Activist Literacies: Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics

By Jennifer Nish

A groundbreaking rhetorical framework for the study of transnational digital activism

What does it mean when we call a movement "global"? How can we engage with digital activism without being "slacktivists"? In Activist Literacies, Jennifer Nish responds to these questions and a larger problem in contemporary public discourse: many discussions and analyses of digital and transnational activism rely on inaccurate language and inadequate frameworks. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and rhetorical analysis, Nish formulates a robust set of tools for nuanced engagement with activist rhetorics. Nish applies her literacies of positionality, orientation, and circulation to case studies that highlight grassroots activism, well-resourced nonprofits, and a decentralized social media challenge; in so doing, she illustrates the complex power dynamics at work in each scenario and demonstrates how activist literacies can be used to understand and engage with efforts to contribute to social change. Written in an accessible, engaging style, Activist Literacies invites scholars, students, and activists to read activist rhetoric that engages with "global" concerns and circulates transnationally via social media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643363448

Book preview

Activist Literacies

MOVEMENT RHETORIC/RHETORIC’S MOVEMENTS

Victoria J. Gallagher

A. Freya Thimsen, The Democratic Ethos: Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy

ACTIVIST LITERACIES

Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics

JENNIFER NISH

© 2022 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN: 978-1-64336-342-4 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64336-343-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-64336-344-8 (ebook)

Front cover design: Ben Kamprath, benkamprath.com

For activists everywhere who seek to dismantle oppression:

I hope you find ways to challenge injustice despite all that is working against you, and I hope you experience community along the way.

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface: Situating My Own Feminist Work

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

Literacies of Positionality: Networked Activism, Embodied Genres, and Performances of Dis/Identification

TWO

Differences That Matter: Orientation as a Transnational Feminist Literacy Practice

THREE

Activist Genre Knowledge: Sticky Uptakes, Counteruptakes, and Circulation Literacies

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The University of South Carolina series Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric’s Movements builds on the Press’s longstanding reputation in the field of rhetoric and communication and its cross-disciplinary commitment to studies of civil rights and civil justice. Books in the series address two central questions: In historical and contemporary eras characterized by political, social, and economic movements enacted through rhetorical means, how—and with what consequences—are individuals, collectives, and institutions changed and transformed? How and to what extent can analyses of rhetoric’s movements in relation to circulation and uptake help point the way to a more equal and equitable world?

This timely and well-written book is an outstanding project for the series. Author Jennifer Nish defines and illuminates activist literacies as a set of practices that people can use to understand and engage with local, national, and transnational efforts to contribute to social change. Although other projects may focus on activism, feminist activisms, digital activisms, or digital feminisms, Nish’s book expands that scope to include an examination of transnational feminisms in the digital sphere. This book is thus original and particularly useful for classroom teaching: the activist literacies outlined will enable readers to better understand and take up the relational work of transnational and social media activisms.

PREFACE

Situating My Own Feminist Work

Movements are situated. Movements are networked. Movements are critical. Movements are supportive. Movements resist power. Movements harness power. Movements emerge from existing communities. Movements generate new relationships and communities. Movements build on traditions and histories. Movements imagine new ways of being and doing. Movements channel anger, sadness, and frustration. Movements cultivate joy, curiosity, and love. Movements hold contradiction, tension, and possibility. Movements challenge our world. Movements remake our world. Movements educate. Movements liberate. Movements heal. Movements transform.

Movements are rhetorical. Rhetoric is part of how movements move us. The rhetoric that moves us is itself moving, circulating, and transforming as it moves through the relationships that connect us to one another and to the ideas and structures that shape our world. We move with rhetoric. We move rhetoric. Rhetoric moves us.

Narratives about movements often highlight the ways that relationships and actions move and transform the people who engage with them as they work to move and transform communities and worlds. This preface isn’t a narrative about movements per se, but a narrative about how my engagements with feminism and activism are shaped by a web of interconnected relationships, activities, and ideas. My relationships to people and politics have moved as I have moved, chronologically, emotionally, intellectually, and geographically.

This book draws on transnational feminist theory to think about the complexity of networked rhetorical activity. However, the ideas in this book have also been shaped by my own history and experiences. My perspective on transnational movement and relationships began as a theoretical interest, but the ideas that I learned from transnational feminisms continued to move me as I have moved through the world. A particularly influential period of my life that has shaped this book is the time I spent living and working in Beirut during my first academic job after completing my Ph.D. My experiences during this time transformed my relationships to feminism, activism, and research (among other things).

During my time in Beirut, I walked everywhere, in part because I had the privilege of living close to my place of employment and in part because I sometimes found it stressful to negotiate fares for shared taxis. I also really liked many aspects of walking in Beirut: there’s always something interesting to observe and I enjoyed saying hello to shop owners and employees that I passed on my regular routes. However, as I moved through public spaces, I stuck out. As is common for women in most large cities, I experienced some sexual harassment as I walked around in public. Depending on the neighborhood and time of day, I also experienced plenty of stares and attention that were presumably not sexual but certainly made me self-conscious. I am also neurodivergent and disabled. My chronic illness and my neurodivergence contribute to experiences of overwhelm and exacerbated stress response, so these experiences were difficult for me to manage.

I also struggled with how to respond, both because of my position as a white, US-American woman and because of language and cultural differences. Although I understood and spoke some Arabic, I didn’t always know what people said if they spoke to me in Arabic and therefore didn’t always feel absolutely sure that I knew exactly what was happening. Although tone and body language can say a lot, tone, volume, and gestures can all vary across cultures, and I had observed some differences between my interpretation of tone and that of others around me. Furthermore, if I were to respond, that response might also be a site of misinterpretation. If I wanted to respond to these experiences, what aspects of cross-cultural communication, power analysis, and positionality should inform my response? Without a satisfactory answer to this question, I often felt frustrated by this situation. I also felt a sense of isolation when many of my colleagues didn’t seem to understand this experience or how overwhelming it was. Some of this was clearly due to differences in positionality such as age and gender, but some may also have been related to my experiences of disability and my concerns about responding appropriately.

One day, I saw a post shared in a university-related feminist group on Facebook calling folks who wanted to discuss harassment to meet at a local restaurant. I was excited at the idea of finding a space to discuss this. I was also nervous: would it be weird for me to attend if I was a faculty member and other participants were (I assumed) students? Would I be welcome as a US American in this space? I recall talking my concerns over with a trusted friend who encouraged me to attend the meeting. I am generally shy, insecure, and socially anxious, and these things were surely shaping my hesitance. However, I was also nervous about issues of power and positionality. As I had suspected, some of the folks at the meetings were students at my university (undergraduate and graduate), which meant that as a faculty member, I was in a position of relative power even if the students weren’t in my classes. Most of the participants were Lebanese and I was not. I didn’t want to cause harm by inserting myself into a space where I wasn’t wanted, claiming knowledge I didn’t have, or perpetuating the harm that many (mostly white) feminists have caused in cross-cultural and transnational settings by engaging with arrogance rather than accountability. These were issues that I knew about from reading and studying transnational feminism but also from observing interactions at talks and in public spaces in Beirut. Both my scholarly background and my experiences in Beirut shaped the cautious attitude with which I entered this space.

I approached the group, then, with intention of being mindful of my position, listening and learning before speaking, and trying to prioritize the voices and opinions of other participants rather than my own. I did my best to show up in consistent ways and looked for opportunities to contribute to the group’s work that would take advantage of my skills and position to support the work of the group. For example, one of the first individual contributions I remember making involved students at my university who had spoken out about a student-created video that essentially encouraged sexual harassment. These students experienced harassment and retaliation for speaking out against the video and were not receiving support from university administration. We offered support to the students as a group, but I also realized that I could use my position as a faculty member, since many folks at the university respond differently to faculty members than they do to students. I wrote a letter to the dean of students asking him to take action in support of the students. Doing something that took advantage of my specific position helped me feel like I had something to contribute to the group, and I think this helped me continue to participate despite all of my insecurities.

However, I continued to be preoccupied with my position and all of the ways I differed from other folks in the group. I was often very quiet and worried that I wasn’t a valuable contributor to the group. I recall being in a meeting many months later in which we were talking about our experiences of the group and what direction we’d like to see it go in. I was quiet, as I often was. I don’t remember the specific contours of the conversation, but I remember somehow indicating my reluctance to contribute. Several members of the group pushed back on this, telling me explicitly that they wanted me to share my thoughts because I was part of the group. This was one of several experiences that led me to challenge myself to complicate my understanding of what it meant to stay in my lane. Sure, I shouldn’t barge in and assume everyone wants to hear from me, but also what’s the point of showing up if I’m not going to contribute?

In reflecting on this situation, I have realized that I was treating my participation and identity in a narrow or overdetermined way that constrained my ability to form relationships and contribute. I was learning in practice about the limits of what Linda Alcoff, in The Problem of Speaking for Others, describes as a retreat response: my concern about reproducing patterns of oppression within feminism led me to be wary of speaking at all and to attempt to speak only in certain very specific conditions about my own experiences.¹ Alcoff explains that the retreat response is something of a double-edged sword. It can be an appropriate move in some circumstances in which speaking for others can be a form of discursive imperialism or violence. However, the impulse to retreat and speak only for oneself can also obscure the ways that people and their actions are inextricably bound up with other people, their experiences, and their practices. It is not possible, Alcoff writes, to make claims from a discrete location that is separated from others and does not affect them:

there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one’s words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a boundary between one’s location and all others. Even a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to reinforce their dominance … the declaration that I speak only for myself has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot literally erase those effects.²

In short, I was engaging in the retreat response in an attempt to avoid making mistakes, but this was an untenable position. Political participation involves affecting and being affected by others. My caution and attentiveness to positionality were important, but they also needed to be balanced with the expectation that being in political relationship with others means that we all have the capacity to affect one another. I could not avoid mistakes altogether, no matter how carefully I tried to manage my contributions.

I share this story because it exemplifies how political and activist engagement are about more than public action; activism also involves building relationships. These relationships are part of how movements transform people and transform worlds. The relational components of activism are vital to sustaining activist groups and the activist commitments of those who participate in activist groups. I have shared this story in detail to make the following point: I was looking for ways to be a perfect individual contributor. Alcoff describes this process, in which one attempts to avoid criticism, as a move that privileges personal mastery of the situation over collective goals. Due to both my position and my individual insecurities, I was placing too much emphasis on me. Do I fit in? Am I contributing enough? These are not irrelevant questions. Self-reflection and attention to positionality are important, but they are important because of their impact on relationships. For many months, I showed up consistently and tried to be supportive of the group, but I struggled to truly feel like I belonged. I recall several moments where I specifically noticed that I was not as open as I should be to building relationships with others in the group by sharing my own experiences. Thankfully, other members of the group still wanted me to participate, welcomed me at meetings, and encouraged me as I eased out of my shell. Once I opened up more, I developed deeper relationships with others that helped me experience the group as supportive and sustaining. My weakness within the group, which took me a while to discover, was that my reticence and over-attention to my difference was making it hard for me to develop strong connections. Those connections are vital, radical work.

I did not see this group as a site for research and did not anticipate it becoming part of this book. It was, however, an important space of personal and political growth for me, and I share some of that experience here because it shaped the perspective on activism that I share in this book. One of the things I learned is the way that collective engagement facilitates action because of accountability. I don’t mean accountability in the sense of someone calling me in (or out) when I did something wrong, although that is an important element of accountability. Instead, I mean accountability as an understanding of myself and my engagement with activism as relational processes that are connected to broader patterns of activity, social structures, and power relations. Accountability is a way of understanding ourselves as social actors and not lone individuals³ and thinking and acting with a sense of commitment and responsibility to others. Through groups or networks of accountability, people share ideas, sites of action, and support. It was through this group that I found ways to engage consistently in feminist activism in Beirut. The relationships I developed in this group helped sustain me and motivate me politically. Through the group, I felt supported as an activist and as a human being. This support helped me see myself as a political agent and ground my thoughts and actions in relation to others. When I attended marches, talks, or other events in Beirut, I didn’t have to participate alone. I had others to talk through ideas with, to listen to and learn from.

By focusing so much on how this experience shaped me as an individual, I do not mean to suggest that the benefits of activist relationships are important only in this way. Rather, I want to suggest that I understand my individual position and experiences best through an understanding of relationships and interactions that have had reverberating effects. To understand myself politically, I have to understand how I have affected and been affected by others. As Aimee Carrillo Rowe writes, the meaning of the self is never individual, but forged across a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of.⁴ The relationships I’ve described here transformed me; therefore, they shaped the thoughts and idea in this book. My connections with these collaborators, as activists and friends, still shape my thinking and my behavior. While these relationships and their effects have changed over time—my memories of these experiences are not the same as ongoing conversation and interaction—the way that these relationships and interactions have shaped me and continue to motivate me are part of what is important about activist relationships.

Communities exist in many forms and serve many purposes. Groups dedicated specifically to political work aren’t the only collectives that can support activism, though I think they are an especially effective site for this work. For example, since I moved to Lubbock, Texas, I’ve felt an absence in my life that is the absence of this group. In 2019 and 2020, I attended several small demonstrations in Lubbock (related to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camps, climate change, and the police murder of George Floyd), but I longed for the sense of community I’d experienced in Beirut. I showed up and participated, but it felt different to participate in an event without connecting to organizers or engaging in an ongoing way. I had several friends who would circulate materials on social media about topics I was interested in, which made me feel a bit less alone, but I didn’t feel the same sense of accountability or belonging that I had when I was engaged with a group specifically dedicated to activism.

My work in this book is also, of course, shaped by other aspects of my positionality and life experiences. My ways of thinking, researching, writing, and doing have been shaped by my position in the world and my relationships to people around me. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, surrounded predominantly by people who were white, middle-class, and Catholic. Most of the political ideas I encountered while growing up were conservative. Much of my knowledge about feminism and other forms of resistance to oppression developed gradually in my teenage and adult years, and especially as I formed relationships with people whose experiences and background differed from my own. Aside from these gradual processes of growth and change, I also see two strands of experience as particularly transformative of my politics and worldview. The first is my experience of disability. My entire adult life has been heavily shaped by my experience of disability, though I did not always have disability as a lens to name and understand these experiences. My experiences of disability helped me recognize how privilege has shaped my life, including my experience of illness and my access to care. For example, during experiences with hospitalization and group therapy in my early twenties, I noticed contrasts between my own experiences and those of some other patients, including how I was seen by other patients, by the people facilitating our care, and by my family and friends. I did not have this language at the time, but I was becoming aware of the ways that class and race shaped people’s expectations about the severity of my situation, my chances of recovering, and the kind of care I should receive in ways that contrasted with their expectations of other patients. In this way, disability helped me identify examples of intersectionality and privilege before I had the words to name these phenomena.

The second thread that shaped my perspective on activism was my engagement with feminist theory during a particularly transformative period of my life. The reading I did during this time helped me to name and make sense of my own experiences and my desire to think and live a different life than the one I had been living. Feminist theory helped me recognize my experiences of sexist oppression, but also to recognize how those experiences had been shaped by various privileges. Some of the scholars who most profoundly affected my political development were Black women whose writing I read in undergraduate coursework at the time, such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Patricia Williams, and June Jordan. For example, in Feminism Is for Everybody, bell hooks writes that a woman cannot be anti-abortion and an advocate of feminism.⁵ This was a controversial statement for a group of Nebraskan students, even in the relatively progressive context of a Women’s Studies class. However, hooks’s writing helped me identify that although I thought of myself as pro-life, I could not reconcile that abstract belief with the ways I responded when I encountered actual people who experienced unwanted pregnancy. Hooks’s explanation helped me realize that I was holding onto a term that did not actually describe my position. Her words were especially impactful because during the previous year, I had listened to women in my inpatient recovery program describe experiences of sexual assault and rape, some of which had resulted in unwanted pregnancy. Although I didn’t have this language to describe it at the time, I had begun to realize that bodily autonomy and reproductive choice were shaped by intersecting forms of oppression—abortion was not an issue of morality and individual choice as I’d been taught. By developing awareness of the ways that people experience differential access to abortion, medical care, and effects of unwanted pregnancy, I also began to see that some of my previous thinking came from my position of privilege.

Conversations about feminism and activism often involve examining the ways that experiences and socially constructed identities shape the perspective people bring to their work. However, as many scholars and activists have pointed out, position and privilege are not discrete; they are relational.⁶ When I reflect on my experiences, I understand my position through not just an explanation of who I am as an individual, but also through reflection on my relationships with people around me, including other people engaged in feminist and activist work.

Through my background, experiences, and relationships with others, my politics and practices have evolved and shifted. The ideas in this book are shaped by these personal and professional experiences in which my position, location, and relationships have profoundly affected what I know, how I know it, and with whom I develop and share experience and knowledge. My work in this book comes from a deep commitment to feminist politics and resistance to oppression. The questions I consider and the analyses I develop in the following pages have been shaped by my experiences and relationships as well as my scholarly training. I am indebted to the scholars, writers, activists, and friends who have made space for me to grow and have educated me about oppressions I do not experience. I am not a model feminist, activist, scholar, or human being, and any mistakes that follow are mine alone. I share these current ideas with the knowledge that they will likely continue to grow and change. From this imperfect, situated, shifting location, I am, to borrow a phrase from scholars in disability rhetorics, finding ways to move.⁷

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Mary Jo Reiff, Amy Devitt, Marta Vicente, Alesha Doan, Ayu Saraswati, Jay Childers, Germaine Halegoua, Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Kenton Rambsy, and Kara Kynion for your support in (and beyond) Lawrence. Thank you to Beirut colleagues and friends for support during my first academic job and the early stages of this project: Mounawar Abbouchi, Altayib Ahmed, Ira Allen, Lisa Arnold, Doyle Avant, Nora Bakhsh, Greg Burris, Caesar Chan, David Currell, Lucy Currell, Hanine El Mir, Alli Finn, Dorota Fleszar, Zeina Ghanem, Talah Hassan, Jim Hodapp, Syrine Hout, Rima Iskandarani, Nagham Jaber, Malakeh Khoury, Alison Lo, Laure Makarem, Mira Mawla, Tarek Mehmood Ali, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Sara Mourad, Laura Noll, John Pill, Rima Rantisi, Elsa Saade, Zane Sinno, Samhita Sunya, Michael Vermy, Adam Waterman, Amy Zenger. I am also grateful for the support of the TTU Women Faculty Writing Program and Lubbock friends and colleagues Mike Borshuk, Aaron Braver, Cassie Christopher, Nesrine Chahine, Jess Gross, Steve Holmes, Matt Hunter, Callie Kostelich, Marta Kvande, Beau Pihlaja, Elizabeth Sharp, Jess Smith, Brian Still, Jason Tham, Bill Wenthe, Allison Whitney, Greg Wilson, and Elissa Zellinger. Thanks to the Texas Tech Humanities Center for financial support.

Thanks to many nonhuman companions: Moose, Murphy, Max, Polly, Squeak, Patches, Opal, Oatmeal, Moon, Bob Sr., Freckle, Bob Jr., Billie, Dusty, Penny, Nickels, and the mockingbirds of Lubbock, Texas, who made my pandemic