This Pussy Grabs back: Humour, Digital Affects and Women’s Protest

Abstract

Abstract:The "affective" turn has enabled many scholars to theorise media representations not only as texts that can be distantly decoded but also as a matter of emotional attachments, intensities of feelings, synesthetic sensations, and embodied experiences. Yet, what has been less often theorized is how this affective meaningmaking is (re)shaped by the dynamic and interactive nature of social networking systems such as Facebook or Twitter. How do images and the affective qualities that "stick" to them, travel and transform through user engagement where "users grab images and technologies by which they are grabbed in return" (Paasonen, Carnal Resonance 178;Senft 2008). We aim to explore this question further through examples of humorous images from the January 2017 Women's March, considered within the digital contexts of Facebook and Twitter. Social movement scholars argue that emotional engagement can be a powerful and positive motivating factor in getting people involved in political life, and we here suggest that these humorous images can move the reader in new critical directions, encouraging them to challenge systems of inequality and oppression in contemporary society. Keywords: online humour, affect, activism, feminismThe Women's March was an international protest event on January 21, 2017, advocating for legislation and policies on issues such as women's rights, racial equality, LGBTQ rights, immigration reform, healthcare reform, climate change, freedom of religion, and workers' rights. The rallies took place the day after President Trump's inauguration and took aim at his statements and positions that many regarded as misogynistic, racist or otherwise offensive. Protesters participated in almost 700 marches across the world, making it one of the biggest human rights demonstrations in history. Social media networks played a crucial role in the preparation, organisation and communication of this multi-sited event. Our study explores one key aspect of this communication, which was the widespread circulation of humorous feminist images from the march on Facebook and Twitter. We want to examine this practice to reflect on some of the opportunities and limitations for using digital humour to communicate political messages and struggles.By bringing critical humour studies into dialogue with contemporary scholars of affect, digital media and political communication, the article explores the affective and sensuous relationship between humorous online images of protest and social/political change. Rather than understanding these humorous images merely as a product and commodity of a new form of affective capitalism (which they are!), we suggest that they can also have the capacity to move "users" in new critical directions, encouraging them to challenge systems of inequality and oppression in contemporary society. This potentiality lies in the complex ways in which humour and the affective force of these online representations can move and touch the offline reading body.

Unruly Women and Carnivalesque Countercontrol: Offensive Humor in Mediated Social Protest

“…This article builds on our previous study (Bore et al, 2018), which examined the social media circulation of images from the 2017 Women's March. One of the key themes we identified was the prevalence of images featuring placards that mocked Trump's body.…”

“…(Thorogood, 2016, p. 217)This so-called echo chamber phenomenon is often discussed in the context of social media. Critics argue that, rather than enabling debate and deliberative compromise essential for creating political change, our social media practices of “posting,” “liking” and “sharing,” along with algorithms, generate filter bubbles and echo chambers with restrictive partisan sentiments, where only like-minded people speak to each other (Bore et al., 2018; Jamieson & Capella, 2008; Pariser, 2012). Nevertheless, Bivens and Cole (2018, p. 6) maintain that “the prevalence of social media use, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, provides a method through which individuals can push back against the legislative structures in the United States.” They illustrate in their work on “grotesque protest” that social media provides individuals with opportunities to resist attempts to control bodies and to reinsert individuals’ voices in political discourse that is aimed to exclude those bodies (Enli and Skogerbø, 2013).…”

“…Reilly & Boler, 2014, p. 442), there is also concern that it remains inefficient or even antithetical to meaningful sociopolitical change (Thorogood, 2016). Thus, in the context of social media, offensive political humor advances the so-called echo chambers where people only speak to like-minded individuals (Bore, Graefer, & Kilby, 2018). Others argue that routine online searches for pleasure and entertainment “entrap[s] us within the circuits of neoliberal communicative capitalism—a process that continuously replaces political action with political feeling, forever turning activity into passivity” (Pedwell 2017, p. 157).…”

S(t)imulating resistance: Corporate responses to the Trump presidency

“…The dominant strategy, here, is to ridicule Trump and/or his policies rather than appeal to a sense of social justice through emotions like anger or indignation. Various studies of the use of humour in resistance have found it to be a volatile strategy that both destabilizes one's own political project and that of the adversary (Holm, 2017;Kalviknes Bore et al, 2017;Rodrigues and Collinson, 1995). Thus, humour is often used to defuse the critical point one is making ('we were only joking') so as to circumvent retaliation while maintaining the critical potential of the utterance.…”

Content Analysis in the Research Field of Satire

“…, and studies on social protest (Bore et al 2017;Graefer et al 2019). Most studies, however, relate to political communication and journalism studies.…”