The Grotesque Protest in Social Media as Embodied,Political Rhetoric

Abstract

The grotesque protest—emboldened through social media—employs the body’s fluids to push back against attempts to legislate bodies. Although social media use is commonly understood as engaging audience members who share ideological frames, it can instead diversify protest networks and encourage discourse. Social media provides individuals opportunities to resist attempts to control bodies and to reinsert individuals’ voices in political discourse aimed to exclude those bodies. The body functions as the modality in which the communicative act occurs, and the body’s fluids function as the medium for inventing disruptive, grotesque protest strategies. Activists such as Rupi Kaur, The Satanic Temple’s Jex Blackmore, and those using Twitter hashtags #periodsforPence and #PEEOTUS use bodily fluids and tissues to emphasize resistance to political movements attempting to control and legislate bodies. The protest campaigns show that the grotesque can be an effective tool for opening space, transgressing boundaries, demanding attention, and equalizing differential political power relations.

Keywords

feminist media communication body resistance political discourse

The national climate in the United States is steeped in increased dissatisfaction with state legislatures’ ongoing attempts to control women’s bodies and recent (2017) Congressional attempts to reduce the health-care benefits gained by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111–148) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111–152), more commonly known as the ACA or Obamacare. When combined with ubiquitous social media use, such disapproval leads to increased and inventive protest strategies. For some, the result of the U.S. Presidential Election on November 8, 2016 signaled a potential dismantling of the mechanisms upholding Roe v. Wade and the ACA at the federal level. For others, the Election indicated a go-ahead to begin to push for legislation circumventing Roe v. Wade and repealing the ACA. The social climate in the United States became even more ripe for dissent post-2016 Presidential Election as protestors sought means to equalize the differential power relations between elected officials and individuals. The prevalence of social media use, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, provides one possible method through which individuals can push back against the legislative structures in the United States. Social media provides individuals opportunities to resist attempts to control women’s bodies and to reinsert individuals’ voices in political discourse aimed to exclude those bodies.

That these protest strategies take place via social media is no accident. Tufekci and Wilson (2012) found that social media use greatly increased the odds of being involved in a protest. Not only do odds of participation increase, but social media use “represent[s] crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology” (Segerberg & Bennett 2011, p. 197). Although commonly understood as like minds speaking to like minds, social media can diversify protest networks and encourage discourse. According to Boyle (2016), the function of such rhetorical action is inventional: “Rhetoric, in practice and performance, is a continuous exercise of tendencies of inventional media or the writing body that produce new capacities of relating within an ecology of practice” (p. 551). If Boyle’s context applies to protest rhetoric, social media protest strategies represent an inventional media that produces new practices. In our context, the body functions as the modality in which the communicative act occurs, and the body’s fluids function as the medium (Simonson, 2014) for inventing disruptive protest strategies. According to Simonson (2014), “the concept of medium indicates a way of looking at the phenomena found in the [11] different [heuristic] categories” (p. 315) he suggested as the new framework for invention theory. He defines medium as habitat, as artistic material, as modes of communicative expression, and “as in the medium through which we address or interact with audiences” (p. 314). We look at bodily fluid as the medium through which protest interacts with audiences. The medium provides the opportunity to redistribute “rhetorical resources” more equally (p. 315). We refer to this inventional act as grotesque protest.

The grotesque protest uses the body’s fluids to push back against attempts to legislate bodies. Although the grotesque as a protest technique is not new, it is gaining traction because of a resurgence in nation-wide state legislative attempts to regulate bodies. The case studies we analyze include Rupi Kaur’s period. project, The Satanic Temple’s (TST; n.d.) Jex Blackmore’s call to send semen socks to an anti-choice Texas government official, and the Twitter hashtags #periodsforPence and #PEEOTUS. Grotesque protests capitalize on societal depictions of bodies and bodily fluids as grotesque, vulgar, and taboo. In the process, such protests show that the grotesque can be an effective tool for opening space, transgressing boundaries, and demanding attention. Attempts to legislate bodies will never account for or conceal the functions of the body; and the more powerful the attempts to sanitize the body, the more unsanitary the bodily displays. In the cases we present, we focus on the potential of menstrual blood, semen, and, most recently, urine as tools of grotesque protest to frame arguments about the body. We argue that grotesque protests represent an embodied rhetoric in which bodily fluids serve protesters by exaggerating and emphasizing their resistance to ineloquent political movements attempting to control bodies.

The Grotesque Body

In his article on satire and politics, Thorogood (2016) asks, “In what ways might fart jokes be geopolitical?” (p. 215). As Thorogood unpacks the role of “satirical humor that generates laughter that is politically ambivalent, vulgar, and messy” (p. 217), he identifies the grotesque as a common aspect of geopolitical critique. Grotesque realism, according to Bakhtin (1965/1984), includes the material bodily principle (p. 18) which is “contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed … This exaggeration has a positive, assertive character” (p. 19). The grotesque can be understood as a positive, public exaggeration of the bodily element. Moving the destructive or repulsive aspects of the lower bodily stratum (e.g., genitals, organs), the grotesque presents them as generative and affirming (p. 62). Like Bakhtin, Thorogood points to the vulgar offshoots of the body as productively political, particularly when paired with humor. In other words, when deployed with humor, the tools of vulgarity have a lasting effect.

According to Dodds (2007), satire often relies on grotesque bodily humor to be effective. Thorogood (2016) argues that in order to affect the audience, the political message must be funny, repulsive, or vulgar. We understand the grotesque as exaggeration of the vulgar for use. Bakhtin says that the grotesque opens the possibility for the untouchable to be reversed and renewed. No longer is the vulgar simply gross, nor is it to be rejected or dismissed. Instead, it is invoked for its value to strategically reframe public and political discourse about the body. Bakhtin (1965/1984) accounts for productive vulgarity by formulating the grotesque as transgression—as open, as fluid: “[the grotesque body] is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits … the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose” (p. 26). The various offshoots of the grotesque body inevitably include bodily fluids: snot, nasal mucus, cervical mucus, vaginal discharge, menstrual blood, urine, and semen. Bakhtin distinguished between the purpose of exaggeration to reappropriate and to revalue the body and its bodily elements. But, according to Russo (1995), Bakhtin neglects sociogender relations when he points to the figure of the pregnant hag as “a typical and very strongly expressed grotesque” (p. 25). She uses Cixous to explore the social ramifications of the gendered grotesque, claiming that Cixous configures the female boy in her discussion of ecriture feminine with striking similarity to the continuous process of the grotesque body. Cixous refers to this as “the body without beginning and without end” (as cited in Russo, 1995, p. 67). According to Gasbarrone (1994), however, Bakhtin’s configuration of the hag is as an overt figure, positive in nature, which celebrate life in its extreme intermediacy, in the fullness of its indetermination. Depending on one’s vantage point, then, bodily elements and fluids might appear to be vulgar; however, in recent contexts, this kind of vulgarity is positive, endless, and exuberant. And when deployed as protest, it is strategic, political, and pointed. The grotesque body might represent a constantly evolving embodied subjectivity (Shabot, 2006). For Shabot, grotesque bodies provide the ideal apparatus to reunite disconnected notions of the body and its bodily fluids—an embodied conception. To understand the grotesque frame as a useful tool, we present several cases that emphasize the material body and the processes of the body as both individual and communal. The examples below first demonstrate the dominant assumptions surrounding bodies and bodily fluids as grotesque, vulgar, and taboo; and second, that the grotesque can be an effective tool for opening space, for transgressing boundaries, for demanding attention, and for equalizing differential political power relations.

The grotesque—in the protests and marked resistance we examine—can upend existing power structures, call attention to the inequality or discrimination inherent in the power structure that one seeks to supplant, resist attempts to control bodies, and reinsert individuals’ voices in political discourse aimed to exclude those bodies. As grotesque protests—and components of grotesque rhetorical strategies—capture momentum to create movements, protesters call upon others to resist by reaching within their bodies to extract their bodily fluids. Physically embodying resistance to attempts aimed to control bodies, these individuals use existing structures (e.g., the U. S. Postal Service) to deliver their body’s fluids to the desks of elected government officials. Through the grotesque protests, we explore what Thorogood (2016) calls for: an “attention to the relations between corporeal, material phenomena and representations in popular culture” (p. 221). Although other strategies are available to react to potential threatening laws and lawmakers, the grotesque protest is unique because it calls upon individuals to use the very thing that is being regulated—the body—to push back, to resist, to dissent, to protest.

Legislating Bodies in the United States

Undeniably, legislation across all 50 states has passed regarding women’s bodies and the limitations placed on those bodies, including nearly 340 abortion restrictions since 2010 (Nash, Gold, Ansari-Thomas, Cappello, & Mohammed, 2017). The Guttmacher Institute cites certain states as categorically hostile or extremely hostile to abortion. Feminists actively oppose restrictions placed on women’s bodies in their own states, as well as in other hostile or extremely hostile states. In 2016 alone, Republican state legislatures passed over 60 abortion restrictions, after proposing more than 500. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights (2017), “medically unjustified, red-tape regulations” have been “ubiquitous in state legislatures across the country since 2011” (p. 4). The report provides a state-by-state comprehensive overview of new legislation enacted in 2016. Table 1 includes a sample.

Table 1.

A Brief Snapshot at Reproductive Right Restrictions Across Several States.

State	Action
Alabama	Criminalize physicians; shut down clinics
Georgia Idaho	Funding crisis pregnancy centers
Indiana Louisiana Texas	Embryonic and fetal tissue cremation and burial
Ohio Oklahoma South Dakota	Abortion restrictions

The legislative actions listed represent only a few of the numerous ways in which women’s bodies are legislated and regulated in the United States. The Republican legislative agenda represented earlier is a direct attack on women’s rights in the United States. Located in the body, these attempted legislative restrictions seek to regulate the processes of the body and to provoke protest responses that are deeply rooted in cultural commonplaces about women. The grotesque provides a unique platform for understanding how an embodied rhetoric can successfully resist such restrictive regulatory acts by disrupting cultural and social expectations for bodies, and in particular, women’s bodies.

The suggested “cultural politics for women” appear to be contained between the poles of “radical negation, silence, withdrawal, and invisibility, and the bold affirmations of feminine performance, imposture, and masquerade (purity and danger)” (Russo, 1995, p. 54). Russo begins her analysis of the female grotesque with the colloquialism, “She is making a spectacle out of herself” (p. 53). She argues that the danger of exposure, the danger of being a spectacle, is specifically a feminine concern. What she does not discuss in this section is the inherently racialized and classed nature of the spectacle. We acknowledge that in an intersectional reading, women of color and poor women have no access to the dominant constructions of purity. For example, one of the most frequently circulated news stories about the international Women’s March on 21 January 2017 celebrated their nonviolence. The celebration of nonviolence not only points to the privilege associated with predominantly White women’s bodies (the police were not under threat) but also points to the ways in which “behaving” bodies are celebrated and disruptive bodies are punished.

Purity/behaving or danger/disrupting seem to be motivating forces behind abstinence-only obsessed Republican politicians who appear to lock women’s bodies into either the role of virgin or mother. Anything beyond that purity is threatening enough to close down the federal government.¹ Obviously, the extremes of this cultural logic (Ratcliffe, 1999) are not mutually exclusive; however, the grotesque protest might open the space for a translocation of the binary discourse surrounding women’s bodies—a way to move beyond identifying the artificial separation of women from their bodies.

In The Purity Myth, feminist and activist Jessica Valenti (2010) points to another way in which women’s bodies are censored and controlled:

[In 1996 (Pemberton, 1999),] Laura Pemberton—while in active labor—[was] shackled, and forced to undergo a cesarean section she did not want. Pemberton had wanted to have a vaginal home birth, but when she became dehydrated during labor, she decided to go to the hospital to receive fluids. When a doctor noticed a scar from a previous C-section, the hospital staff panicked—many doctors won’t perform a vaginal delivery (VBAC) after a cesarean section. They told Pemberton that she wouldn’t be able to give birth vaginally, and that she would have to stay at the hospital. She refused, and went home to continue her labor. (She actually had to sneak out of the hospital, as the staff had called the district attorney to come and compel her to get surgery.)

Once she was back at home, a sheriff came to her house, at which point her legs were shackled together and she was forced to go to the hospital, where a hearing was being held about the rights of the fetus—her child. A lawyer had been appointed to her unborn child, but not to Pemberton. After being forced to have surgery, Pemberton sued. She lost. The state told Pemberton that her rights hadn’t been violated; doctors could operate on her without her permission because the rights of her fetus—as defined by the state—trumped her own. (pp. 140–141)

We include this extended excerpt because it so aptly demonstrates the legal reality faced by women in the United States. The issues extend beyond abortion or anti-choice arguments. Clearly, women’s reproductive autonomy cannot easily be encapsulated within an either/or binary: either you are for “life” or you are not does not justify legislative action or court injunctions that have consistently attempted to commandeer women’s bodies. Additionally, in some cases, members of the medical profession operationalize the same ideology to deny women control over their own bodies. A Tweet from @afroSHIRL went viral when “Writey McScriberson” relayed her experience attempting to get tubal ligation (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

January 2, 2017 Writey McScriberson tweets her birth control experience.

When it comes to sex and pregnancy, women’s bodies are not, according to patriarchal discourses, safe when left in the hands of women. Instead they must be controlled ideologically or physically, in some cases with shackles, to conform to dominant constructions of pure womanhood—a womanhood that makes the body’s functions like menstruation obscene, unseemly, and indecent.

The Grotesque period. and Menstrual Blood

As part of a final project in a visual rhetoric course, Canadian poet Kaur (2015) posted a photograph of herself to Instagram. In the photo, Kaur wears gray sweatpants and a white tank top and lies on a bed with a yellow comforter covering part of her body (see Figure 2). The sheets of her bed were stained with fake menstrual blood and matched a fake crimson stain on her sweatpants. Twice, the photo was removed by Instagram for violating community guidelines (Figure 3).

Figure 2.

Kaur’s repost of the twice-removed Instagram photo on Facebook, along with her commentary and caption on the photo’s removal from Instagram (Rupi Kaur, 2015).

Figure 3.

Instagram referenced their Community Guidelines as the reason for Kuar’s post being removed.

Eventually, the photo was reinstated with an apology from Instagram. However, in response to Instagram’s removal of her photo, Kaur (on March 25, 2015) posted the same photo on Facebook and wrote:

thank you instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. you deleted my photo twice stating that it goes against community guidelines … when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so so many who are underage) are objectified. pornified. and treated less than human …

Experience. Learning. No.

Their patriarchy is leaking.

Their misogyny is leaking.

We will not be censored.

The 4,135 comments in response to Kaur’s public post² were diverse. From supportive (“preach!”; “… natural and normal …”) to condemning (“Filthy as fuck. Yuck” and “As a woman myself, I find this disgusting”) to grateful (“thank you …”; “appreciate your power of rhetoric”) to grotesque (“at first glance i thought she sleep sharted”; “yep totally thought it was poop …”). The diverse nature of the comments, as well as the reach of the original photograph and ensuing Instagram controversy, indicates that the embodied subject has immediate and lasting discursive effect.

Kaur (2016), who worked with her sister on the photo project, wrote about her period. collection, “we menstruate and they see it as dirty. attention seeking. sick. a burden. as if this process is less natural than breathing …” (https://www.rupikaur.com/period/). Kaur’s emphasis here on the material body, and the natural processes of the body, fall into the context of the grotesque. By pointing to the interpretation of menses as “dirty” and “attention seeking,” Kaur highlights the simultaneous discipline and erasure of women’s bodies. Other commenters to her Facebook post agreed, writing: “People are more disgusted with periods than rape or how women are treated like sexual objects and abused. And there's something wrong with that”; “Why don't we discuss CENSORSHIP instead and question why THIS was censored but sexualised girls and women, violence, humiliation, abuse are frequently not?”; and “What the ‘ew yuck' crowd seems to have missed is that ‘ew yuck', when scaled up, results in the kind of society where women on their period are deemed unclean and impure. Menstrual blood is no more disgusting than any other bodily fluid, and a lot less harmful to health than some.”

Kaur’s awareness of the “ew yuck” audience is meaningful in an era when lawmakers seek to discipline women for their bodily processes and resultant bodily fluids.

In most of the legislative bills prior to 2016, state lawmakers rhetorically and physically attempted to separate the processes of women’s bodies (menstruation, reproduction, miscarriage, and abortion) from the physical body. For example, many lawmakers transpose the function of women's bodies with their actual, physical bodies, and then use that as an excuse to legislate those possible functions (menstruation, miscarriage, and pregnancy). Arduser and Koerber (2014) suggest that between 2010 and 2012, Republican political rhetoric attempted to “split [women] apart as their reproductive and sexual capacities became separated from their status as free citizens and affiliated with all that is in need of restraint or regulation” (p. 122). They argue that such rhetoric splits women in order to regulate their bodies “for the good of the nation” (p. 125). They cite Rick Santorum in his discussion of women’s bodies and women’s sexuality as something that must be controlled or contained as representative of legislative fear of the excesses of women’s bodies. According to Shapiro (2010), the fear of the uncontrolled female body remains such a powerful tenet of Western culture that it can even impact women’s self-understanding. Menstrual blood, therefore, can be a useful grotesque protest tool to push back against the anti-woman legislative agenda.

One function of the grotesque protest is to remind people (and politicians in particular) that women are not separate from their bodies. A recent Georgia state bill (HB1) attempting to criminalize miscarriage is an example of political rhetoric that attempts to regulate bodily fluids. The bill would “require proof that a miscarriage occurred naturally,” and if no such proof could be offered, the woman would face felony charges. The bill’s language constructs women as separate from their bodily processes—that they could, for example, control whether or not they miscarry early in pregnancy. In response, a call went viral for women to mail their representatives and governors their used tampons. The first mention of such a tactic was made on February 24, 2011. Jill Filipovic drafted a letter on the website Rewire (https://rewire.news/about-us/), excerpted below, that she offered to women to share with Georgia Representative Bobby Franklin, who authored the first of several such bills.

… As I’m sure you know, more than 50% of fertilized eggs–Georgia citizens! — naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the body during menstruation. I am personally concerned that my own murdering woman-body may have flushed out some human beings, and I may have flushed them down the toilet without knowing that I was disposing of Georgia citizens in such an undignified way … To that end, I attach a picture of my latest used tampon. I am preserving this tampon, as well as all of my other tampons, pads, feminine hygiene products and soiled panties from my current menstrual cycle, so that the Georgia State Police can come collect them as evidence … (Filipovic, 2011, para. 2–3)

Hyperbolic and focused on the Republican ideology that women cannot be trusted with their own bodies, Filipovic expresses confusion and fear about her body. Hyperbole seems to be a necessary aspect of grotesque protest strategies and tactics, and Devery Dolman of the website Tiger Beatdown (http://tigerbeatdown.com/) perfects the technique in her February 25, 2011 blog post about the same Georgia bill:

I need your [Rep. Franklin] help. I need your Uterine Investigatory Crime Unit and every bit of biological lady-part know-how your degree in Biblical studies and Business Administration from Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, can bring to my case … I think there is a killer inside me. The killer is MY UTERUS. Help me stop it before it kills again … I can’t take this uncertainty any more, so if it’s okay with you, I’d like to start sending you evidence right away. There’s still a bloodstain on our mattress pad, I have a bunch of old period underwear, and I’m happy to bag and send you my tampons next week if the killer strikes again. Usually I go through an OB Super once every 2 hours the first couple days so there will be ample material for your lab to analyze to determine what in the hell is going on here and to help bring the relevant parties to justice …

Both Filipovic and Dolman engage the grotesque—they use menstrual blood via used tampons and old period underwear to point to the clear underlying assumption of such legislation—that women cannot be trusted to inhabit and make decisions about their bodies. By engaging hyperbolic rhetoric, they highlight how ridiculous such legislation would be in day-to-day life. The Tiger Beatdown editorial team followed up this post with a recommendation about how to proceed with the grotesque protest in keeping with legal requirements.

Many of us have been stirred by Devery’s unswerving commitment to finding the killer within. Although, sadly, US law prohibits us from sending unsolicited, used tampons and pads — don’t do it! Don’t do it or you will GO TO JAIL, REAL TALK …

These letters were reblogged and reposted widely. However, it was not until 2016 that a Twitter hashtag caught on and went viral. #periodsforPence is the hashtag for women responding to similar legislation from Texas, and to legislation drafted by Indiana Republican state representative Casey Cox and approved by, then governor of Indiana, Mike Pence. From a variety of different sources, women such as Ele Chupik, and the anonymous “Periods for Politicians/Periods for Pence” (2016) Facebook page calls on women to report their periods to the governors’ offices as they could easily be “a miscarriage without knowledge” (Periods for Politicians). Because it is alliterative and therefore catchy, #periodsforPence went viral with over almost 95,000 likes and 3,000 Facebook shares. On Twitter, the hashtag has a reach,³ as of February 14, 2017, of 73,000 and a timeline delivery of 80,000 (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

February 14, 2017 Hashtracking report on #periodsforpence (TweetReach, 2017).

The call for women to mail government officials their tampons, pads, period underwear, and in one case, a stained mattress pad utilizes the same grotesque protest method that Kaur displayed in her period. photography collection. When combined with hyperbole about women sarcastically claiming that they cannot in fact understand their own bodies, the grotesque tactic marks a humorous and useful way to protest laws that might otherwise land women in jail for having a monthly menstrual cycle.

Transgressive Fluids and Forms: Semen, Tissue, and Urine

It is not just women’s bodies that are implicated by these discursive constructs. In fact, Texas representative Jessica Farrar introduced a bill to regulate “masturbatory emissions,” calling for a $100 fine for “emissions outside of a woman’s vagina, or created outside of a health or medical facility,” which “will be considered an act against an unborn child, and failing to preserve the sanctity of life” (Dart, 2017). Although news coverage of the bill is careful to point out that it is “satirical,” grotesque protesters (and some members of the legislature) emphasize the function of multiple types of bodily fluid in reproduction (and to highlight the absurdity of solely zeroing in on menstruation).

Recently, a Satanic Temple (TST) grotesque protest was dubbed “Cum Rags for Congress.” The official spokesperson for TST and director of its Detroit location, Jex Blackmore, used social media to advance #CumragsforCongress by prompting people to send socks filled with semen and tampons to the Texas governor Greg Abbott under whose purview rules about fetal funerals were finalized. Beusman (2016) reported:

Having mailed a ejaculate-covered sock to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, along with a handwritten note that says, “These r babies. Plz bury,” Blackmore is publicly encouraging others to send Governor Abbott semen-encrusted materials of their own (or, for those wary of sending bodily fluids through the mail, items coated in non-seminal but semen- esque substances).

In a Facebook post (see Figure 5; left), the Detroit, Michigan-based Blackmore wrote:

Be wary of apathy! Texas and Indiana mandate their citizens bury abortion remnants! This is an attempt to establish the legal precedent of fetal personhood. Take action! Send your used condoms and cumrags to Governor Abbott’s office …

Figure 5.

Jex Blackmore’s Facebook post (left; Blackmore, 2016b) and Tweet (right; Blackmore, 2016b) from December 1, 2016 encouraging people to send “used condoms and cumrags to Governor Abbott’s office” in Austin, TX and “Bury your #abortion.”

Note: Sending bodily fluid via postal service may get you in trouble, so do this at your own risk. However, feel free to supplement with gooey lotions and shampoos … the point is still valid. (Jex Blackmore, 2016a)

What prompted Blackmore to create #CumragsforCongress (see Figure 5) is the rule from the state of Texas she references. The regulation, Title 25, §§ 1.132–1.137 of the Texas Administrative Health Services Code, published December 9, 2016, amends Texas’s current rules governing the proper disposal of “special waste from healthcare-related facilities” for embryonic and fetal tissue only. Health-care providers are now required to dispose of fetal and embryonic tissue using methods typically used to dispose of human bodies—by burial or by cremation. The new rule was established four days after the U. S. Supreme Court struck down two provisions of another Texas anti-abortion law, House Bill 2 of 2013 (“HB 2”)—outlawing abortion after 20 weeks.

To situate TST’s and Blackmore’s #CumragsforCongress, it is important to recognize the context of the burial rule on embryonic and fetal tissue. Anti-abortion activists, Daleiden and Merritt, unsuccessfully pursued a common strategy in anti-abortion campaigns—the use of fake body parts passing for fetal tissue to convince their audience of cruelty and general disregard toward infants. Interestingly, this strategy shares many of the traits of grotesque protest, including Blackmore’s #CumragsforCongress. The suggestion that fetal tissue would be bought and sold is vulgar and meant to solicit contempt for the practice. Daleiden and Merritt clearly endeavored to expose the purported practice as vulgar and, in turn, offer their own grotesque protest strategy. Fernandez (2016) reported that Daleiden and Merritt were indicted on record-tampering charges for manufacturing fake information (footage of a physician at Planned Parenthood discussing the sale of fetal tissue and remains for profit) with the intent to defraud Planned Parenthood. As a result of the video, numerous Congressional and state investigations were launched and found no evidence of Planned Parenthood or any physician connected to the organization illegally selling fetal tissue.

When it became apparent that the video was largely debunked, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine maintained the same rhetorical anti-choice strategy (Ludden, 2016). DeWine stated, at a news conference professing to share a new discovery about abortion practices, that “Fetuses from abortions are being cooked and then put into landfills and mixed in with all other garbage that's out there” (as cited in Ludden, 2016, para. 8). His use of the word “cooking” seems to refer to the process by which all medical waste is steamed in order to sterilize it. By qualifying abortion waste as something different than typical medical waste, he was able to spark a grotesque protest against abortion providers. Instead of stalking patients in front of clinics, protesters also began harassing clinicians behind the clinics, where medical waste is picked up. In the midst of this controversy, a number of state legislatures began to push through anti-abortion policy focused on medical waste like the Texas rule.

Blackmore’s political activism works to operationalize the privilege that many Christian and religious organizations claim in such health-care issues (i.e., employer or employee birth control coverage, women’s health-care screenings, and abortion). However, activists across the spectrum of these issues, as evidenced by the faked Planned Parenthood videos and the rhetoric of anti-choice politicians, use grotesque protest as a transgressive method to achieve their ends, gain attention, and equalize differential political power relations. Differential political power relations are a key aspect of activist strategies and one they rely upon to craft effective hyperbolic rhetoric.

In grotesque protest, hyperbole, sarcasm, and humor are commonplace in social media responses to political activity. To paraphrase Thorogood’s question, “In what ways might pee jokes be political?,” Andy Borowitz (2016) provides an answer. In the 2016 American Presidential election, Donald J. Trump won the electoral college and became President of the United States. A report surfaced about him shortly thereafter in which he allegedly either watched or participated in a golden shower.⁴ His unpopularity with the American people is unprecedented, and social media users deployed a variety of grotesque tactics to protest his presidency. Immediately after the report surfaced, Twitter users adopted #PEEOTUS as a hashtag used to replace #POTUS, and a number of users edited memes of the president’s ice bucket challenge, changing the color of the water to yellow (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

User-edited photo of Trump’s Ice-Bucket Challenge, tagged #PEEOTUS (badtux99, January 11, 2017).

Urine seems to be inextricably associated with the office of the 45th President, Donald Trump. Recently, Andy Borowitz used a grotesque tactic to protest the Republican campaign to repeal the ACA (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

January 13, 2017 Andy Borowitz calls for Americans to send urine samples to President Trump (Borowitz, 2016).

Commonly paired with the hashtag #PEEOTUS is the hashtag #SCROTUS, a suggested repurposing of #POTUS in social media users scramble to find a way to refer to President Trump without using his name and without assigning him the legitimacy of the office. An offshoot of the #NotMyPresident campaign, #SCROTUS uses the body in order to mock, in order to undermine, and in order to deauthorize the possibilities of the 45th President being respectable as President. #PEEOTUS and #SCROTUS both use bodily fluid or genitalia to mock, destabilize, and publicize private parts and activities we are socialized to hide. And with a timeline delivery count of 3,783,576 as of February 22, 2017, this grotesque protest has proliferated as a transgressive act enabled by social media.

When Bakhtin defines the grotesque body, he refers to it as “transgressing its own limits” (p. 26). Here, transgression might be read not only as excess or multiplicity but also as a productive act of resistance that trespasses social norms. The call to use bodily fluids in public protests transgresses commonplace assumptions that bodily functions are private. The grotesque protest work here functions as excess. The excesses of the body are generative because they open space and demand attention. In the same way that menstrual blood serves as a tool for grotesque protest, so too does semen, or the appearance thereof. It is not just reproductive fluid, however, that functions as a tool for grotesque protest. Recently, bodily fluids of many types have been used to respond to the larger political landscape in the United States.

Grotesque Conclusions

What these grotesque protests accomplish is bringing attention back to the body—our bodies—through social media. The inventional strategies associated with social media grotesque protests make available differently structured audiences and participants. The body functions as a communicative act for protesters and legislators alike. By drawing into focus the actual fluids—the actual bodily processes—as the medium for communication, grotesque protesters are not only educating, they are also co-opting the discursive construction that seeks to either vilify or erase women’s and individual’s agency. In other words, the grotesque protests use the body’s fluids to show humanity’s similarities and body fluids’ purposes in attempts to equalize differential political power relations.

Strategically, what these cases highlight is the apparent and simultaneous vulgarity of both trying to legislate, sanitize, and control bodies and expose what is attempting to be legislated, sanitized, and controlled: the body’s fluids and tissues. Although legislative attempts to control and to sanitize bodies have increased since 2010 in the United States, there has also been some progress to maintain, for example, Roe v. Wade and women’s rights to choose what they do with their bodies. In fact, the fetal burial rule in Texas resulted from the U.S. Supreme Court striking down legislation in that state that attempted to bypass the rights afforded to women by Roe v. Wade. In the last half decade or so, grotesque maneuvers have been used to protest legislative actions aimed to sanitize (Kaur; Blackmore) and control women’s (Blackmore; Filipovic; Chupik) bodies (Borowitz). Grotesque protests originate in and provide a method to destabilize differential power relationships. The grotesque allows protesters to embody an agency that both reacts against the enforced cleanliness and purity of women’s bodies and reminds legislators that men’s bodies are involved in these processes as well. The grotesque protest provides a positively vulgar platform which decries the enforced sanitation and simultaneous control of the body. Grotesque protest uses bodily fluids to make a powerful parallel counter statement, asserting first that attempts to legislate women’s bodies will never account for nor will they conceal the functions of the body; and second, the more powerful the attempts to sanitize the body, the more unsanitary the bodily displays through grotesque protests.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Kristin Marie Bivens is an associate professor of English at Harold Washington College—one of the City Colleges of Chicago where she serves as the faculty chair of the Institutional Review Board. Her current and forthcoming work appears in Harlot, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Kairos, and Health Communication. Additionally, her current and forthcoming work will appear in two edited collections: Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (Routledge, 2017) and Interrogating Gendered Pathologies.

Kirsti Cole is an associate professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literature at the Minnesota State University. She is the faculty chair of the Teaching Writing Graduate Certificate and Master’s of Communication and Composition programs. She has published in Feminist Media Studies, College English, Harlot, In the Library with a Lead Pipe, and thirdspace. She is the editor of two collections: Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics (2014) and Surviving Sexism in the Academy: Feminist Strategies for Leadership (2017) from Routledge Press. She has chapters appearing in collections focused on mothering, transgressive feminist rhetoric, the rhetoric of civility, feminist leadership in shared faculty governance, and labor in writing studies.

References

Arduser

Koerber

(2014) Splitting women, producing biocitizens, and vilifying Obamacare in the 2012 presidential campaign. Women’s Studies in Communication 37(2): 117–137.

badtux99. (2017). #PEEOTUS #GoldenShowerGate #GoldenShowers #TrickleDown. BadTux the Snarky Penguin. Retrieved from https://snarkypenguin.wordpress.com/2017/01/11/peeotus-goldenshowergate-goldenshowers-trickledown/.

Bakhtin, M. (1965/1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Beusman, C. (2016, December 2). ‘Cum Rags for Congress’: Satanists protest Texas abortion law with semen socks. Retrieved from https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/cum-rags-for-congress-satanists-protest-texas-abortion-law-with-semen-socks.

Blackmore, J. (2016a, December 1). Be wary of apathy! Texas and Indiana mandate their citizens bury abortion remnants! This is an attempt to establish the legal precedent of fetal personhood. Take action! Send your used condoms and cumrags to Governor Abbott’s office at: Office of [Facebook status update]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/JexBlackmore/photos/a.878960368854795.1073741828.872105932873572/1178015955615900/?type=3.

Blackmore, J. (2016b, December 1). Bury your #abortion?! Send your cumrags to: Office of the Governor, P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711 #CUMRAGSFORCONGRESS [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/JexBlackmore/status/804526756690624512.

Borowitz, A. (2016, January 13). Americans Stripped of Obamacare Urged to Send Urine Samples Directly to Trump. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/andyborowitz/posts/10155256483655681.

Boyle

(2016) Writing and rhetoric and/as posthuman practice. College English 78(6): 532–554.

Center for Reproductive Rights. (2017). 2016 state of the states: A pivotal time for reproductive rights. Retrieved from https://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/USPA_StateofStates_11.16_Web_Final.pdf.

10.

Dart, T. (2017, March 13). Texas lawmaker ridicules anti-abortion measures by filing anti-masturbation bill. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/13/texas-masturbation-bill-abortion-jessica-farrar.

11.

Dodds

(2007) Steve Bell's Eye: cartoons, geopolitics and the visualization of the War on Terror'. Security Dialogue 38(2): 157–177.

12.

Dolman, D. (2011, February 25). Are you there, Representative Bobby Franklin? It’s me, Devery. Tiger Beatdown. Retrieved from http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/02/25/are-you-there-representative-bobby-franklin-its-me-devery/.

13.

Fernandez, M. (2016, January 25). 2 Abortion foes behind Planned Parenthood videos are indicted. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/2-abortion-foes-behind-planned-parenthood-videos-are-indicted.html?_r=0.

14.

Filipovic, J. (2011, February 24). Dear Rep. Franklin: I submit my used tampons as evidence. Rewire. Retrieved from https://rewire.news/article/2011/02/24/dear-franklin-here-tampons/.

15.

Gasbarrone

(1994) ‘The locus for the other’: Cixous, Bakhtin, and women’s writing. In: Hohne

Wussow

(eds) In a dialogue of voices: Feminist theory and Bakhtin, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–19.

16.

Kaur, R. (2015, March 25). Thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. You deleted my photo twice stating that it goes against community guidelines. I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/rupikaurpoetry/photos/a.523823527711928.1073741828.513614775399470/821302664630678/?type=3&theater.

17.

Kaur, R. (2016). period. Retrieved from https://www.rupikaur.com/period/.

18.

Ludden, J. (2016, December 12). Lawsuit challenges fetal burial rule in Texas. National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/12/505304688/lawsuit-challenges-fetal-burial-rule-in-texas.

19.

McScriberson, W. (2017, January 2). Dr wouldn't tie my tubes cuz I wasnt married and maybe someday my husband might want kids. Medically, my body belongs to a man [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/afroshirl/status/815993233880842244?lang=en.

20.

Nash, E., Gold, R. B., Ansari-Thomas, Z., Cappello, O., & Mohammed, L. (2017, January 3). The Guttmacher Institute’s “Policy Trends in the States: 2016.” Retrieved from https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2017/22-states-are-extremely-hostile-abortion.

21.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, 42 U.S.C. § 18001 (2010).

22.

Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, 19 U.S.C. §P.L. 111 (2010).

23.

Pemberton v. Tallahassee [Florida] Memorial Regional Medical, 66 F. Supp. 2d 1247 (1999). Retrieved from http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/66/1247/2489193/.

24.

Periods for Politicians. (2016, March 26). Fertilized eggs can be expelled during a woman's period without a woman even knowing that she might have had the potential blastocyst in her. Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/REALP4P/posts/565630956938734).

25.

Ratcliffe

(1999) Rhetorical listening: A trope for interpretive invention and a “Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.”. College Composition and Communication 51(2): 195–224.

26.

Russo

(1995) The female grotesque: Risk, excess, and modernity, London, England: Routledge Press.

27.

The Satanic Temple. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Temple.

28.

Segerberg

Bennett

W. L.

(2011) Social media and the organization of collective action: Using Twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests. The Communication Review 14(3): 197–215.

29.

Shabot

(2006) Grotesque bodies: A response to disembodied cyborgs. Journal of Gender Studies 15(3): 223–235.

30.

Shapiro

(2010) Gender circuits: Bodies and identities in a technological age, London, England: Routledge.

31.

Simonson

(2014) Reinventing invention, again. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44(4): 299–322.

32.

Texas Health Services. Title 25, §§ 1.132-1.137 (2016).

33.

Thorogood

(2016) Satire and geopolitics: Vulgarity, ambiguity and the body grotesque in South Park. Geopolitics 21(1): 215–235.

34.

Tufekci

Wilson

(2012) Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: Observations from Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication 62(2): 363–379.

35.

TweetReach. (2017). Tweetreach snapshot for #periodsforPence. Retrieved from https://tweetreach.com/.

36.

Valenti

(2010) The purity myth: How America's obsession with virginity is hurting young women, Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.