Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue No. 14: Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent (November 2018)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26765

Issue edited by Ela Przybylo, Veronika Novoselova, and Sara Rodrigues

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Browsing Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue No. 14: Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent (November 2018) by Most Recent

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    [Issue no. 14 Cover]
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Rego, Paula
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    Awkwardness and Assemblage: Digital Schemes for Feminist World-Making
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Smith-Prei, Carrie, 1975- author; Stehle, Maria
    In this essay, we develop the concept of awkward assemblages to describe feminist digital activism that is multidirectional in its political effects and interpretive legibility, built of uneasy bedfellows and ill-suited coalitional partners. We exemplify the way in which activist practices, developing out of the tensions in which contemporary feminisms find themselves, complicate the genealogy of feminist protest. We focus on feminist responses triggered by the sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, particularly the work of Swiss-German performance artist Milo Moiré. This example allows us to highlight the complex ways in which local and contemporary feminist interventions intersect with the history of feminist protest art and how they link to transnational movements—among other examples, the #MeToo movement. We then turn to digital-feminist coalitional possibilities by thinking through assembling, along with coding and hacking, as performative labor that emphasizes the potential of inventing and visualizing political forms that (however awkwardly) materialize different worlds.
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    Protesting in the Streets of Instagram
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Pearl, Ali Rachel
    Instagram, much like Twitter, is a vital site of social movement documentation and activist possibility. This image-sharing social media platform functions as a digital neighborhood populated with digital “citizens” who utilize its many avenues of photo presentation for a variety of purposes: selfies and feminist-self love, memes, marketing, and the sharing and preservation of one’s travels, one’s food, one’s life. But like physical streets, the digital “streets” of Instagram are also occasionally filled with protest. Protesters use Instagram to geotag photos of protest with the real world address where the protest occurred, thus indexing protest images alongside more mundane photos that are geotagged with the same location. Geotag archives for popular protest sites such as the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles simultaneously visualize daily activities, weapons and police officers, and protest (protest against the police, state-violence, and racism, but also rallies in support of the police, the state, and the current presidential administration). This essay explores how Instagram geotags allow us to construct a “digitally networked public sphere” and how we might use those geotag archives as extensions of our physical presence when protesting police violence.
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    Platform Feminism: Protest and the Politics of Spatial Organization
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Singh, Rianka
    This article brings into question the political utility of platforms as media for feminist resistance. Using examples of #MeToo, and the Women’s March on Washington, movements that have relied on the platform for reinvigorating what Sarah Banet-Weiser has called “popular feminism” (2018), I argue that common media platforms tend to infer an underlying assumption of safety, privilege and power in relation to social space. Through highlighting how BIPOC people organize in social space, I argue that the focus on amplification and elevation, facilitated by the logics of platform, obscures the needs of those who resist on the margins. I introduce the spatial strategies employed by those who must negotiate space differently to challenge the centrality of platforms as media the structure contemporary feminist protest.
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    Drawing the Revolution: The Practice and Politics of Collaboration in the Graphic Novel Lissa
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Nye, Coleman; Sherine, Hamdy
    Motivated by the potentials of comics to convey complex, yet accessible anthropological insights on global health and political transformation, the authors crafted the collaborative work of graphic “ethnofiction” Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution. Lissa chronicles the unlikely friendship of two young women living in Cairo—one Egyptian, one American—who are navigating difficult health circumstances at home and revolutionary unrest in the streets. In this excerpt and discussion of the collaborative process of crafting Lissa, we illustrate how we attended to the broader epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical fields within which the project took shape by working collaboratively with Egyptian revolutionaries on the story and by employing different visual and narrative techniques throughout the book to cite their artistic, academic, and activist work.
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    Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Performative Politics And Queer Migrant Activisms
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Lynes, Krista
    In June 2017, the refugee rights group LGBTQI+ Refugees in Greece abducted a participatory artwork from the global contemporary art exhibit Documenta 14, held in Athens to highlight the city’s centrality to European imaginaries of crisis. They then released a ransom note and accompanying video in social media, in which they addressed the artist, Roger Bernat, condemning the fetishization of refugees by Documenta, and highlighting the precarious conditions queer migrants face on a daily basis. This paper takes up this action to examine the performative potential of such cultural interventions, their use of embodied actions which draw from the aesthetic languages of feminist and queer artistic practice, the forms of alliance their gesture enacted, and their careful negotiation of the tricky boundary of visibility/invisibility. It concludes that the strategic appropriation of urban space and digital platforms—a strategy it names “displacement”—served to interrupt Documenta’s more narrowly defined public sphere, forging a new space in which to appear publicly.
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    “América Latina Vai Ser Toda Feminista”: Visualizing & Realizing Transnational Feminisms in the Women’s Worlds March for Rights
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Synder, Cara K; Veiga, Ana Maria; Wolff, Cristina Scheibe
    On August 2, 2017, ten thousand feminists from around the globe took to the streets of Florianopolis, Brazil to march for women’s rights. The Marcha Mundos de Mulheres por Direitos (Women’s Worlds March for Rights, or MMMD) was a central part of an academic conference jointly titled the 13th Women’s Worlds Congress / 11th Seminário Internacional Fazendo Gênero. Using this March – both its physical forms and its digital translations – as a case study, this essay explores how the visual rendering of dissent articulates and realizes transnational feminist politics and solidarities.
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    Introduction: Visualizing Protest:Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent
    (Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Pryzbylo, Ela; Novoselova, Veronika; Rodríguez, Sara