violence against marginalized women in diverse communities. Violence Against Women, 11(38), 38–64. Sotirin, P. (2020). Introduction to feminist vigilance. In P. Sotirin, V. L. Bergvall, & D. L. Shoos (Eds.), Feminist Vigilance (pp. 1–19). Palgrave Macmillan. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press. Tailfeathers, E.-M. & Hepburn, K. (Directors). (2019). The body remembers when the world broke open [Video file]. Retrieved from http://netflix.com/. Experimental Forest Films & Violator Films. Taub, A. (2020, April 7) A new COVID-19 crisis: Domestic abuse rises worldwide. Chicago Tribune.  https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/sns-­ nyt-­coronavirus-domestic-abuse-rises-worldwide-20200407-­6kd46ga4hrfizox mhz4dmiigja-­story.html United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2018). Global Study on Homicide. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2018/November/home-­ the-­m ost-dangerous-place-for-women-with-majority-of-female-homicidevictims-­worldwide-killed-by-partners-or-family--unodc-study-says.html Walker, C. (2016, April 10). Missing, murdered aboriginal women crisis demands a look at root causes. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/ missing-murdered-aboriginal-women-crisis-demands-a-look-at-rootcauses-­1.3027023

CHAPTER 7

Black Women, Black Panther, and Black Feminist Anticipatory Vigilance Siobhan E. Smith-Jones

The first time I saw Black Panther (Coogler, 2018), I was in Louisville, Kentucky, through an event hosted by Kingdom Fellowship’s Life Development Corporation. The “Marvel’s Black Panther Pre-Release for Economic Empowerment” event featured African music and art as well as delicious food and drink. Of course, my people came out in full force, dressed in traditional African garb complete with elegant head-wraps and shawls in extravagant prints and amazing colors, as well as fandom-inspired T-shirts emblazoned with any combination of superheroes, coupled with black leather, silver, gold, and denim. There was no lack of gorgeous ‘locs, ‘fros, low naturals, relaxers, and fantastic weaves. There was even a red carpet and a photographer to memorialize all of the fabulousness. The vibe was one of excitement, and as I sat in the back row of the theater with my girlfriend and her sorors, we were ready to be transported to the world of Wakanda. Once the lights went down, the audience sat in mostly quiet reverence for the film, though we laughed openly when Shuri, M’Baku,

S. E. Smith-Jones (*) University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_7

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and Killmonger stole scenes. When the film ended (as Marvel fans, we knew to stay for the WHOLE movie, including the credits), our commentary ranged from just how good the movie’s narrative was, how incredibly aesthetically pleasing the entire cast was, to how encouraged we felt. There was also the anticipation of seeing the Black Panther again when Chadwick Boseman would reprise his role in Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018). As one of my girl’s sorors, Shae, exclaimed, “I just can’t wait to see it! It was all so good … I feel so good.” From this unique experience, I began pondering just what was happening to us through this mediated phenomenon as Black people and Black women. Though I didn’t have a name for it yet, the film provoked a phenomenon which was stirring many of these audience members, including the interviewees in the study I discuss here. I have come to describe this phenomenon as Black feminist anticipatory vigilance (BFAV). As Sotirin writes in the introduction to this book, feminist vigilance is not about vulnerability and defensiveness but about mutual empowerment and hope (Sotirin, “Introduction,” this volume). This conception informs BFAV. I define Black feminist anticipatory vigilance as the attention/awareness that we, as African American women, pay to future popular culture media representations of us. It is optimistic and hopes for positive and empowering future media texts; it is realistic considering the likelihood of disempowering media texts that chip away at Black Pride. It uses a Black Female Gaze (Roach & Felix, 1989) to anticipate, “to look forward to” future texts that include new and needed representations of Black people. The historical representations of Black women have a checkered past, to say the least. The majority of them are negatively stereotypical (e.g., The Mammy, The Tragic Mulatto) while others are more positive scripts (e.g., The Black Lady, The Strong Black Woman), depending on one’s opinion. Our media have continued to reproduce the images through all of their forms. Black women are very aware of how others see us (e.g., Harris-Perry’s (2011) “Crooked Room” metaphor1) but of interest is also how we, as Black women, see ourselves. Scholars such as bell hooks, Karla Scott, and Jacqueline Bobo have interrogated these understandings, so it is understood that the term The Gaze implies a White male’s gaze. However, Roach and Felix (1989) explain: “We are black and we are women; we have our own reality, our own history, our own gaze—one which sees the world rather different from ‘anyone else.’ As black women we need to assert this difference, whilst keeping one eye on our collective strength!” (p. 142).

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Roach and Felix state that there is indeed a Black Female Gaze, a different way of looking. hooks (2009) also explains the need for and reliance on this gaze: Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that “looks” to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. (p. 255)

Black audiences regularly develop critical responses to mainstream movies and other cultural products, including documenting, cultivating critical awareness, critical interrogation, and naming. However, Black Panther and Infinity War have encouraged these audiences to anticipate, “to look forward to” these particular texts, with their promise of “what we’ve been waiting for” (DeLuca, 2018, p. 10). In addition, like other branches of Black feminist thought, understanding is not just within the individual, but developed through engagement and interaction with the group as a whole. For instance, I saw Black Panther three different times in the theater; our sensemaking did not just occur with each other while watching the film, but afterward, with others who had also seen it in other places and spaces, with other audience members. I posit that Black feminist anticipatory vigilance takes place as African American women understand media texts as members of an interpretive community. Like the “interpretive community” of Black women in Bobo’s study (1995, p. 22), the Black women that participated in this research project “are not professional media analysts but are members of an audience who have been brought together to talk about their relationship to specific cultural texts (p.  22),” with particular focus on Marvel’s Black Panther; my study taps the collective, vigilant strength of this unique interpretive community of Black women moviegoers. Currently, the media are providing Black viewers with more chances to see previously neglected images of themselves, with superhero media such as those mentioned above as well as Black Lightning (Akil, 2018) and Luke Cage (Coker, 2016–2018). Beyond that genre, Black people are able to see themselves in movies such as Girl’s Trip (Lee, 2017) and TV shows

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including Insecure (Rae & Wilmore, 2016–), Black-ish (Barris, 2014–), and Atlanta (Glover, 2016–). How we, as Black people, as members of a Black audience, respond to these images, deserves scholarly attention. Further, hooks (2009) argues the importance of studies that explore the lived experiences of Black women viewers in particular: “Black women have written little about black female spectatorship, about our moviegoing practices. A growing body of film theory and criticism by black women has only begun to emerge” (p.  257). Therefore, this study aims to give us more understanding of this particular audience and their ways of seeing. Specifically, this study seeks to uncover the criteria for future representations of Black people and in particular, Black women, that Black women viewers articulate from their engagement with Black Panther. This study allows me to explore how these criteria emerge from their discussion of the film. In addition to the aforementioned goal, it also contributes to the ways feminist vigilance reframes past conceptualizations of vigilance. Like feminist vigilance, anticipatory vigilance is proactive, rather than reactive. It is hopeful rather than suspicious, excited to the point of ecstasy rather than worried to the point of anxiety. In addition, as with other Black feminist perspectives, it is critical and aware of preceding media images. In this study, Black feminist anticipatory vigilance emerges as a set of criteria for assessing future representations based on attention to and awareness of negative and positive images in Black Panther.

Method Overview In order to explore the criteria for future representations that emerged from African American women’s perceptions of Black Panther, I employed an interpretative research methodology, utilizing interviews and in one case, a shared interview of two participants. I viewed each interview as a text. This hermeneutical approach allowed for interpretation and reinterpretation of the emergent meanings in the text (Kvale, 1996). Each interview allowed the participant to share her experience with Black Panther (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). I also ensured my participants’ confidentiality2 (Kvale, 1996).

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Research Design I conducted interviews, and in one case a shared interview, over the phone with African American women who lived in the American South (i.e., Arkansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana) and had seen Black Panther. In the case of the shared interview, the two participants were on a three-way call with me. Every focus group or interview was audio-recorded. I also took notes during the interviews. This procedure allowed for transcription, analysis, and interpretation of the data (Keyton, 2006). Transcription resulted in approximately 57 single-spaced pages of data. Participants The research sample included African American women who had recently viewed Black Panther in a commercial theater. All of the women went voluntarily to showings of their choice prior to my contact with them about this project (in other words, they went with friends and family because they wanted to see this movie). Two participated together in a shared interview, and eight women participated in individual phone interviews for a total of N = 10 participants. At the time of the study, participants ranged in age from 36 to 75 years with a mean of 48.1 years. Two of the women had completed college, four had completed advanced degrees, and two had completed trade school. In terms of socio-economic class, incomes ranged from less than $10,000 a year to more than $150,000 a year. My sampling was not meant to be exhaustive but to engage women of differing perspectives in in-depth conversations about their opinions after watching the movie. Thus, this is an exploratory study into what these viewers see in the movie’s representations that offer informal criteria for assessing future representations of Black people, especially Black women. Procedure Interviews followed a semi-structured interview protocol. In order to develop this protocol, Keyton’s (2006) guidelines were utilized. To explore African American women’s perceptions of Black Panther, my questions were designed to generate vivid descriptions of their experiences. Specifically, I was interested in their feelings and emotions before, during, and after watching Black Panther. The average time of an interview was about an hour. During the interviews, participants were informed

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that they were participating in a research study regarding African American women’s perceptions of Black Panther. In addition, I assured participants that their contributions would remain confidential. To ensure their comfort, I invited each participant to choose a pseudonym for herself. Before each interview, I requested each participant’s permission to audio record the discussion. During these interactions, I cross-checked my interpretations with the participants (Parker, 2001). Analysis After the interviews were conducted, they were analyzed using a thematic analysis (i.e., Glesne, 2006). First, I read all of the notes I produced during the interviews and focus groups to get a general feeling for the data. This interaction with the data allowed me a primary sense of themes. Second, I engaged in a close reading of the transcripts, coding each extended response for emergent/recurring themes and/or criteria for assessing representations. Last, I grouped themes and criteria together. Verification This chapter presents thick, rich description from the transcripts (Cresswell, 1997); readers of this piece are invited to draw their own conclusions from my interpretations. In addition, during each focus group and interview, I attempted to clarify thoughts, feelings, and statements presented by the participants. Many researchers (e.g., Cresswell, 1997) have suggested peer review, and/or member checking to verify data. Accordingly, I utilized formal member checking by inviting the participants to see how the data they provided matched the emergent themes in order to verify the quality of the themes. However, only one participant agreed to participate in this portion of the study.

Findings An analysis of the transcripts revealed four main findings: the importance of Black media that include intelligent, independent, and authentic3 Black women; the importance of Black media that present and value authentic Black beauty; the importance of Black media that reference Africa and African heritage with pride rather than shame; and the importance of Black media that present hope for the future, including positive role

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models for children, healthy Black families, and Black love. It also suggests that media texts have the ability to bring people together, rather than keep them separated. These four themes represent the criteria of Black Feminist Anticipatory Vigilance. Strong Black Womanhood In their discussions of Black Panther, all of the women expressed their pleasure with the depiction of the Black women in the film. Queen Mother Ramonda, Wakandan Spy Nakia, General Okoye, and Technology Guru Shuri won the hearts of the participants. The women’s descriptors of the characters ranged from “amazing” to “strong,” and emphasized that the characters were “sophisticated.” The participants also enjoyed that the characters displayed a variety of talents and abilities. The participants felt “encouraged” and “happy” by the characters and related to them. One thing that the interviewees appreciated about the characters was that they were independent, yet served as protectors and innovators. For example, Tracy felt that it “was very, very interesting” that Shuri was an intelligent woman and that T’Challa, the other Wakandans, and other Marvel characters such as Buckey, “relied on her.” Keneka commented on women’s independence: They didn’t necessarily want to be a princess or a queen, you know, although they could. They wanted to be warriors and out, you know, doin’ missions and savin’ the world, you know, in any way they knew how and that was just so awesome to me … because I think of Black women as doing that anyway and so to see it on the film with this twist of Africa, Wakanda, it really was good. It was really good.

Rather than seeing Black women as subordinated to Black men, or in traditionally feminine roles (e.g., “princess,” “queen”), Black Panther suggests that Black women can work to “[save] the world,” because as Keneka states, “Black women [do] that anyway.” Madigan also spoke at length about Nakia, and how she represented Black women’s independence: What spoke to me most was the strength of the Black women in the film. And how they are, and how we are essentially the … backbone to … to our Black men … [Nakia] was … working to save people … and so to me, that is, you know, exactly what our Black women, that’s what we do as a race or

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for me, that’s what I do, as a Black woman…. I’ve always felt like I have been the backbone in terms of my relationships with my husband and friends … just being that constant.

Here, Madigan is echoing Keneka’s sentiments: Black women “work to save people,” and as a Black woman, Madigan recognizes that she is the “constant,” the “backbone.” Obviously, “backbones” must be strong enough to support lives, the lives of Black men in particular. In addition, “backbones” are able to support communities and provide structure for the future. Both participants are arguing that Black women are independent and have their own goals for their lives. This appears to be a criterion for BFAV. Shonda also had a strong reaction to Okoye, who served as T’Challa’s General, yet was in a romantic relationship with W’Kabi. Unfortunately, the tension between T’Challa and Killmonger resulted in Okoye and W’Kabi being on different sides of the narrative conflict; Okoye chose her country over her love interest. Shonda explains: There was a part of the movie that I think caught a lot of people off guard when [Okoye] stood in front of that big animal, and [W’Kabi] was like, ‘would you, you know, would you kill me?’ and she was like, ‘absolutely, without question’ … that’s his woman!

Okoye clearly admits to being torn between her vow to serve and protect the Black Panther, regardless of who wears the mantle, and her loyalty to T’Challa. On the other hand, when Killmonger reveals that he is not morally fit to rule Wakanda, Okoye maintains her loyalty to her nation and fights to overthrow him. In addition, despite being W’Kabi’s “woman,” and therefore his possession, Okoye still had independent command over her own priorities. She was willing to sacrifice her lover for the greater good of Wakanda. Okoye’s decision-making is reflective of many Black women who have had to sacrifice for the good of others; this self-sacrificial behavior is often a marker of strong Black womanhood. “A primary concept in the mythology of Black women’s strength is the ability to handle anything including pain and suffering without acknowledging the need for self-care and healing … this image has become both a badge of honor and a burden” (Scott, 2017, p. xx). In addition, Okoye’s resistance to Killmonger’s plans also illustrates concern for Wakanda’s future. Though she remains loyal to him,

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she points out that Wakanda’s political strategy to remain hidden in plain sight has resulted in peace and progress for the country; she does not want Killmonger to make decisions that will risk the safety of the nation. In this way, Okoye also embodies the desire to protect the future. As Keneka explains: I knew they were together because [Okoye and W’Kabi] kept calling each other ‘my love’ and when he said, ‘you would kill me, my love?’ you know and she was like, ‘for Wakanda,’ you know, without a doubt, Brother … you know, I love you but there’s something higher at stake and I just thought that was kinda cool. Not that she would kill him, cool, but you know, the fact that she … had, you know, somethin’ higher that she was tryin’ to get her point across and just strong, Black, women. Holdin’ their ground.

Here, strong Black womanhood is embodied by the ability to discern between one’s personal desires, including the need for a romantic partner, and the call to serve one’s nation. Like the depiction of Black women’s independence, BFAV anticipates positive portrayals of mature Black women who are able to work for the greater good and serve as guardians of the future. While, as noted above, this sacrificial aspect of strong Black womanhood can be dangerous, BFAV appears to celebrate it. Authentic Black Beauty In addition to discussing the independence and intelligence of the Black women in Black Panther many of the women pointed out the film’s dedication to a shared Black aesthetic rather than a Eurocentric view of beauty. In the dialogue presented below, Madigan addresses the colorism that Hollywood often employs in film. Rather than “whitewash” the characters, Black Panther presents Black women without the requisite European features: Madigan: [W]hen I saw [the trailer for Black Panther] and I heard about [Okoye] I thought, “Wow, … they’re doin’ their very best to portray … the strong actual African woman and not just a Black woman that you see in just a regular everyday film because they’re tryin’ to say that person’s Black but they really don’t look like every Black woman…. I was proud that they did not whitewash them.

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Siobhan: Mm-kay. And when you say ‘whitewash,’ what do you mean? Madigan: That they didn’t lighten their skin or they didn’t cast only fair-skinned Black women because that’s typically what you see in films whenever there’s an African-American woman … she doesn’t look like the African-American women that you see in Black Panther. They’re more, they’re typically more like biracial women … they would cast a person like that in the role of an African-American woman…. I was happy to see that they did not do that in this film. In fact, actress Amanda Stenberg of The Hate U Give (Tillman, 2018) did explain that she turned down the role of Shuri “because she felt the role would best be played by a dark-skinned actress” (Singh, 2018, para. 3). Stenberg’s statement and Madigan’s comments suggest that not only are Black women audience members aware of colorism, but that Black women actors are too. Therefore, BFAV provides a critical perspective that Black women who actually look Black should portray such roles. Pam also explored the tension regarding Black female beauty in depth, moving beyond skin tone to discuss hair length, style, and texture and facial features: I really appreciated that it seemed like it was like an expression of pride for Black female beauty … and not Black female beauty in its relationship to how close we can be to White beauty, to Caucasian beauty? But actual Black female beauty … so natural hair and brown skin and African features. So that’s what I got from it … just that Black women are beautiful as is. As well as, we’re very beautiful without any hair, essentially … her character was the epitome of just Black beauty, Black strength, Black female strength. And she was just strong. She wasn’t afraid of anybody. She was confident … You know, they were completely bald! But they were strong and they were beautiful and they were kickin’ butt and they were takin’ care of business.

Like Madigan, Pam was also taken with Okoye’s “Black female strength” and natural beauty, which her baldness only enhances. In fact, Okoye is disgusted with the wig, and refers to it as “ridiculous.” Though she, T’Challa, and Nakia are undercovers and therefore in disguise, the wig is “ridiculous” because it is fake and makes her feel unnatural. The BFAV criterion that emerges from these excerpts is vigilance over portrayals of

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natural Black beauty. Pam also explains how BFAV speaks to wounds that Black women have endured as a result of racism in America: I grew up in the South so there’s a certain way a Black woman has to look in order for her to be attractive. She needs to look more close to Caucasian. If she doesn’t look very Caucasian she needs to have really long hair … basically the expression is ‘dipped in chocolate.’ It’s completely White features with brown skin…. I identify with [Okoye] because she looked like me. A Black woman with African features … someone that looks like me, kickin’ butt … strong and beautiful…. [I]t made me feel very proud and I loved in the movie when she’s walkin’ around, right before they’re kickin’ butt at the bar and Lupita’s character tells her, ‘Oh, you know, that wig is cute.’ She was like, ‘This wig is crappy.’ And then she snatches that wig off and she does the town…. I was like, ‘Look, I don’t need a wig on my head to be cute. And in fact, I am the most beautiful without this wig! I’m the most beautiful with my shiny head.’

Here, Pam expresses pride in Okoye’s character, portrayed by Danai Gurira, “a Black woman with African features.” Also, Pam is proud because her beauty is natural; “[she’s] the most beautiful with [her] shiny head.” Okoye is undisputedly Black in her skin tone and facial features. Her wig, which is straightened and curled, does not look like Black hair in its natural state. Okoye is a Marvel character from the fictional Wakanda, a culture that embraces Blackness; in contrast, the American South has a history of punishing Black women who do not look White, or as Pam says, are not “dipped in chocolate”—that is, who have “completely White features with brown skin.” Pam’s comments express BFAV as an expectation for natural Black beauty’s dissemination in the media. Like Madigan and Pam, Keneka also argued against “whitewashed” images of Black people. Similar to Pam, she paid close attention to the scene containing Okoye’s response to her wig. However, she also suggested that Black Panther (Feige & Coogler, 2018) should be praised for its message that Black women having confidence in themselves is the epitome of beauty: The age that Black women are in now, we wear weaves, we wear lace fonts and we have this image of Black beauty … either it’s long natural curly hair or it’s long, straight hair and so I just thought that particular scene when [Okoye] was just saying how ridiculous [her wig] was, which meant she was very, very comfortable with her bald head and she was good with that. And I

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think that is a good place for Black women to be, is to be proud of who you are, how you look, how you feel and you’re comfortable in your own skin, and so I really thought that that was an interesting piece.

This scene is “interesting” to Keneka because it suggests to her in the current time, Black women’s hair expressions include any manner of style choices, such as “weaves,” “lace fronts,” “long natural curly hair,” and “long, straight hair.” What matters is that Black women feel proud of who they are. In summary, these women express a BFAV that embraces a natural, expanded notion of Black beauty, encouraging Black women to be proud of who they are, regardless of skin tone, hair texture, and facial features. They are vigilant over media representations of Black as beautiful, challenging past hurtful sentiments that were circulated in the media and that attacked authentic Black beauty. Empowerment: Africa, Heritage, and Black Pride In addition to the themes of Strong Black Womanhood and Authentic Black Beauty, Black Panther also provides viewers with a sense of pride in African heritage. Many of the women spoke how proud they were of the film and, like Shae, expressed that the movie made them feel good about themselves as Black people. Similar to the theme of Authentic Black Beauty, elements of BFAV emerged here as the participants explained how the movie went against the grain of previous media texts that have presented African Americans and other members of the Diaspora as inferior to Whites. Cynthia: First of all, [the movie] showed us … in a very natural way, not made up to fit into ‘White America,’ … but to really embrace our African roots and heritage and background … which I thought was empowering.

In order to prepare for the film, director Ryan Coogler visited South Africa to learn more about some of its culture. He states, “What we were taught about our own African-American culture is that it’s a bastardized culture. We’re taught that we lost the things that made us African; we have to make due [sic] with the scraps” (Augustin, 2018, para. 7). Coogler discovered on his trip that this simply was not true, but that we as African Americans do have access to our culture, as they are “embedded within us” (Augustin, 2018, para. 6). In order to look forward to the future,

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BFAV is anchored in a proud history. However, it is this grounding that allows for the future to be anticipated with excitement rather than trepidation. Keneka, whose husband is Nigerian, also discussed this issue in her interview: When [Killmonger] went back…. I thought that was really interesting because, again, we’ve … always been connected to our ancestors. I think Black people, as a whole, we brought that tradition over and … we’ve lost some of that but, not a lot of it.

These interview excerpts suggest that BFAV entails awareness of the negative portrayals that have come before this film so that the women were able to delight in the film because it portrayed African culture in a positive light. Responding to concerns about portraying Africa in film, Coogler stated that his main priority with Black Panther was to understand what it means to be a part of the Diaspora and to explore “the idealized version of Africa that lives in the head of a lot of African-Americans” (Fleming, 2018, para. 8). In so doing, the movie bolstered in many of the women a feeling of personal Black pride. According to Cynthia, it just promoted a different identity of what African Americans “can be”: Cynthia: You know it was just really nice to see a unified society full of African-Americans that were in these most powerful positions doing these most amazing things, and it all being people like us. Beth: The movie demonstrated our intelligence. That, often … they tend to try to downplay and … we might question ourselves.

In these examples, the women argue against former portrayals that have suggested that those of African descent are ignorant or otherwise powerless. Keneka also spoke to aspects of African American’s connections to Africa and Black Pride: “I just felt really sad that … some of us haven’t really connected or don’t want to be identified with being African and it’s so sad because of the way Africa is portrayed.” Coogler shares similar feelings in his interview with Rolling Stone, stating, “When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them the Bay Area and there’s a sense of pride there. But the truth is, we’re really from that place. The place that everybody’s from” (Eells, 2018, para. 9). Just as Stenberg stated misgivings about playing a role that was not a good fit for her, Coogler voices the fears that

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he had been portraying Africa on the silver screen, when past media portrayals have misrepresented the Diaspora. Keneka discussed how those in power have misrepresented Africans, African Americans, and their history as a whole. Many of us have been led to believe that Africa was home to uncivilized savages, rather than the birthplace of humankind: I think unfortunately that’s how a lot of people actually view Africa … they just have a misconception of what it really is…. I feel like I connect to Africans so I was like, “oh, okay, come on Africa, I see you” so I felt really, really proud in a lot of it, especially the way it ended with him doin’ the community center…. A lot of Black people … are somewhat connected to Africa but we recognize the roots that we have over there and … we’ve been able to get some education that has enlightened us and let us know that we were kings and queens at one point and the history of the continent.

Keneka’s statement, “okay, come on Africa, I see you” is her recognition of seeing a portrayal of Africa that was positive and resulted in a sense of pride in her heritage. She also states that Black Panther tackled many issues, such as giving back to our communities, isolationist versus inclusionist viewpoints of humanitarian aid, and the ignorance of many African Americans when it comes to knowing Africa’s history. She argues, “[those of African descent] were kings and queens at one point.” Coogler also explores these tensions: Because it’s hard to tell a child about slavery—it’s so dire and so awful that you kind of have to balance it with something. So we get this fairy-tale version of Africa. ‘We were kings and queens, and we walked around and ate perfect food, and everyone was free.’ (Eells, 2018, para. 12)

The vigilance of BFAV is grounded in the recognition that Black people have had enough of negative portrayals of their homeland and need more fair and balanced portrayals. Though Black Panther is fictional, it met a real need of the participants to counter denigration and misrepresentation and see Black people portrayed in a positive manner. Beth expressed pride in Coogler’s portrayal of an African country that colonialism had not tarnished: I was extremely proud that someone … had this imagination because I have no imagination. So to think up the country…. I know ‘once upon a time’ before Colonialism and all of that … that we had our kingdoms and even

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though for us we might consider them as being bushmen and this sort of thing that they were very smart, that they … of course had the jewels, the wealth of the country demonstrated in a lot of what they wore when the White people came and saw stuff that perhaps we didn’t even quite realize the value of …. it was just realizing that somebody thought enough about what Africa was worth, and what could be, that they thought of these … [that were] just out of mind, to me (chuckles).

Here, Beth admits that Black Panther gave her images of Africa that were “out of [her] mind,” taking her beyond the limits of her imagination. She explains that we have historical texts, such as the Bible, that provide evidence of African wealth and affluence from antiquity. However, cultural misrepresentation has resulted in many of us “consider[ing Africans] as bushmen.” Challenging these negative representations, Coogler achieved his goal in portraying an Africa that gave its Black viewers a sense of pride. These excerpts illustrate that a critical element of BFAV is a sense of pride in the positive portrayals of the Diaspora and its people.

Media Portrayals and Hope for the Future The fourth and final theme that emerged from my exploratory study was that Black Panther spoke to (Black) family concerns, especially those that create an optimistic outlook regarding what’s to come. Specifically, the women’s comments that illustrated this theme emphasized the importance of media that would acknowledge and foster Black love, positive Black family dynamics, and positive role models in general. The majority of the comments here were from mothers, and their concern regarding the impact that the media have on their children. They expressed a need for media images to which Black people could aspire. As Cynthia put it: “I thought that the Black women that were featured were just amazing representations of strength and empowerment. It was just great examples to show not only ourselves but also the youth.” Here, she suggests that the images Black Panther presented were of strong, empowered Black people. This provides her with a sense of hope for the future. Arguably, the desire for inspirational media images involved aspects of BFAV discussed above, which suggests that the need for positive media images is an over-arching, all-inclusive criterion. For example, many of the women appreciated the film’s portrayals of Black women as strong, independent, and naturally beautiful, and most of the women also commented

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on the manner in which Black Panther presents the African continent. They implicated past (mediated) portrayals as negative; Black Panther presents Africans not as backwards, but as technologically advanced. In addition, its peoples are regal, rather than just negative stereotypes. Madigan admitted to being “enchanted” by “the sheer beauty of the movie, the message of the movie.” Also, though the film was a “lovely fantasy” (Beth), Black Panther made several of the women consider the ‘what-ifs’ of an African country that remained untouched by colonialism. For instance, Tracy remarked that “[Black Panther was] showing unity and how a family and a tribe should work together.” Specifically, Tracy appreciated that the film provided its Black audience members with a template for family unity, as well as unity of a nation as a whole. While many of the family dynamics in the movie were healthy, Keneka pointed out that much of Killmonger’s desire for revenge was rooted in the family he had lost: Now as African-Americans we see that really a family unity is what is needed. A mother and a father. You know, the struggle is real but it’s like, without one of those, somethin’s missing … in the movie, the young boy grew up knowing his father was killed which we see a lot in the inner cities, with hatred and some revenge … and not really fully knowing that he was great … from Wakanda, he knew bits and pieces of it and I think again, that’s so reflective of African-Americans—we know we’re great and different.

Though Keneka feels that her single mother did a great job raising her, the “something missing” was “family unity … a mother and a father.” She acknowledges the realistic aspects of Killmonger’s upbringing, and how he was not aware of his Wakanda heritage. She argues that Black people have survived the adversity of slavery and have achieved much, yet, we still are missing our connection to Africa, even though we know “bits and pieces.” Pam’s comments also explored the ideas of Black unity and pride: “It makes you just wonder, can these things happen as far as technology, but probably just more so as a people, can we work together and can we make greatness out of what we already have naturally?” In this example, we can see Pam mulling over the potential what-ifs that Black Panther brought to mind: what if Black people were able to achieve a united front? What if the technology shown in the film was possible? What if we could “make greatness”? This suggests that BFAV may be characterized by an optimistic, what-if principle. Black Panther presented a vision to which all African

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Americans could aspire. Ultimately, what if African Americans were able to move beyond the wound of colorism to realize our dreams as a community? Further, this theme suggested that the participants looked forward to positive media representations. In separate interviews, Keneka, Cynthia, and Tracy each discussed this aspect, particularly as it related to Black girls: Keneka: I thought that was really kinda cool portrayin’ the young Sister, the technologist, as a technology genius, rather … because young Black women need to see that you can really truly be anything that you wanna be…. You don’t have to be a Queen or a Princess. You can rule technology. Cynthia: I look forward to seeing images that would impact the future of my daughter. You know, something that’s positive. Something that is enriching. Something that would uplift her. I don’t necessarily have to dictate what that looks like but if it serves that purpose then I’m all for it. Tracy: On BET they have “Black Girls Rock” (Restrepo, 2019)4 and especially young ladies, to know that they can achieve anything if they just put their mind to it. So, showing those type of images on TV or social media. I believe that will help our young ladies as they grow up, seeing a positive image and that you can achieve anything. Siobhan: Why do you think that that’s important? Tracy: Mmm, well, young ladies to not to have to always depend on a man…. And know that it’s okay, that they don’t have to have a man always to sustain them or take care of them. They can take care of themselves.

Cynthia and Tracy, both mothers to young Black women, want to see images that will “uplift” their daughters, and so voice hope and vigilance over future representations of Black women’s lives. They want media portrayals that encourage Black women to be independent and advance the idea that they don’t need men to provide for them. They need messages that tell them that “[they] can achieve anything.” Keneka also applauded the film for its message that a woman does not have to fulfill traditionally feminine roles, but “can rule technology.” In another instance, Beth argued that audiences should see more Black women making gains in business, politics, and media. “It’s been difficult. They all would say the Black woman is at the bottom of the heap, when it comes to business and transactions.” She mentioned Shirley Chisolm, “first Black woman to say she’s running for President” as well as Black women editors and the woman who started Essence Magazine. “So if I keep thinking, I might can think of a few more. But on the whole I think we probably have a lot to accomplish if we want to get there. And I can see

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the reasons for it.” In her interview, Shonda also spoke on the importance of children having positive role models. Further, she felt that children needed to see “Black women in leadership” to see that such positions are “attainable for them.” In addition, she argued for children to recognize the importance of education and our history. Our children just need to see more positive Black people and we need to know our history so I love that they gave so much history in this movie ‘cos it’s important to understand where we came from, to know where you’re goin’ and make sure that you don’t go back… Uh, not that you can’t go on and play basketball and be a star, but you know, there are other things out there that we need to see. You know, young Black people, young Black girls, young Black boys need to see. There are other avenues that you can take.

Shonda argues that, while sports are places for Black achievement, Black children need to know that they can go in other directions, such as attaining an education. She praises Black Panther for giving Black audiences an understanding of “from whence we came.” Like Cynthia, she also stresses how important it is for Black youth to see these images. In addition to the desire for positive role models, the women also voiced their support for media images that portray healthy romantic relationships between Black women and Black men. For instance, Madigan expressed that media need to show “Black love”: For me growing up, I didn’t have those images to see lots of Black families on television, Black successful relationships, happy relationships…. Sometimes I have to wonder, maybe subconsciously what I saw growin’ up made me gravitate … towards dating outside of my race. And so for me, I would like to see more of those images of Black love and Black friendship and happiness for my son and for my daughter so that they know that it does exist … and it’s a beautiful thing.

Madigan wants to see more images of Black love represented as “a beautiful thing.” This suggests that BFAV is an anticipatory vigilance over media portrayals of Black people in healthy, loving relationships. This issue was of such concern to Madigan that she revisited it later in her interview: I honestly couldn’t name one person … that was my race, that I saw growin’ up as a child that I had a childhood crush on…. I loved that my children will

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have those choices…. [T]hey’ll be able to have those memories of different people and people that look like them and that makes me happy.

Previously, Madigan had not thought about how much television and other media had suggested to her that romantic love between Black people was not possible; she was shocked to realize that none of her childhood crushes were Black. However, she was excited that current and future media will provide her children “with choices” of partners. Therefore, an additional aspect of BFAV is attention to images that support Black love, in addition to love between diverse people. A final aspect of BFAV is the expectation that Black characters be well-­ developed. The participants expressed their desires for non-stereotypical characters and storylines that display the range of Black experiences in a realistic manner: I enjoy the character development and those actors in Blac-kish (Barris). Because … they are completely relatable. The mom, the husband, working hard, doing his very best and both of them trying to essentially make it in this White world all the while trying to maintain their sense of Blackness and instill that into their children and to open their kids’ eyes to let them know, ‘Hey, while you are in this private school, you are gonna encounter these things.

Here, Madigan expresses that she enjoys programs such as Black-ish because it explores a situation which is familiar to many Black people— “making it in a White world”—while “maintain[ing a] sense of Blackness.” She also likes Black-ish because it recognizes that Black children must be vigilant as well. Pam also shared her thoughts about Black women’s character development, or lack thereof, in mainstream media offerings. She wanted to see main characters that possessed fully explored backgrounds; she wanted to see Black women as the center of narratives, rather than watch them as “[as] the servers, [as] the helpers, [as] the helpful friends”: I’ll give you an example. The creators of Breaking In (McTeigue, 2018) with [Gabrielle Union] didn’t take the time to develop her character…. Okay, she’s a hard fighter and she’s gonna kick butt but … how is she able to do all this stuff? It would have been cooler if they’d said, ‘Yeah, when I was little my dad made me take ju-jitsu.’ Somethin’! … So even if we get lucky enough to have a movie that is featuring us, it still feels like the characters are still kind of incomplete … and not well rounded.

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Pam finds fault with movies such as The Help (Tate, 2011), because it “got all the attention and got all this media frenzy [but the main Black woman character] was… the cook or the maid or something.” In her opinion, narratives with fully developed Black women characters such as Black Panther are lacking, or “so few and far between.” Keneka’s comments concerning this topic reveal the aspirational aspect of BFAV. She speaks to media that provide viewers with a sense of “hope.” This media would inspire adults, children, and would also “help White people” with positive images of Blacks. This suggests that not only does BFAV include anticipation of media that illustrate Black love, family unity, and well-developed Black characters, but for media that can bring people from different races and backgrounds together and promote positive, intercultural change. As C.T. May (n.d.), a White viewer, writes: “[Black Panther] is a screen of wall-to-wall black people doing the important things that normally whites do on the screen, and it’s a landmark… The day will come when our hold on institutions has lessened and the consensus takes a new shape” (para. 5). Black Panther and media texts in this mold not only assist White audiences in having access to Black media “landmarks” (May, n.d., para. 5), they also make Black audience members feel proud and optimistic for future media portrayals that reflect their lives positively.

Discussion The main goal of this study was to explore the emergent criteria for BFAV in African American women’s perceptions of Black Panther. I discovered that BFAV is not “vigilant” in a reactive, defensive sense (See Sotirin, “Introduction,” this volume, pp. xx). Indeed, BFAV optimistically waits for future media texts and responds to them accordingly. My participants applauded Black Panther’s representation of strong, intelligent, and independent Black women, as well as its portrayals of natural Black beauty. The film also gave the participants a sense of pride in their heritage as African Americans. Because Africa’s history is a proud one, we, as members of the Diaspora, have inherited said pride. My interviewees expressed BFAV as a celebration of positive images of Africa and rejected those that result in shame and embarrassment. Their comments also suggest the importance of solidarity in the Black Community as a criterion of BFAV.  When we work together, we are unstoppable. Lastly, and most importantly, BFAV is expressed as hope for the future. My interviewees look forward to images that will encourage and inspire Black adults, but especially Black youth.

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They want to see Black women achieve, and desire fully-imagined-and-­ realized characters. They also believe that there are media that are able to build bridges across cultures. Their comments illustrate that BFAV is both vigilant and anticipatory: this is a media gaze that looks both forward and backward regarding portrayals of Black people. This is why, for instance, the participants were thrilled that the portrayals of Black women as generals, spies, and technology specialists in Black Panther pushed the boundaries of imagination; the film did not rely on stereotypical, flat characters such as Jezebels or Sapphires. Further, Black Panther’s portrayal of Africa, “the place that everybody’s from” (Eells, 2018, para. 9), gave the participants a sense of pride, another BFAV criterion for future representations. As mentioned above, scholars such as Jacqueline Bobo, bell hooks, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Karla Scott have explored how African American women are portrayed in the media, and in turn, how African American women view themselves, in light of—or despite of—these images (Bobo, 1991, 1995; Harris-Perry, 2011; hooks, 2009; Scott, this volume, pp. xx–xx). The participants in the study were aware of previous negative representations; this is part of what made the Black women in Black Panther a delight for them. The film was also a site for the Black Female Gaze, which is a different, critical standpoint for Black women viewers. As Roach and Felix (1989) explain, Black viewers often approach media texts as interpretive communities. They critique and discuss the texts, dissecting during their first exploration of them. They continue to sample the texts, enjoying the flavors as they engage in sensemaking sessions with others. The Black Community started excited conversations about Black Panther on Twitter and other social media outlets when the film was first announced. By the time it was released, anticipation had reached a fever pitch that has not dissipated in the years since. While most mainstream media are not made for minority audiences, part of my own pleasure with the movie was the knowledge that it was primarily made for me; Black women viewers like myself could relate to the women characters, as each one represented a proud aspect of strong, Black womanhood. Rather than be forced into “Crooked Rooms” (Harris-Perry, 2011), Black Panther allows us to stand tall on a floor that is level, since it was built according to our understanding and perspective. One limitation of this exploratory study is its small sample size; another is its lack of variation within the sample. All of the participants were over 35; five were in their forties, one was in her seventies. In addition, the sample included highly educated women: all had completed college degrees or trade school; some had also completed advanced degrees.

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These shortcomings are likely the result of the snowball sampling procedure, in which I reached out to Black women who I knew had seen Black Panther and then recruited these women’s friends to participate. Future studies to develop this initial indication of BFAV might address these issues of sample size and homogeneity by recruiting women of different ages and socio-economic backgrounds. In addition, study of the forthcoming Black Panther 2 may assist in further developing the tenets of BFAV.  In spite of these limitations, this exploratory study provided the basis of the hopeful, future-oriented concept of Black feminist anticipatory vigilance and suggests that Black women audiences are ready to explore forthcoming texts through criteria that they deem critical for positive, empowering, hopeful representations of Black Life.

Notes 1. Melissa Harris-Perry explains the “Crooked Room” metaphor as it is rooted in a field psychology experiment from post-World War II, manipulating people as they literally attempted to determine “which way was up” in a room that was tilted on its access. She relates the term to the distorted images of Black women in society: When they confront race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion… it can be hard to stand straight in a crooked room. (p. 29) 2. The Institutional Review Board of the University of Louisville approved this research project, number 18.0538. 3. There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the term authentic, especially as it relates to cultural appropriation. There is also tension surrounding who is “more authentic” than who as it refers to Blackness. Therefore, while I recognize this debate, I do not use the term in a negative sense. 4. An annual live awards ceremony for women of color in music, entertainment, and entrepreneurship (See, e.g., Restrepo, 2019).

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References Akil, S. (Director). (2018). Black lightning [Television series]. The CW. Augustin, C. (2018, February 16). How Ryan Coogler’s visit to “The Continent’ was a ‘Black Panther’ moment of awakening. Vibe.com. https://www.vibe. com/2018/02/ryan-coogler-black-panther-creation Barris, K. (Creator). (2014–). Black-ish [Television series]. Wilmore Films. Bobo, J. (1991). “The subject is money”: Reconsidering the Black film audience as a theoretical paradigm. Black American Literature Forum, 25(2), 421–432. Bobo, J. (1995). Black women as cultural readers. New  York: Columbia University Press. Coker, C. H. (Creator). (2016–2018). Luke cage [Television series]. Netflix. Coogler, R. (Director). (2018). Black panther [Film]. Marvel Studios. Cresswell, J. W. (1997). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Sage. DeLuca, V.  K. (2018). Wakanda, the place we’ve been waiting for. Essence Magazine, 48(10), 10. Eells, J. (2018, February 26). Ryan Coogler: Why I needed to make ‘Black Panther’: How the director’s trip to Africa informed the making of his record-­ breaking blockbuster: “I wanted to explore what it means to be African.” Rolling Stone.com. Fleming, M. (2018, November 14). Can barrier-breaking ‘Black Panther’ become the first superhero movie nominated for best picture? Deadline.com. Glesne, C. (2006). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction. Pearson Glover, D. (Creator). (2016–). Atlanta [Television series]. FX. Harris-Perry, M. V. (2011). Sister citizen: Shame, stereotypes, and Black women in America. Yale University Press. hooks, b. (2009). Reel to real: Race, class and sex at the movies. In The oppositional gaze: Black female spectators (pp. 253–274). Routledge. Keyton, J. (2006). Communication research: Asking questions, finding answers (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill. Kvale, S. (1996). Interviews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing. Sage. Lee, M. (Director). (2017). Girl’s trip [Film]. Perfect World Pictures. Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2002). Qualitative communication research methods (2nd ed.). Sage. May, C. T. (n.d.). I saw Black Panther with a White audience. Splicetoday.com. McTeigue, J. (Director). (2018). Breaking in [Film]. Universal Pictures. Parker, P. S. (2001). African American women executives’ leadership communication within dominant culture organizations: (Re)conceptualizing notions of collaboration and instrumentality. Management Communication Quarterly, 15, 42–82.

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Rae, I., & Wilmore, L. (Creators). (2016–). Insecure [Television series]. HBO. Restrepo, S. (Director). (2019). Black girls rock! [Television special]. BET. Roach, J., & Felix, P. (1989). Black looks. In L.  Gamman & M.  Marshment (Eds.), The female gaze (pp. 130–142). The Real Comet Press. Russo, A., & Russo, J. (Directors). (2018). Avengers: Infinity war [Film]. Marvel Studios. Scott, K. D. (2017). The language of strong Black womanhood: Myths, models, messages, and a new mandate for self-care. Lexington Books. Singh, O. (2018, August 28). Amandla Stenberg nearly played a pivotal role in ‘Black Panther’—but she felt a darker-skinned actor should be cast instead. Insider.com. Sotirin, P. (2020). Introduction to feminist vigilance. In P. Sotirin, V. L. Bergvall, & D. L. Shoos (Eds.), Feminist vigilance (pp. 1–19). Palgrave Macmillan. Tate, T. (Director). (2011). The help [Film]. Dreamworks Pictures. Tillman, G. (Director). (2018). The hate U give [Film]. Fox 2000 Pictures, Temple Hill Entertainment, & State Street Pictures.

CHAPTER 8

Vigilance in/as Feminist Research Laura L. Ellingson

I sat expectantly at Shelley’s dining room table, a practiced yet sincere smile on my face intended to set my participant at ease. The laptop computer on the table between us displayed the first of over 30 pictures she had taken of her daily life as a long-term cancer survivor. Shelley’s long-­ ago cancer treatment had left her with a host of serious chronic health conditions including extensive radiation damage to her facial bones, teeth, sinuses, saliva glands, and esophagus, and I painstakingly catalogued physical details for the notes I would make after the interview. The glowing red light signaled that my digital recorder was on, and my pen was poised above my legal pad for notes and follow-up questions. The tension in my shoulders and belly belied my vigilant attention to this courageous, resilient woman who generously agreed to share her story with me. For a few seconds, I gleefully envisioned the recorded interview completed, transcribed, printed, and already bearing the marks of my old-­ school combination of multi-colored highlighters, sticky notes, marginal notes penned in purple ink, and dog-eared pages bearing the stains and

L. L. Ellingson (*) Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_8

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waterlogged impressions of my frequent cans of Diet Coke. My smile widened at the thought of engaging with what I knew would be wonderful data, and Shelley responded to my warmth by leaning forward. Ashamed, I brought myself back to the present moment with my participant. The least I owed her was my undivided attention. I worried for an instant that she knew where my mind had drifted and would feel disrespected. But her expression remained open and peaceful, so I took a deep breath and refocused my attention squarely on her and her story, determined to be vigilant in keeping my caring focus on my participant’s words and embodied performance of self. As a feminist researcher, I understand vigilance as an ethical imperative as well as a source of meaning and connection. In this chapter, I reflect on three particular ways in which feminist vigilance manifests itself in and through feminist methods: as a dynamic ethics of care; as an embodied methodological practice; and as a way of managing dialectical tensions while engaging with participants. I use my own feminist photovoice study of long-term cancer survivors (Billingslea & Ellingson, 2015; Borofka, Boren, & Ellingson, 2015; Ellingson, 2017; Ellingson & Borofka, 2020; Wagner, Ellingson, & Kunkel, 2016) to illustrate both feminist methodological vigilance and missed opportunities for vigilance. Mobilizing the concept of vigilance offers generative possibilities for continually adapting feminist methodologies to meet the contemporary challenges and opportunities of increasing attention to intersectionality, decolonizing practices, and materialism.

Feminist Vigilance as an Ethic of Care Feminist vigilance is an affective force and a caring attentiveness (Sotirin, “Introduction,”  this volume, pp. 1–19). Through vigilance, feminist researchers may attend to the dynamic state of research ethics, that is, acknowledging the continually changing relationships and material circumstances in order to continually be reflexive and enact compassion, reciprocity, and respect, embrace multiple perspectives, and attend to power differentials with participants. Feminist vigilance is neither reactive nor defensive. Instead, feminist vigilance promotes a collective, dynamic, proactive, and responsive form of mutual care. The agency of feminist vigilance has energy and an affective sensibility of caring. Caring is not merely abstract but may involve material intervention, particularly in projects involving participatory research practices (Fine & Torre, 2019). Feminist

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research vigilance thus manifests caring attentiveness involving such practices as compassionate attention, being alert to omissions and contexts, making careful and considered choices, paying careful attention to the power and limits of representational genres, and reciprocal caring. The gift of listening compassionately to people who are suffering may be considered a significant form of vigilant, caring attentiveness (DeVault, 1990; Priya, 2010; Swartz, 2011). The long-term cancer survivors in my study coped with a variety of late effects, or illnesses and chronic conditions that are caused by the surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, medications, and other treatments that enabled them to survive their initial cancer diagnoses (Blank, 2009). The wide array of late effects includes heart disease, diabetes, kidney and liver failure, neuropathy, lymphedema, chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, and infertility; and mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (National Cancer Institute, 2018). Moreover, long-term survivors (LTS) face relational difficulties that are shaped by intensive treatment and subsequent ailments: sexual functioning impairment (Mah et al., 2011), difficulty in family functioning and communication (Alderfer et al., 2009), and fewer social relationships (Enskär & Berterö, 2010). At the same time, the majority of LTS manifest significant personal strengths, resilience, and spiritual growth (Jones et al., 2010). I readily offered caring and compassionate attentiveness to participants’ stories out of a deep sense of empathy and connection grounded in my own long-term survivorship, which has required my own extreme vigilance in attending to some aspects of my health. Our interviews were structured by the photos of their daily lives participants shared with me; we discussed the people, places, and objects pictured and reflected on their meanings for participants. I honored their stories of suffering and resilience by actively and compassionately listening to their joys as well as their disappointments, their pain, and their accomplishments (Ellis & Patti, 2014). As a long-term cancer survivor who also lives with late effects, I offered understanding and kindness, while also respecting the significant differences in our experiences. In this way, I practiced feminist vigilance as an ethic of care responsive to each participant’s lived experiences. Moreover, vigilance as carefulness is critical when feminist researchers take care to avoid limiting their inquiry and to accommodate emergent ideas and possibilities (Ellingson, 2009a). This careful and considered attention is a hallmark of feminist research. For example, a well-worn truism in social research asserts that the research question should determine

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the method(s). That is, feminist researchers should determine what they want to better understand and describe, choose an appropriate method (tool) to explore the question posed in their research, and be prepared to adapt to changing circumstances as their research progresses (Reinharz, 1992). Researchers trained in only a small set of tools may become complacent about perceiving only those questions and needs that fit with their accustomed tools, and worse, they can fail to adapt to opportunities. In other words, they fail to be vigilant about possible alternatives. For example, while I was working on my long-term cancer survivorship study, I was given an opportunity to collaborate with a student research assistant who noticed that the photovoice interviews featured references to and stories about difficulties with late effects that led to participants becoming empowered as patient self-advocates within the health-care system. Pursuing her interest in self-advocacy, we collaborated with a quantitative scholar to design a mixed methods survey (i.e., open/qualitative questions and validated measurement scales) to investigate perceived efficacy for survivors in this role within a wider community of long-term cancer survivors (Borofka et al., 2015). My assistant’s careful and caring attentiveness to our data and my caring attentiveness to her idea about patient self-advocacy reflect the power of vigilance to harness creativity and flexibility in research design. Another aspect of feminist vigilance as caring attentiveness and carefulness about methodological choices is staying alert to omissions that reproduce hegemonic perspectives. Practicing vigilance over how contexts matter is imperative to providing sufficient social, cultural, and political grounds for research claims. This avoids the neoliberal impulse that locates all problems and solutions in individuals, thus absolving inequitable institutions and privileged groups of their complicity. Feminist researchers vigilantly attend to and question taken-for-granted ways of being and doing in order to expose how power structures family, popular culture, language, and institutions such as education and health care (Browne et al., 2017; Clemons, 2019; Hesse-Biber, 2007; Leavy & Harris, 2018; Taylor et al., 2020). Further, feminist researchers pay caring attention to intersectional privileges and oppressions on both the systemic and individual levels in order to denaturalize identities and practices such as mothering (Sotirin, 2010), aunts’ relationships with nieces and nephews (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2010), stay-at-home fathers (Medved, 2016), lesbian families (Suter et al., 2008), LGBTQ coming out processes (Manning, 2015), coping with hidden illness and disability (Morant Williams  &

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Morant, 2018), and resisting stereotypes of Black womanhood (Scott, 2013). These studies are vigilantly careful about contextualizing dynamics and how those dynamics matter in lived experiences. My own commitment to the carefulness and caring attentiveness of feminist vigilance kept me aware of and alert to multiple contexts relevant to the themes from my photovoice interview data. I queried statistical analyses of overall trends in health care for long-term survivors, documented occurrences of late effects, and paid caring attention to the prevalence of psychosocial issues encountered in the years following cancer treatment. My vigilance in pursuing these connections highlighted the collective impact of the participants whose stories I had engaged in depth. Framing the beauty and pain of participants’ narratives in a larger biopsychosocial research picture emphasized the physical, emotional, cognitive, and relational suffering and resiliencies of long-term survivors. In addition, I was vigilant about framing these narratives to persuasively counter neoliberal logics and victim-blaming. Further, vigilant feminist researchers must watch out for how the power and limits of representation may forward or obscure the complexities of participants’ stories. Elsewhere I advocated consciously producing multiple genres of representation—such as poetry, music, blogs, or digital stories—to complement more traditional research reports, thus spanning the continuum from art to (social) science and crystallizing findings by making sense of them in multiple rich, yet always partial, ways (Ellingson, 2009a). I argue that representation involves significant ethical responsibility for researchers. Fine  et  al. (2000) pointed out, for example, that researchers must be wary of framing results in such a way that they can be coopted readily by anti-feminist forces and used to hurt the participants for whom we advocate. I urge vigilant attention to the partiality of all genres as an ethical stance that makes it much more difficult to deny the complexity of lived experiences and the need for social justice. To represent long-term survivors’ experiences of suffering and resilience in a nuanced manner, I collaborated to produce research reports but also a website with photos and stories from participants along with resources on long-term survivorship and an interactive art exhibit that included photos and quotes from participants into evocative, quilt-like panels (Billingslea & Ellingson, 2015). Further, I composed autoethnographic narratives about some aspects of long-term cancer survivorship to complement other representations with first-person accounts (e.g., Ellingson, 2005, 2009b). These varied representations are an ethical response grounded in my

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vigilance over the capacities of different forms of representation to engage the nuances and complexities of long-term survivorship. Finally, vigilance as a caring attentiveness manifests through reciprocity or reciprocal caring. Feminist methodologists (Hesse-Biber, 2007) and participatory action researchers (Wang, 1999) frame reciprocity as complex and political, including guidelines such as do no harm to communities, collaborate with participants as equals, speak with rather than for participants to highlight their voices, acknowledge embodied participants and their material circumstances, critique structural inequities, and develop solutions to participant-identified problems (Preissle, 2007). Moreover, “[r]eciprocity promotes recognition that partners have varying amounts and types of power in different situations and different interests in a specific project—and thus will benefit from different things” (Maiter et al., 2008, p. 321). Many feminist researchers enact reciprocity materially by giving time, resources, or both as a way of thanking participants and acknowledging their time and efforts to collaborate in research processes. In this sense, “[r]eciprocity is a matter of making a fitting and proportional return for the good or ill we receive” (Becker, 2005, p.  18). Examples of reciprocity are thank you gifts for interviewees such as gift cards to stores (Ellingson, 2011), covering children’s school fees (Swartz, 2011), paying for meals or drinks (Stodulka, 2015), assisting teachers (Gallagher, 2011), assisting in the daily work of a business (Edley, 2000), and providing organizational members with workshops, training, or consulting services (Diver & Higgins, 2014). Reciprocity is never perfect; participants give their time, stories, and trust, while feminist researchers remain vigilant that they reciprocate in caring, meaningful, material, and symbolic ways. In this section, I played with vibrant possibilities for vigilance as caring attentiveness. Vigilance about caring, carefulness, and reciprocal caregiving involves embracing an ethic of care while paying attention to what inhibits caring practices and to opportunities to develop such practices further through feminist research.

Vigilance as Embodied Practice Feminist vigilance can also be understood as an embodied methodological practice of knowledge construction. That is, vigilance transcends mind-­ body boundaries, rejecting the Cartesian dualism that renders knowing merely cognitive in favor of deeply sensory sensemaking rooted in the

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body-self as it pays attention to the world (Ellingson, 2017; Grosz, 1994; Pink, 2015). Attention to watching, listening, touching, tasting, smelling, gut feelings, tears, laughter—all of these are experienced in and through the body. While sight and hearing are privileged culturally as the most critical for interfacing with society, other senses also are integral components of individuals’ sensorium, that is, their “way of coordinating all the body’s perceptual and proprioceptive signals as well as the changing sensory envelope of the self” (Jones et al., 2006, p. 8). Researchers tend to act and speak as though knowing happens in the mind; that is, “the researcher’s body is typically regarded as an instrument for sensory data collection, which is then rationalized and given meaning as knowledge by the mind” (Brady, 2011, p.  323). Bodies are complex systems that include the brain and central nervous system but are not interpreted solely by them. Instead, knowing is a corporeal process that is tied up with our ontology, or way of “being-in-the-world” (Merleau-­ Ponty, 1962), such that “consciousness is always and only embodied, holistically integrated into the enfleshed subject” (Hoel, 2013, p. 35) and “[b]eing and knowing cannot be easily separated” (Longhurst 2008, p.  208). Thus to enact vigilance involves the whole body-self of the researcher attending to and intra-acting (Barad, 2007) with the body-­ selves of participants and their material contexts. Vigilance involves a certain quality of attention and openness to others’ embodied presence and can take a number of forms. It may be a sharply focused gaze, adrenalin coursing through veins, and heightened awareness as a feminist researcher bears witness to a patient’s silent suffering. Yet it may also be listening mindfully to the complex, dynamic soundscape of an ethnic neighborhood or using one’s gut to tune into the layers of emotion and meaning in a participant’s story of immigration. Vigilance is more than reflexive thinking about fieldwork or interviewing; embodied vigilance involves being attuned to the material world and relations. Sensory attunement does not stop with a final look (privileging sight) but remains vigilant to what is available to be known through multiple senses (Pink, 2015). This understanding of research vigilance is contextual, embodied, and affective, less abstract and more engaged, proactive rather than fear-based, and enacted through a mutuality that is not co-dependent but intra-active, a mutuality that is vital and fluid (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020). I advocate embodied vigilance as responsive to embodied knowledge and experience. Being watchful and attentive through all our senses connects researchers

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to the embodied experiences of participants as well as researchers’ embodied sensemaking. I attended to deeply embodied knowledge during my photovoice interviews as participants and I made eye contact, smiled, frowned, laughed, and cried together (Ellingson & Borofka, 2020). I watched their bodies for signs of emotion, hesitation, discomfort, resistance, confusion, or interest. At the same time, I carefully attended to sensations in my own body, including tension in my shoulders and temples, nausea in my stomach, an aching sensation deep in my chest, a lightness in my chest, accelerated heartbeat, a restlessness in my leg and buttocks, and other embodied bits of data as I listened to participants and talked with them (Ellingson, 2017). Vigilance thus supersedes the mind-body dichotomy by attending to richly sensory ways of knowing the world as a leaking, messy body-in-­ relation (e.g., Ash & Gallacher, 2015; Booth & Spencer, 2016; De Zordo, 2012; Inckle, 2014; Riach & Warren, 2015).

Managing Dialectical Tensions Vigilance also helps feminist researchers continually negotiate dialectical tensions that inevitably arise in engaged research. I have described an ethic of care and embodied vigilance as positive elements of feminist methods. However, a hypervigilance, or distorted and non-generative vigilance, may arise out of anxieties that stem from struggling with dialectics of autonomy and connection, empowerment and agency, or caring and respect, leaving researchers stuck in obsessive loops of fearful self-monitoring and self-admonishment. Researchers can become stymied and feel that nothing is ever quite ethical enough, collaborative enough, empowering enough, or caring enough. After more than two decades as a feminist ethnographer, I often feel anxious rather than empowered while conducting fieldwork, interviews, and other modes of making data. My internal monologue admonishes me to be ever vigilant lest I inadvertently succumb to practices that capitalize on my privilege or downplay my complicity with power relations. Here is just a partial list of tensions in which I sometimes find myself stuck as I imagine my feminist forebearers enjoining me to: • Engage in continuous reflexivity but don’t be accused of navel-­ gazing (Boylorn, 2013; Gachago, 2015).

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• Amplify marginalized voices but don’t speak for others or presume to give them voice (Alcoff, 1991; Cavalieri, 2019; Fine et al., 2000). • Attend carefully to how participants perform embodied intersectional identities but don’t essentialize those bodies or identities (Ellingson, 2017; Pitts-Taylor, 2015). • Don’t forget that your privileges prevent you from fully understanding others’ situated knowledges but keep in mind that “[t]he standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions” (Haraway, 1988, p. 584; Bell, this volume, pp. xx–xx). • Conduct research with marginalized, underserved communities but make sure that they benefit from your engagement as much as you do professionally (Madison, 2005). • Keep up on the latest feminist theory, methodology, and onto-­ epistemology but don’t needlessly impose labels, jargon, or abstract theorizing on material contexts (Brabeck, 2018). • Be authentic but respectfully negotiate participants’ cultural norms and expectations (Henry, 2007). • Gather participants’ most intimate particularities in order to present them in nuanced and complex ways but don’t hurt or embarrass vulnerable participants (Preissle, 2007). • Be inclusive of all group members but don’t essentialize the group (Gullion & Tilton, 2020). • Engage with nuanced theoretical concepts to achieve depth of analysis but simultaneously devise pragmatic strategies for promoting social justice (Falcón, 2016). Please note that I am not excusing myself (or anyone else) from meeting ethical standards nor claiming to be victimized by the crucial methodological considerations generated by intersectional feminist theorizing. To the contrary, I embrace feminist vigilance as a way of holding myself accountable, doing good research, and diving deeply into reflexive consideration of my embodied standpoint. I long passionately to do feminist research that leaves the world a better place than it was before I dared to make a claim to knowledge, yet I do not want to ever make any mistakes in the process—an unrealistic goal. I suggest that a vigilant stance can get researchers “unstuck” by attending with care to the dynamic negotiation of dialectic tensions rather than attempting to resolve seemingly fixed, opposing extremes.

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Feminist vigilance offers at least three flows through these ongoing tensions: a stance of “ethical enough,” love, and joy. Vigilant researchers must pay attention to ethical standards, understanding that being ethical should not be confused with enacting ethical standards perfectly. All feminist researchers have intersecting privileges and complex, embodied identities. Scholars have rightfully called out male, white, First World, affluent, able-bodied, English-speaking, heteronormative researchers for failing to consider how their privileges shape relationships to participants, positions within cultural systems of power, perspectives on participants’ language and meanings, and relative benefits from research (e.g., Chakravartty et al. 2018; Gullion & Tilton, 2020; Hesse-Biber, 2007; Vannini, 2015). I am fully in support of these critiques and know that the situated knowledges I produce are partial, partisan, and problematic. At the same time, feminist researchers need to be able to conduct ethically imperfect research that is still ethical enough (Preissle, 2007). It takes courage and conviction for researchers to remain vigilant, do our best, keep learning with vulnerable others, and apologize when we fall short, which we inevitably will. Critical ethnographer Madison (2005) encourages researchers to embrace the risks of engagement with vulnerable others and holds researchers accountable for meaningful engagement with underserved communities: “Your angst and guilt about your benefits [from representing Others] cannot eclipse or cloud your responsibility to do meaningful work” (p.  135; emphasis in original). In my study of long-term survivors, I attended to an ethic of care while also accepting inevitable imperfections. Feminist vigilance was integral to my engagement with a group of highly vulnerable people–long-term cancer survivors with late effects of treatments—knowing that their wellbeing necessitated my careful interactions, thoughtful consideration of the photos they generated as data, and painstaking attempts to represent them ethically. For me, the ethical enough standard offered the only way to represent vulnerable people in presentations and publications, knowing that no representation is without its flaws, partialities, and shadings. Avoiding doing grievous harm was relatively easy by being vigilant, but the nuanced arguments, decontextualized quotes, curated photos, and bodies of theory I assembled all opened up possibilities for misunderstandings, patronizing or hurtful implications about participants, and cooptation by regressive sociopolitical forces. Yet if I insisted I could not share my work until I had achieved ethical perfection, no essay, article, or web material would ever be released (Ellingson, 2017).

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Feminist vigilance also allows for navigating methodological and ethical dialectics by making room for criticism and corrections to be made with love rather than disdain or dismissal. One Black feminist scholar explained the toxicity of “call out” practices which pervade online activist communities, including feminist and anti-racist activists and scholars (Ross, 2019). Ross points out that these practices foster a “cancel culture” that sets an impossibly high bar, requiring feminist activists to know everything and speak perfectly every time. “Calling out” other feminists for failing to meet unrelenting high standards can eventually become counterproductive, by shaming others and making everyone afraid to speak publicly, lest they make a mistake and be subjected to viral ridicule. Yet we can practice feminist vigilance without self-righteous condemnation of others. Ross articulates a loving strategy of “calling in.” Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect. It is not tone policing, protecting white fragility or covering up abuse. It helps avoid the weaponization of suffering that prevents constructive healing. Calling-in engages in debates with words and actions of healing and restoration, and without the self-indulgence of drama. And we can make productive choices about the terms of the debate: Conflicts about coalition-building, supporting candidates or policies are a routine and desirable feature of a pluralistic democracy. (Ross, 2019, n.p.)

Love can be enacted through sincere vigilance about doing one’s best as a researcher while being open to feedback, change, and contrition. Feminist vigilance enables a relational accountability wherein scholars help each other own their privileges; acknowledge gaps in their education regarding particular bodies of theory, research, and embodied experiences; and negotiate complex dialectics of promoting others’ voices and perspectives while framing them in ways intelligible within the academy and for wider publics. Ross acknowledges that there is danger in promoting love and calling-in when inevitable power disparities make it easier for privileged groups to suppress the rightful anger and frustration of marginalized groups. Love as an affective force must not be wielded to silence less powerful voices but embraced as a generative path to feminist dialogue and constructive feedback across differences. During my career as a feminist researcher, I certainly have not been immune to criticism, nor have I managed to always act with grace and

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humility when I felt the need to criticize others. Vigilance as an ethical stance means that I do the best I can and hold myself and others accountable with the goal of dignity, inclusivity, mutual understanding, and compassion, rather than the goal of proving myself right and someone else wrong. One preemptive strategy that I practice is to always ground my analyses within my own standpoint (DeVault, 1990; Harding, 1993; Hoel, 2013; Onwuegbuzie et al., 2008). That is, I take seriously that it is my responsibility to account for the situated knowledges that I produce and not present my work as impartial or objective (Haraway, 1988). In a co-­ authored article as part of my study of long-term survivorship, my collaborator and I made this statement as part of our discussion of how we engaged in feminist qualitative analysis. The first author, a senior faculty, is an LTS [long-term survivor] of bone cancer with significant late effects. The second author lives with a chronic illness (unrelated to cancer); she worked as the first author’s research assistant, attended medical school, and is a family practice resident. Both of us benefit from white and cisgender privileges; the first author is heterosexual while the second identifies as LGBTQ+. Our embodied standpoints provided points of similarity and difference among authors and participants, enriching our analyses. Specifically, the first author drew on her experiences of late effects, relationship with her spouse, and experiences balancing work with late effects as points of empathy with participants, while also exploring differences based on age at diagnosis, her decision not to have children (nine of 10 participants were parents), and types of medical treatments. The second author contributed insights from her perspective as a physician in training, and as a chronic illness sufferer, she reflected on managing difficult symptoms. (Ellingson & Borofka, 2020, p. 183)

We made this statement as a loving act of vigilant self-accountability that we hoped would foster responses—including criticism. We were hopeful as well that our vulnerability would encourage a shared, loving orientation to productive, feminist dialogue, rather than a hostile “calling-out” intended to diminish and silence. While ours was one small contribution to potential feminist debates about issues such as embodied identities, health-care access, and chronic illness and disability, we hope we signaled a meaningful openness that can be lacking when feminist scholars eagerly stake their theoretical, epistemological, and methodological positions. A final way that feminist vigilance may help feminist researchers negotiate dialectical tensions in methodological practices is through the affect of

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joy. Joy can mobilize researchers to work with caring attentiveness toward a more just world. [F]inding joy in the research process and with the communities with whom we come to form relationships along the way is sustaining…. [T]he ability to laugh and enjoy the research process is fundamental to our research practices. If we remain stuck in a space of anger, frustration, or disillusionment, then putting our research efforts toward a greater good does not become possible. (Falcón, 2016, p. 186)

Falcón refers both to individual researchers’ emotional experience of joy and implicitly to the need for feminist researchers to consider the vitality needed to move ever onward toward feminist goals of social justice. My collaborator and I tapped into this latter sensibility when we defined joy as an ethical commitment in critical qualitative research; more specifically, we posited joy not as a feeling of exhilaration but as the vitalities of life itself (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020, p. 13). This is an ethical commitment to be carefully attentive to “some modes of life’s intensification and self-­ ordering” (Grosz, 2018, p. 149). Further, while joy may be wild, exuberant, and awesome, the vitalities of life may also be awful, “disruptive, overwhelming, even unbearable and painful (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010)” (in Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020). Embracing joy in and through my participants’ embodied cancer survivorship was for me an affirmation of the vitalities of life itself among vulnerable people who have survived a disruption to the story of their lives and constructed a “new normal” of life after cancer (Harter, 2013b). I acknowledge both the joyful elements of surviving medical trauma and the intensity of suffering that necessarily intertwines with joy, showing them to be inseparable (Billingslea & Ellingson, 2015). Moreover, I illustrated how participants’ experiences of their bodies and embodied emotions are not individual experiences but inextricably bound to the body-selves of loved ones, including children, spouses, and friends (Ellingson & Borofka, 2020). The practice of feminist vigilance accessed the joyful vitalities of participants’ survival following cancer, their suffering from late effects, and the mundane struggles and comforts of their everyday lives as vulnerable members of the “community of pain” (Frank, 1995). Thus, understanding joy as an ethical commitment opens up further possibilities for transformative research.

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Final Thoughts Feminist qualitative researchers use a variety of methods from interviewing and ethnography to participatory action research to critical analyses of popular media, and all of these benefit from practices of vigilance. Feminist vigilance in/as method complements feminist reflexivity with a powerful practice of engagement that is less about reflecting on and making sense of what has happened and more about careful attentiveness to what possibilities may emerge in the research process. In this chapter, I have considered vigilance in feminist methodology as an ethic of care, as deeply embodied, and as a way of working in and through dialectical tensions. In the opening vignette, I described a moment of wandering attention during an interview with one of my research participants and expressed regret that I had not perfectly attended to the richness of the experience for a couple of moments before refocusing on the woman I was interviewing. Yet it was commitment to feminist vigilance that quickly drew me back to listen to her embodied storytelling. Feminist researchers will find that an ethic and practice of vigilance offers a generative mode of participant engagement that fosters care, compassion, and even love and joy, while resisting unattainable and disempowering standards of ethical perfectionism.

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National Cancer Institute. (2018). Facing forward: Life after cancer treatment. NIH Publication No. 18-2424. Retrieved from https://www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/life-after-treatment.pdf Onwuegbuzie, A.  J., Leech, N.  L., & Collins, K.  M. (2008). Interviewing the interpretive researcher: A method for addressing the crises of representation, legitimation, and praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 7(4), 1–18. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Pitts-Taylor, V. (2015). A feminist carnal sociology? Embodiment in sociology, feminism, and naturalized philosophy. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), 19–25. Preissle, J. (2007). Feminist research ethics. In S. N. Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis (pp. 515–532). Sage. Priya, K. R. (2010). The research relationship as a facilitator of remoralization and self-growth: Postearthquake suffering and healing. Qualitative Health Research, 20(4), 479–495. Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist methods in social research. Oxford University Press. Riach, K., & Warren, S. (2015). Smell organization: Bodies and corporeal porosity in office work. Human Relations, 68, 789–809. Ross, L. (2019, August 17). I’m a Black feminist. I think call-out culture is toxic. New York Times, n.p. Retrieved from https://nyti.ms/2NcRJZG Scott, K. D. (2013). Communication strategies across cultural borders: Dispelling stereotypes, performing competence, and redefining black womanhood. Women’s Studies in Communication, 36(3), 312–329. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–28). Duke University Press. Sotirin, P. (2010). Autoethnographic mother-writing: Advocating radical specificity. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), M9. Retrieved from http://jrp.icaap. org/index.php/jrp/article/view/220/220 Sotirin, P. (2020). Introduction to feminist vigilance. In P. Sotirin, V. L. Bergvall, & D. L. Shoos (Eds.), Feminist Vigilance (pp. 1–19). Palgrave Macmillan. Suter, E.  A., Daas, K.  L., & Bergen, K.  M. (2008). Negotiating lesbian family identity via symbols and rituals. Journal of Family Issues, 29(1), 26–47. Swartz, S. (2011). ‘Going deep’ and ‘giving back’: Strategies for exceeding ethical expectations when researching amongst vulnerable youth. Qualitative Research, 11(1), 47–68. Taylor, C. A., Ulmer, J., & Hughes, C. (2020). Transdisciplinary feminist research: Innovations in theory, method and practice. Routledge. Vannini, P. (Ed.). (2015). Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research. Routledge. Wagner, P. E., Ellingson, L. L., & Kunkel, A. (2016). Pictures, patience, and practicalities: Lessons learned from using photovoice in applied communication contexts. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 44(3), 336–342. Wang, C. C. (1999). Photovoice: A participatory action research strategy applied to women’s health. Journal of Women’s Health, 8(2), 185–192.

CHAPTER 9

Essentialism, Empathy, and Economics in Silicon Valley: A Feminist-Vigilant Critical Discourse Analysis Victoria L. Bergvall

In July of 2017, Google engineer James Damore posted a memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” critiquing what he saw as the company’s harmful, reverse discrimination against a true diversity of viewpoints, particularly those of conservatives. Damore lamented Google’s required training on unconscious bias in regard to sexism and racism, asserting that “At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership” (2017, p. 3). Damore countered that there were, in fact, fewer women in high-­ tech jobs because, “On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed” (p. 3). He concluded his memo with ten suggestions for change at Google, including the following: “Stop alienating conservatives; confront Google’s biases; be open about the science of human nature; de-emphasize empathy.”

V. L. Bergvall (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_9

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In the resulting furor, Damore was fired, and Google has since reiterated its commitment to fostering gender and racial diversity in its workplace (Pichai, 2017, 2020). So why is this a subject for feminist vigilance? It might seem that Damore’s firing was a victory for intersectional feminist values. However, Damore’s dismissal of empathy and his antagonism toward required diversity training and toward programs designed to help women and minorities succeed, in fact, fits within the mythos and discourses of Silicon Valley: that meritocratic enterprise and individual hard work lead to success and wealth in technological fields. Despite Google’s efforts to diversify its workforce and advance diversity training, the company has failed to make substantive progress in hiring women and minorities.1 In fact, it may have reduced diversity initiatives in response to a lawsuit by Damore and conservatives at Google that argued for the rights of conservative white men (Glaser, 2020; Reimann, 2020).2 Meanwhile, Google and other Silicon Valley corporations have come under increased criticism for their gender- and race-biased algorithms and for corporate resistance to any significant oversight of their data-scraping and monetization of almost all of our online behaviors, valuing commodification and demonstrating an unempathetic lack of concern for privacy and fairness (Noble, 2018; O’Neil, 2016; Perez, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). In this chapter, I consider how we must be critically vigilant in sustaining a feminist ethic of care (long advocated by the feminist community3) as we examine discursive constructions that reflect, create, and sustain gender imbalances and mindsets in Silicon Valley industries. In the analysis that follows, I undertake a close feminist critical discourse analysis of how Damore discursively framed his statements in seemingly careful terms in order to present a non-sexist argument. A deeper analysis shows that he still reverted to essentialist tropes and binaries. In addition, analysis of Damore’s memo reveals an underlying antipathy toward giving a hand-up to women or minorities who wish to become part of the tech world. I then broaden the focus to other discourses about the business practices of Silicon Valley (which often regard women—and the business of technology—in some of the extreme terms that Damore’s careful discourse might seem to mitigate). Finally, I propose that we must exercise a deep and sustained feminist vigilance toward the technology industries that build the black-box algorithms that are increasingly observing and commodifying so many of the details of our lives, including our online searches, chats, and purchasing behaviors (as detailed by Zuboff in her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). As society moves headlong toward an

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educational system that values STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) over traditional liberal arts that can teach us about the lives and experiences of others, I argue that we must inculcate in our children empathy and concern for those whose lives are shaped by these technologies; we must advocate for a broader ethic of care, not essentialized as a sex-linked characteristic of women, but deeply embedded in gender-free educational practices that must begin from children’s earliest days. This vigilance must be deeply feminist-informed from childhood because “implicit-bias” workshops at the corporate level alone will not address this systemic problem. Damore’s Google memo represents attitudes that demand a sustained feminist vigilance toward Silicon Valley’s practices and its discursive formation of gender for two primary reasons. First, Google is one of the “Big Nine” technological companies in the world that are significantly reshaping our culture (along with Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon in the United States, plus Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent in China), what Webb (2019) called the G-MAFIA-BAT. Google has insinuated itself so deeply into so many lives that it has become accepted into the language as a lower-case transitive verb: the American Dialect Society chose google (as a verb) as the most useful word of 2002, and both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added google in 2006. Second, the struggles at Google are emblematic of one of the major world-changing, wealth-producing engines in the United States: the Silicon Valley culture, with its predominantly (White and Asian) male workforce; despite their motto of “Do no evil,” Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still struggle to change their workforce (Chang, 2018; Eadiciccio, 2016; Glaser, 2020; Google, 2020). And the broader practices of Google and of the information-technology industry as a whole call into question their commitments to change. Through this analysis, I employ a feminist-vigilance-informed approach to Critical Discourse Analysis that considers how gender roles and assumptions are created and promoted discursively, drawing on Michelle Lazar’s (2014) work on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA): A central concern of FCDA is a critical analysis of discourses which sustain a gendered social order in which some people, by virtue of being “men,” are accorded privileges systematically, and others, by virtue of being “women,” are routinely disadvantaged, excluded, and not taken seriously. FCDA, like CDA, takes the view that social practices are reflected in as well as consti-

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tuted by discourse … but also takes it further by arguing that many practices, far from being “neutral,” are in fact, deeply gendered. (p. 184)

The “far from neutral” characterization that Damore used as he discusses women and men in technology is revealed in his lexical choices and syntactic patterns, which Machin and Mayr (2012) point out do discursive ideological work by their very repetition. Damore expressed his belief in one significant factor that underlies the continued unequal participation of women in technology (and the factor cited by Pichai [2017] in his firing of Damore): innate, biological difference4: I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. (Damore, 2017, p. 3) [emphasis added]

This is part of the process that feminists (e.g., Cameron, 2010) have critiqued as resurgent biological essentialism: The current ascendancy of the more “scientific” formula is one manifestation of a larger discursive shift: a move away from the “softer” forms of gender essentialism and sexism, and towards what I am calling “the new biologism”—a 21st century revival of the traditional view that differences between men and women are not, as feminists would have it, “social constructed,” but natural, rooted in our biological make-up. (p. 526)

On some levels, Damore’s discussion appears to be carefully constructed linguistically to mitigate essentialism, presenting him as a rational critic, speaking uncomfortable truths about the real reasons for the lack of women in high-tech jobs. Yet, as I show in the sections that follow, a close discourse analysis of Damore’s Google memo demonstrates how he appeals to essentialism, empathy, and economics to explain why there are so few women at Google and in in tech industries in general. He argues that targeting programs to help women and minorities constitutes problematic, discriminatory practices that are bad for business. I then turn to other discourses of Silicon Valley to show that mistaken beliefs in the degree of innate biological difference (Fine, 2010; Hyde, 2007; Jordan-­ Young, 2010) are not the only problem that women face in trying to work

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in high-tech industries. I argue that business practices in Silicon Valley contribute to a lack of empathy, for example, as coded into the technical algorithms that support and control much of our lives. Hence, we need sustained feminist vigilance to enact systematic change to create a more empathetic technological future.

Damore’s Memo: The Voice of Reason In the front matter on the first page of his memo, in a section entitled “Reply to public response and misrepresentation,” Damore says, “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.” But then he adds, “When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population-level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.” His TL; DR (too long; didn’t read) summary on the second page ends with these two bullet points: • Differences in distribution of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representations of women in tech and leadership. • Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business. On the same page, in a footnote to his “Background” section, Damore writes: “I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason.” The underlining (added here) refers to Damore’s embedded hyperlinks to the Wikipedia page on “Classical liberalism,” which includes discussions of utilitarian philosophy and laissez-faire economics, and to Jonathan Haidt’s (2012) blog post, which itself links to a paper Haidt wrote with Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, and Haidt (2012) on the psychological and political inclinations of libertarians. Damore has since commented that he considers himself a “centrist with libertarian inclinations” (Lewis, 2017). Certainly, his arguments against what he perceives as “discrimination to reach equal representation” and against mandatory training in diversity and inclusion suggest an alignment with libertarian psychology “and its rationalist, individualist ethos.” As noted in Iyer et al., “According to Davis (1983), low levels of empathic concern indicate

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lower levels of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others, which may underlie … their general rejection of altruism as a moral duty.” Throughout his memo, Damore carefully hedged his claims and perspectives about the innate differences between women and men, which he backed with numerous citations of research. However, as I will show, under closer critical discourse analysis, this careful framing is undercut by Damore’s repeated, gender-essentialist assumptions and his invocation of other unquestioned binaries. Essentialism On page 4 of his memo, Damore inserted a two-part image with captions that might at first seem to inoculate him from claims of essentialism. The upper image presents two overlapping bell curves, purple on the left and green on the right, captioned “Populations have significant overlap.” The lower image presents two parallel lines, again, purple on the left and green on the right, captioned “Reducing people to their group identity and assuming the average is representative ignores this overlap (this is bad and I don’t endorse that).” Thus, Damore claims that “populations” should not be reduced to binary, internally consistent groups, separated from the each other by a clear gap. As seen in Table  9.1 and examples that follow, in his discussions of women’s and men’s attributes, Damore substantiates this “overlap” theme in three basic linguistic ways: through the use of scalar adverbials (e.g., on average, generally); through the use of numerous comparative and superlative modifiers (e.g., more, mostly, higher); and through the use of modal auxiliary verbs (e.g., may, might, can, should), which suggest varying levels of certainty. Damore’s frequent use of these linguistic hedges—the absence of which would otherwise reduce women and men to undifferentiated, separate groups (akin to his parallel green and purple lines)—reinforces the idea that, with respect to these traits, women and men belong to overlapping populations. Of the 78 mentions of women and men in Damore’s memo (39 of each), over two-thirds occur with some form of hedging: 26 (66.7%) with uses of the word men and 27 (69.3%) with uses of the word women. (In the examples that follow, note that emphasis is added through italics and underlining to highlight the linguistic examples under discussion.) Damore’s statements include the following:

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Table 9.1  Linguistic hedges that mitigate Damore’s claims; for example, about women and men Type of linguistic hedge

Examples

Number of uses

Scalar adverbials

Generally On average Often Likely Relative to More Higher Lower Mostly Most Less Better Farther, fuller, further, greater, greener, harder, larger, stronger, wider Can Should May Would Might

8 7 5 2 1 25 9 4 4 3 3 2 1 each

Comparative & superlatives

Modal verbs

16 13 11 5 1

• “Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).” (p. 4) • “Women on average have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).” (p. 4) • “Women on average are more cooperative.” (p. 5) • “Women on average are more prone to anxiety.” (p. 5) • “For heterosexual romantic relationships, men are more strongly judged by status and women by beauty.” (p. 5, fn. 4) • “Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average.” (p. 6) • “[W]omen are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men.” (p. 7) • “Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons.” (p. 7, fn. 9)

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• “Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employee sacrifices (e.g., more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power.” (p. 7, fn. 9) • “Men’s problems are more often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood, due to our gendered idea of agency.” (p. 7, fn. 10)5 Damore also employs other syntactic means—sometimes mixed within a single sentence—to further mitigate the division of women and men into clearly separate binary sets. For example, he frequently positions women and men as in subject position before passive verbs (noted in italics in below), or in object positions after active verbs, or in positions where they are acted upon by forces external to them (as noted by underlining below). These syntactic strategies imply that people don’t intentionally take action; instead, they are impelled to be the way they are, either by biology or by cultural norms. Examples include: • “For heterosexual romantic relationships, men are more strongly judged by status and women by beauty.” (p. 5, fn. 4) • “Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status they entail.” (p. 5) • “Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.” (p. 5) • Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.” (p. 6) • “Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role.” (p. 6) • “If we, as a society, allow men to be more ‘feminine,’ then the gender gap will shrink.” (p. 6) • “Men are expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own.” (p. 7) • “We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner.” (p. 7)

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• “This discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.” (p. 7, fn. 10) With these syntactic devices (hedging with scalar adverbials, comparatives and superlatives, and modal verbs; and the use of passive and non-­ agentive verbs), Damore might reasonably claim that he does not “reduc[e] people to their group identity and assum[e] the average is representative.” Yet for someone who claims to focus on overlaps, Damore uses that word just four times, while he overlexicalizes6 the terms differ, differences, and differentials 25 times in his memo and the word gap 9 times (8 times in reference to the gender gap), all of which suggest that, with respect to these traits, women and men might be reduced to two separate, non-­ overlapping groups (more akin to Damore’s image of parallel, purple and green lines). Damore’s attributes for women and men (even if on average) also align in very gender-traditional (and oppositional) ways. For women, the attributes include cooperative, higher anxiety, neurotic, open to feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas, judged on their beauty, protected by society, empathizing, looking for work-life balance, higher spenders, with extraversion expressed as gregariousness, and agreeable. For men, the attributes are strong, uncomplaining, judged by their status, taking high-stress/high-­ danger jobs, more interested in things, and systemizing. Even though modified by hedges, such as on average, these collective attributions build a profile of women as being externally judged for their beauty and their emotions, while men have more agentive profiles (taking jobs and systematizing). Further, while Damore ostensibly decries reductive binaries, he articulates them elsewhere in his memo. On pages 2 and 3, he laments that “we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.” He then presents two columns of “Left Biases” versus “Right Biases,” drawn with a clear dividing line between them, as show in Table 9.2. After this table, Damore concludes,

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Table 9.2  Biases of the left and right Left biases

Right biases

Compassion for the weak Disparities are due to injustices Humans are inherently cooperative Change is good (unstable) Open Idealist

Respect for the strong/authority Disparities are natural and just Humans are inherently competitive Change is dangerous (stable) Closed Pragmatic

Adapted from Damore (2017, pp. 2–3)

Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society, or in this case, company. … Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. (p. 3)7

His explicit contrast between left and right aligns with his contrasts between liberals and conservatives, as well as Google versus dissenters. None of these binaries suggest any overlapping middle ground, emphasizing differences over commonalities. If Damore were truly against reductive binaries, he should have noted these inconsistencies himself and focused more on the overlaps in populations than on the polarizing essentialism that casts women and men, and Left and Right, as fundamentally (and irreconcilably) different. Empathy One of the attributes Damore listed for women is empathizing. Though he only employs that word once and the word empathy three times, empathy is prominent in his attributes for women. In fact, empathy is the first topic Damore discusses in his section entitled “Personality differences,” which is directly below his image of the overlapping bell curves versus the parallel, vertical lines: Women, on average, have more: • Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than

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things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing). –– These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs [software engineers], comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. (p. 4) The empathizing versus systemizing dichotomy was first proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen in The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain (2003), in which Baron-Cohen makes biologically essentialist assertions about why there is a male predominance in (diagnosed) cases of autism: “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems” (p.  1). Baron-Cohen concludes his book with a discussion of the jobs for which those with male and female brains are most suited: People with the female brain make the most wonderful counselors, primary-­ school teachers, nurses, carers [sic], therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators, or personnel staff. People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists [sic], bankers, toolmakers, programmers, or even lawyers. (p. 185) [emphasis added]

(Consider the significant pay gaps between the two lists, which provide a measure of how much society values these different professions.) In footnote 3 on page 3, Damore says, “Throughout the document, by ‘tech’ I mostly mean software engineering.”8 He concludes that continuing to attempt to recruit women into these primary tech jobs at Google is both philosophically and economically unsound: Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principled reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that. (p. 6)

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In addition to calling Google’s efforts to recruit women into tech as “arbitrary social engineering,” Damore continues his negative overlexicalization of efforts to appeal to women with terms like limits, deceive ourselves, misguided, and biased, as seen in this quote: Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). (p. 5) [emphasis added] Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts. (p. 9) [emphasis added]

Damore’s attitudes toward what he sees as “arbitrary social engineering” echo the sentiments of Doreen Kimura, psychologist and author of a 1992 Scientific American article entitled “Sex Differences in the Brain” and of a 2002 book entitled Sex and Cognition. Kimura frames diversity initiatives even more negatively: “Engaging in coercive social engineering to balance the sex ratios may actually be the worst kind of discrimination. It also serves to entice some people into fields they will neither excel in nor enjoy” (2001, p. 3; cited in Woodfield, 2007, p. 16). At the end of his memo, Damore again raises the issue of empathy, including it in his list of ten recommendations for what Google should do to redress the problems he sees within the company’s efforts to promote a more diverse workplace. As the seventh item on this list, Damore urges Google to “De-emphasize empathy.” He goes on to elaborate: I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts. (p. 9)

Damore hyperlinks “irrational and dangerous biases” and his discussion of empathy to a 2014 essay by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who argues “against empathy,” saying that it is too biased and narrow: “it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical

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differences and statistical data. … In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside.” Damore concludes that empathy promotes “irrational and dangerous biases,” and that “[b]eing emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.” He also encourages Google to “[b]e open about the science of human nature”: Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems. (p. 9)

Here, Damore presents (and attacks) a straw argument: few contemporary feminists would argue that “all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination,” but most would agree that we need a deeper understanding of complex biological and social attitudes and gender expectations, including those that play into why engineering persists in being so male dominated. (I’ll discuss some of those social conditions below.) Does empathy deserve a place in Silicon Valley? In a 2017 article published on medium.com, Yonatan Zunger, former Distinguished Engineer at Google, argues that it does: “Essentially engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration and empathy for both your colleagues and your customer.” This sentiment is expanded in Emily Chang’s interview with Zunger, as reported in her (2018) book, Brotopia: Breaking up the Boy’s Club of Silicon Valley: Being coldly rational and solving very specific computational puzzles, Zunger admits, is part of an engineer’s job and a requirement when learning to code and in the early days of one’s career. However, it is only after that stage, he says, that the ‘real engineering’ begins. The true job of an engineer is to fix problems that exist in the real world. Those problems always involve understanding people. It is a challenge that requires not less empathy but more. (p. 92)

Damore’s negative characterization of empathy aligns with political beliefs of libertarians, as noted above. Iyer et al. (2012) found that liberals showed the most empathy while libertarians were “more individualistic and less collectivist than both liberals and conservatives” and “show strong reactance toward social or legal pressures to join groups or assume obligations toward others that are not freely chosen.” Such pressures would

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certainly include Google’s diversity-training initiatives. Damore’s critique fits the libertarian emphasis on individualism, freedom, and reason over empathy, as he challenges Google’s attempts to diversify its workforce. Economics In addition to essentialism and empathy, Damore also includes economics as a central issue in his memo and relates economics to gendered assumptions. He claims that men’s concern about status drives them to work “long, stressful hours” and draws them to dangerous and high-stress jobs. In Damore’s analysis, note the negative characterization of factors that men must face when seeking employment: We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.9 Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths. (p. 5) [emphasis added] Damore continues this negative overlexicalization pattern in describing the economic (and social) effects that he sees arising from Google’s efforts to pursue diversity: “Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.” (p. 2) [emphasis added]

Damore represents Google’s business prospects as a struggle in a “zero-­ sum game” where one’s gain is equal to another’s loss: For each of these changes [i.e., through diversity programs], we need principled reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that. For example, currently those willing to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous ­consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google’s funding is finite, so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged.

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We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. … As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of ‘grass being greener on the other side’; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is being spent to water only one side of the lawn. (pp. 6–7) [emphasis added]

Finally, economic concerns are prominent in three of Damore’s ten suggestions for Google, consistent with his concern that Google should pay more attention to the costs and benefits of its diversity initiatives. Note again the repetition of negative lexical terms for Google’s actions as bad business: • Demoralize diversity. –– As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.” • Stop alienating conservatives. –– Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company. (p. 8) • Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs. –– I realize that some of our programs may be precautions against government accusations of discrimination, but that can easily backfire since they incentivize illegal discrimination. (p.  9) [emphasis added] As Machin and Mayr (2012) argue, such negative overlexicalization does ideological work: it “gives a sense of over-persuasion and is normally evidence that something is problematic or of ideological contention” (p. 37). Rather than dismissing emotion here, Damore is clearly using on affective vocabulary to make his point, despite his claim that “[b]eing emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.” Empathy and economics often reside together uncomfortably in Silicon Valley. Google makes an overt show of pro-diversity initiatives, yet former executive Andy Rubin, called “the Father of Android”—Google’s very

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successful mobile operating system—received a $90 million exit package, despite being asked to resign from Google over “credible” claims of sexual harassment. Wakabayashi and Benner (2018) report that, Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

These issues (as well as the replication problems of hiring practices in Silicon Valley discussed further below) demand a constant feminist vigilance over both Silicon Valley’s hiring and economic practices and about discourse concerning why some people get ahead in technology and why others struggle.

Other Voices on Sex, Gender, and Technology Other reports on what women and minorities have experienced in trying to succeed in the tech domain provide counterpoints to Damore’s claims. Chang’s (2018) book Brotopia provides a different take on who can get ahead in Silicon Valley and why. Chang discussed how one prominent venture capitalist preferred to interview funding-applicants in hot tubs, and she notes how some men in the Valley often took long lunches at strip clubs followed by private “viewings,” a practice so commonplace that Yelp employees referred to these strip clubs as “Conference Room G.” But Chang’s chapter “Sex and the Valley: Men Play, Women Pay” highlights most clearly one important way the unequal gender balance plays out in Silicon Valley. She writes that one frequent venue for socialization was weekend parties where two women (almost without exception young and very attractive) were invited for every man (usually older and wealthier or well-connected) for Ecstasy-fueled “cuddle puddles” of sexual abandon. (Recall Damore’s assertion of the naturalness of status vs. beauty metrics for men and women.) Whereas men’s multiple sexual entanglements are accepted (despite their sometimes being in ostensibly ongoing relationships), women who work in Silicon Valley report that if they attend such parties, either they are characterized as money-hungry

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“founder-­ hounders,” they are sexualized thereafter in uncomfortable work settings, or they are ostracized. Many women felt forced to leave jobs rather than suffer from continued sexual evaluation and subtle and not-so-subtle harassment and exclusion from promotions. Uber executive Susan Fowler told Chang that her manager at a new job made a pass at her over the internal company chat system. She went on to criticize the assumption of sexual availability of women by men in power in Silicon Valley: “You just don’t proposition your subordinate for sex, like ever, but especially not on their first day on your team” (p. 106). Chang noted that women were systematically profiled out of technology jobs over recent decades—though once seen as the very essential human “computers” that supported calculations for moon shots, including the women of color made famous in the 2016 film Hidden Figures (T.  Melfi, director). This was fueled by 1960s psychologists William Cannon and Dallis Perry, who created a “vocational interest scale” that privileged “antisocial, mathematically inclined males” who “don’t like people,” who are, hence, now overrepresented in the field (Chang, pp. 19, 22). This movement, Chang continued, was underscored when suddenly popular computer science programs began to filter selection into their programs with a very high threshold of acceptable grade point averages in specific courses. Chang claims that this led to a self-perpetuating, very male group of founders and venture capitalists and a prevalent myth of meritocracy, suggesting that talent and hard work were all that was needed to succeed in tech fields. (However, see Hart Research Associates [2015] on what employers value: “written and oral communication skills, teamwork skills, ethical decision-making, critical thinking, and the ability to apply knowledge in real-world settings” [p. 1].) For many women in Silicon Valley, meritocracy seems more mythic than actual. One problem is self-replication: corporations like Google pride themselves on their elitism in hiring. Discussing a trip by Google’s Associate Project Managers (APMs) to Asia, author Steven Levy (2011) comments: The most fascinating part of the trip was the time spent with the young Googlers. They were generally from elite colleges, with SAT scores approaching or achieving perfection. Carefully culled from thousands of people who would have killed for the job, their personalities and abilities were a r­ eflection of Google’s own character. … [O]ne of the APMs charted the group demo-

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graphics and half had parents who taught at a university—which puts them in the company of Google’s founders. (p. 5)

He later notes: From the beginning, Google profiled people by which college they had attended. As [Google founder Larry] Page said, “We hired people like us”— brainy strivers from privileged backgrounds who aced the SAT, brought home good grades, and wrote the essays that got them into the best schools. Google sought its employees from Stanford, Berkeley, University of Washington, MIT—the regulars. (p. 140)

Writing of Google’s hiring practices in looking for the fit with the company’s “Googleyness,” Schmidt and Rosenberg (2014) commented on the famous Google brainteaser employment tests, which had been criticized as being “elitist”: To those critics, let us say once and for all: You are right. We want to hire the best minds available, because we believe there is a big difference between people who are great and those who are good, and we will do everything we can to separate the two. (p. 116)

Recall Damore’s comment, “We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life” (p.  5) [emphasis added]. However, in Reset, her 2017 memoir about working in a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, Ellen Pao argued that the stressors for women were harsh but different from those for men and that long hours and hard work aren’t enough to enable women to rise to leadership positions. Pao would seem to be well primed for Silicon Valley success by the meritocratic metrics Levy noted: her father was a math professor at New York University, her mother was an engineer in computer sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and Pao herself earned an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and a law degree and an MBA from Harvard. And yet, Socially I was the odd ‘man’ out. I’d been right to be wary of the culture. Even though I now knew more and more about the business, I still wasn’t fitting in. … We [women] were all working twice as hard for half as much and trying to get the menial work done so we could get to the meaningful

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work of investing. … I ate lunch alone or with people making unfunny jokes, which meant I had to freeze that blank smile on my face for an hour. … I was in my mid-thirties, single, and a workaholic with less power than men I’d trained. (p. 90)

Vigilant feminism points out the systemic sexist, racist, and classist practices behind the expectations and experiences of those who work and create algorithms at Google and other technology firms in Silicon Valley. If tech companies persist in hiring people who look just like the men presently in power, they will never really understand the truly diverse perspectives and concerns that others might bring to the algorithms that determine how our personal data points are being used, algorithms that optimize for competitive business culture and fail to include empathy and care in the code.

On Caring and Coding It is possible to change perspectives on what is important to achieve success in science and technology by enacting a feminist vigilance over STEM and Silicon Valley, challenging not only the surface discourses that are being created, but also the deeper messages hidden in codes and conversations. Because of the dominance of information technology and its near ubiquity in our lives, Silicon Valley firms perpetuate conceptual dominance not only through computer engineering, but also through their discourse: their language and policies matter. To address the underlying issues of the treatment of women and minorities, it is critical to be vigilant in challenging the binaries in which the debate is all too often framed. We must facilitate the shift from (what is essentially) sex differences to emphasize, instead, the gender variation of truly overlapping abilities. This vigilance must be deeply feminist in addressing systemic racism, sexism, and classism that goes back to the early days of education. Who nurtures the children? Who stays at home when the child is sick? And who schools them when pandemics strike? Which groups have access to high-quality schools and high-speed Wi-Fi access that enable young minds to grow and explore the world from their homes and schools? What courses do students take in college and university that might provide a meaningful, liberal education? Who recognizes that women and minorities, too, wish to participate and succeed in science and technology, to exercise their minds and technical abilities?

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People of all genders and ethnicities cannot thrive in a vacuum of indifference, or worse, an expectation that anything they do will be judged as not as good as work done by someone of another gender, ethnicity, or class, based on mistaken essentialist, biological beliefs. Everyone needs to be taught caring right alongside coding.10 A conception of the workplace as essentially sex-divided shunts men and women into different career paths, with one group more likely to be hired into highly paid and valued tech jobs and the other into front-end social-service jobs with lower pay and prestige. Challenging this essentialism means rejecting the binary oppositions of sex differences, and recognizing, instead, the diversity of gender variation. It means accepting that empathy and collaboration are non-essentialized values, important for all people to practice, regardless of gender. By examining underlying linguistic choices, a critical analysis of Silicon Valley discourse enacts feminist vigilance in order to embrace non-binary, intersectional diversity. This also focuses on the possibility of change by addressing the discursive and social influences that shape our biology, our brains, and our social choices, to create a positive alternative of inclusion and care. One problem with attempting to challenge the diversity practices of high-tech industries is that so much of their activity is protected by strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). It is hard to peer into the carefully guarded black boxes of code or corporate practices (which was one reason why Damore’s memo provoked such controversy). But according to Webb’s (2019) analysis of the Big Nine technology companies, we do know that, The current developmental track of AI prioritizes automation and efficiency, which necessarily means we have less control and choice over the thousands of our everyday activities. What’s not on the table, at the G-MAFIA or BAT, is optimizing for empathy. Take empathy out of the decision-making process, and you take away our humanity. Sometimes what might make no logical sense at all is the best possible choice for us at a particular moment. Like blowing off work to spend time with a sick family member, or helping someone out of a burning car, even if that action puts your own life in jeopardy. (p. 130)

Computer algorithms build and sustain widely critiqued patterns of racial profiling and gender discrimination (e.g., Noble, 2018; Perez, 2019,

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Zuboff, 2019). As Kathy O’Neil details in her 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction (which she shortens to WMDs), these algorithms based on amalgamated data scrapings have resulted in failures to even consider women’s job applications because of their gender; they drive heightened stop-and-frisk and false arrests in neighborhoods of people of color; and they lead to inabilities to secure mortgages by qualified people and many other harmful social effects. In part, Silicon Valley fails because they don’t understand how to codify social values like empathy: While looking at WMDs, we’re often faced with a choice between fairness and efficacy. Our legal traditions lean strongly toward fairness. Our Constitution, for example, presumes innocence and is engineered to value it. … WMDs, by contrast, tend to favor efficiency. By their very nature, they feed on data that can be measured and counted. But fairness is squishy and hard to quantify. It is a concept. And computers, for all of their advances in language and logic, still struggle mightily with concepts. … They try in vain to measure “friendship” by counting likes and connections on Facebook. And the concept of fairness utterly escapes them. Programmers don’t know how to code for it, and few of their bosses ask them to. (p. 95)

A business that struggles to encode empathy or fairness and whose profit rests on selling our personal data points, rather than attending to people and their needs for information and empathetic connections with others, fails in its unexamined assumptions about the natural care and empathy that all humans should both give and receive. So why is the Damore memo so important as a case for exercising feminist vigilance? First, in downplaying empathy and elevating the competitive marketplace, the memo runs counter to the fundamental ethic of care embedded in a feminist perspective on vigilance. It highlights how we must always watch those who, themselves, watch over all our data and online interactions. We must be vigilant toward those who hold so much of our private information in their corporate hands and who create and manage the algorithms known to be flawed and biased in favor of those who already hold power and wealth and against those who do not. As income inequality widens because of access to data and the profits reaped from the interconnected world, it is ironic that the connectivity that gets downplayed is human connectivity. We are not machines interlinked in an information network devoid of human values; we are all part of a deeply connected human web of interactions and we need to be

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vigilant toward those whose values don’t foreground empathy and compassion. This cannot be solved only by adding more women and minorities to the high-tech workforce. The needed change requires a deeper rethinking of our systems, both computational and human. Feminist vigilance regards an ethic of care as crucial, but not as a sex-­ linked, innate characteristic. To care only for ourselves and those like us is not enough: we must learn to care for ever-widening circles that encompass not just self and families, but also communities, nations, and the non-­ human ecosystem upon which we depend. As Joan Tronto (2013) writes, Politically, the feminist democratic ethic of care seeks to expose how social and political institutions permit some to bear the burdens (and joys) of care and allow others to escape them. Some people have to take up their caring responsibilities, while others are given “passes” out of such responsibilities … because they are engaged in other activities that they (and presumably, society) deem are simply more important than caring. Conversely, those who are given a disproportionate amount of responsibility for care are presumed to have less interest and concern with such matters as protection, production, self-aggrandizement, or wealth. In a democratic society, all of these issues would concern everyone. (pp. 32–33) [emphasis in the original]

Feminist vigilance seeks the equitable distribution of rights and responsibilities, both for caring and for coding. It sees all humans both as deserving of care and empathy and as capable of reason. It challenges a system that too easily slides toward oligarchy, within a techno-capitalist complex that seems to be failing at the deepest political and social levels. In The Darkness Now Visible (2018), Carol Gilligan and Davis Richards wrote, In exposing the darkness now in our midst, we argue that feminism is now the key ethical movement of our age. Understood as the movement to free democracy from patriarchy, feminism alone pinpoints and resists the gender binary and hierarchy that cripple love and impair our capacity to engage in the communication and relationships that are vital to a democratic citizenship. (p. 8)

We cannot expect that programs about implicit bias and diversity hiring goals practiced at the corporate level—however well-intentioned—will be enough. Change requires the deep, intersectional challenges to systemic sexism, racism, and classism that feminist vigilance demands. Families, local schools, communities, and political and religious institutions must all

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emphasize and inculcate a feminist-informed ethic of care. Our educational systems, from preschool to graduate schools, can turn to caring as informed by the liberal arts (Anders, 2017) (including literature, philosophy, history, communication, anthropology, and linguistics) in order to help students understand and care for others, even as schools push for more coding and STEM. Finally, we must be vigilant to the discourses about technology and gender around us if we want to build a more feminist-­informed, humane, compassionate, and interconnected technological future.

Notes 1. For example, between 2017 (when Damore wrote his memo) and 2020, the overall representation of men at Google fell just 2.1% (from 70.5% to 68.4%). However, in 2017, white men constituted 42.8% of Google’s overall workforce and 46.7% of those in technical jobs; by 2020, these numbers had fallen to 36.5% (−6.3%) and 38.5% (−8.2%), respectively. Over that same time, Google had only fractional percentages of increases in Black+ and Latinx+ workers (see Google’s annual diversity report https:// diversity.google/annual-report/). 2. In a May 2020 agreement with Google, Damore asked that his suit be dismissed (Burnson, 2020); this followed a 2018 decision against Damore by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which found that Google had grounds for dismissing Damore: An employer’s good-faith efforts to enforce its lawful anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policies must be afforded particular deference in light of the employer’s duty to comply with state and federal EEO laws. Additional, employers have a strong interest in promoting diversity and encouraging employees across diverse demographic groups to thrive in their workplaces. In furtherance of these legitimate interests, employers must be permitted to “nip in the bud” the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a “hostile workplace,” rather than waiting until an actionable hostile workplace has been created before taking action. (Sophir, 2018) 3. The feminist discussion of an ethic of care has a long history, from early conceptions deriving from maternal care (Noddings, 1984), to feminist challenges to ethics based on masculine models (Fisher & Tronto, 1990; Gilligan, 1993; Held, 1995; Tronto, 1987), to more recent ­conceptualization expanding the notion of what care means today (Gilligan & Richards, 2018; Noddings, 2013; Tronto, 2013, 2015).

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4. In the NLRB memo that decided against Damore, Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir (2018) notes that, [I]n the version of the document upon which the Employer based its investigation…. [Damore] also argued that, “Men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women, such that there are more men at both the top and bottom of the distribution. Thus, [Damore] posited, the Employer’s preference to hire from the “top of the curve” may result in a candidate pool with fewer females than those of “less selective” tech companies. (p. 2) 5. In the NLRB memo that decided against Damore, Sophir (2018) refers to these qualifiers and hedges as “limiting language” and “disclaimers.” Nevertheless, the NLRB sided with Google in determining that Damore’s firing was legal because his claims could contribute to a “hostile workplace.” 6. Machin and Mayr (2012) define overlexicalization as “where we find a word or its synonyms ‘overpresent’ in a text (i.e. the word or its synonyms are used more than we would normally expect). This is normally evidence of some kind of moral awkwardness or attempt to over-persuade” (p. 222). 7. Even though Silicon Valley is widely considered to be politically left-leaning, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a Senate hearing under questioning from Republican Ted Cruz (Schwartz, 2018), Broockman, Ferenstein, and Malhotra (2019), in fact, argue that “technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies”—a mix that Lindsey and Teles (2017) call “liberaltarianism” (p. 175). 8. Indeed, others substantiate that tech for Google was primarily about engineering. For example, Levy (2011) notes that as Google grew, The center of gravity remained at Building Zero…. It was where the engineers [emphasis in the original] were, and they were royalty at Google. Those who had gotten jobs at Google without computer science degrees—the people churning out tasks such as communications, billing, human resources, and even building facilities administration— weren’t exactly second-class citizens, but definitely a lower class of citizens. (p. 130) 9. Of course, missing from Damore’s discussion of the “long, stressful hours” are those many workers who struggle to cobble together enough hours at poorly compensated (or, in the case of home-life, usually unpaid) labor in order to get by. See, for example, Ehrenreich (2001); Hochschild and Machung (2012). 10. Can caring and empathy be taught? Researchers working on this field say yes. See Baron-Cohen, Golan, and Ashwin (2009) for evidence of success in teaching children on the autism spectrum, and Spiro (1992, 2009) on the importance of empathy education for physicians.

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References Anders, G. (2017). You can do anything: The surprising power of a “useless” liberal arts education. Little Brown. Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The essential difference: Male and female brains and the truth about autism. Basic Books. Baron-Cohen, S., Golan, O., & Ashwin, E. (2009). Can emotion recognition be taught to children with autism spectrum conditions? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 3567–3574. https://doi.org/10.1098/ rstb.2009.0191 Bloom, P. (2014, September 10). Against empathy. Boston Review. Retrieved from https://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy Broockman, D. E., Ferenstein, G., & Malhotra, N. (2019). Predispositions and the political behavior of American economic elites: Evidence from technology entrepreneurs. American Journal of Political Science, 63(1), 212–233. https:// doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12408 Burnson, R. (2020, May 8). Ex-Google engineer who became right-wing hero ends suit quietly. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2020-05-09/ex-google-engineer-who-became-right-wing-heroquietly-ends-suit Cameron, D. (2010). Gender, language, and the new biologism. Constellations, 17(4), 526–539. Chang, E. (2018). Brotopia: Breaking up the boy’s club of Silicon Valley. Portfolio Press. Damore, J. (2017). Google’s ideological echo chamber. Retrieved from https:// www.dhillonlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Damore-GoogleManifesto.pdf Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113–126. Eadiciccio, L. (2016, July 1). Google’s diversity efforts still have a long way to go. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://time.com/4391031/ google-diversity-statistics-2016/ Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickel and dimed: On (not) getting by in America. Henry Holt. Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender: How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Norton. Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. In E. K. Abel & M.  K. Nelson (Eds.), Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives (pp. 35–62). SUNY Press. Gilligan, C. (1993). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

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Lindsey, B., & Teles, S. M. (2017). The captured economy: How the powerful enrich themselves, slow down growth, and increase inequality. Oxford University Press. Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. Sage. Melfi, T. (Director). (2016). Hidden figures [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethical moral education. University of California Press. Noddings, N. (2013). Care: A relational approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed., updated). University of California Press. O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books. Pao, E. (2017). Reset: My fight for inclusion and lasting change. Spiegel & Grau. Perez, C.  C. (2019). Invisible women: Data bias in a world designed for men. Abrams Press. Pichai, S. (2017, August 8). Note to employees from CEO Sundar Pichai. Google, The Keyword. Retrieved from https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/ note-employees-ceo-sundar-pichai/ Pichai, S. (2020, June 17). Our commitments to racial equity. Google, The Keyword. Retrieved from https://www.blog.google/inside-google/companyannouncements/commitments-racial-equity/ Reimann, N. (2020, May 13). Google cuts diversity programs over fears of seeming anti-conservative, according to report. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/05/13/google-cutsdiversity-programs-over-fears-of-seeming-anti-conservative-according-toreport/#67ef162a3599 Schmidt, E., & Rosenberg, J. (2014). How Google works. Grand Central Publishing. Schwartz, I. (2018). Zuckerberg to Cruz on bias: Silicon Valley “extremely left-­ leaning” place, “I understand” the Concern. RealClear Politics. Retrieved from https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/04/10/zuckerberg_to_ cruz_on_bias_silicon_valley_extremely_left-leaning_place_i_understand_the_ concern.html Sophir, J. L. (2018, January 16). Advice Memorandum, Google Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., Case 32-CA-205351. National Labor Relations Board, Office of the General Counsel. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/ file/d/1K1JRtRYBLyhhgkJLXnW2Nxjo5Bn6lw5V/view Spiro, H. (1992). What is empathy and can it be taught? Annals of Internal Medicine, 116(10), 843–846. Spiro, H. (2009). Commentary: The practice of empathy. Academic Medicine, 84(9), 1177–1179.

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CHAPTER 10

Lessons for Feminist Vigilance Against Gun Violence Patty Sotirin

Moms Demand Action for Gun  Sense in America (hereafter Moms Demand Action or Moms), a grassroots organization, now with chapters in every state, began as a Facebook page created by Shannon Watts, a stay-­ at-­home mother of five, in reaction to the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in 2012. Moms Demand Action promotes vigilant, postfeminist attention to the policies and politics of gun control summarized in its original slogan, “One Tough Mother,” referring to the tenacity, resilience, and appeal to maternal ferocity of Moms activism—who better to protect children from gun violence than mothers? At the same time, Moms Demand Action enacts what might be thought of as feminist vigilance. Moms activism is embodied, engendered, riddled by affective energies of fear, trauma, and care, and caught up in material relations and contexts. This chapter draws lessons for feminist vigilance as pragmatic civic action by illustrating two models of vigilant care in the work of Moms Demand Action.

P. Sotirin (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1_10

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Two campaigns by the Moms Demand Action organization illustrate vigilant care as a force for civic action. One is a Moms signature campaign, Be SMART, focused on parental responsibility for gun storage and accessibility, a campaign that mobilizes maternalism in the figure of “mom” as ultimately responsible for child safety and the threat of gun violence in schools, in neighborhoods, and in homes. The other is spearheaded by the umbrella organization for Moms, Everytown for Gun Safety (hereafter Everytown). In February 2020, Everytown joined with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), two of the largest educational associations in the U.S., to issue a protest against Active Shooter Drills in primary and secondary schools. These are campaigns of civic vigilance and, as I will argue, they offer lessons for feminist vigilance (despite the fact that Moms is by no means a feminist organization). While I focus explicitly on the Moms Demand Action campaigns, my purpose in this chapter is to explore the grounding of feminist vigilance in a conception of care as civic action. Both Moms campaigns offer generative perspectives for understanding feminist vigilance through the vitalities and ambivalences of care. This is rich ground for rethinking vigilance. I begin by considering the turn from justice to care in gun politics and how maternalism has been mobilized as a moral mandate. Whereas vigilance as social action has been historically grounded in justice (or the perception of injustice as a warrant for vigilant self-protection), the vigilance of Moms has been grounded in maternal care for the safety of children. Such a grounding is both problematic and a force in itself.

Turning from Justice to Care The focus of U.S. public debates over gun violence shifted after the 1990s from a focus on crimes committed by criminals with guns to a focus on mass shootings and protecting innocent victims (Carlson & Goss, 2017). While justice remains central to these debates, a moral mandate of protection has become critical. The National Rifle Association’s (hereafter NRA) admonition, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” claims a neoliberal moral mandate—the responsibility for self-­ defense and violence as protection.1 This is the vigilante “hero” model and it has a mythic suasory appeal in the American imagination. Yet despite the popularity of arming teachers and allowing guns into public venues, research shows that few people actually defend themselves with guns

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(Hemenway & Solnick, 2015). Against such a model, Moms counters with maternalism as a moral force drawn on care as a relational and situational mandate to advocate for vigilant protection of children from gun violence. Maternalism is cast as a moral and civic commitment to the welfare of the community’s and the nation’s children (Bell, 2005). Whereas the male vigilante figure authorizes vigilantes to “take justice into their own hands” because institutionalized justice has failed, it is the literal mobilization of maternal care that authorizes Moms as vigilant neighbors and concerned parents. In other words, this is a vigilance not only of justice but of care. While the essentialism and parochialism of maternal care as a moral perspective has been adamantly decried, maternalism remains a potent force in debates over gun violence (Carlson & Goss, 2017; Goss, 2017). I link maternalism to Tronto’s (1987, 1995) expanded conception of care as an ethico-political repertoire of practices including what we care about and for, the carefulness of our thoughts and actions, the labor of caring, what care can do, the affective energies and dynamics of affection, and the ethico-political dimensions of responsibility, obligation, and dependence/ independence/interdependence. Maternal care as I use it here is not about mothering per se. Instead, it is a discursive complex articulating diverse instantiations of adult care for children, particularly the moral mandate to protect children and prioritize their best interests; the normative rules and roles of adults, particularly women, to prioritize this moral injunction as/ above their own self-interests; the historical development of childhood as distinct from adulthood with associations of dependency, vulnerability, incompetence, and immaturity; and the institutional and social segregation of children into special places (schools), by social exclusion (from work, sex), through compartmentalized and segregated treatment in institutions (legal, judicial) and systems (welfare, consumption) (McCarthy, et al., 2003). Based on their interviews with parents, McCarthy et al. observed, “The moral imperative that children’s needs take precedence may be one of the few remaining unquestionable moral assertions” (p. 139). Thus, maternalism as a civic force mobilizes an expansive moral mandate for  vigilance over children’s well-being and care and it is this more expansive mandate for vigilant care that energizes the call to advocacy against gun violence by Moms and other organizations.

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Mobilizing Maternal Care as Vigilant Civic Advocacy Although mobilizing maternalism in gun control campaigns risks invoking the oppressive ideologies of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996), it has proven to be a pragmatic strategy that recognizes the powerful moral mandate of maternal protection and acknowledges the gendered implications of gun violence. Indeed, Goss (2017) holds that mobilizing maternalism has been a critical strategy in focusing gun control advocacy on the threat gun violence poses to children and families. Unfortunately, statistics bear out this threat (Everytownresearch, 2020b). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from 2018 reveals that firearms have now surpassed motor vehicle deaths as the leading cause of death for children and teens in America (CDC, 2014–2018). Children under 13 are most likely to die from firearms in their own homes in incidents of domestic or family violence with Black children and teens 14 times more likely to die than White children and teens  (CDC, 2014–2018). Since 2010, the firearm suicide rate among children and teens has increased by 65% (Everytownresearch, 2020b). In addition, women are most at risk for death or injury from gunshots in their homes and roles as mothers, wives, girlfriends, and parents. On average, 52 women are shot and killed every month in the U.S. by intimate partners (Everytownresearch, 2019, Oct. 17). Along with the grim statistics that confirm the dangers of gun violence for children, women, and families, it is the case that regardless of what the particular incident is, a majority of gun shootings involve mothers. Consider: for every deadly school shooting, police shooting, accidental child shooting, and suicide by gun, there are mothers mourning and other mothers organizing their lives and choices around an increased sense of danger and vulnerability. In the words of Moms founder Shannon Watts in her book Fight Like a Mother, “For mothers, the thought of losing a child is unbearable. And while suffering such a loss is terrible to contemplate, it’s also liberating. It empowers you to protect your kids as if you have nothing to lose. Because if you lost your kids, you would feel as though you’d lost everything” (2019, 24). Her statement gives maternal care a critical existential significance, powerfully underwriting the moral mandate to protect children and providing a rationale for moving out of the private sphere to take up political and civic action. Watts very intentionally calls on the legacies of earlier campaigns invoking maternalism including the invitation to “Mama Grizzlies” in the ill-fated vice-­ presidential campaign of Sarah Palin (Rodino-Colocino, 2012), Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and the Million Mom March against

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gun violence in 2000. I briefly outline how the latter two campaigns affirm the efficacy of maternalism as a pragmatic force for political and civic action. MADD, established in 1980, has waged an extended and ultimately successful campaign to reduce motor vehicle fatalities, institute policies to control underage drinking and driving, and support victims of drunk driving (Fell & Voas, 2006; Marshall & Oleson, 1994). The group effectively mobilizes maternalism to organize women for public policy change. As Hamilton (2000, p. 90) notes, there are few civic organizations that are as “widely recognized, powerful, and enduring” as MADD. A direct antecedent to Moms Demand Action is the Million Mom March for gun control (Goss, 2017; Hayden, 2003). The March took place on the Washington, DC, National Mall on May 14, 2000, with 750,000 people in attendance and thousands more at satellite marches in major cities (Wikipedia). Hayden (2003) makes a rhetorical case for understanding women’s collective mobilization in the Million Mom March not as an essentialist enactment of motherhood but as an expansive and inclusive mode of civic action that bodes an alternative model of communal life and mutual responsibility: “a social and political worldview in which nurturance, empathy, and care are privileged” (p. 212). In contrast to Hayden, Goss (2017,  2003) analyzes the Million Mom March as evidence of emerging forms of women’s political advocacy. Goss and Heaney (2010) extol the hybridity of the March’s appeal, noting that both maternalist and post-feminist civic identities were enjoined to address gun violence. (It seems notable that the heteronormative assumptions underwriting such identities remain unquestioned.) They note that documents from the March use the “language of level-headed, pragmatic motherhood” to construct an underlying narrative that “Women, and mothers in particular, were practical citizens who wanted commonsense gun control policy to protect children” (2010, p. 35). Summarily, these analyses of the March advance the vigilance of no-nonsense mothers against the threat guns pose to children and families as well as a grand vision of transformative social change premised in maternal care as a world view. These features of maternal care are evident in Moms Demand Action since it first organized in 2013. Notably, the name “Moms Demand Action for Gun  Sense in America” echoes the appeal to no-nonsense motherhood. A year after it began, Moms joined with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to form Everytown for Gun Safety (Everytown), now a wellfunded gun violence prevention organization claiming 2.5 million members. From 2013–2018, Moms maintained its own website and activities until a rebranding in 2019. The online changes are worth noting because

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the overt appeal to mothers was strategically redirected to “a network of survivors, families, students, friends, teachers, parents, moms, dads, Americans.” Instead of the slogan, “One Tough Mother,” the website now proclaims, “Together, we will end gun violence” (Moms Demand Action, n.d.). As Watts (2020) put it in her book, there was a need to move the organization beyond the image of white suburban mothers and to professionalize the group’s online presence.2 Notably, the Moms signature campaign, Be SMART—which was initiated long before the rebranding—is promoted on a website separate (though linked to) the new website. It too now features the color scheme and inclusive participation of the rebranded site. With this rebranding, mothers are supplemented by a spectrum of activists mobilized around the moral agency of an expanded and inclusive maternalism to engage in civic vigilance against the threat of gun violence.

Vigilance, Responsibilization, and Maternal Care The Moms signature Be SMART campaign is premised on the responsibility of caregivers to safeguard their children and, more generally, of adults to protect children from the danger of unsecured guns. From the website, Besmartforkids.org (2020): “The Be SMART framework is designed to help parents and adults normalize conversations about gun safety and take responsible actions that can prevent child gun deaths and injuries.” The neutral and inclusive civility modeled by the Be SMART script encodes a compelling injunction to moral responsibility, maternal vigilance, and civil conduct, and enacts a well-entrenched commonsense faith in the power of sincere and civil conversation to effect social accord. SMART is an acronym: Secure all guns in your homes and vehicles; Model responsible behavior around guns; Ask about the presence of unsecured guns; Recognize the role of guns in suicide3; Tell your peers to be SMART. Succinctly, the core message as stated on a downloadable pdf and the Be SMART website is, “SMART adults protect kids by storing guns locked, unloaded and separately from ammunition, and by making sure children are never in the presence of unsecured guns”  (Besmartforkids. org, 2020). The campaign is not only an educational and awareness effort informed by federal statistics and university research studies but also seeks to instill a script for action. The website offers guides in Spanish and English to demonstrate how to check on gun storage with adults in households where children might visit or reside. In this way, Be SMART recruits

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adults to be vigilant about commonplace gun practices through their social networks and on the basis of not only their familial but their moral caretaking responsibilities. The campaign enjoins all adults to be accountable to the civil and moral obligations of maternal protectiveness. In a Youtube video introduction, the “BeSMART Anthem,” an interracial cast of mothers and fathers who have lost children to gun violence speaks directly to the viewer: a Black military wife, a Black retired police chief, a Hispanic pediatrician, a Spanish-­speaking mother, a white dad: “We all share in the responsibility of keeping our kids safe” (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2019). This diverse group of parents embodies an inclusive appeal to vigilant civic action. Indeed, the Everytown research linked to the Moms site documents the threat of gun violence in an interactive national map of gun incidents involving children’s unintentional injury or death, “#NotAnAccident Index” (Everytownresearch, 2020a). Further, the appeal is to a maternal subject: while adults are urged to remain firm with others when asking that guns be secured before their children visit, this is not depicted as a stand-off or a show of force but as a maternal expression of concern and a shared caretaking responsibility to be vigilant about keeping children safe. Thus, Be SMART is a campaign of maternal vigilance in that it promotes awareness, attention, and action in order to protect against the threat that unsecured guns pose to children, families, neighbors, kin, friends, and communities. A downloadable one-page information sheet, “Asking About Secure Gun Storage,” (Besmartforkids, 2020) provides scripts for having a conversation about gun storage that avoids both awkwardness and politics. The opening paragraph makes a clear distinction: “Owning a gun is a personal decision, but secure storage is a public safety issue.” Sidestepping the divisive politics of gun ownership, Be SMART separates ownership as a personal decision from the public safety issue of gun storage/accessibility. Further, the language in this statement carefully resists the language of gun rights, framing gun ownership as a personal decision rather than a citizen’s right. Ownership is thus depoliticized and rendered a private issue. However, storage is identified as a shared concern and here again, a potentially divisive public debate is sidestepped by naming gun storage as an issue for responsible citizens rather than state mandates or sanctions. The tip sheet offers concrete ways to broach the topic of gun storage and frames this as a shared personal, parental, and civic responsibility

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among adults who take children’s safety as a moral responsibility and civic value. The tips for a productive conversation include sample conversation starters and text messages for talking to other parents and even with teen aged babysitters about whether all guns in the home are secured before a child or teen visits. The advice is to “sandwich” the question about gun storage between  questions about other safety issues (unfriendly dogs, swimming pools, and the like): “Before I drop my son off, I just want to check to see if you have pets? And also ask if you have firearms in your house and confirm how they are stored. I want to make sure he knows your safety rules.” Parents are advised to make gun storage a “Deal Breaker”— “I’m sorry but unless you make sure your guns are locked the entire time we’re/John’s at your home, we/he won’t be able to make it.” Noting that “sometimes it is easier to use email”  to talk with family and friends, Be SMART activates more expansive informal networks than those limited to face-to-face and proximate vicinity. The scripts, tips, and Be SMART practices  advance a model of polite civil interaction that invokes, through everyday talk, the moral injunction to safeguard children and renders vigilance over gun safety part of responsible family and community life. The  Be SMART campaign  advances a particular fantasy of American civic life as polite, rational, and based on common values and concerns, in this case, the moral authority of maternal protectiveness, the civil, rational conduct of communal relations, and shared responsibility for children’s safety. The campaign extends the moral mandate of maternal care for vulnerable children beyond mothers even as it strengthens an essentialist maternalism as the basis for civic action. At the same time, this call to advocacy contributes to a neoliberal construction of citizenship as moralized and “responsibilized,” that is, exercising self-governing autonomy to enact reasonable choices in the conduct of personal and civil life (Sotirin, 2016). This is a vision of American life that accords with neoliberal injunctions to privatize social problems and remedies and to expect citizens to make reasonable and responsible choices to manage their own welfare and safety (King, 2003). As Clarke put it, “ideal citizens are moralized, choice-­ making, self-directing subjects” taking responsibility for good choices as consumers, citizens, and individuals (2005, p. 451). Rather than relying on civil authorities and agencies, citizens must make their own life choices guided by prevailing codes of decency and reasonableness. Citizens are “self-regulating” (Dean, 1999) and “empowered” to act as responsible and independent agents of personal and civic life. Be SMART poses gun safety as a smart, responsible, and moral choice, constituting the issue as a commonsense (“no non-sense”) matter among

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“responsibilized” citizens. The call to maternal citizenship at the core of Moms Demand Action and the Be SMART campaign enacts what Berlant (1988, 1998) calls “intimate-citizenship” in which affective attachments and intimate knowledge underwrite a prevailing ethic of self-governance. In this sense, the Be SMART campaign promotes the self-restraint of polite conversation, the discipline of civil decency, and the moral rectitude of maternal protectiveness to address the risk of accidental gun tragedies that threatens the intimate intelligibility of this gendered and genteel vision of American life. SMART Lessons for Feminist Vigilance All of this raises the question: how does the Be SMART campaign enact feminist vigilance? Moms does not claim a feminist orientation yet it is possible to draw out lessons for feminist vigilance. Such lessons must begin by acknowledging the reproductive power dynamics of Moms and Be SMART.  The Moms appeal to maternal vigilance articulates ideological and affective forces in ways that reproduce essentialist assumptions, ignore intersectional power inequities, and assume a model of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996). So while pointed appeals to grief, anger, and hope energize the vigilance of Moms, there is little acknowledgment that maternal agency is complicated by class and race and caught up in politics of gender and sex. Additionally, the Be SMART script for neighborly conversations emphasizes polite conversation and a performance of civility that reproduces hegemonic norms of (white) neoliberal responsibilization. However, it is the case that resisting the hegemonic force of civility has been part of the feminist cannon for decades. Feminist scholars like Anzaldúa, hooks, and Lorde have called for a variety of “uncivil” identities and practices. A few recent examples: Ahmed (2010) issues a “feminist killjoy manifesto”; Griffin (2012) reclaims the angry Black woman (see also Ahmed, 2009); Calafell (2007) argues for asserting monstrous (queer) femininity; and Patton (2004) argues that the dominant model of civility effects a white supremacist ideology that suppresses Black women and reproduces a social infrastructure of racism (see also Bell (2020), pp. 27–29 in this volume, on the politics of refusal). Berlant (1993, p. 568), advocating what she calls “Diva citizenship,” argues that codes of civility “discipline the ways women take, hold, use, respect, or demonize public authority” so that breaches of class and racial decorum are necessary if feminists hope to

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effect radical social change, or, in this case, to engage the politics of gun control and vigilance. Feminist conversations that enact the affective force of maternal care need not skirt politics or disagreements with carefully worded conversations nor temper anger through careful scripting. Instead, such conversations may be impassioned, forceful, and care-full. Repressing the intensities of issues we care about may serve civility but does not advance the matter at hand. Consider the angry, tearful outburst of one mother during a news interview the day after her son was shot in a Silicon Valley night club: “I don’t want prayers, I want gun control” became the news headline (Associated Press, 2018). Her outburst was raw with pain, grief, and anger, not unexpected from a mother of a gun victim; but such calls for gun control have had little impact despite their increasing prevalence over the past two decades. Maybe it’s the distraught mother stereotype that disempowers these individual efforts. Or that these cries can be readily absorbed by a calculus that renders pain, anger, and loss as acceptable societal costs (Butler, 2004). Yet maternal care as a vital affective force need not be disciplined by a hegemonic civility or the governing substructure of neoliberal responsibilization. The lesson for feminist vigilance is to resist such disciplining constraints on the energies of anger and grief: press the issue; give in to impatience; forego gentility; be a feminist killjoy.

The Traumatizing Hypervigilance of Active Shooter Drills According to the Everytown database for “Gunfire on School Grounds in the United States,” from 2013–2019, there were 347 shooting incidents on school grounds in which 129 people were killed and 270 wounded, 208 of them students (Everytownresearch, 2020c). While these statistics show that school shootings are rare, they have inspired widespread fear and hypervigilance against the threat of an armed shooter breaching school defenses to kill innocent school children. One popular response has been required active shooter drills involving kids in shooter enactments. Over 95% of elementary and secondary schools around the country now require these drills (O’Brien, 2020). The drills put hypervigilance into practice. They materialize the danger, vulnerability, and fear inspired by the active shooter scenario that dominates the contemporary cultural imaginary. Drills make clear that vigilance is not only attentional and corporeal but entwined in the politics of

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cultural narratives, material arrangements, and spatial relations and forces. In this section, I consider active shooter drills in schools from a perspective on cultural narratives of vigilance and trauma and school spaces as processual rather than stable, less as containers for than as shifting relations among sounds, objects, arrangements, and actions (McAlister & Ewalt, 2013, pp.  3–4). This reconsideration explores vigilance as narrative-­ material-­spatial and concludes with lessons for a feminist vigilance of care. “Keeping Our Schools Safe: A Plan for Preventing Mass Shootings and Ending Gun Violence in American Schools” (hereafter the Plan), advanced by Everytown (including Moms and Students for Gun Sense in America, hereafter Students), AFT, and NEA (Everytown for Gun Safety, et  al., 2020, May 19), includes gun control legislation and community practices to prevent gun violence—Be SMART is in this part of the plan—as well as a trauma-informed approach to making schools safe from gun violence— the petition against active shooter drills is in this part of the plan. Among other measures to eliminate gun violence from schools, the report recommends that active shooter drills be modified in recognition of their often traumatizing impact on children. For Moms Demand Action, this campaign forwards the group’s raison d’etre to exercise maternal vigilance over gun safety and the threat of violence. Protecting children from gun violence invokes maternal response not only to the fear of a child’s death but to the impact of a child’s fear as well. Maternal care is associated with acts of comfort and reassurance; in the case of gun violence, acts of care include witnessing as well as responding to the terror and pain of gun victims, especially children. The need for such care is grounded in the widespread experience of gun violence in America: over half of surveyed adults have witnessed a shooting; 25% of school children have witnessed acts of violence and over 3 million have seen someone shot (Everytownresearch, 2019, May 29). Scenes of students, families, and communities in the aftermath of school shootings have propelled public demand for more and stronger measures to make schools safe from gun violence. In the face of the ongoing failure of lawmakers to pass uniform gun control legislation, a patchwork of regulations and requirements has emerged across the country and school districts have invested heavily in various plans, programs, equipment, and facility modifications. There is now a $2.7 billion industry serving the demands for school safety (InformaTech, 2018). These social and economic activities contribute to an orientation of hypervigilance manifested in an ongoing demand for more protection for students regardless of the

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measures taken as any new school shooting reinforces the prevailing sense of risk, danger, and insecurity. A variety of measures have become commonplace in order to “harden” schools so that they do not present “soft” targets for gun violence including (with the percentage of U.S. schools using these measures): [H]aving a written plan for procedures to be performed in the event of an ‘active shooter’ (92%), monitored (94%) or locked (78%) doors to the building, security cameras (81%), faculty and staff with IDs (68%), electronic notification system in school (73%), classrooms be locked from inside (67%), lockers randomly checked (53%), and random metal detector checks in high schools (11%). (Price & Khubchandani, 2019, p. 161)

There have been few studies of these measures to establish their effectiveness in reducing or eliminating the threat of gun violence (Smart, et al., 2020). Unsurprisingly, students, parents, teachers, school administrators, communities, law enforcement, and the general public continue to view schools as places of risk and vulnerability. These measures may or may not increase protection for students but they most certainly affirm the public orientation of hypervigilance (Everytownresearch, 2020, Feb. 11). To the extent that schools adopt uncertain firearm violence prevention measures, they are creating both a false sense of security and a lived experience of risk and vulnerability. This is the case with active shooter drills that I contend are recrafting material life of and in schools. Notably, active shooter drills manifest what Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism”: “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.” These drills follow a particular narrative of danger, vigilance, and the hope for protection and safety and yet they invoke fear, trauma, and insecurity. In short, they enact a fantasy about protecting children and childhood innocence while creating the trauma they hope to defer. This undoing involves a collusion of material-spatial-affective relations. I make this case by thinking more closely about the spatial relations and lived experiences of the drills themselves and the counter-practices proposed in the Plan. In particular, I argue that the Plan intervenes in the prevailing hypervigilant moment, offering a repertoire of measures that can be thought of as recasting vigilance as care. This re-focus offers a few lessons for a feminist vigilance of care.

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Trauma, Scary Spaces, and Scarier Binaries The press release (Everytown for Gun Safety, et al., 2020, Feb. 13) for the Plan emphasizes that active shooter drills are bad for kids, citing the leaders of the associated organizations: “It’s now clear that unannounced active shooter drills are scaring America’s students without making them any safer” (John Feinblatt, president of Everytown); “Our students are already experiencing record levels of trauma and anxiety—first, because of the threat of shootings in schools, and now with the way these active shooter drills have been done” (Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT); “As educators, ensuring our students’ safety and well-being is our number one priority. So traumatizing students as we work to keep students safe from gun violence is not the answer” (Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of NEA); “As parents, we should refuse to accept extreme and unannounced drills as the new normal for our children. As volunteers, we will work to keep our schools safe without traumatizing our children in the process.” (Shannon Watts, founder of Moms)

Trauma as defined in the Everytown Plan includes a list of psychic and physical problems—“bad dreams, fear of coming to school, asthma attacks, increased antidepressant prescriptions” (Everytown for Gun Safety et al., May 19, p. 23). Certainly experiencing an active shooter in the school is traumatic and children exhibiting symptoms of trauma need caring attention. However, my interest is in the claim that active shooter drills are themselves traumatizing. What I suggest is that trauma is not only a psychological consequence of these drills but is coconstituted through the narratives, affects, materialities, and spaces of such drills. Accordingly, I focus on the articulation of bodies, spaces, and mobilities that refigure learning spaces into “scary spaces” of hiding, enclosure, waiting, securitization, and physical defense. This is aptly recognized in the following song, setting drill procedures to the popular nursery tune, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”: Lockdown, Lockdown. Lock the door./ Shut the lights off, Say no more./ Go behind the desk and hide./ Wait until it’s safe inside./ Lockdown, Lockdown, it’s all done./ Now it’s time to have some fun!—Seen on a poster at Arthur D Healey School, Somerville, MA. Sung to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” (Everytownresearch et al., 2020, May 19)

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The innocence culturally associated with the rhyme contrasts with the sociospatial relations and cultural narrative that figure in its instructions. There is darkness and silence; familiar objects now refashion learning spaces into hiding spaces; passive waiting inside is threatened by a menace from outside. Thus, the active shooter drill described in the rhyme alludes to a very familiar hypervigilant cultural narrative that casts the shooter as mobile, menacing, unrelenting, homicidal; the children as stationary, frightened, vulnerable, helpless; and the classroom spaces they inhabit as scary and residually unsettled. It is a narrative still-life that offers only limited interventions: seeing and not seeing shooters and children’s bodies and movements, lockdown and lockout techniques and technologies, and the heroic “good guy with a gun”—armed guards, teachers, police. Yet such interventions remain reactive, limited, and unsubstantiated (indeed, available studies suggest that armed guards and teachers might create more risk). They also cast available adults in traditional narratives of protectionist and masculinist vigilantism (see Sotirin, 2020, this volume, pp. 1–19). This dominant narrative of danger and hypervigilance entails binary relations: hard/soft, outside/inside, predator/prey, evil/innocence, threat/vulnerability, mobile/static, and malevolence/care. The binary relations construct a rigid narrative about an active shooter (outside/ predator/evil/threatening/mobile/destructive) and vulnerable children (inside/prey/innocent/vulnerable/static). Yet while these binary relations affirm hypervigilance, there is more going on in the interstices of such bifurcated relations and spaces. Here I turn to the Moms and Everytown coalition Plan to revisit the trauma and hypervigilance of the active shooter drill. The Plan’s Interventions The goal of the Plan is to “end gun violence in schools” and to this end, it intervenes in the binary relations and fixed affordances that configure active shooter drills. For example, the Plan questions the external threat of the mass shooter with alternative facts showing that most school shooters are not evil outsiders but have some connection to the school whether as current or previous students or by virtue of relationships with those at the school.4 The switch disrupts critical binaries that undergird active shooter drills—external threat/internal vulnerability; evil/innocence—and invites care for and about both shooters and children, both of whom are now

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enfolded into the school body. The Plan also promotes a model of the community school as “the new heart of the community” with extensive partnerships among stakeholders in and outside the school. In this, the Plan articulates elements left out of the dominant narrative about school shootings, including the spaces and mobilities inside and outside facilities as well as issues of race, class, and generational needs. The Plan also expands both the spaces of school that children traverse and inhabit beyond the physical school and the material affordances of proximate environments: Create safe passages to and from school, provide alternatives to out-of-­ school suspensions that offer meaningful educational opportunities for students; reduce suspension rates and break the school-to-prison pipeline; increase access to mentoring and counseling services both inside and outside the school, starting in preschool, and incorporate inclusive restorative justice into discipline policies. (p. 24)

In short, rather than undifferentiated children herded together in active shooter drills, the Plan articulates differentiated bodies within an assemblage of differences, some social, some physical, some spatial, some institutional, some intimate, some historical. In this, the Plan advances an agenda of care for at-risk communities addressing social inequities, material disparities, communal patterns of mental and physical illnesses, and alternative practices of mentoring, discipline, and mobility. Regarding drills themselves, the Plan advocates trauma-informed training and drills that do not involve realistic enactments, are pre-announced to parents, and preferably don’t involve children at all, thereby side-­ stepping the traumatic hypervigilance of active shooter drills. More importantly, the Plan calls out a multiplicity of everyday school traumas: bullying, harassment, racial/ethnic conflicts, mental health, zero tolerance disciplinary policies, and other social issues and practices that contribute to the proliferation and familiarity of unsafe spaces and create the conditions for violence from within school life (EveryTown for Gun Safety et al., 2020, May 19). This acknowledgment expands forces of threat and protection beyond the active shooter narrative. In this way, the Plan intervenes in the hypervigilance of contemporary school protection narratives and measures but it does so by complicating and expanding the realities of school violence. The Plan is not a feminist plan: it remains firmly ensconced in the

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assumptions of responsibilization and neoliberal social uplift. Yet it catalyzes lessons for feminist vigilance.

Feminist Lessons: Re-visioning, Re-turning, and Caring for Everything I find lessons for a feminist vigilance of care not in the specific recommendations of the Plan but in the ambiguities, fluidities, and possibilities that disrupt the hypervigilance of school defenses and assumptions. The lessons for feminist vigilance entail re-visioning genres of hypervigilance and violence, re-turning to new worlds, and respecting the moral limits of care. I begin with a classic feminist mode of insight and imagination: “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (Rich, 1972, p. 18). Re-vision is not merely about being attentive or focused; it is about seeing again differently, that is, re-seeing the realities of women’s lived experiences and histories as oppressive or arbitrary but seeing as well possibilities and hope for other futures. Here I want to offer an inflection on re-visioning that moves away from its epistemological ambitions for coming to know through self-reflection. Rich presciently advocated seeing multiplicities rather than reconciling tensions, especially tensions of anger and hope. Feminist vigilance may be thought of similarly: as re-focusing anger, attending to new possibilities, and revising strategies of care and hope. The Everytown Plan invites such feminist re-visioning; we might see in it a new world, alive with anger and struggle yet attending differently to established practices and institutions on the basis of care for inclusive well-­ being, equity, and justice. Further, as Berlant (2011) warns, we have come to depend on narratives of crisis and trauma as the prevailing genre for making sense of everyday life. The Plan advanced by Moms and the Everytown coalition remains within this genre, a logic of crisis, vulnerability, threat, and hypervigilance that contributes to the ongoing production and circulation of these risks, fears, and anxieties. And while I have extolled the Plan for calling attention to matters of everyday school trauma and embedded injustices that we must care about if we want to end gun violence in schools, the governing logic of this Plan retains an appeal to stakeholders whose shared moral (maternalist) commitments narrow the purview of what matters. There is

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need, then, for further feminist re-visioning. Although she is speaking about how writers expand our moral sympathies, Sontag’s (2007) observations speak to what is at stake when a vigilance of care draws on moral injunctions to care about what matters from particular moral perspectives: When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world. (p. 226)

Perhaps we can stop gun violence in schools but violence permeates contemporary life. Certainly, children killed in gun violence constitute grievable losses; and yet, as one journalist put it, “The debate over gun violence was over once America decided that killing children was acceptable” (Hodges, 2015). Despite the seemingly universal injunction to protect children, other forces trump this mandate: the pernicious institutionalization of state and civil violence in the service of historically, culturally, materially entrenched privileges. Thus, there is a need to re-­ vision the prevailing genre of crisis and trauma. Such a re-vision is offered in Butler’s treatise on the grievability of a life. She posits that public grief over deaths from gun violence is segregated and disparate: “The differential distribution of grievability across populations has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference” (2004, p.  24). It is not possible to end gun violence in schools separate from addressing the systemic oppressions and violences perpetuated in the service of a sectarian dream of security, control, and vigilance over peace and order. Butler calls for revising the demand for traumatizing security measures through care for the vulnerabilities and fragilities of human life. And she warns against confounding care with moral justifications for gun violence. Her vigilance over the shared fragility of life is an expansive and universalist perspective on care for each other that cautions against confounding moral obligations and mandates with violent means for attaining security and peace. It is, ultimately, a revised narrative, a genre re-vision. Yet as the discussion of hypervigilant active shooter drills above makes clear, there are complex entanglements beyond the human that must be

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considered in a vigilant re-vision of what else is possible. Barad’s conception of diffraction as re-turning offers a useful corrective. Unlike re-vision, re-turning is not “reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-­ turning as in turning it over and over again” (2014, p. 168). Diffraction is, like Rich’s re-vision, an optical metaphor. Diffraction refers to “iterative reconfigurings of patterns of differentiating-entangling” (p. 168). Barad posits re-turning as a way to examine diffracting in/as moments of feminist theorizing about difference. She offers an analogy: We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over—ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (p. 168)

I began this chapter by noting that feminist care as civic action is rich ground for reworking feminist vigilance; an apt invitation for earthworm re-turning. Re-turning to the nursery rhyme of an elementary school lockdown drill, we might burrow through the assurances of school readiness and subsequent traumatic impacts on participants’ psyches. A feminist re-­ turning to this scenario highlights vigilance as what a body can do: to be vigilant is to be in a physiological state of tension and readiness that aligns with a sensory attentional focus; on the alert, attuned to a sensorium of sounds, smells, sensations, feelings. Vigilance is often studied as a cognitive activity—how to stay alert, how to stay focused. However, vigilance in the active shooter scenarios is not limited to cognitive activity but is animated in networks of coconstituting actants (an actant does not imply human action or agency but is rather “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others”; see Latour, 1996). Vigilance becomes an entanglement of physiological and affective energies, corporeal proximities, fluid spaces, animate and inanimate actants. In active shooter drills, these agentic co-relations constitute a traumatizing hypervigilance that is not just psychological but material, spatial, corporeal, and performative. A compelling depiction of this traumatizing vigilant assemblage is a short news video of an active shooter lockdown drill at an elementary school (CBS Evening News, 2018). The camera zooms in on children

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huddled behind a hastily constructed barrier made from their desks, eyes wide, breathing audibly, waiting, listening. No one says anything until the loudspeaker voice calls “All Clear.” There is a palpable fear animating the scene: the children’s eyes, their crouched bodies, the darkness of the room, the furniture around and above them, the space between their locations and the doorway, the space under the door where light is visible, the sounds of breathing, the momentary space/silence/breathless freeze after “All Clear,” the slow untwining of bodies, breathing, and movements. There are connections among vulnerable bodies, affective flows of fear and dread, and spaces that shift seamlessly from the regulated pathways and regimented arrangements of everyday schooling to constrained spaces holding bodies immobile, refiguring the material facticity of school life and anticipating the physics of a gunshot—force, trajectories, penetrations, relative destructiveness. Trauma and vigilance are thus visceral, fluid, material, and performative: neurochemicals, enfleshed sensations, agentic things, fluid spaces, affecting more-than-human entanglements that “circulate in interdependent more than human relational webs” (de la Bellacasa, 2017, p.  24). Barad advises that feminist re-turning entails a vigilant response: “Responding—being responsible/response-able—to the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave is perhaps what re-­ turning is about” (2014, p. 184). We are always already in worlds old and new, traumatic and caring, inevitable and revisable. Feminist vigilance must participate in cutting-together “thick tangles” that thread rhizomatically through the spaces, moments, and bodies that affect violence and trauma, re-turning anger and hope toward new diffractions of spacetimematterings. A final lesson: a feminist vigilance of care must remain vigilant over care itself, respect the limits of human capacities, and be response-able to/with more-than-human entanglements. Although I am invoking much more than she intended, I find Sontag’s warning to be prescient when she advances a task that is daunting yet inescapable: “Perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding … to take this in” (2007, p. 226). Re-turning Sontag’s observation to Barad’s conception of responding to timespacematterings, the simultaneity of everything invokes more than a re-vision of our responsibility to acknowledge moral limitations;

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rather, this is about care as response within worlds that are always threaded through by becoming/elsewhere/otherwise. One might say that a feminist vigilance of care is an injunction to care about “the simultaneity of everything,” to eschew the ready absolutions of moral understanding, and to remain vigilant to what else might call on our material-discursive attentiveness so that we can collectively and with care cut-together-apart new worlds.

Gun Violence and Feminist Vigilance This chapter draws lessons for feminist vigilance from two models of vigilant care in the work of Moms Demand Action. In Be SMART, Moms sets out a model of volunteer citizenship premised on maternalism as a moral injunction. Yet it is not the organization per se but the actions and agencies of its communal vigilance that offer lessons: the persistent conversations about securing guns and the arguments for community schools affect maternal networks mobilized around the moralities of care and the everyday traumas of children’s lives. Yet feminist vigilance must abandon civility to mobilize energies of anger and hope. Solnit (2016) opined that hope is fluid, moving like water, undeterred by hegemonic constraints. Just so, a feminist vigilance of care, hope, and anger may be thought of as fluidly and vigilantly rhizomatic, seeking out the cracks and crevices of hegemonic civility and hypervigilant excesses to assert hope for nonviolent futures. In the Plan to “End Gun Violence in Schools” and revise active shooter drills, Moms and a coalition of gun control and educational associations advances an alternative to the traumatizing practices intended to protect vulnerable children and schools from external threats of violence. The Plan criticizes the measures to protect children and harden schools for provoking the traumas they seek to counter. The interventions of the Plan expand schools into communities; dispel binaries like external/internal and evil/innocence by addressing the mundane traumas and violences of standard school practices and spaces; and recognize that schooling is deeply imbricated in the historical and institutional oppressions of racism and classism: prison pipelines, generational poverty, and the disparate provision of mental and health services. Yet the maternalist moral injunction to protect children implicit in the Plan is countermanded by a systemic justification at the heart of endemic gun violence to value and protect some lives over others. A feminist vigilance of care must respond to shared

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fragilities, bow to the limits of moral sensibilities, and engage with the entanglements and differentiations of “everything,” not by abandoning feminist commitments to justice and care but by remaining vigilant about their limitations and vitalities. This makes vigilant care a practice of “re-­ turning” within the dense entanglements that thread through violence and vulnerability. Reframing the work of Moms Demand Action through feminist sensibilities encourages thinking vigilance anew: as the intensities, flows, energies, and affects that articulate and rearticulate a feminist vigilance.

Notes 1. As Wayne LaPierre, then executive vice president of the NRA, famously introduced this slogan after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 that killed 20 children and 6 school staff (CBS DC, 2012). He reiterated it in February after the shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead. President Trump echoed it again after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 27, 2018, where 11 people were fatally shot (Keneally, 2018). 2. Earlier versions of the Moms website are archived by the Internet Archive Project’s Wayback Machine where there are 1820 captures of the site between March 2, 2013, and June 5, 2020. See https://web.archive.org/ web/20180830181824/https://momsdemandaction.org/ for an example of the earlier women-centered Moms campaigns. Prior to the rebranding, the Moms website included a number of women-associated activities recruiting an essentialized maternal subject to protect the welfare of children. For example, the site promoted “momcotts” of retail chains in an effort to get those corporations to rescind open carry policies. It also promoted commemoration walks in honor of gun violence victims known as “Orange Walks” held on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shootings. The rebranding changed orange to red, with volunteers sporting red T-shirts with the Moms logo at all activities. Finally, the original website featured memorial quilts made ostensibly by Moms members for children who died from accidental gunshots. This quintessentially feminine mode of commemoration and public grief disappeared after the rebranding. 3. I have not touched on the issue of teen suicide although this is a plank in the Be SMART campaign. Teen suicide brings in a plethora of other issues including among them the vulnerability of minority-identified teens, bullying, harassment, addictions, and the appeal of self-destructive choices.

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4. Accordingly, the report advocates for extreme risk laws, secure firearm storage laws, 21 as the minimum age to purchase semi-automatic firearms, universal background checks, and threat assessment programs.

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Index1

A Active shooter drills, 17, 194, 202–212 and trauma, 193, 202–211, 225 Affect, affective, 2–3, 5, 9–14, 17, 33, 36–37, 103, 113, 148, 155, 157–158, 176, 179, 193, 195, 201–202, 204–205, 209–213 intensities, energies, 10–12, 17, 193, 195, 201–204, 209–210 research joy, 158–159 sensibility of caring, 148 See also Computation, affective; Computation, voice biases African, 16, 44–45, 56–57, 65–66, 72, 123, 128, 131–138 diaspora, 134–137, 142 femocracy, 45 heritage, 16, 128, 134 Agency, 2–3, 8–10, 15, 31, 33, 85, 93–96, 108, 116–118, 125, 148, 154, 173, 198, 201, 210

Agyeman-Rawlings, Nana Konadu, 48–50 Algorithm, algorithmic, 13, 24, 32, 166–167, 169, 183–185 American Federation of Teachers (AFT), 194, 203, 205 Anger, 2, 11–12, 17, 53, 111, 116, 157, 159, 201–202, 208, 211–212 B Bad feminist, 2 Barad, Karen, 153, 210–211 Berlant, Lauren, 3, 10–12, 109, 112, 201, 204, 208–209 See also Cruel optimism; Hypervigilant, hypervigilance Big Nine (technology corporations), 167, 184 Binary, binaries, 17, 27, 166, 170–174, 183–184, 186, 205–206, 212

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refers to notes

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Sotirin et al. (eds.), Feminist Vigilance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59793-1

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INDEX

Black female gaze, 124–125, 143 Black feminist anticipatory vigilance criteria, 126, 129–142 definition, 124–125 Black feminist vigilance, 16, 67, 69, 71–73, 77–78 Black Lives Matter, 76 Black media portrayals families, 137–138, 140–142 love relationships, 129, 140–142 men, 107, 129–130 white-wash, 131–133 Black Pride, 16, 124, 134–137 Black women beauty, 16, 128, 131–134, 142 and family, 65–66 hair, 132–134 restorative self-care, 14, 67–68, 75, 77–78 role models, 137–142 self-care, 14, 66–68, 71–75, 78–79, 130 See also Myth of Strong Black Womanhood Black Women’s Health Imperative, 78 Body as boundary interface, 33–37 as ethical worlding, 33 materiality, 9, 13, 33–34, 205 See also Embodiment, embodied Butler, Judith, 10, 202, 208 C Calling in, cancel culture, 157 Cancer survivor, 16, 147–152, 158–159 Care, caring, care-giving, 12, 14, 17, 86, 93, 97, 155, 183, 185, 193–198, 206, 207 See also Ethic(s) of care Catholic, 14, 84–97 custody of the eyes, 89–90, 94

immigrants in U.S., 14, 85–88, 96, 97 nuns (see Women Religious) sisters (see Women Religious) Vatican, Vatican II, 86, 94 Catholic institutions Charity Hospital, New Orleans, 88 New York Foundling Asylum, 87 St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York, 88, 95 schools, 85, 87, 89–92, 94, 96 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 196 Chang, Emily, 167, 177, 180–181 Coding, 32, 175–176, 183, 186–187 Colonialism, 8, 56–59, 136–138 Computation, 13, 24–29, 32, 38–39, 177, 186 affective computing, 33, 35–37 ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), 34–36, 38 voice biases, 36–37 Cosmopolitics, cosmopolitical, 13, 43–44, 56–57, 59–60 reconstruction, 57–58 transversal politics, 56–57 Cruel optimism, 10, 13, 103–104, 111–112, 118, 204 See also Berlant, Lauren D Damore, James, 16–17, 165–166, 187n2, 188n4, 188n5 See also Google, Damore memo Data Manifest-no, 31 Diffraction, 210–211 Digilantism, 7 Djaba, Otiko Afisa, 44, 49–51 Domestic violence, 15, 48–49, 58–59, 102 abused women, 15, 50, 65–66, 101–102

 INDEX 

abuse narratives, 103, 112–113 abusers, 101, 103 coercive control, 105–106, 109, 116 gaslighting, 105–106 structural factors, 108 See also Intimate partner violence (IPV); Male-partner Violence (MPV); Post-awareness (of intimate partner violence) Domestic Violence Coalition, Ghana, 58 E Economics laissez faire, 169 See also Neoliberal, neoliberalism Embodiment, embodied, 5, 8–9, 12–14, 16, 33–37, 90–93, 114, 131 See also Methodology, embodied Empathy, empathizing, 16–17, 149, 158, 165–169, 172–179, 183–186, 188n10 Empowerment of women, 8, 13, 46, 57, 58, 60, 103, 124, 134–137 victim empowerment, 107, 108, 111, 118 Essentialism, 4, 10, 11, 27, 168–174, 184 Ethic(s) of care, ethical care, 12, 16, 148–152, 154, 156–160, 166–167, 185–187, 187n3, 195, 208–213 maternal, 10, 193–195 relational, relationality, 8–10, 12, 31, 157–158, 195, 211 See also Research, feminist Ethics, research ethical enough, 154, 156 feminist reflexivity, 154–155, 160

221

participant engagement, 16, 29–30, 125–126, 155, 156, 160 Everytown for Gun Safety, 194, 198, 202–203, 205–208 F Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), 13, 17, 166–168, 170 Femocracy, 45 Films Avengers: Infinity War, 124, 125 Band of Sisters, 95 Bells of St. Mary’s, The, 83 Black Panther, 16, 123–144 Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, The, 15, 113–118 Cold Pursuit, 6 Custody, 112 Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The, 91 Dead Man Walking, 92 Death Wish, 6 Dirty Harry, 6 Dolores Claiborne, 103 Doubt, 92 Enough, 103 Every F-ing Day of My Life, 112 Gaslight, 105–106 Hidden Figures, 181 Just Before Losing Everything, 112 Peppermint, 7 A Question of Habit, 91 Radical Grace, 95 Safe Haven, 103 Silent Voices, 112 Sister Mary Explains It All, 91 Sleeping with the Enemy, 102 Suffragette, 7 Trouble with Angels, The, 91 A Vigilante, 110–111 Vigilante, The (1941; 2016), 6 What’s Love Got to Do with It, 102

222 

INDEX

G Gaze, Black female, 124–125, 143 Genre, 10–12, 102, 208–209 film, 6, 15, 104, 106, 109–113, 117, 125 representation, 149, 151 Ghanaian Women Manifesto Movement, 58–59 GirlTrek, 77–79 Global South, Global Southern, 13, 43, 45–46, 57, 60 Google, 16–17, 35, 165–168, 177–183, 187n1, 187n2, 188n5, 188n8 Damore memo, 16, 165, 167–179 H Haraway, Donna, 9, 13, 23–33, 39n1, 39n2, 39n4, 39–40n5 Manifesto for Cyborgs, 25, 28, 30–32, 38 non-innocence, 24, 28, 38 See also Situated knowledges Hypervigilant, hypervigilance, 2, 3, 10–11, 90, 154, 202–204, 206–208, 210 See also Berlant, Lauren I Implicit bias, 14, 167, 186 Indigenous Women, 15, 113–118 indigenous scholars, tactic of refusal, 30 Informatics of domination, 13, 24–25, 32–34, 38 politics of, 28–29, 31–32 See also Algorithm, algorithmic Intersectional, intersectionality, 2–4, 8, 14, 15, 25, 28, 38, 106, 107, 148, 150, 155, 166, 184, 186, 201

Interviews, research, 16, 124, 126–128, 147, 154, 160 photovoice, 149–151 Intimate partner violence (IPV), 101–109, 112–113, 116, 118n1 See also Domestic violence; Post-­ awareness (of intimate partner violence) K Knowledge embodied, 33, 153, 154 knowledge enterprise, regime, 13, 24, 30, 32 knowledge practices, 33, 155 situated knowledge, 25, 30, 31, 37, 39n2, 156, 158 See also Embodiment, embodied M Male-partner Violence (MPV), 15, 101–113, 118 Marvel’s Black Panther Pre-Release for Economic Empowerment, 123 Material-semiotic actors, 32, 33 Maternal, maternalism, 194, 196–203, 208, 212, 213n2 Meritocracy, 16, 181 Methodology anti-racist, 24–25, 35–37, 157 embodied, 148, 152–155, 157–160 feminist, 16, 155, 160 feminist vigilance as, 24–32 technofeminist, 13, 27, 29, 39 See also Interviews, research Million Mom March (for gun control), 196–197 Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection, Ghana, 48, 55

 INDEX 

Moms Demand Action for GunSense in America (Moms), 17, 193, 195–198, 212–213, 213n2 Be SMART, 17, 194, 198–201, 212, 213n3 Keeping Our Schools Safe: A Plan, 203–208, 212 Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), 196, 197 Myth of Strong Black Womanhood, 14, 67–71, 129–131, 143 N National Association of Colored Women Club, 68–69, 78–79 National Education Association (NEA), 194, 203, 205 National Rifle Association (NRA), 194, 213n1 Neoliberal, neoliberalism, 2–3, 43–46, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59–60, 150, 151, 194 neoliberal precarity, 1, 13, 15 neoliberal responsibilization, 200, 202 Nuns, see Sisters; Women Religious Nuns on the Bus, 94–95 O Obama, Michelle, 70–71 P Patriarchy, 4, 25, 39n4, 47, 65, 67, 70, 72, 79, 96, 114, 186 patriarchal, 24–26, 32, 38, 44, 45, 50, 55, 59, 85, 102, 110, 115 Post-awareness (of intimate partner violence), 104–107

223

Postcolonial, 13, 24–25, 30–31, 45–46, 56 postcolony, 44, 59 state feminism, 44–45 Postfeminism, postfeminist, 2, 3, 15, 46, 50, 104, 107–109 Poststructural, poststructuralism, 8–9, 26–27 Predominantly White Institution (PWI), 14, 70–71, 73, 76 R Racism explaining, 11, 69, 97, 102, 133, 165, 212 health disparities, 72 See also Methodology, anti-racist Research, feminist dialectics, dialectical, 16, 148, 154–160 love, joy, 156, 157, 159–160 See also Empathy, empathizing; Ethics; Embodiment, embodied Responsibilization, 198–202 S Science and Technology Studies (STS), 25–28 Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM), 17, 28–29, 166–167, 183, 187 Self-care Black women’s, 14, 67, 71, 73–76 chocolate as, 75 restorative, 68, 77–79 Self-reflexivity, 10, 55, 154 Sexual harassment, 180 Silicon Valley, 16–17, 166–169, 177, 179–180, 183–185 Sistas, SistaDoc, SistaFriend, 73–76

224 

INDEX

Sisters, see Nuns; Women religious Sisters’ Keepers, 48, 49 Situated knowledge, 25, 30, 31, 37, 39n2, 156, 158 Sontag, Susan, 209, 211–212 Spivak, Gayatri, 3, 7–8, 43, 46, 56 T Technofeminist, technofeminism, 13, 27, 29, 39 See also Methodology, technofeminist Tronto, Joan, 186, 187n3, 195 Truth, Sojourner, 66 Tubman, Harriet, 70, 76 vigilante role, 68 Twinkle, twinkle, little star, 205–206 Twitter campaigns #COVID exposure notification, 35; #Ghana, 50; #Gimmefive, 71; #Howshortwasyourskirt, 51; #Justiceforher, 51; #MeToo, 2, 11 #notanaccident, 199; #rape, 50; #SayHerName, 2; #TimesUp, 2, 11 #WhyIStayed#WhyILeft, 112 U United Nations, 47, 57, 60n4, 96, 118n1 Universal Turing Machine, 32 U.S. history Black liberation movement, 69–70 Civil Rights movement, 69, 79 Civil War, 87, 89 immigration, 14, 85–89, 94 post slavery, 68–69

V Vigilance in feminism, 7–8 as feminist, 8–12 See also Black feminist vigilance; Black feminist anticipatory vigilance; Coding; Methodology, feminist vigilance as; Post-awareness; Postfeminism, postfeminist; Women Religious, and feminist vigilance Vigilance studies behavioral studies, 4–5 cognitive studies, 5 predator/prey, 5 Vigilante, 2, 6–7, 65, 68, 103, 111, 194–195 Vigilant feminist critique, 54–59 W Watch Night, 14, 66–69, 77, 79 Watts, Shannon, 193, 196–198, 205 White supremacy, 65, 66, 69–70, 72, 79, 114–115, 156, 201 Women Religious Angel of the House, 84, 85 and feminist vigilance, 14–15, 85, 97 Maryknoll Sisters, 95–96 Sister Helen Prejean CSJ, 92–94 Sister Dorothy Stang, 96 Ursuline Nuns, 86–89 See also Catholic; Catholic institutions; Nuns; Nuns on the Bus