Abstract
Contemporary feminisms in the Western world are defined more and more by what is declared and registers as feminist across media platforms, especially those on social media: from Twitter hashtag campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported (Canada), #EndSexism (UK) and #Solidarityisforwhitewomen (US), to Tumblrs such as ‘Feminist Ryan Gosling’. The spread of feminist memes, such as 2012’s ‘Binders Full of Women’, and Beyoncé performing in front of the giant neon ‘FEMINISM’ sign during the television broadcast of the US Video Music Awards in 2014, are ‘literally putting the spotlight on feminism’ (Little, 2014).
Examples such as these demonstrate how closely linked the ideas of ‘doing feminism’ and ‘making media’ are, particularly when surrounded by feminist discursive publics whose critical commentary foments lively debates about media and feminism. Feminist authors, bloggers and Tweeters like Laurie Penny (2014) and Roxane Gay (2014), among many others, not only contribute to these debates, they help define and produce them. They provide poignant feminist responses to current events and feminist issues; they model critical forms of interpretation; they share information; and in the process, they often make us laugh. Penny and Gay have published highly acclaimed books about the current state of feminism and their own personal relationships to the movement, marking a key juncture in which feminist bloggers and Tweeters have become centrally recognised voices of contemporary feminism. In the words of Feministing’s Samhita Mukhopadhyay, ‘feminist blogs are the consciousness raising groups of our generation’ (see Johnson, 2013; Loza, 2014). Back in 2007, Tracy Kennedy correlated the consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s American women’s movement – where women ‘joined collectively to talk about their experiences of sexism and oppression under a system that traditionally undervalued women’ (2007: 1) – with digitally enabled modes of feminist conversation and collectivity taking place in the blogosphere. The ubiquity of the Internet, Kennedy argues, ‘locate[s] feminist advocacy and consciousness-raising within the virtual world’ (2007: 1) and ‘allow[s] feminist[s] […] to connect with each other and establish social networks’ (2007: 3). These ways of ‘doing feminism’ via media – what Kennedy terms ‘“feminist virtual consciousness-raising”’ (2007: 1) – also challenge earlier assertions that young women and men were hesitant to claim their actions, and identities, as feminist.
In their now infamous report ‘#FemFuture: Online Revolution’, 1 Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti tout the strategic role digital feminists already play in popularising and mobilising movement feminisms: ‘We liveblog at conferences, tweet calls to action, and translate sometimes jargon-laden organizational press releases into catchy hashtags, nudging people to look twice before they skip to a funny cat video’ (2013: 9). Noting that their demands for attention compete with cute cat videos and other modes of Internet humour, online feminists strategically deploy social media tactics as powerful tools of community building and political mobilisation in ways that take from the content and style of other satirical practices of Internet culture (what Olga Goriunova (2013) endearingly calls ‘new media idiocy’). They use humour and nurture other affective resonances to move feminism, not only technologically, via social media channels of distribution, but also emotionally and affectively.
The contemporary context of feminism defined through these examples thus highlights the centrality of media techné to feminist practices, the topic around which this special issue is focused. Specifically, this special issue conceptualises and analyses three key dimensions of recent and contemporary feminisms’ media practices: feminist media events, the online and paper archives of feminism, and feminist activist techné – the technical practices and practical knowledge feminists come to embody as they do feminism with media. Feminists build technological, affective and cultural infrastructures through which they produce, disseminate and share resources, ideas and knowledge, whether through older fax machine networks for distributing movement newsletters (Feigenbaum, 2008; Rentschler, 2015), activist Google mapping of young women’s testimonials to sexual harassment and online aggregations of digital video testimonials to sexual violence and survivor experiences (Rentschler, 2014), or clippings files around which movements judge their public visibility (Thrift, 2011), for example.
The ephemeral acts, artefacts and cultural infrastructures generated by feminist-identified movements and practitioners often get lost in the official and popular record, despite their political significance and potentially transformative power. Following Meaghan Morris’s (1998) call to prolong the life of feminist ephemera, the articles in this collection develop new ways of theorising and analysing what constitutes the material and mediatic traces of ‘doing feminism’ from the 1970s to the present. To this end, the contributors to this special issue examine what gets lost, found and reconfigured through feminist re-conceptualisations of eventfulness, the technologies of feminist action, and their media and documentary archives in order to investigate emerging conceptions of what it means to do feminism at the intersection between media practice and activism.
This issue was developed with a clear historiographical dimension, motivated by feminist interrogation and re-conceptualisation of the eventfulness of doing feminism as a key practice for challenging teleological narratives of historical progress. The editors and contributors challenge spectacle-driven definitions of eventfulness, which tend to produce turning-point histories that pivot on instances of rapid, transformative and, often, violent methods of social and political change. Instead, our analyses evidence some of the ways in which feminist social change plays out in ‘sporadic bursts of energy, interrupted projects […] stretches of lassitude, and invaluably prolonged digressions’ (Morris, 1998: xiii). Feminist approaches to eventfulness can cut across dominant ways of narrating history as a series of hyper-visible turning points by developing new ways of thinking about temporality, social transformation, and expressions and practices of dissent and, in doing so, help produce new contexts for political and cultural practice. As issue co-editor Samantha C. Thrift argues, ‘a feminist approach to eventfulness means adopting a more flexible and attentive vantage point from which to view history in order to discern that which is unexpectedly transformative and significant’ (2012: 416; see also Morris, 1998; Deem, 1999; Della Porta, 2008; Moore, 2011). The articles here aim to contribute to further theorising about eventfulness as a cultural and genealogical strategy that can better account for the capacity of feminist events to be transformative in unforeseen and often unrecognised ways.
While the ‘struggle to name a different temporality’ accounts for a certain inability to conceive of feminist actions, artefacts and network infrastructures as eventful, the ‘risky acts’ of feminist media praxis sometimes cannot be recognised as significant in the moment of their making, by their makers (Morris, 1998: xv). Only later, in retrospect, do activist media become legible as eventful, revolutionary, or even movement making. Reflecting on her own experience in AIDS activist video and New Queer Cinema, feminist scholar and activist filmmaker Alexandra Juhasz (2014) recently noted that ‘the making and living of alternative, counter or radical culture, through media praxis, does not feel fully revolutionary in its own time because the act of making is too small, unstable, marginal, and precarious; the dominant culture, and its media praxis, looms large, solid, and powerful’ (n.p.). Queer and feminist archives make the process of looking back at activist media – those ‘small, beautiful, fleeting instants of potential’ – possible (Juhasz, 2014). Feminist artefacts and their collection enable people to re-vision feminism. As Roxanne Samer (2014) suggests in relation to queer digital archives, re-vision is both ‘an approach to historiography and […] an argument for archiving’ (n.p.). Moreover, the act of looking back is, according to Adrienne Rich (1972), an ‘act of survival’, a ‘way to understand the assumptions in which we are drenched’ and ‘a refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society’ (also quoted in Samer, 2014).
Encounters with archives and their media re-shape the very notion of what constitutes feminisms and their eventfulness. They also powerfully structure the feelings through which people relate to feminisms and their histories (see Cvetkovich, 2003; Hemmings, 2011; Eichhorn, 2013). As our contributors argue, feminist interpretations of analogue and digital archives of feminist documentation may represent past feminist activity as being more or less politicised than the present’s, but they also provide materials through which future movements and activist practices can be imagined (see Hemmings, 2011). What is at stake, as Kate Eichhorn reminds us, ‘is not the world these collections claim to represent, but rather the worlds they invite us to imagine and even realize’ (2013: 160). Whether in the networked feeling spaces of archived feminist collections, the social media channels of contemporary feminisms, or the protest spaces of the activist feminist encampment, competing visions of feminism shape the practice of telling stories about feminist pasts, presents and futures.
The mediatic processes of doing feminism require us to shift from seeing media technologies as objects and instead approach them as ‘interlocked and dynamic processes of mediation’ (Kember and Zylinska, 2012: 1). Our contributors draw from a perspective that approaches media, communication and technology as forms of techné. Feminists engage in distinct, place-based practices of techno-cultural production and reproduction, utilising ‘old’ and ‘new’ media tools that make gender and do feminism in ways that are often not fully accounted for and remain under-theorised (see Haraway, 1988, 1994; Wajcman, 2004; Parks, 2005; Balsamo, 2011; Feigenbaum, 2013). As Jonathan Sterne argues, ‘an approach to communication as techné demands that we study what people actually do when they are communicating – not what they say they are doing or what they think they are doing, but what they do’ (2006: 93, emphasis in original; see also Slack and Wise, 2015). What people actually do emerges from their embodied, situated and practical knowledge, their ‘ways of doing things’ according to anthropological definitions of culture. Techné is an embodied relationship to technology, a learned and socially habituated way of doing things with machines, tools, interfaces, instruments and media. Techné signals more than technical skill; it constitutes embodied habits for acting and doing.
Our contributors approach feminist techné as the craft and techniques for doing feminism. Rather than analyse representations of feminist activism, we examine how media practices, communication infrastructures and information technologies constitute key elements of doing feminism in the present that resonate with prior feminist activisms. The goal is not to further ossify teleological narratives of feminist movement – in waves, generations, or themes of loss and return. Rather, the collection envisages past and present feminist media praxis as ‘linked moments of making’ (Juhasz, 2014) across time. We identify feminist techné as a site for ‘cross-temporal encounter’ – a ‘meeting ground’ where ‘we think through feminism together, not as mothers and daughters, but as cross-temporal peers, co-conspirators […] as we come together in the process of imagining possible futures’ (Samer, 2014).
This perspective offers a useful vantage point from which to detect the ‘reverberation’ or ‘resonance’ of feminist energy – from one event form to another, even when temporally or geographically removed (see Feigenbaum and Groeneveld, both this issue). Ednie Kaeh Garrison (2004) offers the model of the radio wave for understanding how feminisms resonate over time. Using the rhetorics of radio transmission and reception, Garrison (2004: 237) re-conceives how feminism imagined as ‘technologically harnessed electromagnetic wavelengths’ can register ‘different, multiple and simultaneous wave frequencies’, ways of doing and disseminating feminism, even in the so-called ‘doldrums’ of feminist movement (see Rupp and Taylor, 1987). In light of so many narratives of feminist loss and failure inscribed into the very discourse of feminism and feminist pasts, we examine how both established and emerging practices of media production and dissemination shape current feminist activity and understandings of scale, place, time and eventfulness (see e.g. Pozner, 2003; Hemmings, 2011; Hesford, 2013).
Outline of the articles
Around archives, two of our contributors, Kate Eichhorn and Cait McKinney, ask what feminists do with archival collections – activist, or amateur and institutional – and how media shape the role that networks play between archives, activists, researchers and writers. Building from her conclusion to the 2013 book The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, Kate Eichhorn opens the issue by revisiting the problem of nostalgia in feminist history and storytelling in order to conceptualise the important future-oriented work feminist nostalgia for historical artefacts, texts and practices might do. Eichhorn approaches the ‘doing’ of feminism as a larger question of how feminist scholars and activists talk about feminisms’ pasts, presents and futures, particularly in the contexts of the US, UK and Canada. Eichhorn asks how the ‘there’ of feminism – its constitution as events – haunts feminist thought and what it means to be feminist and do feminism. Having ‘been there’ marks activists and writers as authentic witnesses, but having been absent ‘from an event that was feminism’, in reference to second wave feminist actions, offers what Eichhorn suggests is an important standpoint from which to assess feminism now and in the future, one defined, generationally, by feminists born during the late 1960s and after, and who came to feminist political consciousness in the 1990s.
It is also shaped by affective longings for past feminisms and what they represented. Against strident critiques of nostalgic orientations to feminist pasts, Eichhorn calls for a feminist nostalgia in the present that desires ‘the sheer potentiality of being on the cusp of something revolutionary’. Drawing from her analysis of how recent books by Elizabeth Freeman (2010), Clare Hemmings (2011) and Victoria Hesford (2013) approach the issue of feminist nostalgia for past feminisms, Eichhorn points to the larger structures of how doing and thinking feminism in the present are shaped by a construction of feminism as ‘post’. Rather than deny the nostalgic pull for those pasts and their modes of doing feminism, Eichhorn sees nostalgia as an affective orientation that catalyses ways of doing feminism now that are moved by feminisms of the past.
Anna Feigenbaum’s and Elizabeth Groeneveld’s articles examine contemporary feminist movements and practices with an eye toward historical antecedents and longer feminist genealogies. Anna Feigenbaum’s article calls for a critical mode of ‘drone feminism’ to intervene in the militarised surveillance and killing apparatus that constitutes drone logics. A key genealogy of drone feminism is feminist anti-nuclear activism, particularly the activist repertoires and material practices of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Encampment. Studying the activist archives of Greenham Common, Feigenbaum suggests that the unique, place-based activist techné that anti-nuclear feminist campers developed in the 1980s at the protest camp may provide crucial models of feminist organising against the militarised technological systems of distance killing via drones. Drawing from the coffers of campers’ enactment of political network building through the tools and technologies of the military base infrastructure and 1980s print, paper and photocopier communication, the mythmaking practices of Greenham Common’s cyborg feminism offer a critical model of disruptive feminist agency in the context of drone warfare.
While Feigenbaum calls for feminist activism that can disrupt drone warfare by turning to the strategies and tactics of women’s de-militarising anti-nuclear activism, Groeneveld cautions against the comparison of the 2012 Pussy Riot protests in Russia to 1990s US and Canadian Riot Grrrl movements. In the desire to connect Pussy Riot and Riot Grrrl as transnational feminist movements over time, the comparison projects a white Western model of feminism on to Pussy Riot’s action and is ignorant of the specific Russian context in which they enacted their dissent. Similarly, as Groeneveld argues, statements like ‘We Are All Pussy Riot’ risk conflating the desire to express solidarity with the desire to identify with and as the members of Pussy Riot, providing another example of the ways in which #solidarityisforwhitewomen. By attending to the three events that constitute Pussy Riot’s actions – live feminist protest events, feminist media events and feminist meme events that resonate transnationally – Groeneveld’s approach distinguishes the specific protest strategies and media tactics Pussy Riot used from the problematic modes of Western and activist media appropriation that mark one of the ways in which Pussy Riot’s activism nonetheless resonated. Out of these ‘productive conflicts’, Groeneveld locates the affective registers of some contemporary feminisms, driven by the state of being moved by others’ actions, but requiring more self-reflexive attention to different contexts, different struggles and the different grounds on which claims to solidarity are made.
Drawing on Eichhorn’s (2013) analysis of feminist open-access archival politics, Cait McKinney examines how the lesbian feminist print newsletter Matrices connected researchers and activists together through shared knowledge production, building a collaborative lesbian feminist research network that both produced and participated in the making of US lesbian histories. McKinney probes the pre-Internet network thinking embodied in the lesbian feminist newsletter Matrices (1977–1996), tracing the distributed relationships it sustained among readers, writers, researchers, activists and archives in the production of lesbian histories. Through her analysis, McKinney provides new ways of understanding the significance of media networks to different kinds of feminism, from the 1970s to the present. Print newsletters like Matrices deployed ‘the imaginary of a strong, distributed, web-like structure for feminist organising’ before the Internet, evidencing the links between lesbian feminism and network thinking. Lesbian feminist information networks, she argues, are ‘vital in ways that are particular to feminism’. Their print-based networks were modelled on webs and practices of weaving, a way of doing feminism that deployed practices tied to lesbian, eco-feminist and cyborgian mythologies that Feigenbaum also considers in her article on drone feminism and mythmaking practices of 1980s feminist anti-nuclear activism. In Matrices and other lesbian print networks, feminist weaving signified a mode of information practice that connected researchers, activists and historians, among others. The network Matrices created offered a utopian and critical idealist model of feminist movement building. Such a network ultimately sought to improve the life chances of women through information activism and the support of lesbian archives, as McKinney argues, revealing the high level stakes of feminist information activism and its networks of collaboration and connection.
Carrie Rentschler and Samantha Thrift’s analysis picks up on McKinney’s study of feminist information networks by shifting attention to one of the modes of feminist consciousness-raising and community building that occurs in online feminist networks: feminist memes. Earlier networks such as those organised through lesbian feminist newsletters as well as contemporary ones that emerge through feminist memes transform the face-to-face model of consciousness-raising into one that is technologically mediated and distributed. Rentschler and Thrift are particularly interested in the community building capacities of memes in feminist social media networks, where feminism occurs via shared socio-technical ‘vectors of action and meaning making’ (see Young, 1994: 737). Currently those vectors of action are being remade, and reoriented, via social media practices and mobile devices, where Tumblr and Facebook have become crucial spaces of feminist critique, knowledge sharing, testimonial, emotional support and social mobilisation around a number of feminist issues (see Rentschler, 2014).
Using the case of the 2012 feminist meme ‘Binders Full of Women’ during the US presidential election that year, Rentschler and Thrift argue that Internet memes represent a networked model of virtual feminist consciousness-raising, a key model of online feminist activism in the current moment. Utilising social media tools of production and distribution to construct new networks of feminist critique and community building, they argue that the feminist use of Internet memes disrupts public and political misogyny and, simultaneously, the feminist killjoy stereotype by networking feminist laughter. If the Internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist humour online, the networking, linking and distributive capacities of social media also create new modes of feminist critique and models for doing feminism, illustrated by the feminist détournement of ‘Binders Full of Women’.
While so much scholarly attention around feminist movements has focused on how and whether participants identify as feminist, the articles in this issue suggest that feminism is something one does with others (see Heywood and Drake, 1997; Baumgartner and Richards, 2000, 2003; Moi, 2006; Weidhase, 2015). Most academic conceptions of social movement activism intimately link the doing of activism to the being of activists, where the collective identity of movement actors expresses, creates and feeds back into movement actions. As social movement scholar Chris Bobel argues in her study of feminist activists’ non-identification with the label ‘activist’, ‘one can “do activism” without “being activist”, and this discrepancy begs a more complicated account of identity at the center of the study of social movements’ (2007: 149). Our contributors start from the doing of feminism to analyse feminist practices as mediated modes of techné, ways of doing feminism that may not look like or feel like traditional social movement activism, but which are central to feminist movement building and ideologies.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank the editorial team at Feminist Theory for providing us with an opportunity to guest-edit this special issue. A special thank you goes to Katie Cooper, Sarah Kember, and Carolyn Pedwell who have been particularly supportive as we have put this collection together. We also thank the anonymous reviewers, our other readers and audiences for the work-in-progress, and each of the authors for their contributions.