In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited contributors to engage with how protest is visualized, that is, rendered visual in the form of iconography and through social media, and imagined as a utopian project of feminist, queer, and anti-racist worldmaking. Inviting scholarship and creative engagements from the overlapping perspectives of feminist media studies, transnational feminist theory, critical race studies, visual studies, and postcolonial digital humanities, this special issue examines the aesthetics of feminist protests in terms of their networked circulations as well as their affective bonds and material contexts. Exploring the emerging modes of visibility, networked solidarity, and collaborative knowledge production, “Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent” examines the relationships between the aesthetics of feminist transnational protest and digital revolt in a dynamic, polymedia context characterized by amateur remixing, instantaneous sharing, immaterial labour, corporate ownership of digital platforms, and institutionalized state surveillance of social media.
Charting connections between consumer protest, feminist activism and affordances of digital media, this chapter argues that social media and blogging platforms are becoming instrumental in creating new spaces for feminist action. Women's blog Jezebel (www.jezebel.com) has been chosen as a case study to examine how feminist bloggers use the dialogical environments of digital media to construct narratives of involvement in consumer culture. The chapter provides a critical overview of the major thematic categories identified on Jezebel. Such an analysis is particularly important for situating the blogosphere as a site of ongoing cultural negotiations while marking the limits of feminist consumer mobilization under the conditions of neoliberalism. The chapter concludes with the discussion of how Jezebel.com establishes a feminist networked space where bloggers construct diverse narratives of consumer activism.
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